The Raj

I just finished reading an interesting book by Lawrence James called Raj, The Making and Unmaking of British India, about the time of British rule in India.

The British, starting from a trading post, acquired control of India in a higgledy-piggledy, unintentional sort of way, as a result of a mish-mash of treaties and wars, some defensive and some aggressive, and to a great extent determined by local commanders. I've heard the British acquired their empire "in a fit of absentmindedness," a description which seems to describe this situation fairly well.

Anyway, once they acquired India, despite plenty of black marks against them, the British seemed generally quite concerned about improving it's lot. I did not read the book for inspiration, but being a Christian, this summary quote in the Epilogue about the Raj (the name for the British-Indian government) caught my eye:

"It [the Raj] had been the most perfect expression of what Britain took to be its duty to humanity as a whole. Its guiding ideals had sprung from late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Evangelical Enlightenment which had dreamed of a world transformed for the better by Christianity and reason. The former made little headway in India, but the later, in the form of Western education and the application of science, did."