Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India

Abstract

Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the apparent anomaly of a European trading company acting as an Indian ruler. Responding to a prolonged crisis of imperial legitimacy, British officials in Bengal tried to build their authority on the basis of an 'ancient constitution', supposedly discovered among the remnants of the declining Mughal Empire. In the search for an indigenous constitution, British political concepts were redeployed and redefined on the Indian frontier of empire, while stereotypes about 'oriental despotism' were challenged by the encounter with sophisticated Indian state forms. This highly original book uncovers a forgotten style of imperial state-building based on constitutional restoration, and in the process opens up new points of connection between British, imperial and South Asian history.

Indirect Rule and Varieties of Governance

“…Though colonial state formation in South Asia was a contingent process of coercion and negotiation across many different regions at different time periods, the political and economic interests of state actors, as well as indigenous response and resistance, help us understand how different modes of governance were established and evolved; many of the same pressures are still driving differences in state-society relations today. This state-interest argument stands against other explanations in colonial state formation: those of the philosophical perspectives of conservatism and liberal universalism in colonial governance (Rudolph 2005;Stokes 1959;Travers 2007;White 2005) and those of simple models of path dependence (Collier and Collier 1991;Pierson 2004) or exhaustion over time. We argue that these perspectives cannot easily explain the changing but persistent diversity of discrete governance arrangements across the subcontinent.…”

Edge of Enlightenment: The Akbar tradition and ‘universal toleration’ in British Bengal

“…But, as Travers has noted, the reforms in judicial administration that Hastings supported were reflective of a tendency to emphasize the ruined condition of Akbar's constitution at the time the British obtained sovereignty over Bengal. 149 His erasure of Akbarian toleration may have been an additional marker of a general retreat from what Travers calls the 'political idiom' in which Britain's Indian empire figured as 'a form of constitutional inheritance'. 150 In any case, Hastings was clearly willing to portray the Mughals as intolerant in order to assert a claim to the moral high ground for British rule.…”

Creating the ‘Problem Hindu’: Sati, Thuggee and Female Infanticide in India, 1800–60

“…The book did not receive a universally warm welcome in either Britain or India, despite its ongoing use as a reference point for the East India Company. 11 Aside from any other point, some readers considered the suggestion that Hindu sacred texts might have been written as much as 5,000 years earlier stretched credulity to beyond breaking point: 'that there were any Writings so old as this, doth not appear'. 12 As Nandini Bhattacharya-Panda has pointed out, these early colonial attempts to codify Hindu law and custom were inherently gendered, and as such had correspondingly far-reaching and enduring implications for colonial understandings of supposedly 'authentic' Hindu gender roles -including the treatment of hotly debated issues like sati.…”