The grant of the diwani to the East India Company in August 1765 represents a climacteric moment in British imperial histories. Vested by the Mughal Emperor Shah Allam II, this newfound right to collect revenue saddled the Company with the broader and formal economic, judicial and military responsibilities of a territorial empire. Wherefore, in the era of post-Mughal political splintering, the EIC, as an emerging subcontinental state had to contend with internal revolts abetted by ethno-religious and socio-economic crises, but also because of threats posed by the Kingdom of Mysore and the Maratha Confederacy. Nevertheless, in the midst of the American Revolution, the EIC’s contentious and contested conduct of imperial governance in India became an ideological, philosophical and pragmatic point of domestic and imperial contention. Thus, confronted with the simultaneous internal and external implications of the crises of Empire between 1765 and 1788, the role of the Company’s fiscal-military administration and exercise of violence within the spheres British imperial governance was reconceptualised and in doing so contemporaries underwrote the emergence of what historians have subsequently called the ‘Second British Empire’ in India. Alternatively, the reconceptualisation of the EIC’s fiscal-military administration served to ensure the continuity and preservation of the British imperial nexus as it was imposed upon Bengal. This work, therefore, traces the Company’s fiscal-military administration and dispensation of violence during the ‘crises of empire’ as a point of genesis in the development and reformation of British imperial governance. Moreover, it will show that the interdependent nature of the Company’s ‘fiscal-military hybridity’ ultimately came to underwrite further the ideological, philosophical and pragmatic consolidation of imperial governance in ‘British India’. Accordingly, this dissertation examines the interdependent role between Parliament’s reconceptualisation of the East India Company’s fiscal-military administration of violence and the changing nature of British imperial governance in ‘British India’.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/40965 |
| Date | 10 September 2020 |
| Creators | Bérubé, Damien |
| Contributors | Connors, Richard |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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