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.

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.

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.

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.

Mapping Senegambia: Legacies of Ambition and the Failure of an Early Colonial Venture

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-231
Author(s):  
Sven Outram-Leman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Senegal River ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Secure Access ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
River Niger

Britain's short-lived Province of Senegambia (1765–1783) was part of an expansion effort in the region driven by a desire to secure access to the gum trade of the Senegal river. Drawing on Britain's knowledge of France's dealings with the Upper-Senegal region it was complemented by the adoption of French cartography, edited to illustrate a new colonial identity. It is argued here that there was an additional motive of developing closer contact with the African interior. This pre-dates the establishment of the African Association in 1788 and its subsequent and better-known expeditions to the River Niger. In contrast to the French, however, the British struggled to engage with the region. This paper approaches the topic from a perspective of cartographic history. It highlights Thomas Jeffery's map of ‘Senegambia Proper’ (1768), copied from Jean Baptiste Bourguingnon d'Anville's ’Carte Particuliére de la Côte Occidentale de l'Afrique' (1751) and illustrative of several obstacles facing both British map-making and colonial expansion in mid-eighteenth century Africa. It is argued that the later enquiries and map-making activities of the African Association, which were hoped to lead to the colonisation of West Africa, built upon these experiences of failure in Senegambia.

Liberty, Property and Popular Politics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
The University

Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career. Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The book includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

Gender, Class and a Naming Process in the English Long Eighteenth Century: Leicestershire c. 1680-1836

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-68
Author(s):  
Dave Postles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Society ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

During the 'long eighteenth century', a novel practice of naming was introduced into England which had a long precedent in some parts of continental Europe. Associated at first with aristocratic status, two 'forenames' were selectively adopted at various levels of English society. How that process occurred is illustrated here through a selective sample of Leicestershire parishes as it varied by the intersections of gender and class.

Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
Single Person ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Lower South

Oliver Hart was arguably the most important evangelical leader of the pre-Revolutionary South. For thirty years the pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church, Hart’s energetic ministry breathed new life into that congregation and the struggling Baptist cause in the region. As the founder of the Charleston Baptist Association, Hart did more than any single person to lay the foundations for the institutional life of the Baptist South, while also working extensively with evangelicals of all denominations to spread the revivalism of the Great Awakening across the lower South. One reason for Hart’s extensive influence is the uneasy compromise he made with white Southern culture, most apparent in his willingness to sanctify rather than challenge the institution of slavery, as his more radical evangelical predecessors had done. While this capitulation gained Hart and his fellow Baptists access to Southern culture, it would also sow the seeds of disunion in the larger American denomination Hart worked so hard to construct. Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America is the first modern biography of Oliver Hart, at the same time interweaving the story of the remarkable transformation of America’s Baptists across the long eighteenth century. It provides perhaps the most complete narrative of the early development of one of America’s largest, most influential, and most understudied religious groups.

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