Empire of Influence
The East India Company and the Making of Indirect Rule

An important new account of how the East India Company established a transregional system of indirect rule in nineteenth century India.

Callie Wilkinson (Author)

9781009311731, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 March 2023

262 pages
23.6 x 15.5 x 2.2 cm, 0.611 kg

'A valuable contribution to our understanding of British rule.' Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal

Indirect rule is widely considered as a defining feature of the nineteenth and twentieth century British Empire but its divisive earlier history remains largely unexplored. Empire of Influence traces the contentious process whereby the East India Company established a system of indirect rule in India in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In a series of thematic chapters covering intelligence gathering, violence, gift giving and the co-optation of the scribal and courtly elite, Callie Wilkinson foregrounds the disagreement surrounding the tactics of the political representatives of the Company and recaptures the experimental nature of early attempts to secure Company control. She demonstrates how these endeavours were reshaped, exploited and resisted by Indians as well as disputed within the Company itself. This important new account exposes the contested origins of these ambiguous relationships of 'protection' and coercion, while identifying the factors that enabled them to take hold and endure.

List of Figures
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Chronology
List of Abbreviations
Maps
Introduction
1. A Time of Trouble
2. Negotiating the disinformation order
3. Warfare and 'wanton provocations'
4. The price of pageantry
5. Weak ties in a tangled web
6. Kinship, gender, and dynastic dramas
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Asian history [HBJF], General & world history [HBG]