Sunday round-up 2 August 2026

Rubbing their hands at the prospect of cake today are former Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and United States Secretary of the Treasury (who presumably does know something) John W. Snow (87), novelist and essayist Isabel Allende (84), writer and ex-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia Dame Rose Tremain (83), journalist and author Lawrence Wright (79), singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer Andy Fairweather-Low (78), former Ministry for Industry and Trade and Speaker of the Riksdag Per Westerberg (75), Runrig lead singer and Labour parliamentary candidate Donnie Munro (73), historian, educator and writer Sir Anthony Seldon (73), La’s lead vocalist Lee Mavers (64), German touring car legend Frank Biela (62), actress Mary-Louise Parker (62), actor, director, producer and screenwriter Kevin Smith (56), Mayor of the District of Columbia Muriel Bowser (54), actor and possessor of “troubled private life” Edward Furlong (49), Vice President of the United States J.D. Vance (42), actress Lily Gladstone (40) and singer-songwriter and possible pseudonym user Charli XCX (34).

Cake left out in the rain post-mortem for Rembrandt spouse and model Saskia van Uylenburgh (1612), final pre-suppression Superior General of the Society of Jesus Lorenzo Ricci (1703), military engineer and planner of Washington DC Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754), influential military leader and former General in Chief of the Central Army Captain General Manuel Pavía y Rodríguez de Alburquerque (1828), Statue of Liberty designer Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834), King Constantine I of the Hellenes (1868), composer and conductor Sir Arthur Bliss (1891), Warner Bros. co-founder Jack Warner (1892), former commandant of Columbia, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps Karl-Otto Koch (1897), actress Myrna Loy (1905), former General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress Lord Murray of Epping Forest (1922), former Prime Minister and President of Israel Shimon Peres (1923), novelist, poet and critic James Baldwin (1924), former Home Secretary and Governor of Bermuda Lord Waddington (1929), actor Peter O’Toole (1932), The Band keyboard player Garth Hudson (1937) and director, producer and screenwriter Wes Craven (1939).

Two’s company..

The British Empire was the one upon which, famously, the sun never set (because, equally famously, God didn’t trust an Englishman in the dark). That was, in fact, at one time true: if you interpret those words as meaning it was always daylight somewhere in British-controlled territory, then it was so in the period after the First Worst War. The reason the empire reached its greatest geographical extent so late was that UK had emerged from the peace negotiations having fared well. It was awarded mandates—jurisdiction over former colonies of the defeated powers—by the League of Nations under various classes. In some cases these were a matter of supervising transitions over unspecified time periods to democracy and self-sufficiency; in other cases, on the ground it was difficult to distinguish mandatory status from a straightforward move from being a colony of one power to that of another.

It is an extraordinary thing: this was a small island off the north-west coast of continental Europe, part of which had for a time, but ending really in the 14th century, held significant territories in what is now France; England was sporadically of reasonable wealth but its prosperity was for centuries fundamentally constrained by geography and resources, while Scotland was never much more than fairly poor; England was prone to dynastic crises, with the depositions of Edward II and Richard II being followed eventually by the Wars of the Roses and the failures—in genealogical terms— of both the Tudors and the Stuarts; in Scotland, after Robert III died in 1406, no Stewart monarch would live to see 45 until James VI passed that milestone in 1611; and all three kingdoms (the Kingdom of Ireland, held in personal union by the English Crown, was created in 1542, having previously been a lordship ruled by England from 1177) went through religious change of varying levels of drama, England ultimately passing from Catholicism to Protestantism with relatively little unrest, Scotland deciding the matter through civil war and the deposition of Mary I and Ireland never resolving the issue at all.

Yet the kingdoms of Britain gradually unified, through personal union of the crowns in 1603, the full royal and parliamentary union of England and Scotland in 1707 and the merger of the resulting realm of Great Britain with Ireland in 1801. (The Statute of Rhuddlan (1284) made Wales a possession of the English crown, while the Laws in Wales Act 1535 and the Laws in Wales Act 1542 formally Wales into England.) Britain’s growing prosperity and power saw it govern the largest empire the world has ever seen, standing in 1920 at 13.7 million square miles and 400 million people, at that time a quarter of the global population.

While the instinct to expand, control and dominate was always present—as it has been and is in so many human societies—there was no blueprint for the British Empire and many of its possessions came about either by coincidence of circumstance, the seizure of unexpected opportunities or sheer dumb luck. British dominance in India—the Raj, the jewel in the imperial crown—came about through a mixture of all three.

The first centuries of English power in India, first commercial then political and military, were exercised by the East India Company, a joint-stock company chartered in 1600 to trade “into the East-Indies”. The company established its first territorial possession of Fort St George on a strip of land purchased in 1639 from the Raja of Chandragiri, around which the city of Madras grew up; it was followed by Bombay Castle, taken from the Portuguese in 1668, and Fort William in Calcutta, built in 1696. For a while, the East India Company co-existed with, or rather under, the vast Mughal Empire, which by 1700 was the richest state in the world accounting for a quarter of global GDP.

When the sixth Mughal ruler, Aurangzeb, died in 1707, however, the empire fractured amid rebellions and wars of succession between Aurangzeb’s sons, Azam Shah and Bahadur Shah I, and by the time Delhi was sacked by the Shah of Iran, Nader Shah, in March 1739, Mughal influence barely extended beyond the city walls. The East India Company exploited the shifting political dynamics to increase its own power, as well as seeking to check the expansion of French interests in India. The turning point was the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, when the East India Company’s Lieutenant Colonel Robert Clive, though heavily outnumbered, defeated and arranged the execution of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, beat his French allies and established effective EIC and British sway over Bengal.

