H-Diplo REVIEW ESSAY 331

1 April 2021

Priya Satia. Time’s Monster: How History Makes History. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780674248373 (hardcover, $29.95).

https://hdiplo.org/to/E331
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Lindsay Aqui | Production Editor: George Fujii

Review by Mircea Raianu, University of Maryland

Amid the ongoing turmoil of Brexit and the spectacular toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol in early
June 2020, a ‘third wave’ of debates on the historical legacy of the British Empire is arguably underway. The first broke out
in response to the Falklands War and the Raj nostalgia craze in the mid-1980s, while the second was catalyzed by the Iraq
War and Niall Ferguson’s controversial book and TV series Empire in the early 2000s. 1 These debates map onto
historiographical currents (such as the impact of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory) and institutional dynamics (in
particular the gulf between popular and professional historical writing). 2 Priya Satia’s sweeping new book sets the agenda for
the third wave. It is both urgently of its time, responding to the exigencies of the present political moment, and timeless in
its broader lessons about how to think about and do history.

Reflecting on the state of the field of imperial history a decade ago (in the wake of Iraq), Richard Drayton harshly
condemned academics’ complicity and proximity to power. “Historians enter into voluntary servitude to middle-class
opinion and taste…they are loyal to bureaucratic logics: both conservative toward the historical paradigms which organize
ideas of periodization and agency, and to the values of the social and economic order which produced them and in which
they so manifestly thrive.” Drayton’s proposed solution was a radical ethical reorientation at the individual level, or “taking
foreign pleasure and pain as one’s own.” 3 In a different vein, Jo Guldi and David Armitage’s History Manifesto lamented
historians’ marginalization and distance from centers of power. Their prescriptions included reviving the longue durée,
integrating big data, and actively influencing policymakers in order to counter the hegemony of economics and other social
sciences. 4 Satia neatly sidesteps these polemics, carefully reconstructing the discipline’s fraught trajectory from handmaiden
of the state to site of resistance. Time’s Monster echoes and amplifies Drayton’s concern with the subjectivity of the
individual historian. The book is after bigger epistemological fish, starting from the fundamental building block of historical
inquiry: the perception and ordering of time itself.

1
Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003). On Raj nostalgia, see Salman Rushdie, “Outside
the Whale,” Granta 11 (1984): 123-138.

2
Dane Kennedy, The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), chapter 9.

3
Richard Drayton, “Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism,”
Journal of Contemporary History 46:3 (2011): 673-674, 684-685.

4
Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014). A spirited debate ensued, with a
critique by Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler and a reply by the authors. See “AHR Exchange: On The History Manifesto,” American Historical Review
120:2 (2015): 527-554.

© 2021 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US

The main argument is most succinctly stated on pages 3-5, where Satia asks how a linear understanding of time came to be
deeply embedded in the rise of modern European (and specifically British) imperialism. Teleology served to absolve the
guilty consciences of empire’s makers and defenders, who often genuinely believed in the promises of progress. Put simply:
“How did such avowedly ‘good’ people live with doing bad things?” The answer lies in the mid-eighteenth century, when
history as a “system of ethical accountability” became central to Enlightenment notions of the self (14-15). Conscience, Page | 2
which was always situated in a temporal framework, structured the normative relationship between the individual and the
institutions of state and market. As Satia explains later in the book: “The Enlightenment goal of papering over internal
splits in the interest of producing internally coherent individuated selves had the effect of outsourcing judgments of
conscience to time, to history. It did not do so without struggle” (239).

In Chapter 1, Satia develops this argument by revisiting the Galton family of Birmingham, the subjects of her previous book
Empire of Guns. 5 For these “Quaker gun-makers,” commerce and warfare were inseparable and unavoidable, “necessary evils”
rendering individual ethical action meaningless. Yet the Galtons were also troubled by the blatant contradiction of
professing pacifism while profiteering from arms manufacture. By the end of the century, the abolitionist movement (in
which Quakers played a prominent role) empowered individuals to take action through consumer boycotts of slave-grown
sugar. But the system of “war capitalism” as a whole remained untouched (45-46). 6 Indeed, the arms trade as both the
material foundation of British power and an occasional focal point of public criticism is an interesting and original thread
running through the book (133, 153, 180). Also in the late eighteenth century, Member of Parliament Edmund Burke’s
prosecution of the East India Company’s abuses spotlighted the individual crimes of Governor-General Warren Hastings
while ultimately bolstering the legitimacy of the imperial enterprise (43). 7 In each instance, wrongs would be made right in
the fullness of time. If the answer to the injustice of slavery was free trade, the answer to the brutality of conquest was liberal
empire – a dynamic that played out repeatedly over the next two centuries.

