Roy Moxham's life reads like a novel whose author kept changing genres. Tea plantation supervisor at 20, agricultural machinery salesman across East Africa, squatter in Covent Garden, gallery owner, book conservator at Canterbury Cathedral — and then, past 50, a writer who produced one genuinely important work of history. The Great Hedge of India (2001) is the book that matters here. The premise sounds absurd: a four-metre-high, 2,500-mile-long hedge of thorny shrubs, maintained by 12,000 guards on behalf of the East India Company as a customs barrier across British India. It was a physical manifestation of extractive colonial economics rendered in vegetation — and after independence it vanished so completely that Moxham spent years of trips to India hunting for remnants. He found a surviving section and cut a branch from it, now kept by his brother John. What makes the book more than a curiosity is what the hedge represents: the sheer administrative obsession the British brought to extracting revenue from India. Twelve thousand men guarding a hedge. The scale of it tells you everything about the colonial project that a shelf of policy papers cannot. The book was published in multiple Indian languages and is still referenced by historians and artists — it even inspired a Horrible Histories sketch, which is its own kind of canonical status. Moxham's other books fill out the picture without quite matching the first. A Brief History of Tea (2003) is solid popular history. Outlaw (2010), about Phoolan Devi, grew from a genuine personal connection — Moxham wrote to her in prison, they became friends, and she was assassinated in 2001 before the book appeared. The Theft of India (2015) tackled European colonial rivalry and its impact on Indians directly. The biography itself is the quiet story underneath. Born in Evesham to a baker who died when Roy was 11, raised by a mother who took in lodgers to survive, he placed a classified ad in the Times — "Young man, good A-levels, seeks opportunity in Africa in tobacco or tea" — and got a job supervising 1,000 tea pickers in Nyasaland (now Malawi). No connections, no family money, just nerve and a newspaper ad. After 13 years in Africa he returned to London, squatted in Covent Garden, joined the Seven Dials Housing Co-operative, retrained as a book conservator at Camberwell College of Arts, and worked at Senate House Library until 2005. The writing career started in his 50s, the India obsession from 1992. He spent months each year living in India after retirement. Moxham died at 86, survived by two brothers, a nephew, three nieces, and the nephew who wrote this obituary. The branch from the Great Hedge sits in his brother's study — a small piece of evidence that an empire once built a 2,500-mile wall of thorns to collect salt tax.
