Study Shows Mughal Systems Were Adapted By British Of Justice To Establish Rule In India

The British Empire was not created through military might alone, historian Robert Travers points out in a new book; subsuming existing bureaucracy was another way the East India Company consolidated power in India starting in the 1770s.

In “Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765-1793” Travers, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, shows how British conquerors colonized and adapted systems of territorial governance created by the Mughal empire – the preceding power in parts of India – including Persian-language forms of bureaucratic record-keeping and Mughal practices of adjudicating local disputes.

“The book emphasizes the durability of Mughal, Persianate ideas of imperial justice in early colonial India, revealing how Indian subjects invoked the memory of Mughal justice in making claims on British rulers,” Travers said.

Travers researched “Empires of Complaints” as a Faculty Fellow with Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. The Law and Society Association awarded the book honorable mention for the James Willard Hurst Book Prize.