A number of features like the spread of English education that characterise modern India have a genesis in institutions and systems set up in British colonial India. Set up not merely to tighten the grip over a vast profitable colony, these were also experiments in social engineering based on the philosophies of Macaulay, Bentham and Mill. India provided a test-bed for ideas that could not possibly be implemented in England itself.

The author is one of the foremost historians of Indian education. This book brings together a collection of five essays that deal with the origin of the system of Western education in India under Lord Macaulay and Charles Wood, and subsequent reforms under Lord Curzon, on the use of military force to maintain control over large swathes of the country and the influence of Utilitarianism in Lord Dalhousie’s policies.

This book is an excellent source material for students and scholars of history of education in British India.

Suresh Chandra Ghosh is a former member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Paedagogica Historica, Belgium. He held the Chair of History of Education at Jawaharlal Nehru, New Delhi, till 2002, and was a Guest Professor at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Preface
Acknowledgements

1. Bentinck, Macaulay, and the Introduction of English Education in India
2. Dalhousie, Charles Wood and the Education Despatch of 1854
3. Dalhousie and the Santal Insurrection of 1855
4. The Utilitarianism of Dalhousie and the Material Improvement of India
5. The Genesis of Curzon’s University Reform, 1899–1905

Bibliography
Index