Empire-Building and Thinking in the Public Works Department of British India

The language of building furnished the promoters and apologists of Empire with some of their most cherished metaphors. As one elder statesman of Indian colonial service proposed in a statement to Parliament in 1873, the administrative infrastructure of British India “… was but a provisional temporary arrangement, … a sort of scaffolding which [has] been erected until the edifice of our Indian Empire is completed. And as it is completed,” he argued, pursuing the logic of his metaphor, “… that scaffolding should be taken down”1 (Figure 4.1).