Indian history writing in the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the growth of an important body of “revisionist” research focused on the eighteenth century (C. A. Bayly, D. Washbrook, M. Alam, A. Wink, S. Alavi). These studies complicated and critiqued earlier narratives that regarded the eighteenth century as a period of economic decline and political chaos following the death of the last great Mughal, Aurangzeb. A lasting legacy of this body of scholarship has been to question the putative rupture marked by the transition from the precolonial to the colonial state in Indian history.

Robert Travers's important and masterly study of the early years of British rule in Bengal draws upon these revisionist impulses but also modifies them in significant ways. By focusing attention on British officials in the employ of the East India Company and on the relationship between the British government in London and the Company, Travers argues that British imperial ideology and the early colonial institutions were “formed at the intersection of exported European concepts and appropriated indigenous categories that were put to new uses by the colonial state” (p. 14). Travers's work is a serious effort to bridge the divide that has marked the historiography on colonial India, in which historians have either insisted upon “the capacity of empire to build alliances with colonial elites based on shared in unequal benefits” or on a narrative of the “violent subordination of Indians and their interests in a colonial regime of conquest” (p. 14).

Travers's central thesis revolves around the question of how eighteenth-century British ideas about “ancient constitutions” influenced the debates on India. Briefly, ancient constitutionalism was the notion that in order for sovereignty not to slide into license and arbitrary power, there needed to be a robust idea of rights and laws enshrined by a constitution. Whigs and radicals debated with one another on whether “the eighteenth century British state represented the triumphant vindication, or a terrible backsliding from the idea of ancient constitution” (p. 47). Alongside the idea of ancient constitution was the British reception of Montesquieu's theories about the typology of different constitutions and the popularization of notions of Asiatic despotisms. Thus, was the East India Company's rule in Bengal an abrogation of some ancient constitution? Or was it, as claimed by Hastings, an attempt to resuscitate some semblance of an “Indian” ancient constitution as it was supposed to have flourished under the great Mughals?

Metropolitan Britons questioned whether the Company was a custodian of the idea of an ancient British constitution in a far off land, or whether, in fact, it was sliding into an arbitrary and rapacious despotic rule that corrupted the foundations of British law and liberty. Amid the fiscal crisis in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, the growth of the standing army, and the crisis of American independence, the East India Company's territories and government came under increased public scrutiny in Britain. The Company's Indian affairs became the ground on which anxieties about liberty, freedom, and justice were fought out. A vast pamphlet literature, which Travers has meticulously researched and documented, together with news reports, memos, letters, and books, shows how men such as Bolts, Verelst, Dow, Hastings, Francis, and many others imagined and designed the East India Company's rulership in India. Indian players such as Maharaja Nandkumar and Mohammad Reza Khan were drawn into these battles as they registered their protests against the Company's (represented by Warren Hastings) injustice to the majority on the Supreme Council (Philip Francis, George Monson, and John Clavering; pp. 145–77). Just as the composition of the Supreme Council represented “the bitter wrangling between the Company and the (British) government,” so also Indian landlords and elites were sharply divided between those who benefited during the rulership of Robert Clive and suffered at the hands of Warren Hastings and those who did not.

At the heart of the book is the story of the bitter struggle between Hastings and Francis—the former seeking to establish his rule with reference to the legal forms of an ancient Mughal government, and the latter using a different notion of ancient constitution to reveal Hastings as an unconstitutional tyrant. And yet, Hastings and Francis, despite their differences, appeared to share a commonality in their commitment to reviving some notion of an ancient constitution. Hastings's legal reforms (1772) and Francis's revenue reforms around the figure of the zamindar represented the two nodes for an elaboration of this idea. It was the Cornwallis Code with the permanent settlement at its core, argues Travers, that “marked a discursive break” from this rhetoric of ancient constitutions in British India. A premonition of this change, and a sense of disillusionment with the innovations introduced by the British, were presaged in the Persian chronicle Seir Mutaqherin (History of His Own Times), completed in 1781–82 by Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai.

Travers's narrative is chronologically organized into six chapters spanning the years 1757–93, that is, from the Battle of Plassey to the permanent settlement. His research is exemplary, his prose precise, and his insights into the politics and history of the period novel, thoughtful, and illuminating. Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India is certainly among the finest examples of “new” imperial history.