Dirks, Nicholas B. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2006. Print.

From the chapters about colonization we learned in class, I had become very interested in the colonization of India by the British Empire. Therefore, for this Shelfie assignment, I wanted to look up a book on colonization of India. So, in order to look for my book, I accessed the Lafayette Library website, and under OneSearch, I typed in the words “colonization of India”. This search first came up with almost 4000 results, so I narrowed my search by searching only for books, which came up with about 200 books. My book, “The Scandal of the Empire”, caught my eye because from the title, it seemed like a very interesting book. This book seems to not focus on how the East India Company gained control of India as we had learned in a broader concept, but on one particular trial that had happened during the colonization, the impeachment and trial of Warren Hastings, and how this “scandal” eventually led to the British government creating the idea of “civilizing” India. Also, this book’s chapters seem to not be written in a chronological order, but written according to different ideas such as corruption, economy, sovereignty, and tradition, with a quote that is related to the topic in the beginning of each chapter. Furthermore, this book contains some illustrations, most of which are related to the trial of Warren Hastings. Most of the books around my book were about colonization of India, but there was one large series of books titled “The Transfer of Power 1942-1947”, which had 12 volumes and seemed to have over a 1000 pages per volume. Overall, I enjoyed doing this assignment again not just because it refreshed knowledge of the previous chapters but also because I was able to learn a new fact about the previous chapters.