By the 1770s, it was becoming clear that the East India Company’s administration was hindered by its division into three presidencies, Bombay, Madras and Bengal. The British government took its first substantial step towards involvement of in the administration of India wth the Regulating Act 1773, which elevated the Governor of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal to the post of Governor General and placed him in authority over the presidencies of Madras and Bombay. It also created a five-man Supreme Council of Bengal, with the Governor General and four others, subject both to the East India Company’s Court of Directors (by which it was appointed) and to the Crown; and a Supreme Court of Judicature in Calcutta.

Warren Hastings therefore became the first Governor General, but the institutions which seemed logical and satisfactory on the vellum of the act were crippled by bitter rivalries. Hastings, having resigned in 1785, was subject to an impeachment process which lasted from 1787 to his acquittal in 1795 (at his formal indictment by the House of Commons, the 20 charges against him took Edmund Burke two days to read into the record). Successive British governments, already grappling with rebellion in the Thirteen Colonies in North America, again and again attempted to refine the procedures of administration; the East India Company Act 1784, introduced by the new Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, created a Board of Control to oversee the governance of India, made up of no fewer than three Privy Counsellors appointed as Commissioners for the Affairs of India; these were to include the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who at that point was also the Prime Minister, and one of the Secretaries of State, of whom there were only two, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary. The Board of Control was headed by a President who would generally sit in Cabinet.

These arrangements were not perfect because India remained under the joint control and supervision of the Crown and the East India Company. But the 1784 act stated for the first time that EIC territories were “British possessions in India”, establishing an ultimate claim of ownership by the Crown. It also resolved many of the worst defects of the previous legislation and effected several shrewd political compromises. It was known as Pitt’s India Act and reflected the acute sensibilities and outstanding administrative ability of the 25-year-old Prime Minister. There was a clear direction of travel which increased the role of the government in the administration of India and wore away at the notion of the East India Company as an autonomous commercial organisation.

The East India Company Act 1813, also known as the Charter Act, eroded the status of the EIC further. It abolished the company’s monopoly on trade, with the exceptions of tea and opium as well as trade with China, and, while it renewed the EIC’s charter granting it commercial and administrative authority in India, it went further than the 1784 act, explicitly asserting the Crown’s sovereignty over India and making the EIC merely an administrative agent. The Board of Control was also required to submit more detailed accounts and financial statements to Parliament.

Government was simply getting bigger, and becoming professionalised. In 1786, the Board of Trade had been restructured and streamlined to give it more executive focus and less of a detached and consultative role. The Customs and Excise Act 1787 consolidated customs duties, making them easier to collect, following which the Account of His Majesty’s Exchequer was established at the Bank of England. Commonly known as the Consolidated Fund, this was (and is) the government’s bank accounts, and with all customs duties going into one account it was much easier for Parliament to exercise scrutiny over it. In 1794, a third secretaryship was created, the office of Secretary of State for War, to bring greater administrative rigour to the organisation of the British Army, and in 1801 the Secretary of State assumed responsibility for the colonies (but not India), previous held by the Home Secretary.

Against this sort of trend, the East India Company’s history of loose, semi-official, semi-private administration was unlikely to remain effective or acceptable. The Government of India Act 1833, later retitled the Saint Helena Act 1833, continued in the same direction. It extended the EIC’s charter fo a further 20 years but stripped it of commercial activities. The Governor General of Bengal was restyled as Governor General of India and his Council named the India Council, with legislative powers across all of British India now vested in the “Governor General in Council”; this necessarily stripped legislative powers from the Governors of Bombay and Madras. A law member, former Whig MP and future historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, was added to the Council. The act also provided for the Law Commission of India, made tentative steps towards open competition in the Indian civil service and forbade discrimination against Indians on the basis of religion. There was also a requirement for the government in India to stamp out slavery, which came about with the passage of the Indian Slavery Act 1843 by the Governor General in Council, 10 years after the United Kingdom Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.

The Government of India Act 1853 was an exercise in refinement and reform, but it reinforced the eclipsing of the private-enterprise model of the East India Company. The India Council separated its executive and legislative functions: six additional members joined the Legislative Council, while the law member joined full-time. The Covenant Civil Service began recruiting on the basis of open competition, allowing Indians to join.

Then all hell broke loose.

(What happened in 1857-58 goes by a variety of hotly of ters, but you will never make everyone happy. I’m going to call it the Indian Mutiny, because that was the terminology when I was first getting to grips with history as a child. It was also occasionally referred to as the Sepoy Mutiny, “sepoy” being a term for an Indian infanryman fighting fin European, usually British, service; it derives from Persian via Urdu in the form sepāhī, which means soldier or horseman; by a different path it ends up as “spahi”, a cavalryman in the Ottoman army or later in French service. “Sepoy” can be pejorative, but, interestingly, much more so in Indian than English usage. In English there is perhaps a faintly patronising, paternalistic tone, but in India and surrounding states, it has a much more bitter sense of “traitor” or “turncoat”, since these were Indian soldiers in British service.

I understand that many Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis, object to the description of what happened as a “mutiny”, since they would quite reasonably argue that India owed no fealty to Britain. It’s a perfectly respectable argument, and many prefer the Great Rebellion, the Revolt of 1857, the Indian Insurrection or the First War of Independence. It’s context-dependent, of course. I make just two points. The first is that I don’t think history serves us well nor we it if is treated as a morality play. The past is too complex for that. The second is that, writing for an Anglophone audience, I think the largest group of people, if they know anything about the history of the Raj at all, will recognise most readily and with least pre-briefing “the Indian Mutiny” rather than “the Revolt of 1857” or “the First War of Independence”. In a similar vein, I wouldn’t call the American Civil War “the War of Northern Aggression” (or, heavens to Betsy, “the recent unpleasantness”). More pertinently, I’ve thought about “the Wars of the Three Kingdoms”, “the English Revolution”, “the Great Rebellion”, “the Great Civil War”, “the English Civil Wars” and “the Puritan Revolution”; while calling the conflicts across England, Scotland and Ireland in the 1640s and 1650s “the English Civil War” is hugely inaccurate, I’m not satisfied that anything else decisively better without being obscurantist. So, the English Civil War, and the Indian Mutiny.)

The Indian Mutiny began on 10 May1857, at the East India Company’s garrison at Meerut, 40 miles north-east of Delhi. There were 2,357s sepoys and 2,038 British soldiers, significant forces, as well as 12 British-crewed artillery pieces. Lieutenant Colonel George Carmichael-Smyth, Officer Commanding the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry, a predominantly Muslim unit, had discipline problems: when ordered to parade and carry out firing practice, the vast majority had refused to accept the cartridges for their newly issues rifles.

It waa a complex story. In 1856, Indian troops had begun to be issued with the .577 calibre Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle-musket. The cartridge for the weapon was a paper cylinder containing gunpowder and a ballprojectile; British Army drills of the time taught that a corner of the cylinder should be torn off with the teeth, allowing the gunpowder to be poured down the barrel; after that, the greased end of the cartridge containing the ball was snapped off at the muzzle, and was rammed down the barrel to load it ready for firing.

As the new weapons were issued, rumours spread that the cartridges—whuch had te be placed in the mouth, remember—were greased with beef tallow, pig fat or a combination of both: beef was forbidden to Hindus and pork to Muslim, so the cartridges were potentially religious unacceptable to almost all Indian soldiers. The British authorities did try to accommodate these anxieties: it was suggested that sepoys could tear the cartridges open by hand rather than biting them, but this was deemed impractical because many sepoys had been drilling in the traditional way for decades and would struggle to change now. It was also much slowed and more cumbersome. Another suggestion that Indian troops were perfectly welcome to make their own cartridges and grease them with ghee, vegetable oil or some other acceptable product backfired: it merely convinced sepoys that the standard cartridges did indeed use beef tallow and pig fat.

Did they? We don’t know, and the British Army of the time didn’t either. They knew that the cartridges were prepared using a combination of animal fat and beeswax, but as was later admitted, records were not kept of the precise types of animals. This meant that, to be truthful, the authorities could not categorically say that the cartridges did not contain fat from either cows or pigs.

While these tensions and anxieties were playing out across northern India, Carmichael-Smyth of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry was attempting a policy of tough love. On 24 Apri, in spite of the objections of his mainly Muslim unit, he had insisted that a rifle drill was executed. Of the 90 men instructed to perform, 85 refused to accept the cartridges. Carmichael-Smyth consequently had them court-martialled, and at 5.00 am on Saturday 9 May, the entire Meerut Division paraded to hear the sentences delivered. Those found guilty were formally stripped of their uniforms and placed in shackles, in a process which took two full hours. The General Officer Commanding Meerut Division, Major-General William Hewitt, signalled that evening to his superiors that all was well. He was wrong.

In fact discontent and rancour were brewing and steeping among many Indian soldiers. The following day, 10 May, fighting broke out between elements of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry, the 11th and 12th Regiments of Bengal Native Infantry and the 60th Rifles, and there was no turning back.

The Mutiny was not just about greased ammunition cartridges. The East India Company’s army included 300,000 sepoys and only 50,000 British soldiers. The three presidencies, Bombay, Madras and Bengal, recruited differently and from different castes, and the EIC made a point of remaining uninvolved in such local matters and traditions. Sepoys were unhappy because there were precious few additional opportunities for conquest now, which meant fewer chances of “foreign service” pay. Promotion had slowed and frustration was mounting.

Here is not the place to record the details of the Mutiny. It lasted for 18 months and saw 6,000 British soldiers and civilians killed. In contrast, including the famines and epidmeics of disease, between 800,000 and a million Indians lost their lives. While drawing no conclusions of morality, it’s worth noting that there were around 40,000 British people in India at the time, so one in six was killed. That made the shock and outrage in Britain all the greater. There was a “mood of retribution and despair”, as a result of which the savage measures taken to punish rebels and deter any future insurrection met with almost universal approval in the UK.

The Mutiny had not been inevitable, but it had been made more likely, and perhaps its effects exacerbated, by the fact that the government had too much to lose in India in political, diplomatic and military terms, as well as commercially and economically. It was clear that more sweeping administrative changes were necessary and that the days of the East India Company as any kind of sub-contracting authority to rule India were now, had to be, over.

The Whig Prime Minister, Viscount Palmerston, had come to power during the Crimean War when the Earl of Aberdeen’s ministry had collapsed in 1855. He was 73 by 1858, disliked by the Queen and distrusted by many political colleagues and rivals, but enormously popular with the press and the public. He had already served as Foreign Secretary three times (1830-34, 1835-41, 1846-51) and was Home Secretary under Aberdeen (1852-55), though his experience went back as far as stint of nearly decades as Secretary at War from 1809 to 1828 under four Prime Ministers (Perceval, Liverpool, Canning and Goderich).

Initially, Palmerston had not appreciated the full significance or scale of the Mutiny. He was working from very sketchy and out-of-date details for simple reasons of distance and available technology, and was also managing the aftermath of the Crimean War, which had only concluded in February 1856. Once he did grasp the severity of the situation, he responded promptly by sending reinforcements to India: within three months of the Mutiny beginning, 30,000 additional troops had been despatched.

On 12 February 1858, Palmerston introduced the Government of India Bill into the House of Commons. He explained that the aim of the bill, “of first-rate importance”, was “transferring from the East India Company to the Crown the government of Her Majesty’s East Indian dominions”. He paid tribute to the EIC and emphasised that the proposals in the bill were not due to “any delinquency on the part of the Company”. Instead, it was intended to address “the inconvenience and injurious character of the existing arrangements”.

It was, the Prime Minister said, astonishing that a country as small and remote, in relative terms, as England should have come to exercise control over India.

That is a remarkable circumstance; but still more remarkable is it that these extensive dominions should have been gained not by the power of a nation as a nation, but by an association of individuals, by a mercantile community, supported, indeed, to a certain degree by the power and resources of their country, but mainly indebted for success to their own energy and enterprise… it is quite as remarkable, quite as singular, that a nation like this, in which the science of government is perhaps better understood than in any other, in which the principle of popular representation has so long been established, should have deliberately consigned to the care of a small body of commercial men the management of such extensive territories, such vast interests, and such numerous populations.

Palmerston argued that the outcome of the Government of India Act 1833 (passed when he was Foreign Secretary), which had taken away the EIC’s commercial raison d’être and left it purely as an administrative institution, had been precisely the wrong way round. It had excluded the company from the field in which it was supposed to specialise, commerce, and instead burdened it with administrative responsibilities for which it had not be designed and was not equipped.

The arrangement so made was a most inconvenient and most cumbrous arrangement. The principle of our political system is that all administrative functions should be accompanied by Ministerial responsibility—responsibility to Parliament, responsibility to public opinion, responsibility to the Crown; but in this case the chief functions in the government of India are committed to a body not responsible to Parliament, not appointed by the Crown, but elected by persons who have no more connection with India than consists in the simple possession of so much India Stock. I think that that of itself is a most objectionable arrangement.

It had permitted a system of divided responsibility which, in practice, often meant no responsibility at all, and certainly no accountability. Quite simply, “Her Majesty’s Government cannot be fairly answerable for things over which they have not a perfect control, and which they cannot entirely direct”.

The bill proposed to abolish the East India Company’s Court of Directors and Court of Proprietors and replace them with a President—an enhanced version of the President of the Board of Control—who, assisted by an eight-member Council for the Affairs of India, would be a member of the government and have individual and sole responsibility for British policy in India. The debate on the bill’s introduction went on into Monday 15 February and Thursday 18 February, and the House voted by a surprisingly large margin of 145 to allow the bill to be introduced.

But the government then resigned.

On 14 January 1858, a radical Italian republican, Felice Orsini, and accomplices had attempted to assassinate the French Emperor, Napoleon III, and the Empress as they travelled by carriage to the Paris Opéra on Rue le Peletier. Three bombs were thrown at the imperial party, killing eight and injuring 142 although the Emperor and Empress were unharmed, and it soon transpired that the devices had been made and tested in England. A wave of anti-British feeling convulsed France, to assuage which Palmerston brought in the Conspiracy to Murder Bill, creating a felony offence of conspiring to commit murder. After spirited debate on 8 February and 9 February, the House of Commons gave leave for the bill to be brought in by 299 votes to 99, and the debate on Second Reading took place on 19 February. The Conservative Party decided to oppose the Second Reading, however, having supported leave to bring in the bill, and the government lost that night by 19 votes as the House declined to give the bill a Second Reading.

Palmerston had no choice but to resign, which he and his ministers did on Saturday 20 February, and he explained to the House of Commons that they would remain in office only until “a noble Lord, who, I believe I may venture to say, is at present engaged in constructing a Government”, could complete his task. The Earl of Derby, who had been Prime Minister for 10 months in 1852 and was approaching his 59th birthday, formed a minority Conservative administration with Benjamin Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons.

After inevitable delay, what was now the Government of India (No. 3) Bill had its Second Reading debate in the House of Commons on 24 June 1858. It was opened by the President of the Board of Control, Lord Stanley, the Prime Minister’s son and heir, and was agreed without a division on the understanding that fine details would be negotiated at its Committee Stage. The bill was considered in Committee of the whole House on 25 June, 1 July, 2 July and 5 July, followed by Report Stage on 6 July and Third Reading on 8 July. Having been sent to the House of Lords, it returned to the Commons on 27 July for consideration of Lords Amendments, most of which were accepted with a handful objected to with Reasons given. Further amendments were considered on 30 July, before the Government of India Act 1858 was granted Royal Assent on Monday 2 August, the day that Parliament was prorogued for that session.

The act did what Palmerston had set out to do. It transferred the East India Company’s territories to the possession of the Crown, to be governed in the Queen’s name by a Governor General or Viceroy. The powers and duties of the EIC’s Court of Directors, and the post of President of the Board of Control, were subsumed into a new position of Secretary of State for India to which Stanley was appointed. He was assisted by the Council of India, but was empowered to send some secret despatches to India directly without consulting the council, and there was an Indian Civil Service.

The first Viceroy was the incumbent Governor General, Viscount Canning; although he had been first appointed in 1856 largely because of his prestige as the son of a Prime Minister (George Canning, April-August 1827) who had also been President of the Board of Control 1816-21, he proved extremely adept an managing the implementation of the new arrangements. He had shown enough calmness and grip to see through the establishment of the first three modern universities in India—the University of Calcutta, the University of Madras and the University of Bombay—at the beginning of 1857, just as disquiet was building to what became open insurrection.

Like many institution nurtured by Britain, the governance of India had reached a stage in 1857 of which many would say, like the Irishman to the tourist in the hoary joke, that they wouldn’t have started from here. No-one would have designed ab nihilo the compromised, slightly ramshackle and occasionally unhelpful arrangements which by the Government of India Act 1833 held sway between the Crown, through the Board of Control, and the East India Company. The 1858 act, granted Royal Assent 168 years ago today, was not a fresh sheet of paper and contained many instances of adaptation and evolution, but it represented a determination to introduce rigour, logic and clarity to the United Kingdom’s governance of India.

The result was the British Raj, the stereotype of colonial rule we have today, of Britons in unsuitable clothing, low, dim bungalows, rattan furniture, great fans wafting slowly at the efforts of punkah wallahs, sweated-through linens, gins and tonic (the quinine in the tonic water staving off malaria, you see), of buttoned-up colonial officials, buttoned-up in every sense: it is A Passage to India, The Raj Quartet, The Far Pavilions, Kim, even The Jungle Book. It became more than a colonial possession for some, and more a kind of mystic destiny. In Richard Attenborough’s towering 1982 biopic Gandhi, the Indian leader (Sir Ben Kingsley) meets the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, played by Sir John Mills, and tells him and his officials, as they claim what organisation and order Britain has brought to India:

There is no people on earth who would not prefer their own bad government to the “good” government of an alien power.

After a stunned silence, an unnamed brigadier finds his indignant voice and responds in a way which would not have seemed absurd or outlandish.

My dear sir—India is Brio tish! We are hardly an alien power.

So interwined with Britain’s fortunes was its possession that it could seem inevitable, fated. The viceroyalty became a post of major political influence: the Marquess of Lansdowne (1888-94), Lord Curzon of Kedleston (1899-1905), Lord Irwin, later Earl of Halifax (1926-31). Equally, significant politicians passed through the office of Secretary of State for India: the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1866-67, 1874-78), the 8th Duke of Devonshire (1880-82), Lord Randolph Churchill (1885-86), Austen Chamberlain (1915-17), the Earl of Birkenhead (1924-28) and Leo Amery (1940-45).1

It is astonishing to think how efficiently the Raj was run. The population of India was 200 million in 1858 and had almost doubled by 1947; at the beginning the administration of soldiers and civil servants, plus families, amounted to only 125,000; if that had increased by 1947 it was only to 150,000. Yet, after the Mutiny, widespread violent resistance was rare, which must have encouraged those who thought the Raj would last for ever.

Yet quite the opposite happened. The Raj lasted for just over 89 years, until the Indian Independence Act 1947 hurriedly created the Dominions of India and Pakistan, formally coming into being on 15 August 1947. (Pakistan was divided into East and West Pakistan, with what was East Pakistan now being Bangladesh.) Dominion status did not last long, India becoming an independent republic in January 1950 and Pakistan following suit in March 1956. It was all over in the blink of an eye, as far as history is concerned: 89 years is an achievable age for a human being (Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Quintin Hailsham, Edward Heath, B.D. Jatti, Ramaswamy Venkataraman, the Duke of Edinburgh and Elizabeth II lived longer). Even before the Second World War, the Government of India Act 1935 was creating institutions designed to lead naturally and gently to India becoming a self-governing dominion. By the 1930s, it was only bone-deep, die-hard imperialists (like Churchill, who resigned from Baldwin’s Shadow Cabinet over India in 1931) who thought the Raj could continue indefinitely and unaltered.

Nothing lasts forever.

1. (This is shamelessly lifted from David Runciman (actually 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford) in The London Review of Books, reported by Helen Lewis on her Substack, The Bluestocking, but facts are held in common so I don’t feel bad.) There are 1,400 federal judges in the United States, 500 of them semi-retired but continuing to practise after the age of 65 with “senior status”. Of those 1,400, six per cent—about 80 judges—are in their nineties, including Alvin Hellerstein, 92, senior United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York, who is presiding over United States v. Nicolás Maduro Moros et al., the proceedings against the former/fraudulent/kidnapped (according to choice) President of Venezuela. The oldest practising federal judge is I. Leo Glasser, United States District Court Judge for the Eastern District of New York, who is 102. Born when Calvin Coolidge was President of the United States after the sudden death of Warren Harding but before Coolidge was elected in his own right, he served in the US Army during the Second World War. He was appointed as a judge of the New York Family Court by Mayor John Lindsay, and nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan within the first year of his administration.

2. I’ve been writing this week for The Critic about the impending 500th anniversary of the Battle of Mohács, where the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent all but wiped out a Hungarian-led, multi-national army, shattered Hungary’s power as a state and burned the two Danubian cities of Buda and Pest. The King of Hungary, 20-year-old Lajos II, was killed along with 1,000 Hungarian nobles, and the total casualties, dead, wounded and missing on both sides, may have numbered as many as 38,000, in a battle the main part of which only lasted about 90 minutes. That made me wonder what the bloodiest one-day battle in history had been. The answer is complex and qualified, because if mediaeval and early modern sources cannot be relied on for absolute accuracy, ancient sources are even more open to interpretation. However, making all necessary allowances, there are two strong candidates, neither of them (I don’t think) at all familiar to the general public. The first is the Battle of Cannae in 216BC, where the Carthaginian general Hannibal enveloped and destroyed a larger Roman army under the two Consuls of Rome, Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius Paullus. The estimate of casualties by Livy was 48,000 Roman dead and 19,000 taken prisoner, and 8,000 Carthaginians killed, which would put the total casualties at 75,000. Some estimates are much higher, with 50,000 Romans killed but also 40,000 dead from Rome’s Italian allies. So it is possible the total could have reached 100,000.

3. If you don’t want to rely on figures from ancient writers, the other likely candidate for the bloodiest one-day battle in history is the Battle of Borodino on 7 September 1812. Napoleon’s Grande Armée faced the Imperial Russian Army outside Moscow, and the casualties were so numerous that there are still debates about who actually won. According to French general staff records, they suffered 6,562 dead and 21,450 injured, but many of those recorded as wounded are unlikely to have survived more than a few hours as the French had very little medical provision. Between 40,000 and 53,000 Russians were killed, injured or captured, so the overall casualty figures may be as high as 95,000. So Cannae and Borodino seem to be top of the pile when it comes to the butcher’s bill; other battles were fearsomely costly but didn’t come close, like 55,000 at Waterloo in 1815, 23,000 at the Battle of Antietam in 1862 or 70,000 on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

4. By contrast, the Battle of Fort Sumter of 12-13 April 1861 is famous as the action which precipitated the American Civil War. Fort Sumter was a United States Army fortification controlling the entrance to the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina. The previous November, Major Robert Anderson of the 1st Regiment of Artillery, an experienced but ageing officer whose health had been poor, had been appointed commander of US Army forces in and around Charleston; he had been chosen because he was a Southerner, a former slave owner from Kentucky, and the country was sliding towards irresolvable conflict over the issue of slavery. On 20 December 1860, a convention specially convened by South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, an act the outgoing President, James Buchanan, declared to be illegal but against which he took no action. Six days later, Anderson moved his garrison from Fort Moultrie, an undermanned and outdated fortress on Sullivan’s Island at the mouth of the harbour and easily approached by land, to Fort Sumter. On 8 February 1861, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas formed the Confederate States of America and adopted an interim constitution (to a large extent a cut-and-shut version of the United States Constitution with some heavy-handed references to the slavery of “African negroes”); on 28 February the Provisional Confederate Congress passed an Act to raise provisional forces for the Confederate States of America, and for other purposes, followed on 6 March by an Act for the establishment and organization of the army of the Confederate States of America. Fort Sumter was by now under a kind of phoney siege, and on 3 March command of the Confederate forces in Charleston had been assumed by the new army’s first general officer, Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, a 42-year-old French-speaking Louisiana Creole artilleryman and military engineer. After graduating second in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1838, Beauregard has stayed on briefly as an assistant to his favourite instructor, Professor of Artillery Captain Robert Anderson, now across the bay in Fort Sumter. By the beginning of April, the Union garrison was desperately short of supplies and President Abraham Lincoln notified the Governor of South Carolina, Francis Pickens, of his intention to send provisions to Fort Sumter by sea, pledging to take no overt military action. The brittle courtesies could only last so long. At 3.20 am on 12 April, one of Beauregard’s aides, Colonel James Chestnut, a former US Senator for South Carolina, travelled out to the fort by boat and handed Anderson a note which read: “Sir: by authority of Brigadier General Beauregard, commanding the Provisional Forces of the Confederate States, we have the honor to notify you that he will open fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time.” At 4.30 am, Lieutenant Henry S. Farley fired a round from a 10-inch mortar at Fort Johnson at the north-eastern point of James Island, which exploded above Fort Sumter at the signal for the assembled Confederate batteries at Fort Moultrie, Fort Johnson, Cummings Point and a floating battery in the harbour, 43 guns and mortars in all, to begin their bombardment. They fired in a counter-clockwise series around the harbour with a two-minute interval between rounds. Fort Sumter had been designed to guard against ships coming from the seaward side, and Anderson was able to use only 21 of the fort’s 60 guns, and was anyway very short of ammunition. He agreed to a truce offered at 2.00 pm on 13 April, his position having been struck by 3,000 Confederate shells. After a 34-hour bombardment, there were no casualties on either side. No human casualties, anyway: an anonymous Confederate horse was reputedly killed by crossfire.

5. Although there were no casualties during the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Anderson had insisted that his surrender be accompanied by a 100-gun salute to the United States flag, which took place the next day on 14 April. During this ceremony, a spark caused the cartridge in the 47th gun to explode prematurely, still in the barrel. The explosion blew off the right arm of Private Daniel Hough, one of the gun’s crew, who died almost instantly, and detonated nearby ammunition, which wounded five other gunners. One of them, Private Edward Galloway, died of wounds five days later at Gibbes Hospital in Charleston. These were the first two fatalities of the American Civil War, but neither had been born in America; Hough (35 or 36) was from Borrisokane in County Tipperary, while Galloway (20) was born in Skibbereen, County Cork.

6. Equality can be measured in a million different way and the dominance of Oxbridge graduates on its own, without any context, is a very poor metric. I also think we can be too scathing and eye-rolling about our two oldest universities: according to The Times Higher Education Supplement rankings, Oxford has been the best university in the world for a decade, while Cambridge was third equal this year, fifth last year and in 2024, third equal in 2023 and fifth equal in 2022. And of course Oxford and Cambridge are becoming more accessible to those who traditionally might not have gained entry or even applied for various reasons. For all that, I am allowing myself an arch of the eyebrow that the new Cabinet is heavily Oxbridge-dominated: of the 28 ministers—23 Cabinet ministers and five “attending”—17 went to Oxbridge (12 to Oxford, five to Cambridge). Of the 29 ministers in Sir Keir Starmer’s first Cabinet, there were 12 Oxbridge alumni (eight Oxford, four Cambridge). Rishi Sunak’s first Cabinet was a bloated 31 ministers, of whom 17 attended Oxbridge (seven Oxford, eight Cambridge and two ecumenical souls, Dominic Raab and John Glen, who had degrees from both universities).

7. By comparison, Margaret Thatcher’s first Cabinet of May 1979 had only 22 ministers. But 17 of them were Oxbridge alumni—seven Oxford, nine Cambridge and (who else?) the ineffable Norman St John Stevas, who had attended Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and Christ Church, Oxford (as well as Yale and the University of London). Of the remaining five ministers, two (Lord Soames and Lord Carrington) had attended the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

1. “John Healey’s ‘Buy British’ plan is a fast track to economic decline”: Oliver Kamm in The Times challenges a central plank of Starmer/Burnham economics by taking on what the new Chancellor of Exchequer, John Healey, laid out in The Sun as the government’s approach to public procurement: “Buying British not ‘if possible’, but by design. So every procurement pound supports British jobs, British apprenticeships and British skills.” Kamm started his career at the Bank of England (as did Rachel Reeves, Matt Hancock, Tim Montgomerie, Alistair Strathearn and Kenneth Grahame, so it’s a mixed bag) and since moving into journalism has adopted a range of political stances which began as standing foursquare behind Sir Tony Blair’s premiership on almost all issues but which now seem slightly eccentric and not easily classified. He explains that public procurement represents around a third of all public expenditure (£400 billion in 2024/25), and suggests that the policy proposed by Healey must inevitably mean “that Labour will require the public sector to purchase domestic goods or services even if these are more expensive and of lower quality than alternatives”. I agree wholeheartedly: you may not like the way he phrases it (“to use a technical economic term, bonkers”), but I don’t see a way in which Kamm’s translation can be inaccurate. Some will admit that, take it on the chin and cite priorities which outrank value for money or quality, believing it better to ensure the money is spent on British products; Kamm admits that “sometimes economic arguments aren’t paramount”, but counters that Healey’s expressed intention goes for beyond a few exceptions carved out for, say, reasons of national security. The government’s position relies partly on a vaguely Trumpian sense that imports are a sign of a country’s weakness. Not so, says Kamm: “imports are neither a threat nor a sign of weakness. They are a benefit. They expand consumer choice and enable productivity gains in domestic production through the mechanism of specialisation.” I thought we’d fought and won a lot of these battles; it’s nearly 25 years since Peter Mandelson declared “We are all Thatcherites now”, though the phrase had first been penned in 1987 by The Glasgow Herald’s Business Editor, R.E. Dundas. Seemingly they have to be fought anew. They still matter, and in the long run protectionism—because that is, ultimately, what Healey is talking about—generally leads to uncompetitive industry and higher consumer prices.

2. “Mayoral scrutiny is a pressing issue”: Jennifer Williams, Northern correspondent for The Financial Times, reminds us that the new Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for devolution will require adaptation of the whole political ecosystem. She makes the very important straightforward point that if significant power is devolved to elected mayoralties or other regional and local bodies, there will be a real need for additional public scrutiny, not just through institutions—though I’m not convinced that bodies like the London Assembly are really adequate anyway—but also by the media. There was a time when some national papers had a significant presence outside the capital; what was founded as The Manchester Guardian only began printing in London in 1961 and maintained production facilities in Manchester until 2018. Equally, the brutal realities of profit and loss have devastated serious local and regional journalism, which threatens a real gap in accountability; “across the country, local press have yet to find a solution in the places Burnham is looking to devolve power to”. Even the scrutiny which Burnham faced as mayor was due to an unusually vigorous local press in his region. “Manchester is an outlier on many things. If Burnham’s plans are to work, an increasingly vibrant media landscape cannot be one of them.”

3. “Barristers shouldn’t be above the law”: in The Spectator, Sir Michael Ellis KC, who was Attorney General for England and Wales for two short stints amounting to six months or so in the mad days of 2021-22, makes what should be an uncontroversial argument: that barristers, like any other cohort of the legal profession, do not enjoy immunity from its restrictions. Indeed, he sensibly suggests, “they are expected to conduct themselves as ‘officers of the court’ and uphold high standards”. (By the same token, the shortcomings in ethics and propriety which seemed to plague the first months of the Starmer government were serious not so much because of the inherent turpitude but because Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues had been so stinging in their denunciations of Conservative ministers and had certainly allowed people to believe that they themselves were so much more virtuous and moral.) He raises the case of Rajiv Menon KC, who was representing a member of Palestine Action before Woolwich Crown Court on charges of criminal damage against the UK subsidiary of Israeli defence manufacturer Elbit Systems: the judge hearing the case made it clear to counsel on both sides that in their closing speeches to the jury “they were not to raise issues he had judged were not relevant for the jury to consider when it came to guilt or innocence”. Menon is accused of having ignored this ruling, suggesting the defendants were prevented from giving evidence about Elbit and talking about Elbit being “protected” and “wined and dined in the corridors of power”. He is now being prosecuted for contempt of court, having directly contravened the judges’ instructions, but inevitably people are describing the “chilling” effect on freedom of speech. Ellis suggests—and I have a great deal of sympathy—that the fact many of those queueing to condemn the judge would be appalled by attacks on the judiciary in other circumstances, but the involvement of the Israel/Palestine question, as we shall delicately term it for now, can find long-standing ethical positions turned on their head. Yet it must surely be right that barristers are bound to observe the instructions of a judge when it comes to the scope a trial, and barristers should proceed extremely carefully when criticising the decisions given from the bench.

4. “How to reindustrialise—five lessons from Defence”: a contribution from journalist and think-tanker Paul Mason on The Future of the Left Reader Substack recommends how the Prime Minister can fulfil his ambition to “reindustrialise” Britain, drawing on lessons from the defence sector. I am almost as sceptical about some of his propositions as I am about “reindustrialisation” in general, but Mason argues cogently and from an evidence base. Essentially his recipe is: act fast; de-risk private capital in the areas you want to see grow; embrace micro-institutions; make location a key requirement of public procurement “to force capital into decisions it would not normally take”; fight neoliberalism. I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, an economist, but to me this has a distinct whiff of hubris about it, as if the state can (let alone should) decree that there will be a car plant in Loughborough, say, or a tech cluster outside Exeter because that is what it has decided we should do. Naturally governments can influence the private sector, can make this or that location especially attractive; and if you spend enough money you probably can “force capital into decisions it would not normally take”. But there must come a point at which you ask why you are doing this and whether it is delivering value for money. As someone whose stated philosophy is that government is usually the worst way to achieve anything but sometimes the only way, and looking at, well, the history of the British economy, I have little faith that our future glory relies on the brilliance of dirigisme, but I’m realistic enough to accept that Andy Burnham will listen to Paul Mason more readily than he will listen to me, so it’s important to know what ‘the other side’ is saying and thinking.

5. “An Iranian missile attack on the UK is no longer far fetched”: veteran Irish journalist and foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn in The i Paper tries to rattle the cage of complacency in which too many people still have their feet propped up in comfort. The Islamic Republic of Iran has declared that UK bases which are being used by the American military to fight the current conflict between them are legitimate military targets. This means, certainly, Naval Support Base Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory (for now…), which is effectively a US base anyway and at which very few British service personnel are stationed. But it could also apply to RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, home of the United States Air Force 501st Combat Support Wing, and the only airbase in Europe that the USAF uses for heavy bomber missions. Instinctively, we think Iran is far too far away for it to be even the remotest threat. Well, the distance from Tehran to Diego Garcia is 2,350 miles, and London is 2,750 miles. That puts the former within range of Iran’s Sejjil intermediate ballistic missile, and in March they fired to as-yet-unidentified missiles at Diego Garcia; they were either intercepted or failed in flight, but it likely Tehran believes them to have enough range to reach the target in ideal conditions. The UK has very little in the way of anti-missile defence: essentially the Sea Viper missiles, working with the SAMPSON and S1850M radar systems, on the Royal Navy’s Type 45 destroyers, but there are only six ships in the class, and availability is currently around half. “Geographical distance from the battlefield is no longer the defence it once was… International airports and huge power stations provide vulnerable and immovable targets, be they in Dubai or Heathrow. In the year of the drone, everybody is in the front line.”

6. “Do Britons pay a lot of tax?”: we are used to hearing (including from me) complaints that the tax burden is approaching record highs, but that partly presupposes a specific answer to the question of how much of our GDP should go to taxation. In The Financial Times, Jonathan Guthrie hears that the UK is approaching and will soon exceed its historic levels of taxation as a percentage of GDP, but that the debate over taxation is nebulous because we sit in between countries like the United States, New Zealand and Australia, which leave many services subject to discretionary spending, and European countries like France, Spain and Italy, where the level of tax is high but it’s an all-in package deal. With the popularity of reflexive “soak the rich” policies, he points out that money raised through taxation is “already hugely dependent on the better off”. The top one per cent now contributes a third of income tax and capital gains. As he concludes, there is no simple answer to the question “Do we pay too much tax?” But given how much we do pay and the condition of our public services, something isn’t working.

7. “The endlessly pliable J.D. Vance has no aversions to conversions”: I have not yet read Vice President J.D. Vance’s latest book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, and, I’m honest, I doubt I will. He has proven himself a man of little intellectual rigour and absolutely no integrity (happy birthday, by the way, Mr Vice President), and it’s a particular affront and disappointment because Hillbilly Elegy (2017) hinted at a thoughful mind capable of nuance and possessing a different perspective. Then Vance realised how far that would get him in politics. In The Washington Post, George F. Will takes his time to beat the Vice President about the head with his own back catalogue, concluding that his current LARPing as a conservative Roman Catholic will soon enough give way to another pose. Hilariously, he has warned the Pope (the actual Pope) to “be careful” when pronouncing on “matters of theology”. In the end, “whether Vance has excelled as a result of his serial conversions is a matter of opinion. But certainly he has risen fast and far because he is as unstable as water.”

8. “The 12 Most Astonishingly Bad Puritan Names, Ranked”: I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ve never had much sympathy with Puritanism. As a drifting agnostic of lightly worn Jewish forebears who eventually had the honesty to declare for atheism and finds it rather satisfying and intelligible, I’ve nevertheless spent more than half my life in and out of the study of religious history, and I am fascinated by the subject and by the experience. Insofar as I’m not a partisan any of the controversies, nonetheless my instincts have always been sympathetic to grandeur, to ritual and ceremony: I once found myself self-describing as “Catholic-curious” on Sky News (not in the sense of having any intention to embrace Holy Mother Church); in the history of the Eastern Roman Empire I always stand with the iconophiles rather than the iconoclasts; I would probably have been a Laudian in the 17th century and a Tractarian in the 19th century; and while I can sometimes see virtue in the stern self-sufficiency and industry of Nonconformism, it doesn’t pull at my heartstrings. So there is little to like in the solemn, sour, disapproving, often near-fanatical worship of men like Oliver Cromwell, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Hooker, Cotton Mather and John Winthrop. Puritans were no friends of religious liberty or pluralism, as some occasionally take them to be, and the closure of theatres, strict sabbatarianism, the prohibition on celebrating Easter and Christmas, the attempts to ban swearing (one of my favourite things), bare, whitewashed churches, “plain russet-coated captains” and so on just doesn’t constitute a society I find appealing. All that being said, Jack Shepherd in his Substack On Words and Up Words is absolutely right about one thing: Puritans had a real flair for giving their children mad and creatively awkward hyphenated names. He lists some of the most glorious—it’s hard to go past Kill-Sin Pimple—but there is, alas, a degree of uncertainty attached to a man name with particular resonance for Parliament. The Nominated Assembly which gathered in the stead of the House of Commons on 4 July 1653 elected Francis Rous as its “Chairman”, later reverting to “Speaker”. However, because he so precisely represented the spirit and attitudes of that parliament, it was named after a Fleet Street seller called Barebone or Barbon. He was a Fifth Monarchist, one of many millenarian movements of the mid-17th century. He is remembered as Praise-God Barebone, not an easy handle for any individual, but it is possible that his baptismal name was the dazzling and undefeated-over-many-decades hortatory name Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone. You can see why he shortened it to Praise-God.

9. “What CapX is reading this summer”: very little to say except that I was delighted to be asked, along with other CapX authors, to suggest some reading material for the summer. If you need ideas, try these.

… as Christ said on the cross, just before he breathed His last. Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.

(The original Koine Greek verb used by St Luke to describe Jesus’s death of the cross is ἐξέπνευσεν, “breathed out” or “expired”. At its root in πνεῦμα, pneuma, which can mean air, breath or spirit. The King James Bible translates this as “he gave up the ghost”, which draws not only from the Greek of the gospels but from the Old English verb āġiefan gāst, “to give up the ghost”; in this context “ghost” means “spirit” or “soul” rather than an apparition or spectre. St Jerome’s 4th century Vulgate uses the Latin word expiravit, which has obvious connotations similar to the Greek. The same phrase is found in John Wycliffe’s translation of the early 1380s, William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526 “he gave vp the goost”) the Great Bible of 1539 (“he gaue vp the ghost”), the 1557 Geneva Bible (“gaue vp the gost”) and the Douay-Rheims Bible of 1582.

If such is your inclination, ἐξέπνευσεν can be read in a Trinitarian way: it can be taken to mean that Christ the Son, the physical manifestation, gives out his last breath; but that He also offers His spirit, the Holy Spirit, to God the Father. Lots to think about in a single word, from the first half of the 1st century AD through translations over the following 1,500 years. Thanks for playing.)