Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765–1793

Legal History

Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765–1793

By Robert Travers
Cambridge University Press May 2025

Specifications

ISBN-13
9781009125697
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publication
May 2025
Format
Paperback
Jurisdiction
U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

Also available as

Hardback

Details

In this deeply researched and revealing account, Robert Travers offers a new view of the transition from Mughal to British rule in India. By focusing on processes of petitioning and judicial inquiry, Travers argues that the East India Company consolidated its territorial power in the conquered province of Bengal by co-opting and transforming late Mughal, Persianate practices of administering justice to petitioning subjects. Recasting the origins of the pivotal 'Permanent Settlement' of the Bengal revenues in 1793, Travers explores 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Petitioning, taxation and law in eighteenth century Bengal: the context for empire
2. Recasting Mughal law: company justice after 1772
3. Zamindari succession disputes and Persianate Hindu law
4. 'At the Durbar' in Calcutta: Banians, revenue farming, and the politics of landed debt
5. A jagirdar's lament: an Indo-Persian historian's appeal to the British empire
6. Conclusion: the making and remaking of a colonial judicial state (c.1780–1793)
Select bibliography
HKD 377.33 −3%
HKD 389.00

Inclusive of HK delivery

Ready to ship
Delivery Time: around 4-5 weeks
Extra 10 working days if shipping address outside Hong Kong
  • Free HK shipping over HK$1,000
  • International shipping to 35+ countries
Order Form
Save

Recommended

You may also be interested in these books:

More titles from Legal History

View all
Politics and the Histories of International Law: The Quest for Knowledge and Justice
Brill Nijhoff

Politics and the Histories of International Law: The Quest for Knowledge and Justice

Raphael Schäfer; Anne Peters
Law and Politics at the National Industrial Relations Court 1970-75: 'Rather Peculiar Things' Pre-order
Hart Publishing

Law and Politics at the National Industrial Relations Court 1970-75: 'Rather Peculiar Things'

Peter Oldham KC
The Magic Mirror
Oxford University Press USA

The Magic Mirror

Kermit L. Hall
HKD 873.00
Victim Reparation under the Ius Post Bellum: An Historical and Normative Perspective
Cambridge University Press

Victim Reparation under the Ius Post Bellum: An Historical and Normative Perspective

Shavana Musa
HKD 1,374.49
The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations
Oxford University Press

The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations

Daniel Lee
HKD 1,324.05
A Cultural History of Law in the Early Modern Age
Bloomsbury Academic

A Cultural History of Law in the Early Modern Age

Peter Goodrich
HKD 358.97