Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India

Sudipta Sen’s Distant Sovereignty is an ambitious attempt to reexamine the characteristics of British power in the Indian subcontinent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sen’s central argument is that East India Company rule in India was very much “part and parcel” of British imperial society, rather than some alien offshoot that bore little relation to the rest of the British polity and society. He is interested, in other words, in bridging the divide between the “domestic” history of the British Isles and the “imperial” history of British expansion in India.

The connectedness of these two was obscured by the East India Company’s own desire to shield its activities in India from metropolitan British oversight, its desire to treat this world as its own private fiefdom. Edmund Burke, however, insisted on “the fundamentally dual source of the political authority of the Company” (xv): On the one hand, it was licensed and authorized by the British parliament through the charter provisions of the East India Company; on the other hand, it was authorized and secured its legitimacy, such as it was, through grants of office and dignities by the Mughal emperor. Although the East India Company progressively sought, in the early nineteenth century, to undo the various marks of its “vassalage” to the Mughal emperor by forbidding imperial forms and ceremonies that involved reference to this status, Sen reminds us that, in its early decades, “the self-image of British rule in India could not be fully or comfortably unfastened from the nominal regality of the Mughals” (xiii). Though he underlines the doubleness of the East India Company’s rule in India, deriving power and authority from both the British polity and the Mughal regime, Sen devotes his own attention primarily to exploring continuities between British power in India and the British polity “at home”: “I reconsider in this book,” he writes, “the unremarked-upon complicity between the island history of the British Empire and the early history of British rule in India” (xxiv).

In undertaking this task, Sen positions his work in relation to the “new imperial historiography” that seeks to “suture” together, in some measure, the multiple archives and histories produced by and imbricated in the imperial venture (xxvii). He draws on the “cultural approaches to English state formation” championed by Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer in The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (1985) in order to examine the construction of a British imperial nationalism in the Indian context. His aim is to show that central “facets of the British national character were fabricated” not only “at home” and in the “Anglo-Saxon settler colonies,” but also in British India (xxx): “new categories of distance and impartiality had to be invented in order to keep the rulers and the ruled in place. It is in this context that identities—patriotic, masculine, national, racial, and imperial—took shape” (xxix). This is a very broad agenda, and both the strengths and weaknesses of the book follow from the attempt to do so much in a relatively limited space.

In the first chapter, Sen argues that the process of state formation “at home and in the colony” was “homologous” (1): “What on the surface may appear as novel or deviant aspects of colonial administration thrust upon [the East India Company] by the force of circumstance turn out on closer inspection to be strikingly consistent with the overall paradigm of political culture in contemporary England” (4). For instance, a conception of the “liberty” of Englishmen, widely celebrated as a national characteristic in eighteenth-century Britain, was elaborated in British India through its contrast with a sense of the “natural slavery” of India’s native inhabitants (12-16). Thus, even as an authoritarian state developed in British India, it could be seen as reinforcing, rather than undermining, this British national characteristic of love of liberty. So, too, despite various contemporary critiques of the rapaciousness of the East India Company’s rule in India, Sen argues that there was a basic continuity—both causal and in terms of characteristics—between the fiscal-military state in Britain and “the colonial state forged through the commercial expansion of Georgian England” (25): “The East India Company . . . regenerated itself as a surrogate and expatriate English state in India” (47).

In the second chapter, Sen “traces the emergence of a colonial historical account of the Indian conquest and explores the way in which Indian events and characters were assimilated into the history of [England as] an imperial nation-state” (29). He seeks to show that there was a continuing tension in British historical writings about India between two approaches: one that sought to place Indian history in the context of a universal history of civilizational progress through the four stages of social organization identified by writers of the Scottish Enlightenment and another that sought to isolate and particularize Indian history as the peculiar and alien product of its own special (“Oriental”) circumstances (30-31). These early histories of India by British writers drew on widespread notions of climatological conditioning and constructed a theory that the native population consisted of two distinct races–not so much “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” or “martial” and “non-martial” races, as “Gentoos” (Hindus) and “Moors” (Muslims). By constructing a triadic narrative of “Hindu antiquity followed by the invasion of Islam and the eventual intercession of the British” (54), this historical discourse served to merge Indian history and the history of the British in India into a single imperial history (55).

The third chapter examines cartographic representations of British India and the role of map-making and land surveys in negotiating the conflict between “contending visions of territory” (59). Sen contrasts the conventions of Mughal cartography with those of the military surveys produced for the British army, such as William Roy’s mapping of Scotland and James Rennell’s survey of Bengal (65) and the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India begun by William Lambton in the early nineteenth century (80). He discusses the role of these cartographic ventures in constructing a “semblance of autonomy and sufficiency for the colonial state” (84), in addition to their more directly utilitarian purposes.

Sen argues in the fourth chapter that the inequalities of the social relations of gender in British society were deeply implicated in the sorting out of relations with colonial subjects. Where earlier studies of imperial culture have examined the relationship between masculinity and the public institutions of imperial rule, Sen turns the reader’s attention to “the unwritten compact between domesticity and manliness” and the role this nexus, instantiated in the patriarchal household, played in subtending the “foundations of the colonial state” (87). The East India Company’s territories in Bengal were conceived of “as an ‘estate’ to be tended like any other back home in England” (94), and the Company’s servants occupied the masculine role of propertied Englishmen over against their Indian subjects as, in effect, feminized figures incapable of exercising full agency in their own right. Moreover, there was an “overt repression of intimacy [between the British and their native subjects] through the figure of the despot and the slave” (96), a figure that recurs through early British discourses about Indian society, whether with reference to Mughal rule or the caste system or gender relations in Indian society, and that served to widen the perceived gap between English masculinity and Indian “want of manliness” (103).

The final chapter, “The Decline of Intimacy,” examines “the racial divide” in early British India (122). By emphasizing the supposedly degenerative effects of tropical climate (126), by repressing and stigmatizing liaisons with native women (130), by excluding mixed parentage Anglo-Indians from the East India Company’s civil and military establishments (135), and by restricting British settlement in India (140), a distinctive racial divide was articulated and enforced between “Englishman” and “native,” thus “anticipating stable and enduring templates of colonial and imperial belonging” (149).

Sen’s emphasis throughout is on the negotiated and constructed nature of “Britishness” in the imperial context, in contrast to approaches that take “differences” between Briton and Indian as primordial givens (153). And he seeks to show that in this process, “forms of inequality within the state and society in England had always shaped ideas of colonial rule as much as the encounter with people newly incorporated into the empire” (122). The phrasing of this last point calls to mind David Cannadine’s argument in Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001), but if Cannadine’s argument seems reductive the major failing of Sen’s book is that it seeks to cover so much ground that it never really pursues and develops its argumentative threads very far, despite the conceptual ambition of the project. We get a kaleidoscopic view of many interesting issues and aspects of early British rule in India, but the reader is hard pressed to arrive at a coherent interpretation bringing these various moments into determinate relation with each other. There is much here to engage any reader interested in early British rule in India, but the fragmentariness of the argument means that the book does not make as strong a revisionist intervention as its interpretive project would seem to promise, and as we might have been led to hope for from Sen’s excellent previous book, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (1998).