The British ruled India for 200 years with unshakeable self-confidence, buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall. Stalin found it 'ridiculous' that 'a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India'. Though not arithmetically accurate, in principle, he was right: it was remarkable that the British Raj was operated by so few people. At its peak in 1931, there were just 168,000 Brits (including 60,000 in the army and police and only 4,000 in civil government) to run a country approaching 300 million people. The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population.

In his monumental book, The British in India, imperial historian David Gilmour helps explain how they did it. He meticulously studies the lives and work of the British who lived and were employed in India, and in a remarkable social history describes the lives of viceroys and bureaucrats, soldiers and tea planters, missionaries and merchants, delving deep into private papers and unpublished correspondence. A decade ago, in his book The Ruling Caste, Gilmour had delved in depth into the lives of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). This volume, three times as long, broadens his range: the ICS is there, but so also are the military, the journalists and the "boxwallahs" (the commercial classes) as well as the hunters who single-handedly decimated most of the subcontinent's wildlife, living by the motto-'It's a fine day, let's go and kill something.

The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience by David Gilmour

The British were in India to govern in the strategic, commercial and political interests of their home country. Elitism at home reinforced racism here: two thirds of the viceroys in the six decades from 1884 were products of Eton. Though from 1868 Indians were allowed to take the civil service examinations, they were long relegated to inferior positions; one Viceroy, Lord Mayo, declared, "We are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race." In Gilmour's telling, they had no illusions about preparing Indians for self-government; their view of Indians was at best paternalist, at worst contemptuous

Several generations of some families served in India, some over three centuries. It was not, of course, all self-sacrifice and hard work: the British in India earned the highest salaries of any officials in the world, with generous furloughs and a guaranteed pension, and some at least found it 'quite impossible' to spend their income.

British society in India was also wedded inexcusably to its own pleasures, retreating to mountain redoubts for months on end to escape the searing heat of the plains, there to while away their time in entertainments, dances and social fripperies while the objects of their rule, the Indian people, were exploited ruthlessly below. In the summer capital of Simla, with its population of 'grass widows' enjoying the cooler air while their husbands toiled in the hot plains, the principal activities included gambling, drinking, dancing-and adultery.

The first decades of British rule after Plassey were more freewheeling, corrupt and extractive, but less racist and socially exclusionary than the second century of the Raj proved to be. In the early years, the British in India took Indian wives-one official, Sir David Ochterlony, married 13, and every evening took all of them in a procession around Delhi, each on the back of her own elephant. But all this changed with the arrival of British women. At English clubs and tennis matches, elegant balls and tiger shoots, the women of the 'fishing-fleet' allowed themselves to be reeled in by eligible civilians. Insulated from India by their upbringing and new social circumstances, waited upon by a flotilla of servants and spared contact with other Indians, and susceptible to the prejudices of white Victorian England, these women were often the most guilty of racism and disdain for the country.

Racism became entrenched, pervasive and repugnant. The Indians were shown their place; even those in government service were condemned to inferiority in their ranks, authority, positions assigned, lack of career advancement, and every month when their salary slips arrived. The lowest Brit considered himself superior to the highest-born Indian: in a statement that has long encapsulated for me the essential premise-and presumption-of British imperialism, the College of Heralds in Victorian London once blandly declared: "The Aga Khan is held by his followers to be a direct descendant of God. English Dukes take precedence."

Gilmour acknowledges the racism as part of a series of distinctions even among the expatriates that he considers analogous to the Indian caste system. In his telling, the ICS were the Brahmins, the army the Kshatriyas, the boxwallahs the merchants and the "other ranks" (clerks, stationmasters, piano-tuners and the like) the Sudras. Still below them were the Eurasians, whom we now know as "Anglo-Indians", products of miscegenation between British and Indians. In this system, of course, the Indians were the outcastes.

