A brief overview of the themes of the study shows that the quest for land upon which to erect defensible settlements and from which to raise necessary revenue determined much of the course of Company endeavour. Without land there was nowhere to erect Company factories and accommodation, without land there was no security from the predations of indigenous and rival European forces, without land there was no settlement of indigenous artisans and traders generating revenue, without land there was no revenue from tenant peasants and without land there was no empire. This legitimacy of this quest and the sovereign authority the Company sought depended in part on the administration of justice. Following haphazard attempts to impose English law, the unification of jurisdiction after 1726 provided a degree of coherence across the three presidencies. Accompanied by all the trappings and pageantry of court proceedings, and the assimilation into its ranks of leading figures from the various communities, the mayor’s courts commanded legitimacy and thus a broad acceptance; this despite the persistence of corruption and a failure to render the courts wholly independent from Company influence.

Bengal was a region long known to the Company. Trade, however, was stifled by the Portuguese and the determination of Mughal authorities to resist English incursions. The Company was able to establish settlements in the weaving centres of Patna, Dacca and Malda, but these were outlying centres of production. Josiah Child’s control of the Company signalled a shift towards a new aggressive phase notable for a resolve to fortify settlements, exploit new sources of land revenue and a willingness to challenge Mughal authority. In the aftermath of the abortive assault on Chittagong, Job Charnock settled on a site on the banks of the Hugli. Pestilential, remote and of little interest to Mughal authorities it may have been, and yet the three small villages which became Calcutta were trading centres, made easily defensible by the encompassing jungle and river. Charnock died before any vision he had for the site could be realized, but his successors acted expeditiously and mostly fraudulently to secure zaminardi rights over the surrounding area, erect adequate fortification and after a period of uncertainty, impose a system of justice based on the mayors’ courts of Bombay and Madras.

In Perspectives, I lay out the broad historical concerns of the study. Historians viewing the transformation of the East India Company from a trading corporation to an imperial power have tended to focus on the eighteenth century, rightly seeing this as the moment when large swathes of land in the Indian subcontinent were annexed. What I offer as an alternative is an argument that the ideological, legal, political and economic requisites for the acquisition of land were laid in the seventeenth century. The founding charter empowered the Company to annex lands in non-Christian countries, and from the outset the Company embarked on a determined quest to realize that ambition. It met, however, determined resistance from Mughal authorities and rival imperial powers, and only with the passage of time and migration to the Coromandel Coast beyond Mughal control did it first gain the rights to a permanent settlement at Madras, later to be followed under very different circumstances by Bombay and Calcutta.

How did blackness and whiteness figure in the patterns of life and represenation that moved across the eighteenth-century theatrical empire? Performances of blackface characters in colonial environments – in this case of Mungo, the enslaved Black Servant in the comic opera The Padlock – could take the lead in parsing, categorizing and enacting typologies of "darker-skinned" peoples with lasting effects – an embodied form of racial "knowledge" that undergirded the subordination of non-British peoples in the construction of a global laboring class.

Chapter 3 explores non-Bollywood, regional Indian cinema. I take up the depiction of urban struggles in Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71 ‘1972’. Sen’s “city films,” as these are called, are trailblazing experiments in stylistic form and anticolonial theory. They explicitly draw from Latin American Cinema Novo, particularly “Imperfect Cinema” and “Third Cinema” popularized by the Cuban Julio Garcia Espinosa and the Argentinians Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, respectively. On the other hand, Sen is equally indebted to Bengali literature on the city, which includes the work of the poet Jibanananda Das and the prose writers Manik Bandyopadhyay and Samaresh Basu among others. Sen’s cinema sets in motion a conceptually daring relationship between film, literature, and politics. He authors what I call a lumpen-aesthetics, which turns a pejorative term for the dissident poor ‘the lumpen’ into an objective assessment of peripheral society. It is a cinema that is adequate to the task of representing the city and articulating its peculiarly peripheral fractures.s

This chapter explores the role and function of occult forces in South Asian bazaars. Drawing mainly, but not exclusively, on material from eastern South Asia, it challenges the repeated attempts by scholars to read these forces along functionalist lines. Instead, it demonstrates that there is a substantial body of formalized textual knowledge which theorizes the nature, role, and application of these forces. This knowledge is available, in the bazaar itself, in a specialized genre of printed books. The chapter argues against mapping the knowledge produced in these books within the category of “religion,” since the emphasis on belief and bounded identities that have become germane to modern ideas of “religion” are inapplicable to the practices of the occult bazaar. The occult bazaar, it is argued, should be treated as a distinctive sphere of abstraction that is separate from, though interacting with, the more formalized and well-known abstraction of “the economy.”

