Land, Law and Empire

‘Marriott makes a valuable and decisive intervention in the ongoing debate around the way we conceptualise and characterise the East India Company’s expansion in Asia in the early modern period. He skilfully reorientates the debate towards the all-encompassing issue of the Company’s quest for territory in India, unspooling the complex negotiations and accommodations of the seventeenth century between the English and the Indigenous powers of the subcontinent. In a work of serious scholarship and impressive archival research, Land, Law and Empire reveals how the Company and its servants acquired the key foundations of later Imperial British power in India: Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta.’ David Veevers, Bangor University‘By carefully scrutinizing the legal precedents and authorities to which the East India Company’s agents in South Asia turned in the century before the Battle of Plassey, Land, Law and Empire convincingly demonstrates that the early modern roots of British imperialism lay as much in questions of law and land as they did in matters of trade and commerce.’ Douglas M. Peers, University of Waterloo

John Marriott is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford and has published extensively on the nexus between London and India.