Violent Fraternity: Indian political thought in the global age

plans were not put into action, ‘the ideas in government.direct were a direct continuation of the thinking that had underpinned all biopolitical population-data gathering since the mid-1960s’ (164). Lastly, Manton returns to the public’s perspectives on the changes, highlighting fears and concerns about data gathering and computerisation, which led to the 1998 Data Protection Act as well as the British government’s reluctance to join the European proposals. Ultimately, Blair’s Labour government mirrored the earlier Conservative governments that were ‘data-driven’, and the ‘hunger’ for information spanned different political ideologies. This book nicely historicises the ‘data state’, showing how it pre-dated the general consumer’s access to computers of the 1980s and beyond. It successfully traces the ‘data-driven turn in British politics’ and demonstrates ‘how the ideas that underpinned this development came to shape thinking across the party-political divide’ (194). The book further highlights the language used by government and the limited knowledge of the public on technology and data. It shows how the framing of the issues under Wilson during the Cold War were similar under Blair during the dot-com era. Manton effectively explores these themes by showing the interrelatedness and contradictions, including the ‘depoliticisation’ in the data-driven approach of the governments, although he does not say so much about its use. Indeed, the book is largely internally focused on policy and debate, and a fair amount of Cold War context and terrorism is under-examined. Surely very real concerns of nuclear war between North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and the Soviet Union, and transnational as well as state-sponsored terrorism, were important factors in safeguarding Britain. Yet these themes are not significant avenues in the book’s analysis. Nonetheless, this study makes a useful contribution to scholars interested in society’s relationship with government regarding data.