The Anglo-Mughal War of 1686–1690 is the focus of Chapter 5, which seeks to challenge traditional understandings of the war as the result of a more capable and belligerent Company seeking to impose its will on the Mughal empire and expand its territory and rights by force, culminating in the acquisition of Calcutta. Instead, this chapter places the war within the context of the personal tensions and conflicts produced by the transcultural ties which bound Company servants and Mughal elites together. Some servants sought to renegotiate these increasingly one-sided relationships with a limited show of force, for which they were immediately expelled from Bengal by the Mughal government. Only after ten years of complex negotiations, in which new transcultural relationships were established with an entirely new Mughal regime, could the Company return and develop Calcutta as a settlement. Even then, its expansion relied on the Company’s utility to the new Mughal regime, to which they contributed men and money to uphold the nawab’s authority against several large-scale rebellions. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Company transformed itself into a key client of the Mughal government which could be mobilised to consolidate the empire’s control of Bengal in exchange for greater rights and privileges.

The final chapter returns to the Indian subcontinent to reveal the durability of the Company’s expansion within the carapace of Mughal sovereignty by the mid-eighteenth century. Although traditionally understood as a period of Mughal decline, largely facilitated by the ‘rise’ of the Company, this chapter argues that the two were not mutually exclusive, and in fact the continued expansion of the Company within a Mughal framework contributed to the empire’s continued authority on the Indian subcontinent, as the networks of Company servants helped bind the emperor in Delhi to the regional nawabs into the 1750s. For example, the imperial farman of 1716 provided the Company with its greatest set of rights yet, including customs-free trade and the territorial expansion of most of its main settlements, such as Calcutta and Madras. The Company’s negotiations to implement these rights with the empire’s various regional governments served to embed the Company even further into these regions, even as the nawabs assumed greater local powers themselves. Many of these negotiations continued to be shaped by the private transcultural networks between Company servants and Mughal elites, and despite the emergence of a powerful and more capable British nation-state in the early eighteenth century, one that made various claims on the Company in Asia, these intimate and cross-cultural ties proved remarkably resilient.

In India, the Irish came late and as conquerors. Irish Catholics – mostly soldiers – were never a significant part of the Catholic population, which traced its origins to successive waves of evangelization dating back to the seventh century. In colonial India, the Irish clashed not only with the long-dominant Portuguese church but also with long-established French, Italian, and other missionary groups.

The statistical picture for Scots in Empire is well known: they were disproportionately represented in the many professions, the army, medicine, administration that served the imperial project. The chapter begins in early 1772 with a twenty-year-old Scot from Ayrshire, Claud Alexander, being appointed to the East India Company. Working first as an assistant in the Account’s Office at Calcutta and later as Paymaster-General for the East India Company in Bengal, Alexander maintains a global correspondence with his family and friends which reveals his multiple epistolary identities as a colonial servant, a private trader, a European in Bengal and a Scot with many personal and professional links with fellow Scots in India, including David Alexander and George Bogle. His epistolary identities are juxtaposed with his visual identity as imaged in a large portrait by Johann Zoffany in which he is shown with his brother Boyd and an Indian servant. The chapter ends with the purchase of a house and estate at Ballochmyle in Ayrshire prior to his return to Scotland in 1786, when eschewing the identity of nabob for laird, he established a cotton manufacturing village at nearby Catrine.

Bandmann’s engagement with the many localities on his circuit required a degree of political activity at a level which is termed here micropolitical. This term refers to personal connections and networks and how they function in a political context. For Bandmann, who attempted to build or manage theatres on his circuit, this meant forging political and business partnerships that demonstrate a much deeper engagement with locality than is normal for itinerant theatre. The micropolitics of locality are discussed in relation to the most important cities on his circuit, which were mostly entrepôts, port cities designed to facilitate colonial trade. The chapter provides detailed discussion of Bandmann’s activities in Malta, Cairo, Bombay, Calcutta, Shanghai, Hong Kong and the Dutch East Indies, as well as in connection with the Victoria Theatre in Singapore and Parsi theatre.