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Lead book review

British India — the scene of repeated war crimes throughout the 19th century

William Dalrymple’s review of The Tears of the Rajas by Ferdinand Mount reminds us that the British empire was erected on the dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of its Indian subjects

14 March 2015

9:00 AM

14 March 2015

9:00 AM

The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805–1905 Ferdinand Mount

Simon & Schuster, pp.773, £25

‘Sometimes, strolling through the ruins of earlier civilisations, we idly wonder what it must have been like to live through the end of one of them,’ writes Ferdinand Mount at the end of The Tears of the Rajas. ‘Now we know for ourselves.’

This is a long, wonderfully discursive and reassuringly old-fashioned book which tells the story of the British in India through the lives of one British family — the author’s ancestors, the Lows of Clatto in Fife.

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