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19 - Rights in Late Mughal and Early Colonial India

from Part III - Rights and Empires

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Hasan Zahid Siddiqui
Edited by
Dan Edelstein  and
Jennifer Pitts
Dan Edelstein
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Jennifer Pitts
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

The East India Company conquest of Bengal opened a field of intellectual contestation centered on questions of rights. At issue were competing conceptions of the place of rights in the history of India. Rights as such could be regarded as having held little significance in light of an underlying history of despotism. On the other hand, the claims of subjects on donative largesse, state patronage, or public infrastructure could be understood as the exercise of a kind of right. Cutting across these positions and their variations was an engagement with the administrative idiom and historical example of the Mughal empire (ca. 1526–1857). Indeed, this rights discourse included contributions from figures who posed themselves as direct interlocutors as much with the Mughal old regime as with the evolving order of the Company. In their works, critiques of the Company could be made by recasting the old regime in new molds to challenge the practice and conceptual underpinnings of Company rule. In order to situate this field of contestation in the intellectual history of rights, this chapter analyzes the views of some singular figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Keywords

East India CompanyMughal empiredespotismIndia
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 463 - 480
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Chatterjee, N., Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chaudhry, F., “Property and Its Rule (in Late Indo-Islamicate and Early Colonial) South Asia: What’s in a Name?,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61/5–6 (2018), 920–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grover, B. R., Land Rights, Landed Hierarchy, and Village Community during the Mughal Age (Delhi, D. K. Publishers, 2006).Google Scholar
Guha, R., A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Permanent Settlement (Paris, Mouton, 1963).Google Scholar
Guha, S., “Wrongs and Rights in the Maratha Country: Antiquity, Custom and Power in Eighteenth-Century India,” in Guha, S. (ed.), Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 14–29.Google Scholar
Hasan, F., Paper, Performance, and the State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaicker, A., The King and the People (New York, Oxford University Press, 2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malcolm, N., Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019).Google Scholar
Sartori, A., Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Siddiqui, H. Z., “The Rights of Subjects over the Kingdom: Situating the History of Rights in Early Modern South Asia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 65/5–6 (2022).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singha, R., A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Sturman, R., The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law and Women’s Rights (Cambridge, MA, Cambridge University Press, 2017).Google Scholar
Travers, R., “The Connected Worlds of Haji Mustapha (c. 1730–91): A Eurasian Cosmopolitan in Eighteenth-Century Bengal,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 52/3 (2015), 297–333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Travers, R., “Contested Despotism: Problems of Liberty in British India,” in Greene, J. P. (ed.), Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 191–219.Google Scholar
Travers, R., Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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