Ilay Cooper’s text is sumptuously illustrated with photographs mostly by Barry Dawson. His focus on traditional buildings is apparently based on anthropologist Milton Singer’s long-accepted but now challenged notion that Indian culture could be divided into two dichotomous strands, the great tradition and the little tradition. Indeed, Cooper’s definition of traditional architecture “as architecture without architects,” by which he means architecture built by local and often skilled craftspeople but without the guidance of “a sophistical urban professional” (p. 10), seemed to fall into Singer’s little tradition category. Reading further, however, it became clear that the text is marred by outmoded imperialist attitudes toward Indian society and its history. Cooper appears to see British rule in India as having brought stability to otherwise decadent indigenous powers, a notion long discarded by serious scholars. For Cooper, the moderation of British rule against the “power and excesses of Hindu and Muslim rulers” (p. 69) allowed for the construction of large-scale domestic dwellings and the flourishing of urban settings, as if this were a new phenomenon. What he terms a “pax britannica” (p. 112), Cooper argues, encouraged long-standing indigenous forms to be translated into grand estates and family establishments. Cooper, an old India hand,...