The timing and causes of the British East India Company's shift from a commercial to an imperial entity is a fundamental issue in world history given its broad repercussions. Mason explores this issue through a biographical lens. Postmodernist theory reduced the esteem of biography among many historians, but Mason shows the value of this approach. His study of Sir James Abbott (1807–96), a career officer in the East India Company, provides new insights into shifts in Anglo-Indian relationships at a critical time. Mason makes the case for a much later deterioration of interactions between the colonizer and the colonized, culminating in the many-named Great Mutiny, Sepoy Rebellion, Indian Mutiny, or First War of Independence in 1857. In addition to correspondence and published works, Abbott left frank diaries never intended for circulation. His posting to many South Asian regions of the British Empire gave him the opportunity to pen firsthand accounts of the Sikh kingdom in Sind (modern Pakistan) and the global frictions imperialism caused that later gave rise to the problems plaguing modern Afghanistan. This well-written account will engage both experts and casual readers. Recommended. General readers through faculty.
— Choice Reviews
In Heart Like a Fakir, Chris Mason uses the voluminous papers of General Sir James Abbott—an explorer, soldier, and district officer who lived as a ‘native’ among the peoples of the Hazara district—to explore how relations, social and sexual, between Britons and Indians broke down in the last decades of British East India Company rule. This breakdown—which contributed to the mutiny uprising—is usually attributed to the arrival of Christian missionaries and British women in significant numbers in the early years of the nineteenth century. Mason’s work suggests that historians need to look much more closely at the twenty-five years before the mutiny uprising. This is essential reading for all those interested in the last years of East India Company rule.
— Francis Robinson, Royal Holloway, University of London
Chris Mason has rescued from obscurity one of the most remarkable agents of British imperial rule in nineteenth-century India. James Abbott was an army officer, district commissioner, Central Asian explorer, and irrepressible romantic. This engaging and insightful study is at once an intimate portrait of the man himself and an illuminating examination of the social and cultural changes that led to the erosion of East India Company rule in India and the outbreak of the 1857 Indian Rebellion/Mutiny.
— Dane Kennedy, author of The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire
Chris Mason’s richly textured and elegant reconstruction of James Abbott’s varied career over the final decades of the East India Company’s rule in India persuasively and entertainingly illuminates the complex and frequently contradictory impulses and impressions shaping British interactions with India in the years before the cataclysmic rebellions of 1857–58. Drawing on Abbott’s remarkable legacy of more than ten thousand pages documenting his forty years in India, Heart Like a Fakir introduces us to a British officer—similar in so many ways to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness—whose deep knowledge and romantic idealization of India—but often willful blindness to the changes happening around him—personifies the increasingly brittle and unstable relationship between colonizer and colonized.
— Douglas M. Peers, University of Waterloo