Introduction: Alternative Histories of the East India Company

Schleck, Julia; Sen, Amrita

doi:10.1353/jem.2017.0015

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

2017

DOI: 10.1353/jem.2017.0015

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Introduction: Alternative Histories of the East India Company

Julia Schleck¹,

Amrita Sen²

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Cited by 2 publications

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“…By reading the Persian materials fully and in relation to their long-standing usage in South Asia, we also attempt to uncover the complex meanings of materials like the Divi parwana. In this we are in sympathy with efforts to write cultural histories of the East India Company in various locales, 18 and with the scholarship on European-Ottoman relations that the former are modeled on. 19 This article specifically studies the negotiation of non-European legal systems by European individuals and corporations.…”

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The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India

Hodges

Chatterjee²

2022

Law hist. rev.

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This article examines Persian-language orders—parwanas—issued by regimes that succeeded the Mughal Empire in South Asia, to European trading companies. Focussing in particular on the mid-eighteenth-century exchanges between the Nizam of Hyderabad; the Nawab of Arcot; and the French Compagnie des Indes, we see how Mughal-style parwanas, or sub-imperial orders, previously used to give instructions or to make or withdraw grants, were transformed into a form of political currency. They were now used to exchange military and fiscal resources between South Asian state-builders and militarised European corporations, and to secure political legitimacy for all within a putative Mughal imperium. Moreover, the legal fiction of Mughal sovereignty led to a grants race, such that rivals—European and South Asian—sought more and more parwanas, while also querying the legitimacy of authorities that issued them. The very fragility of the Mughal empire and the lability of the political landscape in eighteenth-century South Asia was thus generative of prolific Persian legal documentation, as well as its rewiring to novel uses. European empire-builders negotiated this legal landscape with only partial literacy, consequently fetishizing the material aspects and ceremonial accompaniments of Persian legal documents, and according them power beyond their immediate substance.

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confidence: 99%

The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India

Hodges

Chatterjee²

2022

Law hist. rev.

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Overseas Trade and War. Reconstructing a Late Eighteenth-Century East India Company Voyage to Asia Between Routine and Unpredictability

Chiocchetti

2024

Itinerario

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The role played by the East India Company in European expansion in early modern Asia is of such importance that it has generated a large body of scholarly literature. However, the logbooks of the East Indiamen, compiled by their captains, are largely overlooked as a primary source for the history of navigation, despite the wealth of information such firsthand, “from below” documents could provide about those voyages. As part of the Global Sea Routes (GSR) project, this essay analyses the voyage of the Nassau (1781–85) along four main themes: the peculiarities of navigation during the Age of Sail, when the duration of a voyage was difficult to predict and subject to a range of possible accidents; the concrete reality of life on board, oscillating between the various activities of the crew and the episodes of desertion and insubordination that broke its daily routine; her military deployment, as the Nassau was directly involved in operations related to the Second Anglo-Mysore War; and, finally, her commercial activities, from the port cities of India to the seas of China.

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Introduction: Alternative Histories of the East India Company

Cited by 2 publications

References 10 publications

The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India

The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India

Overseas Trade and War. Reconstructing a Late Eighteenth-Century East India Company Voyage to Asia Between Routine and Unpredictability

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