Creating an Early Colonial Order

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Military Violence ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Military

This book explains the origins of colonial rule and its dependence on large-scale military violence in eighteenth-century South Asia. By the final quarter of the long eighteenth century, war-making was not incidental to the elaboration of an infrastructure of extractive domination. The changing capacity of the early colonial regime to organize conquest with increasing efficiency was originative of a complex of laws, ideas, conception of sovereign authority, bureaucratic innovations enmeshed in a political economy of conquest that formed a distinctive early colonial order for South Asia. Colonialism—familiar to historians of the British Raj as coercive authoritarian domination—did not emerge fully formed in early nineteenth-century South Asia. Colonial conquest raised a series of important questions which are at the heart of this book: How was territory to be conquered? How was conquest to be explained and understood? How was the weight assigned to the military in colonial societies justified as an ideology of rule? In answering these questions this early colonial order cast a long shadow across the colonial and the postcolonial periods.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 235-242
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Military Spending ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Executive Authority ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Colonial Order

The early colonial order gave way to a recognizably extractive and coercive colonial rule which stretched across the long nineteenth century. Scholarly debates about the overlap between the late colonial and postcolonial polities in twentieth century South Asia have generally not traced the antecedents of an institutional structure of governance that commits scarce resources and political will in expensive projects of military aggrandizement. The disdain for civilian bodies/rule, placing military spending beyond the purview of public debate, unchecked executive authority in war-making, violent assertion of sovereign authority, aggressively defined borders, special bodies of law and zones of exception where civil rule and liberties are declared to be inapplicable—owe much to the deep structures of early colonial rule.

Creating a ‘Pure and Simple Despotism’

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-234
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Imperial Governance ◽  
The Military ◽  
Flow Of Information

This chapter seeks to locate the political economy of conquest within a wider context of British politics in the age of transoceanic global conflict. The Second Anglo-Maratha War was both the most extensive project of military conquest as well as the least debated colonial misadventure. This war—the most ambitious project of military conquest of the long eighteenth century—was also a secret war. The orderly flow of information about a growing list of subjects—the financial health of the Company, political negotiations with Indian polities, military projects—had become a vital part of early colonial rule. Imperial governance relied on the availability of this information to such an extent that when its transmission was disrupted by/under Richard Wellesley, tectonic shifts in the EIC’s bid for hegemony could not be critically scrutinized. The structures that constituted a distinctive early colonial order—ideological privileging of the military over the civilian, elaborating a legal framework for conquest, nourishing a machine of war, restructuring the hierarchies of power, reconceptualization of land as territory yielding revenue—were animated in the war against the Marathas. The financial exhaustion wreaked by the war typified the political economy of conquest that created an early colonial order in South Asia.

The Company State at War

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-198
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Structural Problems ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Military Commanders ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Shifting Boundaries

This chapter brings together the distinct constituents of the early colonial order that had been created over the preceding three decades to execute conquest. The final conflict with the Marathas (1803–5) required much more than troops and an unprecedented commitment of financial resources. Disputes between civilian administrators and military officers, between legally subordinate civilian administrations and a politically ambitious Bengal council, and, between military forces mobilized across the shifting boundaries of the Company’s territorial expanse and civil administrators in the locales of western India—all received a more unequivocal response in the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Experiments that had been haltingly devised in response to deep structural problems that routinely surfaced during preceding periods of intensified military conflict were radically addressed. Legal innovations like delegating sweeping unqualified powers to military commanders were combined with the deployment of a politically effective ideology of Francophobia to set the stage for what became the most ambitious political project of conquest crafted in the long eighteenth century—the war against the Marathas.

Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-120
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Coercive Force ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Military Law ◽  
Military Discipline

This chapter seeks to analyze the changing meaning of ‘peace’ under an early colonial regime which was perpetually at war. ‘Peace’ in early colonial South Asia no longer meant the absence of conflict, but rather a period when problems of war assumed an urgent significance. From paying soldier’s arrears incurred during military conflicts to disciplining them in times when the Company state was not formally at war—‘peace’ was no longer the opposite of war. Rather it was the fleeting opportunity to re-tool the apparatus of colonial war-making. Conquest did not occur in a legal vacuum. This chapter analyses debates about military law and its significance for the early colonial regime’s claims to sovereign authority. Jurisdictional jockeying between competing sources of law went well beyond the need to maintain military discipline. Examining these debates opens up an unexplored world in which we can understand important questions relating to the territoriality of early colonial rule, the legal personality of the Company state and efforts to compare Britain’s garrisoning of Ireland with the organization of coercive force in South Asia.

Organizing Warfare and Diplomacy in Western India, 1778–83

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Political ◽  
Western India ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Civilian Control ◽  
Critical Component ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Military

This chapter examines the origins of a distinctive system of organizing military conquest in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. It seeks to de-centre the study of politics and military contestation by looking at the war against the Marathas (1778–82) from the vantage point of the region most directly affected by it—the western peninsular territory of the Bombay presidency. The advantage in shifting the focus away from the politically dominant Bengal presidency allows identification of a critical component in the political economy of conquest—the transfer of political authority from a civilian council to the commander of a military force. This shift in political power was essential to the success of the EIC regime of conquest even as it became a perennial source of conflict within the governing structures of the Company state. The debate and dissension that accompanied the deployment of military force both enabled the success of the machine of war and characterized the creation of a distinctive early colonial ideology of rule that subverted civilian control of the military.

scholarly journals Subjective practices of war: The Prussian army and the Zorndorf campaign, 1758

2020 ◽  
pp. 007327532095895
Author(s):  
Adam L. Storring
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Chance Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Subjective Element ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Military ◽  
Military Theory

