Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India 1822-1922

'Civility', a normative code of behaviour in British nineteenth-century society, became a means of imposing control and effecting exclusion when transferred to the colonial domain.
This study examines the manner in which 'civility' became the ethos of the British colonial state in the Indian Subcontinent, and emerged as a key discursive idea around which questions about citizenship, education, gender, race, labour and bureaucratic or civil authority were negotiated.
This discourse of civility, Anindyo Roy argues, provided the basis for disciplinary mechanisms essential to managing the historical exigencies confronting the British Empire in India. He traces the genealogy of civility in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and culture, covering a wide array of texts by authors such as Scott, Trelawny, Mill, Kipling, Foster and Leonard Woolf, as well as parliamentary debates on free trade, narratives about cadetship in the East India Company and popular Anglo-Indian poetry.