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The Cult of Imperial Honor in British India. By STEVEN PATTERSON. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 276 pp. $79.95 (cloth).
In recent years, there has been a flood of scholarship on the British Empire, much of it concentrating on British imperialism in India. Within the scholarship there is a debate over the question of how the British maintained their dominance over India, especially from the Victorian period until the Second World War. While some scholars, like Nicholas Dirks in The Scandal of Empire (2006), emphasize the oppressive, corrupt, and violent nature of British imperialism, others argue that a more useful way to understand British hegemony is to explore the multifaceted nature of power between colonizer and colonized by highlighting the fluidity in social relations and the multiplicity of imperial identities. In The Cult of Imperial Honor in British India, Steven Patterson contributes to this debate by looking closely at how the British in India, especially after 1857, imagined their role as rulers and how this shaped their actions during the period of the British Raj in India. At the heart of his argument is a gendered analysis of the importance of notions of masculinity and male codes of honor to sustaining British rule.
In 1857, Indian soldiers in the British Indian Army mutinied. The uprising was the culmination of growing Indian resentment over British social and economic policies, and it seriously threatened British rule in India. In 1859, British Crown rule was established in India ending centuries...