A number of features like the spread of English education that characterise modern India have a genesis in institutions and systems set up in British colonial India. Set up not merely to tighten the grip over a vast profitable colony, these were also experiments in social engineering based on the philosophies of Macaulay, Bentham and Mill. India provided a test-bed for ideas that could not possibly be implemented in England itself.

The author is one of the foremost historians of Indian education. This book brings together a collection of five essays that deal with the origin of the system of Western education in India under Lord Macaulay and Charles Wood, and subsequent reforms under Lord Curzon, on the use of military force to maintain control over large swathes of the country and the influence of Utilitarianism in Lord Dalhousie’s policies.

This book is an excellent source material for students and scholars of history of education in British India.