Women, Wealth and the State in Early Colonial India

Examines wealthy Indian matriarchs as essential makers of states—and ideas of ‘the state’—in pre- and early colonial India

• Rethinks the political, economic and institutional transition to British colonial rule through the lives of wealthy matriarchs in a late-Mughal successor state
• Links the gendered politics of Indian ruling families with the formation of the colonial state and attendant ideas of sovereignty and statehood
• Traces shifting ideas of ‘the state’ in pre- and early colonial India through emic Persianate political concepts
• Utilises the East India Company’s vast but little-used Persian-language archive

Few polities were more instrumental to the rise of the East India Company and the advent of British colonial rule in South Asia than the Mughal successor state of Awadh (c. 1722–1856). And few individuals influenced the making of the Awadh regime and its pivotal relationship with the Company more than the chief consorts (begams) of its ruling dynasty. Drawing on previously unexamined Persian sources, this book centres the begams of Awadh within a revised history of state-formation and conceptual change in pre- and early colonial India. In so doing, it posits the begams as essential, if contested, builders of both the Awadh regime and the Company state, and as ambivalent partners in forging evolving political economies and emerging conceptual languages of statehood and sovereignty in early colonial India.