The volumes focus on select aspects of the British imperial archives: the accounts of "discovery" and exploration - fauna and flora, geography, climate - the people of the subcontinent, English domesticity and social life in the subcontinent, the wars and skirmishes - including the "Mutiny" of 1857-58 - and the "civilisational mission".

This volume documents how the practice of thuggee was viewed by the British before: as if it symbolized everything that was wrong with the social order in India.

The texts collected here are accounts of how the British 'discovered' the subcontinent. The narrative of discovery, with the freshness of the 'new', was couched very often in the rhetoric of wonder. But this sense of wonder, even astonishment in some cases at the variety, magnitude and sheer difference of the land and its people, was tempered over time with a narrative of exploration.