Persian Archives for Histories of Colonial State-Formation in South Asia in the Eighteenth Century

About the Talk: Amid an efflorescence of new scholarship on ‘Persianate’ political and literary culture in early modern South Asia, historians of the British empire in India have also been reassessing the significance of Persian sources from the era of colonial state-formation. This talk will consider some recent approaches to historicizing changing forms of the ‘Persianate’ in South Asia during the era of colonial conquests, and discuss some Persian-language sources that I have been studying in my research on the East India Company government of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. I will especially focus on the use of Persian documents in building a new colonial regime of post-Mughal land law in Bengal, including petitions, treatises by Indian officials, title deeds, and histories.

About the Speaker: Robert Travers is Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of two books about colonial state formation in eastern India in the late eighteenth century, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007), and Empires of Complaints. Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765-1793 (Cambridge, 2023), which was Honorable Mention for the James Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. He is a recent recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and is currently working on a new book about the impeachment of Warren Hastings.