Why did the British Empire in the mid-eighteenth century transform from one centered on commerce and liberty to one rooted in territorial rule and autocracy? In The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III, James M. Vaughn seeks an answer to this fundamental historiographical problem of the East India Company's role in eighteenth-century imperial politics. Vaughn rejects “sub-imperial” answers that privilege the agency of “on the ground” developments in Indian politics; Namierite accounts that stress metropolitan consensus around ideologies of governance; and structuralist explanations that posit imperial conflict as mere political squabbles over financing territorial expansion in war. Instead, he contends, the mid-century transformation of the company and empire was the result of an intense, partisan war that raged in the post-1688 state between Stuart absolutists and Whig revolutionaries over the character of empire. To Vaughn, the outcome of this ideological conflict, fought largely in the metropole, explains why the East India Company, and eventually the whole British Empire, became coercive, land-based, and militaristic.

Vaughn begins by discussing the company's role in metropolitan politics in the aftermath of the 1688 Revolution. Whig political dominance enabled imperial expansion to focus on pursuing maritime dominion that would enable British subjects to trade freely across the globe. Backed by capitalist aristocrats and London financial elites, the Whigs sought to maintain peace, parliamentary power, and civil liberties across the empire. The East India Company thrived under this Whig supremacy, providing extensive loans to the state in exchange for protection of its trading monopolies. However, Vaughn argues, war with France in the mid-1750s provoked a schism in Whig attitudes toward the company. William Pitt the Elder and his Whig allies supported the company as an instrument that would help them achieve their goal of “radically expand[ing] Britain's commercial and colonial “empire of liberty” through maritime supremacy while remaining “adamantly opposed to conquering territories and to establishing political dominions” (55). Patriot and “radical Whigs”—especially London merchants—argued that the state ought to be oriented toward expanding trade and access to markets overseas at the expense of landed interests; and that the East India Company's monopoly on British trade east of the Cape of Good Hope hurt the empire's strength by inhibiting commercial freedom.

Pitt actively supported the company during the war, using its commercial and military power to fend off the French in Asia in the late 1750s. But following Robert Clive's 1757 victory at Plassey over the French-backed Siraj-ud-daula, the Nawab of Bengal, and Clive's efforts to extend the company's rule in Bengal, the company's leadership was again divided on ideological lines. Clive and his supporters advanced a “New Toryism” that sought to turn Company Bengal into a “heavily militarized garrison state” and endorsed a land-based vision of empire. By contrast, the company's chairman, Laurence Sulivan, and his ally, Henry Vansittart, governor of Bengal in the early 1760s, mirrored the Whig establishment in their efforts to protect the corporation's trading privileges without significant military expenditure. Sulivan and his allies triumphed in the company's election of 1763. But the outbreak of war in India that year between the company and a coalition of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, Shuja-ud-daula (the Nawab of Oudh), and Mir Qasim (the Nawab of Bengal) later that year enabled Clive to seize power at East India House in the company's 1764 election of its Court of Directors via an alliance with the “New Tory” Grenville ministry and a successful campaign for the allegiances of the company's shareholders. With the support of Grenville, Clive then returned to Bengal as governor in June 1764 with extraordinary civilian and military powers. Just as Grenville pursued coercive policies in the Atlantic world through the Sugar Act and Stamp Act, so, too, did he seek to extend this “autocratic and extractive imperialism” (150) rooted in land, rather than trade, to South Asia by backing the ideologically similar Clive, who promptly acted on this program by securing the company's status as diwan, or executor of revenue collection, in 1765. By the time Clive left India in 1767, Vaughn argues, the company was “finally transformed from a mercantile corporation plying an armed trade into a fiscal-military state responsible for maintaining a global commercial empire” (158). A “New Tory political project” that originated in the restructuring of British politics in the aftermath of 1688 had come to triumph in the governance of imperial India.

In the final two chapters, Vaughn examines this “New Toryism” in greater detail by analyzing the political programs of Grenville, Clive, and Lord North. Although this move away from chronology somewhat dampens the propulsive narrative energy of the preceding chapters and may strike some readers as repetitive in its retracing of imperial politics during the 1760s, Vaughan here expertly knits together both Atlantic and Indian imperial histories as he tracks the development of this New Tory program of extractive despotism in company rule during the Grenville ministry, and its ultimate instantiation as (as Vaughn titles his chapter 6 in part) “the Spirit of the Second British Empire” (201). These chapters model the virtues of Vaughn's traditional, “imperial school” focus on metropolitan politics. By analyzing this period from the center, he reveals major empire-wide levers of political change that proto-nationalist approaches to British imperial history inevitably either miss or fail to appropriately contextualize. Yet Vaughn's approach to high politics takes intellectual history seriously: for he sees the victory of the company's “New Tories” over their Whig critics in the 1760s and 1770s as an ideological triumph that explains why illiberalism emerged as the governing “style” of the Second British Empire in these years, with the East India Company as its prototypical practitioner. This exceptionally insightful and richly provocative study deserves to be widely read and debated.