Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Cntury British Attitudes to India (Cambridge South Asian Studies)

Jones has a bit of a teflon thing going on where everybody before Said treated him as the "good empire-builder", the one who really cared, who really understood, which is funny considering how villainized Hastings gets; and Mukherjee falls into that a little. But overall this was by far the most useful of the Jones books I read, distilling his accomplishments and impact, casting a critical eye, and leaving me fairly confident that it is revealing, as opposed to constructing, a bridge-building figure who legiitmately, as opposed to opportunistically, believed that the extension of "British freedoms" to India was possible and desirable, and who demonstrated the ancient commonalities of these two great branches of humankind in language, show more literature and history, in a way that actually influenced things. For the best, who can say, but as the cliche goes, if you read only one book on Jones it should probably be this one. show less