SASC Colloquium Series: Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British India, Robert Travers

From Professor Travers: My new book reinterprets the transition from Mughal to British rule in eighteenth-century eastern India, showing colonial state-builders sought to expropriate and transform precolonial, Persianate routines for doing justice to petitioning subjects. Recasting the origins of the pivotal ‘Permanent Settlement’ of the Bengal revenues in 1793, I explore the gradual production of a new system of colonial taxation and civil law through the selective adaptation and reworking of Mughal norms and precedents. Drawing on English and Persian sources, Empires of Complaints reimagines the origins of British India by foregrounding the late Mughal context for colonial state-formation and the ways that British rulers reinterpreted and reconstituted Persianate forms of statecraft to suit their new empire.
Robert Travers is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell. He is the author of Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765-93 (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India. The British in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He also co-edited (with Rohit De) a special issue of the journal Modern Asian Studies on Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia (January 2019).
The event is in a hybrid setting, in-person & Zoom. The Zoom link is below.