Imperial Designs: The Origins of British India, c. 1750-1800

What is an empire? What does an empire do? During the second half of the eighteenth century, the British Empire emerged as an object of study and intense debate among Britons. Not only did British politicians and pamphleteers explicitly speak about something called “the British Empire” but they also considered what the place of India and indeed, the East Indies would be within this empire. Despite the vast geographic distance separating Britain and India, Britons asked how India should be governed, by whom, and for whose sake. Was India “a branch of the empire” or did the commercial monopoly of the East India Company render it utterly different from Britain’s Atlantic world colonies? Simultaneously, South Asian rulers and chroniclers sought to make sense of who the “Angraiz” or the English were and what precisely “the Company” did. This talk examines the myriad ways in which Britons and South Asians imagined the future of the British Empire in India. It tracks how the “India question” infiltrated domestic British politics and equally, how British politics and history were woven into South Asian accounts composed in Persian.

Tiraana Bains is a historian of Britain, South Asia, and the global British Empire. Her work examines how Britons and South Asians alike debated questions of empire, statecraft, labor, and political economy. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Instituting Empire: The Contested Makings of a British Imperial State in South Asia, 1750-1800, which is under contract at Yale University Press and will be forthcoming in the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth Century History and Culture.