The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Despite profound reservations, the Indian political class, once more, fell in with this appeal.52 Down to the end of the war Gandhi could be found travelling across India, recruiting volunteers for the war effort of the liberal empire. Home Rule, he insisted, meant not independence, but that Indians ‘should become . . . partners in the Empire’, like Canada and Australia.53 The radical Hindu nationalist Tilak called on his fellow Indians to view British war bonds as the ‘title deeds of Home Rule’.54 When the great popular uprising against British rule began in 1919, it was not triggered by discontent at the inadequacy of the Montagu-Chelmsford proposals. It was sparked by outrage at the fact that the trust which the Indians had once more placed in that settlement had been violated by precisely the kind of draconian measures that liberals such as Montagu were desperate to avoid.