In 1834, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British historian and statesman, arrived in Madras. He travelled north to Calcutta, then India’s capital, to assume the role of Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council. “We know that India cannot have a free Government,” Macaulay had written to the Scottish philosopher James Mill the year before. “But she can have the next best thing: a firm and impartial despotism.” A few months later, Macaulay wrote a memo on Indian education, which stated, “It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” The implication was obvious: Indians must learn the language of their occupiers.

Robert McCrum Illustration by Paul Hamlyn

With Macaulay’s backing, schools instructed Indian students in English, a language that offered “ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations,” whereas Sanskrit and Arabic offered only “false taste and false philosophy.” By 1840, according to Macaulay’s biographer Robert E. Sullivan, “English was the dominant language in Calcutta.” In 1857, English-speaking universities opened in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. Macaulay’s vision of an independent class of Anglophone Indians was being realized.

But this development was not without irony: 1857 was also the year that Indian soldiers rebelled against the East India Company’s century-long rule. The uprising was ruthlessly put down, but the shock it provoked in London brought about the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj. The rebellion is now regarded by many Indians as the first war of independence. What’s more, the generations of independence leaders who emerged in the wake of the rebellion tended to be educated English speakers—from precisely the “class” that Macaulay had sought to create. In 1950, the Indian constitution was ratified; it was written in English.

The story of English in India epitomizes its strange history. English has been a language of occupiers and imperialists, but also one of insurgents and democrats. It has often been shaped by populations upon whom it was imposed; a large number of common English words (“jungle,” “nirvana,” “bungalow”) were, for instance, taken from Indian languages. English has also become, as Robert McCrum asserts in “Globish” (Norton; $26.95), the “world’s language,” and it is a merit of his book that he is alert to the many dichotomies of English’s rise. “Is this revolution a creature of globalization,” he asks, “or does global capitalism owe some of its energy and resilience to global English in all its manifestations, cultural as well as linguistic?”

“Globish” is not quite the same as global English. The term was coined by Jean-Paul Nerrière, a French former I.B.M. executive, who noted that non-native English speakers were able to communicate with a minimal, “utilitarian” vocabulary of English words. McCrum, a British author and editor who has co-written several editions of “The Story of English,” explains that Globish is an overwhelmingly economic phenomenon—the language of Singaporean businessmen closing deals with the help of a small arsenal of English words, and of European officials calming financial markets by uttering stock phrases on television. He offers a journalistic account of its worldwide use in tandem with a historical one of the development of English as it made its way around the world. This history shows the depth and complexity of the role of English in the political and cultural evolution of the societies to which it spread. Globish’s influence is unlikely to be as revolutionary or as lasting.

McCrum begins with the birthplace of English, which, as George Orwell observed, has always had several overlapping denominations: “We call our islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion.” The history responsible for this diversity—one of successive invasions—also insured that the language developed in an unusual way. The Roman occupation, from 43 A.D. to the early fifth century, accustomed Celtic-speaking islanders to Latin, which soon became the language of the Romano-British élite. The influence of this is still evident in English topography; for example, the Latin word for camp is castra, which is the reason that so many British place names end in “-chester” or “-cester.” The departure of the Romans was followed by the incursions of Germanic speakers from what is now northern Germany and Denmark, leading to the emergence of Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. McCrum explains, “Everyone who speaks or writes any kind of English in the twenty-first century is using accents, grammar and vocabulary, which, with several modifications, can be traced in a direct lineage to the old English of the Anglo-Saxons.” In the ninth century, Alfred the Great saw the language as a way of uniting various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against the threat of Viking invasions. He ordered up translations of a number of Latin texts into English, recognizing, like Macaulay, the importance of inculcating young people in his tongue of choice.

In 1066, the Norman invasion established French as the language of government, but it did not dislodge English. Instead, the assimilation of elements of French into English produced Middle English and, with it, the basic profile of the language we still speak: a large vocabulary of Germanic and French-derived words organized with a simplified Germanic grammar. From here on, changes were incremental. In the sixteenth century, the wide circulation of English Bible translations and the Book of Common Prayer brought a new degree of standardization. The evolving national literature bears witness to this transformation. As McCrum notes, Chaucer is difficult for contemporary readers, but Shakespeare, two centuries later, is much more intelligible. What’s more, the great linguistic flourishing exemplified by Shakespeare and his contemporaries coincided with Britain’s arrival as a significant sea power. A language of the conquered was now used in the service of empire, not least in the thirteen colonies across the Atlantic.

