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.

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.

Consequences

2018 ◽  
pp. 266-310
Author(s):  
Elena A. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Military Service ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
The Political ◽  
Black Soldiers ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The Military

Chapter 6 links the Aponte slave rebellion in Cuba, which took place fifty years after the siege of Havana, with the wide-ranging impacts of the British invasion and occupation. After Spain regained Havana, Spain took unprecedented measures to promote transatlantic human trafficking, including the annexation in 1778 of what would become its only sub-Saharan African colony, Equatorial Guinea, as well as the tightening of ties to the Spanish Philippines, which was seen as an essential source of goods for exchange in the slave trade. Its Enlightenment-inspired reforms also included new efforts to promote the military service of Spain’s black subjects in both Cuba and greater Spanish America. In the decades that followed the Seven Years’ War, the men of African descent who had defended Cuba from British attack in 1762 sought the continuation and expansion of their many roles buttressing Spanish colonialism; however, white elites in Havana wanted new departures in Spanish imperial political economy and persuaded policymakers in Madrid to grant them. Their efforts remade the political economy of the island, more severely restricted the traditional privileges of free black soldiers and all people of African descent, and ultimately contributed to the outbreak of the Aponte Rebellion.

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.

Conclusions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Covey ◽  
Sonia Alconini
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Local People ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
The Military ◽  
Imperial State

This chapter is an editorial conclusion to Part 3, responding to the central issues raised in chapters on the military, political, and economic power of the Inca state. The concluding chapter mentions some large-scale theoretical formulations for imperial rule, and then discusses the trajectory of Inca militarism as the empire expanded beyond the Cuzco region. Conquest led to varying manifestations of Inca economic power, and many aspects of the political economy were projected from the household of the ruling Inca and his wife. Kinship served as a key means for connecting Inca rulers with subject populations, but local people could evade the imperial state under some circumstances, especially in areas where food production practices were different from those most familiar to the maize-farming Incas.

Khaki Capital: The Political Economy of the Military in Southeast Asia

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-155
Author(s):  
Paul Chambers ◽  
Napisa Waitoolkiat ◽  
John Blaxland ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Military

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.

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