My recently published book, Empires of Complaints. Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765-93 (Cambridge, 2022) explores how British conquerors built a new colonial state in eighteenth-century Bengal by co-opting and transforming Islamicate, Persianate infrastructures of imperial governance created under the Mughal Empire. Focusing on judicial processes of state-formation, the book shows how British rulers used their military power to colonize late Mughal venues and protocols for doing justice to petitioning subjects, and how Indian petitioners appealed to the historical memory of Mughal justice in making claims on the colonial state. In this talk I will discuss some of the main English and Persian language sources for my study, and consider the wider implications of the book for rethinking the transition from early modern to modern forms of empire in South Asia.

Robert Travers is Professor of History at Cornell. He is a historian of Britain and the British empire. 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 latest book, titled Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765-93 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), uses English and Persian language sources to explore how British conquerors built a new colonial state in eighteenth-century Bengal by co-opting and transforming Islamicate, Persianate infrastructures of imperial governance created under the Mughal Empire, particularly looking at how everyday encounters between Indian petitioners and British officials shaped the practice of modern colonial rule. Another ongoing research project focuses on forms of ‘Eurasian cosmopolitanism’ and cultural exchange generated on the moving frontiers of European empires. Recent published essays have also focused on questions of imperial political economy, diplomacy and treaty-making, and imperial law.

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