{"title":"Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Law","authors":"Manu Sehgal","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":302070,"journal":{"name":"Creating an Early Colonial Order","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116939960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Epilogue","authors":"Manu Sehgal","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":302070,"journal":{"name":"Creating an Early Colonial Order","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123964022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Stranger to Relate yet Wonderfully True’","authors":"Manu Sehgal","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Building on the preceding chapter’s effort to study war and territorial conquest from the vantage point of peninsular India, this chapter focuses on the Madras presidency at war against the sultans of Mysore (1780–4). In stark contrast to the muted resistance offered by the civilian government of Bombay, when confronted with a vastly expanded military challenge, the Madras civilian power completely imploded. The belligerent Governor George Macartney struggled to wrest control against encroachments over his civilian authority from military commanders, an overweening Bengal administration and the inveterate hostility of the rulers of Mysore. These fissiparous struggles were not merely confined to the high politics of colonial administration. Ideologues like Henry Malcolm argued for the complete inversion of the ideology of civilian control of the military, especially for the local administration in Madras presidency. Taken together—the complete breakdown of civil–military relations at the highest levels of the Madras presidency and the view from the margins of local administration—the experiment of placing the military well above and beyond the civilian components of early colonial rule had taken deep roots in peninsular India.","PeriodicalId":302070,"journal":{"name":"Creating an Early Colonial Order","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128943093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Organizing Warfare and Diplomacy in Western India, 1778–83","authors":"Manu Sehgal","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":302070,"journal":{"name":"Creating an Early Colonial Order","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128879853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Political Economy of Conquest","authors":"Manu Sehgal","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"By the final decade of the eighteenth century, the political economy of conquest had crystalized into a distinctively recognizable modern form. Expanded scale of war-making created a need to surveil the financial operations of the colonial state. The changing valence of ‘corruption’ came to include a growing insistence on eliminating leakages from the financial flows that enabled conquest. Corruption was not merely a moral scourge but a structural flaw, which if left unresolved would drain the war-making capability of the early colonial regime. Financial accounts of the East India Company therefore had to be rendered legible to public scrutiny and parliamentary debate in the form of an annual India Budget. Colonial conquest captured the cultural imagination of metropolitan Britain – from painting and the Georgian stage to a new graphic scheme of statistical visualization – all sought to comprehend Britain’s territorial empire in South Asia. The growing appetite for war was fed by territorial conquest on an ever-expanding scale and transformed colonial warfare into the most fiscally impactful activity. An entire infrastructure of financial surveillance had to be created to organize warfare and conquest more efficiently. This edifice of control and scrutiny rested upon a growing appetite for reliable information about the financial health of the Indian empire and forecasting the dividends of territorial conquest.","PeriodicalId":302070,"journal":{"name":"Creating an Early Colonial Order","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132350980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creating a ‘Pure and Simple Despotism’","authors":"Manu Sehgal","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190124502.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":302070,"journal":{"name":"Creating an Early Colonial Order","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130324764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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