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A revisionist interpretation of the origins of the British Empire in Asia from 1600 to 1750.
List of contents
Introduction. 'A hundred gates open for entrance'; Part I. Weakness and Adaptation: 1. 'A boddy without a head': the failure of an English enterprise; 2. 'Soe fayre an opportunitie': Madras and the reconstitution of the company; 3. 'Not as absolute lords and kings of the place': the success of an Anglo-Asian enterprise; Part II. Subordination and Expansion: 4. 'To be determined by the Moor's justice': searching for legitimacy in Mughal Bengal; 5. 'A firm settlement in this place': war, negotiation and imperial integration; Part III. Limitations and Devastation: 6. 'The Malays will not preserve ye countrey themselves': Sumatra and the failure of suzerainty; 7. 'The company as their lords and the deputy as a great Rajah': the making and unmaking of an imperial power; Part IV. Empire: 8. 'The end of these things will not be good': legacies of empire in mid-eighteenth century India; Conclusion. Rethinking the origins of the British Empire in Asia.
About the author
David Veevers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He has published articles in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of Global History, and won the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize in 2014. He is co-editor of The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550 to 1750 (2018).
Summary
This is a revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. David Veevers shows that it was the integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies which was central to British imperial and commercial success rather than national or mercantilist enterprise.
Additional text
'David Veevers' book will appeal to students and scholars of the early modern British Empire by offering a sophisticated and compelling discussion of the circumstances in which European empire-building in Asia took place in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, fully alive to the nuances and complexities of those processes.' John McAleer, University of Southampton
