Introduction

Summary

In conventional narratives of Britain’s empire overseas, the Company’s territorial empire in Bengal looms large, overshadowing the more nebulous history of its nominally independent, but practically subordinate, allies in the subcontinent. Yet, the subsidiary alliance system as it developed in India in the late eighteenth century set an important precedent that reverberated across Asia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean World. Empire of Influence furnishes a new perspective on an understudied yet vital period in the history of indirect rule when its future role in sustaining and expanding Britain’s empire remained unclear. Contrary to their depiction as cosmopolitan contact zones, the Residencies were as much spaces of empire as the courthouse or the counting room. Far from being oases sheltered from broader imperial currents, many of the divisions within the Company become most visible at the Residencies, where issues of distance, distrust, and the tensions between domination and exchange were at their most acute. From the vantage point of the Residencies, a period of the Company’s history that is usually associated with bureaucratization and standardization begins to look much more complicated.