Gilmour, as his capacious bibliography and multitude of footnotes attest, is a serious historian, whose work on related subjects includes well-regarded (but entirely sympathetic) biographies of Kipling and Curzon. He writes accessibly and often wittily on the British in India, with a wealth of anecdotage and an eye for the telling story. But, as his book's subtitle-"three centuries of ambition and experience"-reflects, he is unforgivably non-judgemental about his subjects. The very element that indicts the British imperial system in the eyes of an Indian-its foreignness and its disconnection from the Indian people for whose benefit it claimed to govern-is taken for granted. That so many of the men Gilmour writes affectionately or sardonically about were, at the very least, embodiments of iniquity and race privilege does not even seem to have occurred to him

In this regard, The British in India is curiously old-fashioned in its assumptions. There is little awareness of any Indian perspective on the British and their work. What did the subjects of their administration think of them? Gilmour does not tell us. The growing political consciousness of Indians, and how the British reacted to it, is absent in the book; among other omissions, the unforgivable British attitude to famines, which cost 35 million Indian lives because of imperial policy, undermines Gilmour's portraits of glittering durbars and elegant soirees. He glosses over the prejudice and casual racism of many ICS men. Many of the British hated India and Indians, notably Churchill, who said so in as many words. The British did little to advance the welfare of the people they ruled-their concern was stability, not change; their job was to ensure imperial profit, not Indian progress, which would have undermined imperial rule. The pillage and plunder that principally motivated the British presence in India is wholly absent from Gilmour's reckoning; he writes with a benign detachment that, frankly, only an Englishman could be capable of on this subject.

As with all human enterprises, imperial rule too brought positives as well as negatives. Not every British official in India was as rapacious as Clive, as ignorantly contemptuous as Macaulay, as arrogantly divisive as Curzon, as cruel as Dyer, or as racist as Churchill. There were good men who rose above the prejudices of their age to treat Indians with compassion, curiosity and respect; humane judges, conscientious officials, visionary viceroys and governors, Britons who genuinely befriended Indians across the colour barrier. Individuals who "went native", like Charles Andrews and Verrier Elwin, find mention in Gilmour's book, as does the explorer Richard Francis Burton, "whose research into the homosexual brothels of Karachi had been deemed too diligent for an officer of the Indian Army."

Throughout the Raj, there were men who devoted their lives to serve in India-to serve their country's colonial institutions, it must be said, but also to help ordinary people in the process. There is no doubt about the heroic efforts of many individual British, who built dams, dug canals, founded colleges and even, in some cases, advocated Indian self-rule. Their names became part of the geography of the subcontinent: towns called Abbottabad, Lyallpur and Cox's Bazar, Corbett Park, Cotton Hill, the Mcnabbwah Canal. But they alleviated, rather than justified, the monstrous crime that allowed them to exist, the crime of subjugating a people under the oppressive heel of the 'stout British boot'.

Their lifestyles, for the most part, separated them from the masses they sought to rule. By the early 19th century, the British had established themselves as a ruling caste, but they did not intermarry or inter-dine with Indians; they lived in bungalows in their own exclusive areas, known as cantonments and 'civil lines', separated from the 'Black Towns' where the locals lived, patronised whites-only clubs and sneered at the Indians whose oppression paid for their comforts. They also created little islands of Englishness in the hill stations, planting ferns and roses around cottages with nostalgia-suffused English names. Their loyalties remained wedded to their faraway homeland; their children were shipped off to the British public school system and did not mingle with the 'natives'; their clothes and purchases came from Britain, as did their books and ideas. At the end of their careers in India, for the most part, they returned 'home'. As the English writer Henry Nevinson observed in 1907, 'a handful of people from a distant country maintain a predominance unmitigated by social intercourse, marriage, or permanent residence'.

That was the life of the British in India. Then, after 25 or more years in the subcontinent, most would retire to Cheltenham or South Kensington, to English suburbs that became known as 'Asia Minor' or 'the Anglo-Indian Quarter', surrounded by reminders and relics of the land they had ruled. This book is a memorial to them, in their own terms. It belongs on their shelves.