The dominant interpretation of warfare in the Indian subcontinent before the establishment of British rule is that it was comprised of unorganised melees by forces of undisciplined militia. This stemmed from the fact that pre-British Indian states were weak polities with divisible sovereignty; they were – to use the terminology of Burton Stein – segmentary states, lacking any concept of frontiers and standing armies. The divisive caste system of India further debilitated the pre-British indigenous states and armies. The argument goes that the rise of British power in the second half of the eighteenth century resulted in a sea change in warfare. The British introduced a bureaucratic state with standing armies capable of waging decisive battles and conclusive sieges in India. This interpretation dates back to two nineteenth-century British scholars of colonial India. They argued that Indians were incapable of constructing stable states and structured armies due to their racial failings. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians may have substituted a racial analysis for a cultural one, but otherwise they argue along more or less the same lines, that the limited scale of organised inter-state violence reflected the constraints upon the states of pre-British India.

In Perspectives, I lay out the broad historical concerns of the study. Historians viewing the transformation of the East India Company from a trading corporation to an imperial power have tended to focus on the eighteenth century, rightly seeing this as the moment when large swathes of land in the Indian subcontinent were annexed. What I offer as an alternative is an argument that the ideological, legal, political and economic requisites for the acquisition of land were laid in the seventeenth century. The founding charter empowered the Company to annex lands in non-Christian countries, and from the outset the Company embarked on a determined quest to realize that ambition. It met, however, determined resistance from Mughal authorities and rival imperial powers, and only with the passage of time and migration to the Coromandel Coast beyond Mughal control did it first gain the rights to a permanent settlement at Madras, later to be followed under very different circumstances by Bombay and Calcutta.

The first chapter explores the background to the 1600 Charter setting out the conditions for the establishment of the East India Company. Here I am interested in the rights of acquisition inherited from the exploratory age of the Tudor state rather than the more familiar story of its formal constitution. The language of charters granted to trading companies revealed something of the discursive complexity shaped by European powers striving to legitimize claims to overseas territory. England had few jurists of note and so the state drew partially and selectively on Roman and common law to foreground the precept of possession, not least because it conveniently rendered obsolete all challenges to the means of acquisition. The chartered companies of unprecedented size, capital and ambition which rose to power in the second half of the sixteenth century inherited this repertoire of legal pluralism but found in practice that the quest for conquest of overseas territory was compromised by geography and the existence of rival European powers with similar ambitions.

This chapter shows how British sovereignty in Hong Kong was built on inchoate ideas of extradition: half-formed ideas of whether and how the colony would surrender Chinese criminals to China under the contested treaties that ended the Opium War. In 1841–44, these ideas were entangled with unstable ideas of jurisdiction, as British officials struggled to fit the conquered Chinese population of Hong Kong within recognised categories of British subjecthood. Events on the ground then short-circuited efforts to resolve this problem. In The Queen v. Lo A-tow (1843), Governor Henry Pottinger conflated his power to refuse Chinese requests for fugitives for lack of evidence (which China did not dispute) with the power of British courts to try Chinese subjects and sentence them to punishment (which China did dispute). Pottinger’s interpretation of Lo A-tow established a tenuous precedent for territorial sovereignty in a turn of events that would have far-reaching consequences.

Diamonds and jewels – their brilliant refractions providing prototypes for intellectual elasticity and insight into connections between things and gender, colonialism, marriage for hire, and ecosystems – spring forth in Belinda and Les bijoux indiscrets to teach characters to become better interpreters. This chapter argues that in these novels gems become “mouths” that kinesthetically narrate and enact material histories: the labor and commerce that produced them, the deleterious enmeshment of women and objects, and women’s right to be human – that is, honest, rational, fragmented, stained, and radiant. Belinda’s allusion to the historic 48-carat Pigot links domestic larceny in matchmaking to colonial theft in India and Ireland. Markets collide as Belinda demonstrates how the lexicon of purity and perfection dominates the commercialization of courtship and of advisory treatises instructing the public how to buy authentic diamonds. In conclusion, the chapter analyzes how a diamond leads to Lady Delacour’s restoration by teaching her how to belong with the human–nonhuman network.

Although debate has long raged about how to understand the emergence of modern industrial society, it has generally been agreed until recently that Europe’s (and especially Britain’s) pioneering role was enabled by certain distinctive features of its history, economy, or society. Today, however, certain scholars deny this, arguing that other societies had reached a level of development from which a transition similar to Britain’s could have emerged, and that the special trajectory Britain followed was enabled only by accidental or incidental factors or circumstances. The two proposed candidates are China and India, and this chapter takes up and seeks to refute the claims made in regard to each, in the process developing comparisons that show the utility of the categories of autonomy and teleocracy employed throughout this book for the history of industry. The impressive achievements of both countries are acknowledged and described, but growth and sophistication are shown to be insufficient without the structural features that made British society the special case it was.

