As secretary of state for India for a brief period in the 1860s and for four years in the administration of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1870s, Robert Cecil, the third Marquis of Salisbury, oversaw Indian affairs during the crucial period of change and revaluation that followed the terrible events of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. This work, by examining the actions and ideas of one of the most intelligent and influential political figures of the nineteenth century, sheds light on the official thinking of the time and the problems Britain faced in maintaining a complex empire in South Asia. From the India Office in Whitehall, Salisbury involved himself in the details of Indian government, bringing to it an already highly developed understanding of imperial problems and in the process learning much. The importance of India to a man who as prime minister was responsible for consolidating and extending the British Empire needs to be appreciated. His understanding of India was central to his conception of empire generally, and his experiences at the India Office did much to shape the elder statesman whose time as foreign secretary and prime minister has been more closely studied. This work therefore repudiates the assessment of his daughter Lady Gwendolen Cecil, who when writing the life of her father concluded that his period at the India Office was “scarcely…remunerative biographically.” For a biographer seeking to understand his later career, this was understandable: the official and private correspondence of his India Office years is extensive and had to be bypassed. Moreover, Salisbury’s time at the India Office lacked the vital reforms that distinguished those of Sir Charles Wood after the Mutiny. But as a study of a man who was preeminently a man of ideas, an examination of these years