The Imperial State, Politics, and the Transformation of Bombay, c.1665-1750

This work examines Bombay’s early growth through the lens of political, economic, and ideological contestation across the early modern English/British empire. In so doing, I demonstrate Bombay’s evolution into a durable site of an ideologically and politically specific model of British empire in Asia. This model and its influence in Bombay challenge the hegemonic interpretations of the history of English/British imperialism in South Asia from both the perspective of South Asian history and British imperial history. Bombay’s regionally, materially, and temporally specific contexts in the period under study demonstrate the limits of currently dominant narratives of early modern British empire in South Asia. The responses of East India Company corporate directors, employees, and South Asian interlocutors to those contexts show the definitive importance of ideological contestation and transforming political cultures to the development of English/British empire in South Asia.

Bombay came into King Charles II’s personal possession in 1661 as a condition of his marriage contract with Catherine of Braganza, joining a diverse portfolio of Crown imperial possessions. But unlike some Crown colonies, Bombay in 1661 was impoverished, malaria-stricken, and suffused by regional conflict, giving little immediate prospect for enlarging the royal treasury. Charles II quickly leased Bombay to the English East India Company in 1668 for a nominal annual rent of £10. Clearly, the Company’s new possession commanded little excitement. But in the eighteenth century, Bombay became one of the most prosperous sites of the East India Company and the British empire as a whole. In 1753 it was remade one of the East India Company’s four official presidency cities in Asia, alongside Calcutta, Madras, and Bencoolen. This work utilizes four roughly chronological case studies of change in Bombay ranging between its initial possession by the East India Company and the presidency reorganization of 1753. Through these studies, I argue that, in contrast to dominant historiography, Bombay was always seen as a part of the English/British imperial state, rather than belonging to an overlapping but distinct Company-state. Furthermore, I show that Bombay’s early imperial development was only rendered effective when pursued as an alternative to territorial growth of English/British power, rather than a preparation for militaristic and territorial expansion in the subcontinent. My work acknowledges that Bombay’s early modern transformation was partly influenced by unique geographic and political-economic conditions, such as its location without an easily accessible, export-productive hinterland; its legal status as a nominal crown colony leased to a chartered trading company; and its ecology as a swampy, estuarial prospect redeemed only by an exceptional harbor. However, I argue these particularities were never the determinants of Bombay’s trajectory. Rather, they combined, as unique constraints on Bombay’s transformation, with the efflorescence of diverse ideas of political economy throughout the English/British empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was this combination which generated highly specific goals for Bombay in the minds of East India Company Directors, employees in western India, and key South Asian interlocutors for those employees. Working together in a politically contested arena of policy-making, these historical stakeholders established Bombay as a site of alternative British imperial activity in South Asia when compared to the Company’s other factories (and later presidencies). This alternative form privileged capital- and labor-intensive infrastructural investment and the growth of a new administrative apparatus.

Such commitments in Bombay therefore contrasted strategies used by the East India Company elsewhere in South Asia, where the Company co-opted local systems of wealth production and administration and asserted power through military supremacy. Between 1665 and 1765, actors in India and England contested Bombay’s future and successfully crafted an impactful, different version of English/British imperial expansion and state-making in the region. I contend that version ultimately served as a viable model for future port cities of imperial commerce from Durban to Singapore.

My project, using a variety of archival sources, thus revises our understanding of Britain’s “commercial empire” as something purely Atlantic, and possibly purely modern. It furthermore challenges the idea of early modern English/British imperialism in Asia as meaningfully distinct from the holistic study of change across the empire due to the suggested importance of the overlapping sovereignty of the Company-state. By identifying some clear limits of the Company-state analysis, I help in the much-needed de-siloing of the history of early modern English/British empire in South Asia. My cases reintegrate changes taking place in the administration of English/British imperial sites in western India with changes taking place across the metropole and other imperial locations, rejecting the notion that the Company exerted an apolitical, profit-seeking state sovereignty over its parts of the subcontinent in contrast to the politically and ideologically contested English/British empire elsewhere.

Speaking of that political and ideological contestation, my work is often able to tie frequently anonymized employees of the Company over the early modern period to specific groups of people and movements contesting the politics and ideologies of the English/British empire as a whole, shedding new light on the comprehensive political and ideological beliefs which often guided decision-making in London and in India about the trajectory of the East India Company’s various factories. In so doing, this project makes an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning historiography of trans-imperial political and ideological movements and identities in the early modern period. It cuts through the layers of internecine interpersonal conflict which have so often stumped historians seeking to make sense of the administration of Company-controlled parts of South Asia to help clarify the drivers behind what I see as a set of far more cohesive ideological projects for Bombay and South Asia more generally.

At the same time, this work provides further context for the increasingly troubled teleological narratives of South Asian history. Given the focus of so much South Asian historiography on the modern conflict over colonialism and national identity, it has been all too easy for South Asian historians to accept a simple narrative of English/British goals for their control of their Asian territories. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, historians focused on South Asia have been content to assume a static hunger for land and its wealth on the part of the English/British actors in the region over vast swaths of time and space. In so doing, they have struggled to incorporate the history of western India into the pre-nineteenth century narratives of South Asian history. As a part of the subcontinent where the colonizer mostly didn’t expand territorially or militaristically until much later and subsequently impacted the local population in a much different way, Bombay and western India more generally have been presented as practically lacking a premodern imperial/colonial history. This project emphatically rejects that supposition, and, I hope, fully demonstrates how critical challenging the dominance of that land-and-taxes narrative of early modern imperialism in South Asia is for a fuller understanding of the history of the subcontinent.

Finally, this work makes what I consider a key methodological claim. While I utilize a variety of source material, the vast majority of my primary analysis is generated from the records of the East India Company. I hope to show how these voluminous records may allow social scientists to uncover varied and contentious political-economic and ideological positions of actors and factions within the chartered company. While typical assumptions about the Company’s documents privilege stability, unity and apolitical focus in the Company’s positions on key questions of empire, political economy, and state-making across institutional hierarchies and over time, I have found something quite different in my own research. By focusing so intently on what are genuinely contested narratives between historical actors within the Company’s own documents, I challenge common perspectives on the use of this source base in the history of English/British imperialism and the history of South Asia. I contest that I have done some work to disaggregate what many historians have treated as a monolith of an institutional actor into some of its constituent parts and shed light on how policymaking and state-making worked at the complex intersection of state, nation, and chartered company. I encourage future work to take these methodological interventions seriously and read the Company’s archive for the politically rich and contested database it is, rather than as a straightforward record of the Company’s unitary positions in the early modern period.

This project thus intervenes in several hegemonic and crucial historiographic bodies across common spatial and periodic boundaries within the discipline of history. It utilizes novel research on understudied moments of change in English/British imperialism in Bombay over the period c.1665-1750 to re-integrate the story of English/British activities in western India with broader claims about early modern British imperialism and the development of the modern South Asian historical context. It claims that challenging unified and siloed narratives of British empire and South Asia is both possible and important. Through privileging political and ideological contestation among Company actors and their interlocutors regarding western India, it finds a method for crafting a more explanatory, regionally and temporally engaged, and importantly more holistic picture of change over time for both the British empire writ large and the trajectory of that empire in South Asia.