British colonialism firmly established English in the territories that now make up the United States, but the distinctions between American and British English are as important as the shared heritage. Writers in England have tended to play these differences for laughs. Wilde wrote, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language,” and Shaw spoke of “two nations divided by a common language.” Behind the jokes, however, lies a radical history. McCrum shows how disgruntled North American subjects of British rule deliberately forged a distinctively American English. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “New circumstances call for new words, new phrases, and the transfer of old words to new objects.” According to Benjamin Rush, American English was a language that avoided “the turgid style of Johnson, the purple glare of Gibbon.” In 1789, Noah Webster pushed for the reformation of spelling and vocabulary, writing that “Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline.” The new American style, self-consciously direct, was adopted by the Englishman Thomas Paine in his pamphlets. The Constitution, with what McCrum calls its “triumph of synthesis,” is another example of the enduring impact of American English.

But is English somehow inherently democratic and accommodating to liberty and creativity? Would the Constitution be so liberal a document if the people of Britain had been Spanish or French speakers? McCrum tries to have it both ways: “Language becomes more than just an essential means of communication; it embodies a contemporary aspiration, expressing a willingness to innovate with new ideas, to adapt old uses and to enfranchise new people. Language, it cannot be stressed too strongly, is intrinsically neutral, but it is no contradiction to claim that English—by virtue of its origins and history—is unique.” Yet there is a contradiction here, and it reëmerges later when McCrum writes that English is “on the side of the individual,” and quotes Voltaire’s praise of its “naturalness,” “energy,” and “daring.” If languages are “intrinsically neutral,” then English simply can’t be all these things.

Some have argued that English has certain properties—a flexible grammar, a lack of masculine and feminine forms—that make it easier to learn, and thus to export. These qualities, though, are offset by arbitrary spelling, and, besides, there are other languages, such as Russian, that have spread despite being difficult to master. Armies and navies are ultimately more important than syntactic mechanics in establishing a language’s dissemination. Most likely, English was just in the right place at the right time.

McCrum follows his history with a worldwide survey of Globish. There are accounts of call centers and outsourced jobs, and a well-reported visit to a Beijing university’s informal “English corner,” where pupils spend Friday evenings discussing everything from Tiananmen Square to Hugh Grant films. These stories are appealing, but they tend to conflate rudimentary, utilitarian Globish with English. The Chinese students who gather to discuss Hugh Grant are seeking a linguistic and cultural competence far greater than that required by call centers. The problem recurs in McCrum’s discussion of India. He writes perceptively about the Indian-born novelist Kiran Desai, but a Commonwealth writer’s attainments in literary English clearly have little to do with the contemporary phenomenon of Globish, and it is hard to avoid the feeling that McCrum simply has more interest in the former.

Nerrière, the coiner of the term “Globish,” tells McCrum that Globish’s greatest impact will be to “limit the influence of the English language dramatically”; people won’t need to learn English when they can get by with Globish. This would please linguists who fear that the spread of English imperils the survival of other languages. But the idea is questionable. It’s true that linguistic history is full of pidgin languages, which facilitated basic communication among disparate parties but didn’t keep anyone from speaking his own language. However, pidgins typically evolve in situations where speakers of specific languages—Portuguese and Tamil, say—need to communicate for a clearly defined purpose, usually trade. Maybe Globish is just a worldwide pidgin, but the ease of modern travel and the huge reach of electronic media have vastly increased the kinds of interactions now possible. For many people, Globish won’t be enough. They’ll want to learn English.

On a recent trip to India, I spent a few days in Chennai (formerly Madras, the city where Macaulay landed), where the ubiquity of English-language bookstores testifies to a kind of symbiotic relationship with Anglo-American enthusiasm for Indian literature. Both Globish and English are thriving, but it was the latter that registered. Many young people are now reared to speak only English, and one teen-age student told me that even adults who once spoke only Tamil, the local language, were beginning to speak Tanglish with their children. When I said that people in America refer to Spanglish, he seemed disappointed that so-called “code-switching” was not an exclusively Indian phenomenon. I asked a teacher how she communicated with non-Tamil-speaking Indians—all one billion of them. “English, of course,” was the reply.

Macaulay remains a much disputed figure in India, but he understood where his policies would lead. He knew that Indian independence could not be postponed forever, but he wanted to insure that what he considered the right class of people gained power when the British departed, and sought to leave behind “the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.” In 2006, a prominent activist for India’s dalit underclass lauded Macaulay’s educational initiatives, arguing that the English language had the power to emancipate Indians of low caste. Of course, the opposite argument can be made: the lack of an English education may perpetuate the misery of many of India’s poor. Still, to the extent that India, with its many languages and cultures, persists as a cohesive national entity, the language of Macaulay plays a large role. And the Indian story, like the American one, is not about Globish; it is about English. ♦