This article integrates the history of military theory – and the practical history of military campaigns and battles – within the broader history of knowledge. Challenging ideas that the new natural philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called Scientific Revolution) fostered attempts to make warfare mathematically calculated, it builds on work showing that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy was itself much more subjective than previously thought. It uses the figure of King Frederick II of Prussia (reigned 1740–1786) to link theoretical with practical military knowledge, placing the military treatises read and written by the king alongside the practical example of the Prussian army’s campaign against the Russians in summer 1758 at the height of the Seven Years War (1756–1763), which culminated in the battle of Zorndorf. This article shows that both the theory and practice of war – like other branches of knowledge in the long eighteenth century – were fundamentally shaped by the contemporary search for intellectual order. The inability to achieve this in practice led to a reliance on subjective judgment and individual, local knowledge. Whereas historians have noted attempts in the eighteenth century to calculate probabilities mathematically, this article shows that war continued to be conceived as the domain of fortune, subject to incalculable chance. Answering Steven Shapin’s call to define concretely “the subjective element in knowledge-making,” the examples of Frederick and his subordinate, Lieutenant General Count Christoph zu Dohna, reveal sharply different contemporary ideas about how to respond to uncertainty in war. Whereas Dohna sought to be ready for chance events and react to them, Frederick actively embraced uncertainty and risk-taking, making chance both a rhetorical argument and a positive choice guiding strategy and tactics.

scholarly journals Widmo Szwejka i profesjonalizacja czeskiej armii

2009 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 129-144
Author(s):  
Hana Červinková
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
The Public ◽  
Military Violence ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Military

The author discusses the military professionalization of the Czech Armed Forces as a large-scale socio-political process of change that involved efforts both on the part of the Czech state officials and the media aimed at improving the deprived position of the Czech military in the public sphere and culture. These efforts focussed on the obliteration of the cultural idiom of Švejk — a literary hero of Jaroslav Hašek’s novel of the 1920s, and the representation of peaceful resistance to war and military violence. In the course of the 20th century Švejk had become one of the most pervasive cultural references for popular laughter at oppressive military power and has been a leading cultural idiom for the Czechs during the thirty years of German and Soviet military occupations. The article shows how the current official efforts at changing the image of the Czech military focus on the obliteration of Švejk’s cultural idiom, bringing him so frequently into the public discourse that they produce a phantom-like effect in which Švejk has come to haunt the process directed precisely at his expurgation.

‘The Age of Louis XIV’: Frederick the Great and French Ways of War*

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-46
Author(s):  
Adam L Storring
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
French Military ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Military

Abstract This article demonstrates that the military ideas of King Frederick the Great of Prussia up to the Seven Years War (1756–1763) were primarily inspired by France, and particularly by the towering figure of King Louis XIV. It examines the intellectual inspirations for Frederick’s military ideas, showing that French military influence reflected the strength of French cultural influence in the long eighteenth century and the importance of Louis XIV as a model for monarchical self-representation. Frederick’s famous personal command of his armies reflected the Enlightenment concept of the ‘great man’ (grand homme), but Frederick thereby sought primarily to outdo the Sun King, whom Voltaire had criticized for merely accompanying his armies while his generals won battles for him. The example of Frederick thus demonstrates that not only rulers but also enlightened philosophers often looked backwards toward older monarchical examples. Frederick sought to create his own ‘Age of Louis XIV’ in the military sphere by imitating the great French generals of the Sun King. Frederick’s famous outflanking manoeuvres followed the example of famous French generals, reflecting the practice of the more mobile armies of the mid-seventeenth century. Frederick used French practice to justify his attacks with the bayonet, and his ‘short and lively’ wars reflected French strategic traditions. The evidence of French influence on Frederick seriously challenges concepts of a ‘German Way of War’, and indeed of supposed national ‘ways of war’ in general, emphasizing the need for a transnational approach to the history of military thought.

The Office of Akhbār Nawīs: The Transition from Mughal to British Forms

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Political Power ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Essential Nature ◽  
Constant Change ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
English East India Company

The persistence and yet transformation of the office of akhbār nawīs (‘newswriter’) reflected fundamental aspects of the transition from the Mughal to the British Empires. The Mughals appointed akhbār nawīs to collect and transmit specific kinds of information. This office continued, albeit with new functions, through the decentralizing of political power that characterized eighteenth-century South Asia. The expansion fo hte English East India Company meant constant change in the essential nature of political relations, changes mirrored in this office. Indeed, the Company, and its political Residents, subordinated and redefined this office. Under the British Raj, the concept ‘akhbār nawīs’ stood transformed, like the nature of the information it conveyed.

“In that One the Ālif is Missing”: Eunuchs and the Politics of Masculinity in Early Colonial North India

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-116
Author(s):  
Nicholas Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Successor State ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Bodily Difference

AbstractAlthough ostensibly gendered as men and frequently maintaining independent, patriarchal households, enslaved eunuchs (khwājasarās) in pre- and early colonial regimes in South Asia were often mocked for their supposed effeminacy, bodily difference, and pretensions to normative masculinity. In the Mughal successor state of Awadh (1722-1856), such mockery grew more pronounced in the wake of growing financial demands from the British East India Company and attempts by eunuchs to alienate property with wills and testamentary bequests. Through examples of verbal derision directed at eunuchs, this essay shows that not only did ideas of normative masculinity serve as a vehicle for Awadh’s rulers to defend their sovereign authority from colonial encroachment, but that notions of normative manhood continued to inform eunuchs’ own self-perception into the nineteenth century.

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