Darain Mathur’s Reviews > The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj > Status Update

Britain’s role in India had been to ‘create and uphold an enlightened and beneficent despotism’, run by men trained in the spirit of Liberalism and free government. Its ends – doing ‘everything for the people’ – were Liberal in the true sense and yet would be defeated if the British allowed any material power to pass out of their hands.