A Hindu Cromwell courteously decapitates hundreds of maharajas

On 25 July 1947, in the searing heat, almost 100 princes bedecked in jewels gathered in a circular room in New Delhi. Some of them ruled over principalities of less than a square mile; others over an area larger than Korea. All of them had been Britain’s close allies for more than a century and, now that the British were leaving India, many looked forward to regaining their states’ independence.

But on that fateful day, as Lord Mountbatten swaggered around in his ivory white uniform, anxious murmurs rippled through the throng. A cousin of George VI, and related to virtually every royal in Europe, the viceroy was no republican; yet he was about to set in motion one of the great revolutions in world history. He made it clear that if the princes refused to accede to either India or Pakistan, Britain would not come to their aid. It was the death knell of a princely order that had reigned since antiquity.

John Zubrzycki’s Dethroned tells the epic story of how more than 550 sovereign states vanished from the map. India would increase in size by almost two-thirds, while Pakistan’s land mass would virtually double. No other revolution has ended so many monarchies in such a short span, yet the story is still little known.

The changes of fortune that accompanied this were immense. Since the fall of the Ottoman caliphate decades earlier, the Nizam of Hyderabad had, arguably, been the world’s foremost Muslim ruler and his capital the most prominent city of Muslim learning outside of Arabia. His state’s economy rivalled Belgium’s, and with the death of J.D. Rockefeller he became the richest man in the world. But within a few decades, his heir was forced to sack his 14,000 servants – including 38 men employed to dust the chandeliers, and others specifically to grind walnuts – and flee to the Australian Outback, where he became a sheep farmer.