“Thomas Metcalf’s study of India in an Indian Ocean arena is innovative in allowing us to connect the use of governmental, legal, and ruling frameworks from colonial India across a wider space, their linkages with specific labouring, clerical, and diasporic circuits across empire, as well as the complex identities they generated for the British Indian subjects who moved with them. . . . Thomas Metcalf’s is a welcome and comprehensive effort to bring what is variously a transnational, imperial, oceanic, and a global history forward.”
“A unique overview of Indian history. . . . Essential reading for anyone interest[ed] in British Imperial History and Indian Colonial History, and it will serve as an excellent supplemental text in both undergraduate and graduate level history courses.”
“With names, facts, figures, and concepts, this is a detailed, fine, and useful study.”
"Imperial Connections offers an erudite account of how India functioned as a sub-imperial power and how Indians made their way across the variegated landscapes of the British Empire in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By re-centering the history of British India in the larger context of the 'ocean arena,' Thomas Metcalf offers one model of how to transnationalize the study of the Raj, illuminating new domains of future research and raising critical questions about the relationship of empire to the regional, the global, and the intra-colonial as well."
"Imperial Connections challenges the Eurocentrism implicit in many accounts of modern European empires. Focusing on the British empire when it was at its zenith, Metcalf analyzes the pivotal role the Raj played in the running of the empire in regions as far flung from one another as, say, Egypt, Uganda, Natal, and the Malay peninsula. This innovative book is a real tour de force from a respected and versatile historian of India."—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
"As he has done regularly throughout his career, Thomas Metcalf has once again refreshed the study of British imperial history with a bold new perspective. Imperial Connections puts South Asians—soldiers, policemen and labourers—right at the heart of his study."—C.A. Bayly, Cambridge University, author of The Birth of the Modern World
"This is a distinctly original study which re-centers colonial power in provocative ways. Metcalf asks a simple question—why were Indians so persistently to be found elsewhere in the British empire, and in such significant numbers? Then elegantly offers answers that force us to re-think the operations of imperial power in critical ways. Wide-ranging, elegantly written, and meticulously researched, Metcalf's is an important and a persuasive study."—Philippa Levine, author of Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, and forthcoming, The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset
