ABSTRACT
The British Raj was a new kind of Indian state. What made it so was not the fact that it was ‘foreign’, ruled over by white men, and controlled, in the last resort, from London, for many of its dynastic predecessors, including of course the Mughals, had also come from somewhere else, but the fact that it possessed unprecedented political power and administrative penetration, attributes that gave it the capacity to transform society in ways that no previous Indian regime had ever even aspired to. To put it another way, the Raj was different because it was ‘modern’.
