This book exists because of the belief and support of four people in particular: Richard Vinen encouraged me to write for a wider audience, Andrew Gordon helped marshal my ideas to persuade publishers to put it into print, Mike Jones enthusiastically supported it, then Iain MacGregor guided the book to publication with insight and efficiency when it was orphaned in the UK; Rahul Srivastava and his team were enthusiastic advocates in India; George Lucas and Clive Little offered creative, thoughtful and efficient support in the United States, Harriet Dobson assiduously arranged illustrations and managed the production process, Richard Collins copy-edited to perfection, smoothing hundreds of ugly phrases and saving me from as many errors. All those which remain are my own.
The following archives and libraries in Britain and South Asia offered assistance in allowing access to material used in this book: King’s College London Maughan Library; Asia, Africa and Pacific Reading Room at the British Library; the State Archives of Maharashtra in Mumbai and Andhra Pradesh in Hyderabad; the National Archives of India; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library; and National Archives of Bangladesh, which remains, due to the work of Sharif Uddin Ahmed, one of the most friendly and wellorganized archives in the subcontinent. The argument expounded and stories told in India Conquered have developed through conversations with friends over the last decade, but particularly with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Jim Bjork, Upal Chakrabarti, Rajat Datta, Faisal Devji, Andrew Dilley, David Edgerton, Maurice Glasman, Iftekar Iqbal, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Patrick Joyce, Mike Kenny, Elaine Lester, Karuna Mantena, Adnan Naseemullah, Thomas Newbold, Eleanor Newbiggin, Kriti Kapila, Shruti Kapila, Prashant Kidambi, Ben Page, Jahnavi Phalkey, Martin Plaut, Srinath Raghavan, Peter Robb, Katherine Schofield, Taylor Sherman, Bhrigupathi Singh, Nitin Sinha, Philip Stern, Sujit Sivasundaram, Louise Tillin, Robert Travers, Georgios Varouxakis, Richard Vinen, Rupa Viswanath, Kim Wagner and David Washbrook; in these pages I’m sure each will find something to disagree with, but will also find traces of our conversations, too. I’m grateful to Ronald Anil Fernandes for welcoming me to Mangalore and sharing his curiosity about his home town; and to Anuraj Chowfla for talking me through the landscape of India’s new gated communities. Versions of different chapters have been presented at Yale University in New Haven, Presidency University in Kolkata, North South University in Dhaka, Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, Goettingen University, York University, Oxford University, at numerous seminars at King’s College London and the Institute for Historical Research; I’m grateful for insightful critique and comments at each. In an academic world which sometimes seems bereft of new ideas, King’s College London’s history department is a wonderful place to teach and research, where, best of all, there’s space to think; I am grateful to my colleagues for making it such. The engagement of a group of PhD students interested in the Indian and British state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been immensely stimulating; particular mention is due to Shomik Dasgupta, Bulbul Hasan, Kieran Hazzard, Haruki Inagaki, Cathryn Johnson, Amy Kavanagh, Tom Kelsey, Liam Morton and Kapil Subrahmanyam. I’d like to thank Leicester City Football Club and the Labour Party for offering very different kinds of distractions at different times. I’d particularly like to thank Andrew Dilley, David Egerton, Iftekar Iqbal, Patrick Joyce, Elaine Lester, Thomas Newbold, Simon Parker, Jahnavi Phalkey, Srinath Raghavan, Anwesha Roy, Jonathan Rutherford, Katherine Schofield, Philip
Stern, James Vernon, Richard Vinen, David Washbrook and Dorothy Wilson for taking the time to read and comment on chapters. Finally, and most importantly, I’d like to thank my brother Tim and parents Rod and Dot Wilson for their love and support: Delilah and Elsie for such love and entertainment, without whom this book would have been written more quickly but there’d have been no point writing it; and Elaine Lester, for whom thanks are unnecessary and love cannot be expressed in words.