I’ve been reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: Fall of a Dynasty about the Indian Rebellion of 1857 with great interest. The complacent reports of the British commanders as they went about destroying the last remnants of independent Indian power are startlingly reminiscent of the “Good News from Iraq” we got so much of in 2003, and which was briefly revived during the now collapsing surge/awakening/truce. More generally, Dalrymple gives an evocative account of the Mughal court on the eve of destruction.

But I was, perhaps unfairly, amused by Dalrymple’s introduction where he extols the merits of archival research, as against the kind of “subaltern history” that pads out existing secondary sources with large dollops of theory to produce more or less interchangeable articles with titles of the general form “Othering the Imagined Construct” (feel free to permute the parts of speech to derive your own). I’ll leave it to others to decide whether this is better or worse than the old standby “Nonsensical Phrase Drawn From Primary Source: Random Word, Random Word, and the Actual Topic of this Book,” or the generic economic article of the form “Hot Current Idea, Established Field and Putative Application”.