A brief overview of the themes of the study shows that the quest for land upon which to erect defensible settlements and from which to raise necessary revenue determined much of the course of Company endeavour. Without land there was nowhere to erect Company factories and accommodation, without land there was no security from the predations of indigenous and rival European forces, without land there was no settlement of indigenous artisans and traders generating revenue, without land there was no revenue from tenant peasants and without land there was no empire. This legitimacy of this quest and the sovereign authority the Company sought depended in part on the administration of justice. Following haphazard attempts to impose English law, the unification of jurisdiction after 1726 provided a degree of coherence across the three presidencies. Accompanied by all the trappings and pageantry of court proceedings, and the assimilation into its ranks of leading figures from the various communities, the mayor’s courts commanded legitimacy and thus a broad acceptance; this despite the persistence of corruption and a failure to render the courts wholly independent from Company influence.

The second chapter is devoted to the lure of India felt increasingly by the English merchant community, and the Company’s first, tentative attempts to gain a foothold in the great Mughal port of Surat. Frustrated by repeated failures to gain a favourable hearing from the emperor Jahangir, and the hostility of the Portuguese who were determined to resist any challenges to their trading privileges in the region, the EIC court petitioned James I to appoint Sir Thomas Roe as an ambassador. Although he was treated with respect, at the end of the three years of his embassy, Roe returned to London having gained few trading privileges. In the meantime, mounting hostilities between the EIC and Dutch VOC prompted protracted negotiations invoking the fledgling law of nations and culminating in the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1619.

The opening chapter builds on a wide-ranging corpus of documents and texts, but at its core is a set of narrative accounts written South Asian hajj pilgrims between 1739 and 1857. Taken together, the sources illuminate how the hajj from India acquired distinctly “imperial” characteristics from the Mughals onward, and how Indian pilgrims hence also took mental stock of the later unraveling of empire through a signal watchword: “revolution” (inqilāb). The chapter begins by showing how Mughal patronage of hajj created ties of loyalty and subordination between the empire and its subjects. Taking readers from the classical Mughal era to the Sepoy Rebellion, it then reveals how – despite successive waves of regime change and revolution in both India and the Islamic world – the expansion of hajj equaled in South Asians experiencing pilgrimage as an interregional and even “global” undertaking, whose articulations, in turn, they recorded through personal narratives of travel firsthand accounts that offered views of mobility from the decks of Indian Ocean ships and from caravan journeys through the Arabian desert. At the broadest level, the chapter ultimately also contributes to recent scholarly efforts to situate the “age of revolutions” in non-European and global contexts.

After an in-depth analysis of the making of Dutch territorial power in the Indonesian archipelago, Ceylon and Malabar, the two final chapters take an even more Asian perspective on the more marginal Dutch presence in South and West Asia. Through a Dutch window, this chapter perceives a so far undetected Indian world-economy that focuses on the bustling Mughal port city of Surat. Other regional chapters likewise stress the crucial role of Indian commercial brokers, not only in the Indian subcontinent but extending towards the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The Dutch can only accede to these already highly sophisticated and integrated trading systems of the Indian Ocean. Their operations are crucially facilitated by their increasingly monopolised access to both Indonesian spices and Japanese bullion. Despite its marginal position in the Mughal and Safavid Empires, it was not the spices of the archipelago and Ceylon, but the products of India (opium, saltpetre and in particular textiles) which started to dominate the global markets of the eighteenth century. These commodities gave the edge to the previously overpowered but now re-emerging British, be it as Company or, increasingly so, as private traders.