The East India Company conquest of Bengal opened a field of intellectual contestation centered on questions of rights. At issue were competing conceptions of the place of rights in the history of India. Rights as such could be regarded as having held little significance in light of an underlying history of despotism. On the other hand, the claims of subjects on donative largesse, state patronage, or public infrastructure could be understood as the exercise of a kind of right. Cutting across these positions and their variations was an engagement with the administrative idiom and historical example of the Mughal empire (ca. 1526–1857). Indeed, this rights discourse included contributions from figures who posed themselves as direct interlocutors as much with the Mughal old regime as with the evolving order of the Company. In their works, critiques of the Company could be made by recasting the old regime in new molds to challenge the practice and conceptual underpinnings of Company rule. In order to situate this field of contestation in the intellectual history of rights, this chapter analyzes the views of some singular figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Chapter 2 examines attempts to develop a new model observatory in which the physical sciences could be investigated. Although often positioned as the poor cousin to the pursuit of terrestrial magnetism, the study of meteorology was a critical component of activities at physical observatories at home and overseas and was required to conform to the same exacting requirements. The chapter focuses on Britain’s magnetic crusade and the establishment of a series of so-called colonial observatories across the British Empire. It then investigates the history of one physical observatory – the Colaba Observatory in Bombay, India. The chapter considers Colaba’s place within a set of imperial and climatic geographies that extended across the Indian subcontinent.

Our Introduction traces the biography of John Cleland, the notorious and hitherto elusive eighteenth-century author, as we now see it through the letters and documents published in this volume. We follow his early career in Bombay, climbing the ranks of the East India Company, his prison writing of and subsequent re-arrest for Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, his volatile relationship with his mother, his disappointment in writing for the stage, his patronage by the Delaval family, and – new to Cleland scholarship – his intriguing friendship with Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and the French spy Thomas Pichon, which reveals new attributions to Cleland and his attempted assimilation amongst a literary Francophone community as ‘Jean de Cleland’.

In 1835, the East India Company sequestered the salt lake at Sambhar from the Rajput states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, until 1842. This historical footnote left behind a set of financial accounts in the Company records that are alive with musicians and dancers and the cycle of the ritual year in Rajasthan. One courtesan stands forth as exceptional: Mayalee “dancing girl”. Her insistence on being paid in salt reveals the extraordinary stories the fleeting appearance of performers in the official records of the East India Company can tell about relations between the British and the princely states in the 1830s and 40s, about the Rajput notions of prosperity and sovereignty invested in courtesans and in salt, and the existence of a salt commons at Sambhar before the ill-informed interference of the Company there.

My proposals for decolonizing romanticism are threefold. First, and most obviously, transforming the romantic canon by including BAME writers such as Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, James Wedderburn, Mary Prince, Mirza Abu Talib Khan, Ramohun Roy, Henry Derozio. But decolonizing the curriculum must do more than just “add BAME writers and stir.” My second proposal would accordingly remap the established narrative of British romanticism in relation to the wider world of empire; both in relation to canonical figures like Blake and Austen, and to lesser-known writers like Southey and Hemans. My third proposal locates colonial travel accounts alongside poetry, drama, and the novel, given its role in establishing European “planetary consciousness.” Selecting writing by Mungo Park, James Bruce, Humboldt, Maria Graham, Belzoni, Reginald Heber, students can explore the contingency (and sometimes confusion) determining the “cultural entanglements” of European travelers on the colonial frontier. Travel texts restore a sense of the global interconnectivity of Britain’s and Scotland’s colonial and imperial history, allowing citizens of our multicultural society to recognize themselves in it.

There was no legal definition of the British Empire and it possessed no explicit constitutional meaning. The empire was diverse and incoherent and terminology was not very clear. The terms ‘colony’, ‘dominion’, ‘possession’, ‘plantation’, and other expressions were used in different ways at different times. Indeed, an anti-formalist attitude tended to prevail – often eschewing formal law in favour of informal assurances, customs, and conventions. There was no attempt to establish a uniform legal code. And the sovereignty of the Parliament in London was only one of many types of sovereignty that existed. Much of the British Empire lent itself to a more pluralistic type of sovereignty – one that was divided, shared and indeterminate. Indeed, it was likely that power was the only unifying factor underlying the empire, aided by British naval supremacy, and the fact that, in the nineteenth century, global communications were predominantly in British hands. However, that power could not be derived from a unified, coherent account of legal and political sovereignty. And power by itself lacks legitimacy – it must be validated by something else – which is where sovereignty becomes relevant, in providing that grounding. Yet, the claims of sovereignty made by the empire were often mutually self-contradictory.

This chapter discusses how the English nation was imagined in new ways in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It argues that the idea of a distinct English self was increasingly articulated in the context of imperial and mercantile ambitions and and ventures. These ventures helped consolidate the idea that the English were better than foreign peoples, as well as superior to their rivals such as the Spanish or the Dutch. The English both defined themselves in opposition to those they sought to colonise or trade with or to their imperial rivals and also borrowed from them. Imperial nationalism deeply reshaped ideas about proper gender roles, coupledom and marriage, procreation and child-rearing and racial and religious identities. To illustrate this, the chapter discusses the writings of Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and other writers of the period.