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After American rejection of the Covenant, which London could not influence, the League was overshadowed by the Allied Supreme Council which tackled the main post‐war issues. The British supported the Canadian attempt to delete article 10 (the territorial guarantee) but this was not seen as an important issue. Nor was the elaboration of procedures for sanctions under article 16 (the guarantee of peace) through the nineteen resolutions of 1921. Lord Curzon succeeded Balfour as Foreign Secretary. Rejecting balance of power politics, he valued the League as embodying moral principles in the conduct of international affairs. The League was involved in the resolution of several crises including Armenia (1920), North Persia (1920), Vilna (1920–3), Upper Silesia (1921), and Albania (1921). Its record was mixed. Meanwhile, Cecil, aiming to replace Lloyd George with a high‐minded coalition under Grey, turned the League of Nations Union into a significant force in British politics.

Anti-suffrage women believed that their particular virtues and capacities would be needed more than ever during the First World War. Political campaigns were suspended, but an undercurrent of suffrage debate flowed through the war relief efforts of suffragists and anti-suffragists alike. Anti-suffrage women were keen to demonstrate their superior patriotism, and to carry forward their gender beliefs into the new wartime debates over such issues as female employment, maternity, and childcare. In 1916, it became clear that franchise reform was inevitable, and supporters and opponents of votes for women resumed subdued levels of activism. The NLOWS was a much-weakened organization, but far from entirely quiescent as women's suffrage inexorably neared the statute book. Women continued to play a significant opposition role beyond Parliament, and were outraged by Lord Curzon's final capitulation. The NLOWS wake in April 1918 was a mainly female affair, emphasizing commitment to the future political education of women voters.

Between 1891 when Dharmapala arrived at Bodh Gaya and 1910 when he lost the legal struggle to make Bodh Gaya a Buddhist place, Indian circumstances changed from day to night. The universalizing moment was swept away by an Indian nationalism that was Hindu in spirit. The struggle for Bodh Gaya was shaped not only by Bengali forces such as the British India Association but also by British colonial and international actors from Burma and Sri Lanka to Japan. Dharmapala found the British hugely favourable to Buddhism and the Buddhist claim to Bodh Gaya, as his Bengali friends grew less sympathetic to his cause. The struggle brought local British officials—Lord Curzon supporting one side and Henry and Evan Cotton defending the other—into conflict in a way that reinscribed the notion that Buddhism was foreign to India and Hinduism the heart of the Indian nation.

This chapter explores the post-Mutiny rehabilitation of the Raj and the relatively small adjustments to it during the late nineteenth century. On the whole, the government in London and India, as well as the military reconstruction, administrative arrangements, and financial organization, endured remarkably well, sufficiently satisfying Indian demand for participation in the regime. It also investigates the transformation that Victoria's last Viceroy, the authoritarian Lord Curzon, sought to effect in order to regenerate and remotivate an Imperial order that he found tired and complacent. Another follows the counter-revolution that, under Liberal governments from 1905 to 1914, was intended to re-establish stable relations between the Raj and Indians whom Curzon had alienated, and between Britain and rival European empires with interests in India's neighbours whom Curzon had sought to dominate. Finally, it evaluates India's importance for the British Empire, and the consequences of Empire for India.

Gokhale’s election to the Bombay Council in 1899 marked the beginning of his political rehabilitation. Six years later, when he presided over the Benares session of the Indian National Congress, it can be said that he climbed the top rung of the political ladder. His rise to political eminence thus almost coincided with the term of Lord Curzon as the Viceroy of India. This chapter focuses on the conflict between Gokhale and Curzon. Given Curzon’s general antipathy to the educated classes and his hostility to their political aspirations, he was bound, sooner or later, to clash with them. The clash was precipitated by his plans for the reform of the universities.

