Muldoon, Andrew Robert, “Making a `moderate' India: British conservatives, imperial culture and Indian political reform, 1924—1935”, PhD, Washington University, 1999**. Brief summary.

“This dissertation examines the making of the 1935 Government of India Act, using this development as a prism through which to explore several aspects of British, imperial and South Asian history. An investigation of the negotiations between British and Indian politicians leading up to the 1935 Act reveals that British efforts to construct a plan which would give India greater autonomy, but still keep India firmly under British control, emanated not from cynical calculation, but arose out of British cultural assumptions and beliefs about the nature of Indian society, and the workings of Indian politics in particular. The persistence of these assumptions allowed British negotiators to believe that Indian nationalism, in the form of the Indian National Congress Party, was not a serious threat and that the majority of Indians did not desire full political autonomy. This work also highlights the role played by so-called "moderate" Indian politicians in framing the 1935 Act, and argues that these politicians, especially Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, grasped these British assumptions about India and worked to reinforce them for their own gains. These "moderates" shared with Congress the goal of full Indian autonomy, but preferred to use legal and constitutional means to achieve this. Sapru and his colleagues worked publicly to encourage the notion that India would accept gradual political reform, but their real intent was to foster a steady increase in British concessions and create a momentum which would soon leave the British with no other options but to grant full autonomy or to rule by massive force. The dissertation also uses these events to examine the policy-making dynamics of the British Conservative Party and the political influence of various lobbies within that party, including Lancashire businessmen, financiers in the City of London and retired imperial civil servants. This research also provides some insight into the extent and depth of popular support for Empire in twentieth-century Britain, by exploring and analyzing the prevalence and character of support for Britain's imperial ventures among the members of the Conservative Party.” The abstract.