ABSTRACT
Given India’s importance in their interpretive scheme, it is disconcerting that John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson devote so little attention to its roles in the maintenance of British global power and domestic prosperity. It has been a quarter of a century since Robinson and Gallagher’s seminal work Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism was first published. There were two basic dimensions to the multifaceted involvement of Indian migrants in the British empire. The first was political and military. The second main dimension of the Indian alliance with British colonizers was economic. British imperial needs and the willingness of millions of Indians at a variety of caste levels to migrate overseas made for a splendid symbiosis, perhaps the largest and most profitable alliance between colonizer and colonized in all history. The post-colonial fate of Indian overseas communities has been as varied as the societies to which they immigrated and the composition of the Indian migrant flow.