By the summer of 1904, Indian nationalists had despaired of a favourable response to their demands from Lord Curzon or the Conservative Government in Whitehall. Things looked rather bleak, but, fortunately, as the year wore on, British politics took a hopeful turn with the possibility of a general election and a Liberal victory. In response, the Bombay Congress unanimously decided to depute Congress representatives to bring the claims of India ‘before the electors, before the Parliamentary candidates, and before the political leaders’ in England. These delegates included Surendranath Banerjea, M.A. Jinnah, Lajpat Rai, and Gokhale. This chapter chronicles Gokhale’s trip to England and his speeches delivered there.

This chapter discusses the first meeting of the Indian National Congress, which was conducted on 28 December 1885. It was presided over by Allan Octavian Hume. Hume believed that while the British helped bring peace to India, they still had not solved the country’s economic problems. The next section considers the possibility that an All-India political organization would not be accepted by the ‘guardians’ of the British Raj. It also studies the significance of Hume’s speech, which was delivered in Allahabad, and the growing conflict between British officials and the local Indian intelligentsia. The chapter ends with a discussion of Lord Curzon’s regime, the partition of Bengal in 1905, and the time when Motilal was making his way to the top of the Bar.

Chapter 3 focuses on the administration of empire, from the Colonial Office in London to the experiences of governors and civil servants around the globe, whose lives were increasingly dominated by tedious meetings and dull dispatches. It shows that the empire became more bureaucratic during the nineteenth century, as the British implemented a system of centralized administrative rule that sheds light on the origins of Weber’s modern bureaucratic state. The volume of paperwork grew dramatically, and high-level officials, who relished the leisured lifestyle that characterized the aristocratic ideal, complained regularly about the quantity of deskwork and the frequency of ritualized public duties. Moreover, there were increasing numbers of officials who had to work in remote locations performing menial tasks. This chapter thus challenges the “great man” view of history, highlighting the limits on individual action and the impact of bureaucratization on administrators’ sense of mission.

Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, established the Imperial Research Agricultural Institute to draw scientists together in a single location to solve the challenges facing India’s farmers, which included plant disease, soil infertility, low production per acre, and famine. Unknown to most organic farming enthusiasts is the fact that Howard supported the use of artificial pesticides for fruits and vegetables imported into India, and that his colleagues at Pusa pioneered and published many of the same principles as the famous “Indore compost” method that Howard popularized in his book Agricultural Testament, upon his retirement from India in 1939. Howard took these experiments further than his colleagues, formulated them, and popularized them.

This chapter examines Jawaharlal’s growing passion for politics. He read the proceedings of the Indian National Congress and had a strong dislike for racial arrogance, which was often seen on the railways. The chapter first looks at the defeat of the Russian fleet by the Japanese navy, and notes that Jawaharlal’s return to Harrow only increased his interest in politics. It then studies the events in 1907 that led to Motilal’s entry into active politics. It discusses the tension between the Extremists and the Moderates, as well as the tensions that had been building since Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty. The chapter also discusses the first political conflict between Motilal and Jawaharlal, the Surat Congress, and Jawaharlal’s growing radicalism and militant nationalism.

This chapter lays out the antecedents that preceded the eventual British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf. In the early nineteenth century, Britain sent military expeditions to the southern coast of the Gulf in order to combat what they called ‘pirates’. Thanks to its subsequent military victory, London coerced the local forces into entering into a series of treaties. The primary aim of these unequal treaties was to establish a peace in the region that was favourable to British commerce and communication, yet the very act of signing these treaties implied that Britain had acknowledged the legal status of its counterparts. Consequently, the territories concerned were given the standing of sovereign states, a dubious status reflected in their British name ‘Protected States’.

What happens to our understanding of liberal international order--its history, material bases and ideological claims--if we read its development not solely as a social formation built by the West and exported around the earth, but rather as an economic and political encounter with the world of the Global Indian Ocean? This chapter analyzes how the Global Indian Ocean was built and how it evolved over time: its origins in so-called "archaic globalization" as well as the shape it took following the post-1750 "Great Transformation" which, through successive waves of imperialism, spawned a first liberal international order. British-dominated hegemony was replaced after 1945 with a more ambitious system of liberal governance under American leadership. Such reworked "thin hegemony" spurred renewed integration and exchange but also violent resistance and heterodox imagination, processes that further intensified after 1989.