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The association of India with riches has a long literary history. Andrew Marvell imagined his coy mistress finding rubies on the banks of the River Ganges, while Alexander Pope endowed his 'Goddess' in The Rape of the Lock with a 'casket [of] India's glowing gems'. Earlier, and more earthily, Shakespeare's Falstaff envisaged Mistress Ford as his East Indies and her well-filled purse (or rather, her husband's) as his 'exchequer', and the same playwright compared Henry VIII's lustful enjoyment of Catherine of Aragon to having 'all the Indies in his arms'. The Subcontinent's riches had a more melancholy effect on Othello, who, suddenly contrite after murdering his wife, likened himself to 'the base Indian' who threw away a valuable pearl. In the generation between Shakespeare and Marvell, oriental jewels dazzled a courtier of Charles I, the Earl of Denbigh, who brought sacks of them from the East in 1633 and commissioned Van Dyck to paint him in his smart Indian pyjamas.

Speaking at the Crystal Palace in 1872, Benjamin Disraeli admonished his Liberal opponents for attempting to 'effect the disintegration of the Empire' by claiming 'there never was a jewel in the crown of England that was so truly costly as the possession of India'. Disraeli's meaning was slightly altered by other people so that the phrase 'jewel in the crown' – or sometimes 'the brightest jewel in the crown' – came to refer to the Indian Empire not as an expensive possession but as a precious, glamorous and prestigious one. Paul Scott, a perceptive witness of the last years of British India, called the opening novel of his Raj Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown, while in the 1980s Granada Television adopted the same name for its magnificent production of the quartet.

India shone most brightly in the British imagination after 1876 when Disraeli, by then prime minister, gratified Queen Victoria's wish to be made Empress of India. Memories of the Rebellion of 1857 had receded, the recent opening of the Suez Canal had made India seem closer, at any rate in time, and photographers were sending home exotic and uplifting glimpses of life in the East, of maharajas and elephants, of railway bridges spanning vast rivers, of intrepid district officers in sola topis seated under a banyan tree dispensing justice to a benighted populace. The British public grew avid for books with titles like 'My Life on the Frontier' or 'Forty-two Years in Bengal'. It had begun to recognize India's value to Britain, especially as a source of imperial pride, and in economic terms too, for the Subcontinent absorbed much of Britain's overseas investment, notably in the age of railway construction. It also became aware of India's growing military significance, how Indian troops had contributed to the establishment of British paramountcy and how the Indian Army was now being deployed to help the empire on expeditions to Persia, Africa and the Far East. Such interventions may seem insignificant compared with the role played by Indian soldiers in the world wars of the twentieth century, but at the time they were important. The sense of India's value to Britain was conveyed by George Curzon, the last Victorian viceroy of India, when he wrote, 'While we hold onto India, we are a first-rate power. If we lose India, we will decline to a third-rate power.' On another occasion, in Birmingham Town Hall, he told his audience that the loss of empire would reduce Britain to the status of 'a sort of glorified Belgium'.

Plenty of people were at hand, in Parliament, in the universities and in India itself, to justify the conquest and acquisition of vast territories thousands of miles away on another continent. The British, it was often argued, should not feel guilty about being invaders, because India was always being invaded (though usually from the north-west, through the Khyber Pass, rather than from the sea, whence the Europeans had come): India was what V. S. Naipaul called in the 1970s 'a wounded old civilization', 'a land of far older defeat'. Nor should the British worry about being foreigners because Indian dynasties were often foreigners to their subjects and because the inhabitants of the Subcontinent were also foreigners to each other: a Bengali in Bombay was as much a foreigner as a Welshman in Rome. A 'Native of Calcutta,' argued Sir John Strachey, a formidable provincial governor in Victorian India, was 'more of a foreigner to the hardy races on the frontiers of Northern India than an Englishman' could be. In any case, insisted Strachey, Britain's role in India was primarily benevolent, at least by then: it resembled a guardian or trustee working for the good and the improvement of the native inhabitants. According to William Hunter, an historian and civil servant, the British had rescued the Subcontinent from the chaos caused by the decline and disintegration of the Mughal Empire, and their rule was now 'wielded in the joint interest of the races'; without it, India would quickly be torn apart by antagonistic forces, both racial and religious. What India needed, declared Sir James Stephen, a jurist and friend of Strachey, was Englishmen to rule with the qualities of their ancestors, 'the masterful will, the stout heart, the active brain, the calm nerves, the strong body'. With similar arrogance the viceroy Lord Mayo told Sir Henry Durand, whom he had just appointed lieutenant-governor of the Punjab, 'Teach your subordinates that we are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race.'

Before he began his career as a novelist, Paul Scott served in the British Army in India and then Malaya at the end of the Second World War. In Malaya he felt homesick not for England but for India, and on his return home to suburban north London he realized, as he recalled thirty years later, that 'India was also my home. It is difficult to describe but I think in a curious way India in those days was every English person's home, even if it had not been visited. Because we ruled it and benefited from it, it contributed to our well-being and upbringing. It was mysteriously in our blood and perhaps still is.'

As this passage implies, India could dominate the imperial imagination even of people who did not go there. And the numbers of people who did go were remarkably few. In the second half of the nineteenth century millions of Britons left their islands to begin new lives overseas. More than a million went to Australia and New Zealand; another million went to Canada and southern Africa; and over 3 million,...