By 1908 Britain had invested £274 million of capital in Indian railways, making it the largest single investment programme ever undertaken in the British Empire. Railways made up 80 per cent of Britain's industrial investment in India, relying on Indian taxpayers to fund construction and early operations. The size and prominence of this public works project has prompted a continuing scholarly debate on the motivation and results of Indian railways, since Lord Dalhousie's original railway minute of 1853. However, most of the analysis has focused on the earlier period of railway construction up to 1875. Like much historiography of the colonial Indian period, analysis has been characterized by subjective responses to British Imperialism. For example, Daniel Thorner's work on government provision of early Indian railway guarantees complemented Indian nationalist writing on railways, as part of the ‘drain’ debate. To be fair, Thorner was sensitive to the difficulty of pursuing development policies in British India given the political landscape at Westminster. After all, the India Office was not unique in guiding colonial enterprise towards dependence on manufacturers and financiers at the metropole. In contrast, the ‘new Imperialist’ scholars, reinterpreting British railway policy as liberal, sensible and benign have ignored the most compelling aspects of Indian nationalist critique. Dutt, Naoroji, Ranade and Wacha may have overstated their case at times, but the complaint that Britain pursued railways in isolation from other legitimate development concerns has never been rebuffed.