Courts of Law and Styles of Self in Eighteenth-Century Madras: From Hybrid to Colonial Self

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTISON MINES
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Public Life ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Independent Judiciary ◽  
Indian Thought ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Judicial Proceedings ◽  
The Law

My concern is public representations of individuals and how these were affected by British East India Company courts, judicial proceedings, and the law in Madras city during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Company records reveal that this was a period of dramatic transformation in self-representation, just as it also was in Company rule. My purpose is to trace the transformation of the manner in which individuals represented themselves and others and what this process reveals about the constitution of Madras society and Company rule before and after the establishment of an independent judiciary at the end of the eighteenth century. Most particularly, in this paper I seek to demonstrate how the transformation of East India Company courts of judicature from interested courts, strictly controlled by the Company, to independent courts is associated with changes that greatly affected the manner in which individuals—both British and Indian—thought of themselves and others in Madras city public life. This transformation was of a piece with the establishment of independent judiciaries in England and North America at the time and indicates how Madras too was influenced by these political developments.

scholarly journals Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India by Nilanjana Mukherjee

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sutapa Dutta ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British History ◽  
National State ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Complex Phenomena

Nilanjana Mukherjee’s book looks at construction of space, leading from imaginative to concrete contours, within the context of the British imperial enterprise in India. Fundamental to her argument is that colonial definitions of sovereignty were defined in terms of control over space and not just over people, and hence it was first necessary to map the space and inscribe symbols into it. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, imperialism and colonization were complex phenomena that involved new and imminent strategies of nation building. No other period of British history, as Linda Colley has noted, has seen such a conscious attempt to construct a national state and national identity (Colley 1992). Although the physical occupation of India by the British East India Company could be said to have begun with the battle of Plassey (1757), nevertheless the process of conquest through mediation of symbolic forms indicate the time and manner in which the ‘conquest’ was conscripted

Mysore’s Pre-colonial Potentialities for Capitalist Development and Industrialization

Capitalisms ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 152-179
Author(s):  
Kaveh Yazdani
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South India ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Economic Developments

This paper enquires into Mysore’s potentialities for a proto-capitalist development and a sort of industrialization during the reigns of Haidar ‘Ali (r. 1761–82) and Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–99)—the first Muslim rulers of the sultanate of Mysore. During the second half of the eighteenth century, these two autocrats were not only among the most powerful modernizers of South India but also of the subcontinent and Asia as a whole. The threat posed by the growing power of the British East India Company lubricated the wheels of political, fiscal, and military reforms and fuelled profound efforts at centralization. In conjunction with the already existing advances in commerce, artisanry, and incipient capitalist relations of production, the changes that were set in motion suggest that Mysore found itself in an interim stage and historical conjuncture with multiple prospects of socio-economic developments, as well as the potential scope for a transition towards a type of industrial capitalism.

Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-387
Author(s):  
Prabhakar Singh
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Native Sovereignty ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Colonial Texts ◽  
The Law ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Abstract The role of the roughly 600 Indian princely kingdoms in the transformation of the law of nations into international law during the 19th century is an overlooked episode of international legal history. The Indian princely states effected a gradual end of the Mughal and the Maratha confederacies while appropriating international legal language. The Privy Council—before and after 1858—sanctified within common law as the acts of state, both, the seizure of territories from Indian kings and the ossification of encumbrances attached to the annexed territories. After the Crown takeover of the East India Company in 1858, the British India Government carefully rebooted, even mimicked, the native polyandric relationship of the tribal chiefs, petty states and semi-sovereigns with the Mughal–Maratha complex using multi-normative legal texts. Put down in the British stationery as engagements, sunnuds and treaties, these colonial texts projected an imperially layered nature of the native sovereignty. I challenge the metropole's claims of a one-way export to the colonies of the assumed normative surpluses. I argue that the periphery while responding to a ‘jurisdictional imperialism' upended interational law's civilisation-giving thesis by exporting law to the metropole.

The shipping losses of the British East India Company, 1750–1813

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-336
Author(s):  
H.V. Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Full Information ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Navigational Aids ◽  
India And China

This article establishes and examines the shipping losses of the British East India Company between the middle of the eighteenth century and 1813 when it lost its trade monopoly with India. This was the most important period in the history of the East India Company because it greatly expanded its trade with India and China and established what became a very large territorial empire on the subcontinent. It was also a time when Britain was often at war with France. This is the first publication to present full information on all of the East India Company’s shipping losses. They are set out in the Appendix, which presents details of the names of every ship lost, the date of loss, the cause, and whether the ship was sailing to or from Asia. This information, discussed in the article, shows that 105 ships were lost on 2,171 voyages, a rate of loss that stood at just under 5%. The causes were primarily wrecking, foundering and enemy action, which contributed to far higher shipping losses on voyages outward to Asia than homeward. The East India Company did little itself to rectify this situation because the ships they used were hired from private owners, but some specialists within the Company did take it upon themselves to improve some navigational aids and shipbuilding techniques, although with little overall effect upon the rate of shipping losses. This meant that the East India Company was plagued by shipping losses throughout the period, and this had a very negative effect upon its commercial affairs and profitability.

Empire and Opportunity in Britain, 1763–75 The Prothero Lecture

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 111-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West Indies ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British Military ◽  
Overseas Expansion ◽  
British State ◽  
Made In

At the Peace of Paris in 1763 Britain reaped the rewards of a successful war overseas. Great gains were made in North America, die West Indies and West Africa. Two years later Robert Clive signed the treaty of Allahabad by which the Mughal emperor transferred the diwani and widi it effective possession of die huge province of Bengal to the East India Company. No one could doubt the scale of what had been acquired in so short a time in terms of land, people or resources. How these vast gains could be turned to account, by whom and with what consequences, aroused eager anticipation, a well as serious misgivings, as die British state and many private individuals tried to exploit the opportunities opened up by British military prowess. In so doing they revealed much about the strengdis and weaknesses of British overseas expansion in the eighteenth century.

A Mulk of One's Own: Languages of Sovereignty, Statehood, and Dominion in the Eighteenth-Century “Empire of Hindustan”

Itinerario ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 474-501
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Conceptual Foundations

AbstractOver the course of the eighteenth century, India's Mughal empire (1526–1858) fragmented into a number of regional polities that were, in turn, gradually subsumed under the paramount authority of the British East India Company. This essay describes concomitant developments in the empire's Persianate political language, particularly with regard to ideas of sovereignty, statehood, and dominion. It argues that by the mid-eighteenth century, the Mughal “empire of Hindustan” was increasingly framed as a territorialised governing institution comprising emerging provincial sovereignties rooted in local ruling households. This conceptual dispensation, however, remained ill-defined until the 1760s, when a treaty regime dominated by the Company built upon this language to concretise the empire as a confederacy of independent, sub-imperial states. The essay contends that in the short term, this redefinition bolstered the authority of incipient dynasties in provinces like Awadh, but in the longer term generated conflicts that abetted the expansion of colonial rule and laid conceptual foundations for British paramountcy in India.

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

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