Perfidy, Villainy, Intrigue

• Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt by Richard Gott
  Verso, 568 pp, £25.00, November 2011, ISBN 978 1 84467 738 2
• The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power by Partha Chatterjee
  Princeton, 425 pp, £19.95, April 2012, ISBN 978 0 691 15201 1

In 1931, Gandhi visited England to discuss India’s political future. In a speech at Oxford, he hoped that when the empire finally ended, India would be an ‘equal partner with Britain, sharing her joys and sorrows’. Nine years later, on the death of his close friend C.F. Andrews, an Anglican priest, he wrote that while the numerous misdeeds of the English would be forgotten, ‘not one of the heroic deeds of Andrews will be forgotten as long as England and India live. If we really love Andrews’s memory, we may not have hate in us for Englishmen, of whom Andrews was among the best and noblest.’