Miles Taylor's new volume is long awaited, the author having first broached its subject in article form nearly fifteen years ago. Empress: Queen Victoria and India gathers up certain threads Taylor has thrown out in publications since, but for the most part presents completely new material. It is a seriously ambitious, and in many ways pioneering, scholarly production. The book sets out to offer a panoptic account of the relationship between the British monarchy and the Indian empire in the age of Queen Victoria. It rests on an innovative fusion of the tools of biography with both 'high' and 'popular' varieties of political history. But Taylor does not indulge in interpretative pyrotechnics: this is a sustained, mature treatment of a series of knottily connected problems.
展开▼