Time’s Monster doubles as a focused intellectual history and a synthetic overview of the British Empire. Satia is equally
attentive to individual psychology, large-scale structural change, and the ebb and flow of ideas. The book plots out a dense,
interconnected web of people and texts (forming a “canon in dialogue with another,” 81), allowing the reader to see familiar
events with fresh eyes. Chapter 2 follows the consolidation of British rule in India from the Hastings trial to the 1857
Rebellion. The Romantic poetry of Lord Byron and the historical writings of James Mill, Thomas Macaulay, and Karl Marx
contributed to the sense of providential agency animating liberal imperialism. In parallel, a dissonant tradition of history as
exposé took shape. John Kaye’s History of the War in Afghanistan (1851) used “unofficial sources” to hold the imperial state
accountable for its military blunders but did not depart from the self-limiting model of scandalous revelation pioneered by
Burke (84-85). 8 In Chapter 3, Satia tracks the shift to indirect rule and racialized illiberal authoritarianism in the later
nineteenth century through the historical writings of Henry Maine, James Fitzjames Stephen, and J.R. Seeley. As the empire
became more bureaucratized, limits on individual agency provoked a new ethical and even spiritual crisis (139-140). These
two chapters deftly build on a venerable historiographical tradition about the “official mind” of imperialism, as well as on
more recent works diagnosing anxieties and tensions in the governing ideologies and everyday practices of the Raj. 9

5
Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the British Industrial Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2018).

6
On this concept, see Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

7
On the Hastings trial, see also Nicholas Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

8
John William Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1851).

9
See, in chronological order of publication, Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official
Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961); Francis Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1967); Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire:
Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Jon A. Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the

© 2021 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US

Chapter 4 revisits the cast of characters of another of Satia’s earlier books, her debut Spies in Arabia. 10 Espionage and air
control in the interwar Middle East created a “space of moral exceptionalism.” Figures like British Army officer and
adventurer T. E. Lawrence enacted Byronic fantasies of heroic agency, inspired by a complex and not always coherent
historical vision (Arabia as both a remnant of the deep Biblical past and a potential cure for the ails of British industrial
modernity). Yet the secrecy and violence of their exploits once again produced guilty consciences and divided selves (177- Page | 3
80). Paranoid fears of a widespread Bolshevik conspiracy around 1919-1920 recalled the panic about pan-Islamism in 1857
(174). Here Satia shows most clearly how the web of people and texts at the heart of the book constitutes a real kinship
network extending across time and space. Winston Churchill, who cut his teeth in colonial military service in the 1890s and
later directed the Royal Air Force aerial bombing campaign in Iraq in the 1920s as Secretary of State for Air, was guided by
his family lineage going back to the Duke of Marlborough (55-56). His successor Samuel Hoare descended from an
eighteenth-century Quaker banker we met in Chapter 1 (180). In calling attention to such resonances, Satia brilliantly
demonstrates how “an inherited sense of historic destiny, even entitlement, extends the life of great-man agency” (286).

Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the breakdown of the prevailing historicist logic of imperialism and explore alternative imaginaries.
Chapter 5 deals mainly with the Partition of India. The British sought to expiate their guilt and justify their ignominious
exit from the subcontinent by appealing to future judgments on the “balance sheet” of empire. This tendency may be seen at
a granular level in contemporary memoirs of civil servants like Penderel Moon, who was outwardly critical of the Raj yet
softened the blow by citing Marx’s dictum that Britain was “the unconscious tool of history” in India. 11 By contrast,
anticolonial thinkers like Mohandas K. Gandhi rejected stagist narratives in favor of a “present-oriented ethical vision”
(220). The strongest contribution of this chapter, and perhaps of the book as a whole, is to bring attention to the political
and ethical thought of Urdu poets like Muhammad Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafri, and others. In grappling with
the trauma and dislocation of Partition, these literary figures drew on Sufi idioms of birha (longing) and notions of “split
selfhood” in South Asia to refuse “the linear teleology” of progress derived from the Enlightenment (227-237). The spatial
and temporal constraints of the world as it was could be transcended in the here and now – a heterotopic rather than a
utopic project. This argument breathes new life into a canon long siloed in the outer realms of area studies, hopefully
inspiring its (re)discovery by new audiences. However, the book could have done a bit more to historicize Urdu poetry itself
beyond and between the flashpoints of the 1857 Rebellion and the 1947 Partition.

Chapter 6 opens with another masterful illustration of kinship connections, tracing the intellectual arc of historian Edward
Palmer (E.P.) Thompson. His father Edward John Thompson wrote history as exposé, much like John Kaye, “cultivating a
passionate faith in the historian’s craft as the most effective means of truth-telling against the imperial state” (248-249). Yet
the son’s interests and commitments sharply diverged from the father’s, as E.P. devoted his energies to the domestic struggles
of the working classes in England. His scholarly output was marked by a seemingly deliberate forgetting of Britain’s and
India’s intertwined histories. E.P. as “historian-activist” was a product of decolonization yet never fully acknowledged his
debt to it (260-265). In this final chapter, the delicate balance between ideas and context becomes slightly skewed. Readers
would benefit from a deeper dive into the elder Thompson’s work, particularly The Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in

Chaos of Empire (London: Simon and Schuster, 2016); Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2019).

10
Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).

11
Benjamin Zachariah, “Rewriting Imperial Mythologies: The Strange Case of Penderel Moon,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 21:2
(2001): 53-72. It is also on display in popular culture, which continues to draw on an unending reservoir of Raj nostalgia. Deepa Mehta’s film Viceroy’s
House (Pathé/BBC Films, 2017) recycles a fringe conspiracy theory attributing the Partition plan to secret geopolitical machinations between Churchill
and Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League, all in order to absolve the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, for his responsibility in the breakdown of
negotiations. For incisive critiques of the film, see Fatima Bhutto, “I watched this servile pantomime and wept,” The Guardian, 3 March 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/03/fatima-bhutto-viceroys-house-watched-servile-pantomime-and-wept; and Ian Jack, “The Viceroy’s
House version of India’s partition brings fake history to screen,” The Guardian, 18 March 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/18/the-viceroys-house-version-of-indias-partition-brings-fake-history-to-screen.

© 2021 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US

India (1934), as well as a more precise sketch of his relationships with his Indian interlocutors. 12 Similarly, Kaye’s histories
of the Afghan war and 1857 Rebellion could be examined in more detail in Chapter 2. What rhetorical strategies did these
texts use? How did they deploy sources and references, or traverse genre conventions? How were they circulated and
received? Of course, there is a risk of taking too many detours in a book of such ambition and scope. But a few strategically
placed sections dedicated to textual analysis would only serve to enrich the overall study.
Page | 4
For specialists, Time’s Monster will become an instant addition to syllabi and reading lists on the British Empire,
transnational and global history, and historical theory. In the latter realm it pairs nicely with Joan Scott’s newly published
On the Judgment of History, which advances a similar critique on the basis of a different set of case studies from Europe,
South Africa, and the United States. 13 For engaged scholars and the general public alike, Satia’s book will serve as an
invaluable resource in efforts to decolonize and reimagine the pursuit of knowledge in a world in crisis.

Mircea Raianu is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, with primary research interests
in modern South Asia and global capitalism. He is the author of the forthcoming book Tata: The Global Corporation that
Built Indian Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).

12
Edward John Thompson and Geoffrey Garratt, Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India (London: Macmillan, 1934). The only detailed
study of this kind remains Sumit Sarkar, “Edward Thompson and India: The Other Side of the Medal,” in Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1997).

13
Joan W. Scott, On the Judgment of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

© 2021 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US