Empire Building

Empire Building offers a fresh account of how the East India Company changed India, looking in particular at the subcontinent's built environment: its defences, its cities and its infrastructure.

Rosie Llewellyn-Jones reads these projects as acts of political building, carried out with Indian contractors and labourers. Railways, docks, municipal buildings, Freemasons' lodges, hotels, racecourses, barracks, cemeteries, statues and canals all carried a political message, even when it was unintended. The book therefore cares less about architectural style and more about the quiet effect these structures had on the minds of those who saw and used them. It also looks at how Indians responded to the changing landscape. They often welcomed new British manufacturing technologies such as minting and gunpowder production, while the British in turn learned from local methods and adapted them.

From military engineers and cartography to imported metals and steam power, the author weighs the social and environmental consequences of colonial rule. The period saw functions once private and under Indian control, such as education, entertainment, trade and healing, move into British public institutions like universities, theatres, chambers of commerce and hospitals.

The book sets aside current colonialism debates and concentrates on the physical transformation of India during the Company period.