Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India by Priti Joshi, and: Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853–1948 by Eva-Marie Kröller (review)

Reviewed by: Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India by Priti Joshi, and: Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853–1948 by Eva-Marie Kröller David Finkelstein (bio) Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India, by Priti Joshi; pp. xvi + 261. Albany: SUNY Press, 2021, $95.00, $32.95 paper. Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853–1948, by Eva-Marie Kröller; pp. xvi + 519. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021, $110.00. Over the past few decades, we have seen an increase in publications exploring the British colonial world as a space of contestation and complication. Such work has served to deepen our understanding of colonial spaces as complex areas through which a number of players navigated in different ways. Two works take opposing points of view to cover similar questions. Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India, by Priti Joshi, discusses constructions of empire from the perspective of nineteenth-century Indian communication structures. It is a study of press outputs produced within India for local consumption, and the results show a world of hurried news gathering and information sharing that would be familiar to many students of journalistic practices. Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853–1948, by Eva-Marie Kröller, approaches the subject through a holistic genealogical study of a family deeply embedded in the colonial world, scattered and engaged across Britain's many colonies as administrators, cultural commentators, popular novelists, anthropologists, and educationalists. The result is a family history drawing on personal documents to present a closely argued study of how British imperial structures affected interpersonal responses to local environments and cultures. Joshi's work is a historically inflected study that makes use of archives, where they have survived, and original documentation to build a picture of the Indo-British press as it operated during a key period of British settlement. Joshi's ambition is to explore what has been described as the high noon of the British Raj (when power became concentrated in official colonial structures of governance between the 1830s and 1860s), and the subsequent responses to this shift from establishment and counter-colonial voices in the local press. This was a period when British territorial expansion slowed, while its colonial bureaucracy expanded. Joshi provides illuminating examples of transactional exchanges between English-language and vernacular press in Indian circles, re-evaluating such cultural connections through in-depth studies of five key English-language newspapers from Calcutta, Serampore, and nearby provinces (the Mofussilite [1845–1876], the Bengal Hurkaru: and Chronicle [1795–1866], the Friend of India [1835–76], the Englishman [1861–1934], and the Hindoo Patriot [1853–1922]), as well as a small number of other press publications edited by Anglo-Indians of various political persuasions. [End Page 535] What emerges is a finely detailed study of news circulation in provincial and regional spaces during key periods of change and crisis, the latter not least exemplified by the chaos that engulfed India during the Indian insurgency and uprising of 1857. Information during this period became valuable currency, and Joshi draws our attention to the multiple movements of news from colony to metropole and the circulation of material within regional settings. She offers convincing evidence that the press in India was not a monolithic construct of periodical voices, but at times a contradictory space of competing views shaped by the journalistic need for copy, access or lack of access to sources, and volatility in the business of press production, distribution, and circulation. The newspaper business in India was not a strong or stable space. There was a high failure rate among newspaper start-ups, due in part to volatile readership numbers that ranged from an average of thirty-five for the Hindoo Patriot to a more viable 3,500 for the Friend of India. One of the unusually long-lived examples covered by Joshi was the Mofusillite, edited mainly by transplanted Australian John Lang from 1845 through to his death in 1864, and which during its heyday in the late 1840s could count on a subscription level of about 800 per issue. Joshi spends time offering welcome analysis of Lang's role as a thorn in the side of the colonial establishment, both...

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