Callie Wilkinson, "Empire of Influence: The East India Company and the Making of Indirect Rule" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

New Books in South Asian Studies · Jul 14, 2023 · 37m

Indirect rule is widely considered as a defining feature of the nineteenth and twentieth century British Empire but its divisive earlier history remains largely unexplored. Empire of Influence: The East India Company and the Making of Indirect Rule (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the contentious process whereby the East India Company established a system of indirect rule in India in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In a series of thematic chapters covering intelligence gathering, violence, gift giving and the co-optation of the scribal and courtly elite, Callie Wilkinson foregrounds…