A fit of absence of mind? Illiberal imperialism and the founding of British India, 1757--1776

"A Fit of Absence of Mind?" examines the formation of the East India Company state in Bengal in the second half of the 18th century, grasping it politically as a distinctly modern and illiberal initiative projected from the metropole. To illustrate this I chart the dramatic mid-course transformation of the imperial enterprise in the 1760s and early 1770s. In the earliest, "sub-imperialist" phase of territorial expansion in Bengal, military successes were understood and prosecuted by the servants of the East India Company as politically radical, as an extension of the British revolution against arbitrary power. This revolutionary politics differs markedly 20th century anti-imperialist radicalism, as its anti-aristocratic and commercialist commitments were universalistic in scope and ambition. The key difference between the radical sub-imperialists and their antagonists was not over imperialism itself (which radicals were prepared to embrace by simple right of conquest), but over the sort of political economy advanced by the extension of British rule into Bengal. At the center of contention, in the critical case of Bengal in the 1760s, stood the East India Company, the abolition of which was a long cherished goal of British revolutionaries even before the expansion in Bengal. In the Company elections of 1764 and on the ground in Bengal from mid-1765, I trace how the Company under Robert Clive beat back with ministerial backing the combined threat of domestic radicalism and commercial imperialism in order to launch a new sort of imperialism using as his vehicle the East India Company.;Though closely attuned to ideological and political dynamics, the dissertation is not primarily "metropolitan" in focus; nor is it exclusively a work of South Asian history. Rather, it is a work of Global History grounded in an appreciation of the complex historical environments of both the 18th century British Empire and late Mughal Bengal. Seeking to move beyond nationalist frameworks, it demonstrates the historical constitution of the colonizer/colonized dichotomy by a neo-Tory imperial politics that crystallized in Britain in the early years of the reign of George III. By the early 1770s, I argue, this illiberal project succeeded in laying the foundations of the Second British Empire in the soil of Bengal.