Abstract:

During the 1750s and 1760s, the British East India Company [EIC] conquered three provinces in northeastern India and laid the basis for a territorial empire that eventually spanned the entire subcontinent. The origins and early formation of this empire are amongst the most controversial and well-studied topics in British imperial history. The reigning historiographic consensus contends that Anglo-French global warfare, the emergence of post-Mughal successor kingdoms, and the sub-imperialism of European "men on the spot" ineluctably issued in a British territorial empire in South Asia. More importantly, this consensus holds that the acquisition and early formation of this empire were not informed and shaped by metropolitan political and ideological debate. British politicians and officials, as well as the Company's directors and shareholders, were unable to influence the course of events in South Asia and were forced to grapple with the outcomes of processes over which they had no control. From the perspective of contemporary historiography, metropolitan political conflict and ideological debate played no role in the origins and early formation of the EIC's imperial state in Bengal.

This dissertation fundamentally challenges this consensus by placing the history of the EIC in the context of long-term metropolitan socio-political development. In doing so, it demonstrates that the Company's imperial metamorphosis was deeply bound up with the political crises afflicting mid-Hanoverian Britain and its global empire. The first part of the dissertation traces the EIC's transformation from a bulwark of Stuart absolutism into a pillar of the Hanoverian Whig regime. The Company was not only a commercial corporation trading to Asia. It was also a key component of the fiscal-military state and the oligarchic political order. During the 1750s and 1760s, the oligarchic state was wracked by crises; crises that manifested themselves across Britain and its empire, from Bombay to Boston. The second part of the dissertation places the early phase of the transition to British colonial rule in northeastern India in the context of these wide-ranging crises. In doing so, it demonstrates that the EIC's conquest of Bengal was profoundly informed and shaped by the course of political conflict and ideological debate in the metropolis.

The consolidation of the Company State in Bengal was one of the most important manifestations of a "neo-Tory" metropolitan project that sought to preserve Britain's aristocratic-oligarchic socio-political order. In the years leading up to and during the Seven Years' War, the oligarchic state faced numerous crises. Furthermore, a radical Whig form of politics emerged. This radical Whiggery wanted to reform the political order and to deepen and strengthen Britain's dynamic commercial and manufacturing society. The neo-Tory project arose in response to these crises and to the emergence of radical Whiggery. Central to neo-Toryism was a new form of authoritarian and coercive imperialism that sought both to lock the American colonies into a relationship of mercantilist dependency and to consolidate the EIC's territorial empire on the Indian subcontinent via the erection of a tributary and militarized garrison state in Bengal. During the 1760s, an older Whig imperial political economy concerned with constitutional liberties, commercial expansion, and economic growth was replaced by a neo-Tory imperial political economy that emphasized the extraction of revenues from the colonial periphery and the due subordination that subject peoples owed to metropolitan sovereign authority. British India was born in the midst of these metropolitan political conflicts and imperial political-economic transformations.