ICM Fall 2022 New Books Series
Tuesday, November 1, 2022, 4:45 p.m. —6:15 p.m.
ROBERT TRAVERS
"Colonial State-Building in a Persianate World: Mughal Law and the Making of British India"
A.D. White House, Guerlac Room
This talk by Professor Travers will focus on his just published book, Empire of Complaints: Indian Petitioning and the Making of the British Empire in India (Cambridge UP, 2022) which reinterprets the transition from Mughal to British rule in eighteenth-century India, showing how precolonial, Persianate ideas of imperial justice shaped the emergence of modern colonialism. It argues that British conquerors built a new colonial state in Bengal by expropriating and transforming earlier Mughal protocols for doing justice to petitioning subjects, and by adapting Persianate routines for documenting local rights. Travers explores how a new system of colonial land and taxation law grew out of judicial processes of petitioning and judicial inquiry, in which Indian petitioners invoked the historical memory of Mughal justice to make claims on the early colonial state. Even as British rulers claimed to have established an enlightened ‘rule of law’ in a land of ‘despotism’, they also reworked Mughal norms and precedents to suit their own purposes, justifying their own imperial decrees by reference to reconstituted forms of Mughal law.
Robert Travers is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Cornell. His academic research has focused mainly on the British empire in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and tries to understand the political, social and cultural foundations of imperial power. His book, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India (Cambridge UP, 2007) examined the political thought of the first generation of British empire-builders in India.
Another of Travers' ongoing research project focuses on forms of ‘Eurasian cosmopolitanism’ and cultural exchange generated on the moving frontiers of European empires. A recent essay examines the career of a notable Eurasian cosmopolitan, Haji Mustapha d. 1791, who served both the French and British empires in India as a ‘go-between’ and knowledge broker. Recent published essays have also focused on questions of imperial political economy, diplomacy and treaty-making, and imperial law.
A zoom link is provided for the extenuating circumstances of those who cannot attend in person, but the quality of the image and sound cannot be guaranteed.
Free and open to the public. If you need accommodations to participate in this event, please contact icm@cornell.edu as soon as possible.
