In this thoughtful volume, Sudipta Sen rereads the complex entanglements between British and South Asian intellectual and political history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He deftly traces the multiple points of both cross-cultural connection and rupture that were generated by the East India Company's assumption of sovereign power in India following its assumption of the powers of diwan in 1765, a position that entailed responsibility for the assessment and collection of revenues for Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in 1765. The volume traces the company's efforts to elaborate a set of arguments, symbols, and practices that would affirm the legitimacy of its sovereignty in India as well as its broader attempts to define the nature of the new colonial polity it ruled over. Sen not only reconstructs this legal and political project but also explores the chief cultural consequence of the company's sovereign status, a potent “Anglo-British nationalism” that was increasingly articulated by the company's officials, historians, and functionaries. These arguments are developed across a substantial introduction, five chapters that examine a range of themes from the nature of the colonial state to the decline of interracial intimacy, and a brief afterword.

Distant Sovereignty makes it clear that the extension and consolidation of the East India Company's authority in South Asia cannot be read simply as the outcome of “local crises” in the periphery that drew the company ever deeper into India. Sen argues instead that conquest and the extension of the company's sovereignty in South Asia must be understood as read against the ideological imperatives and scaffolding of the British state, especially its ideologies of property and liberty. Throughout the volume, Sen recovers the interdependence of metropolitan and colonial political structures and ideologies, questioning the long-established tendency to treat India as an exceptional case in the historiography of the British Empire. Of course, this insistence on India's exceptional status within the empire was a product of the process of empire building itself and was a powerful thread in J. R. Seeley's famous Cambridge lectures on the “Expansion of England,” which in published form established one of the foundational texts for the emergence of “imperial history” as a independent field of historical inquiry. Where Seeley (who appears in Distant Sovereignty as “Seely”) framed India's place within the empire as “strange” and “curious,” Sen argues that in the voluminous archives created by the East India Company we can recognize many of the ideological formations that reshaped both Britain's Atlantic empire and United Kingdom itself during the eighteenth century. Moreover, as he demonstrates repeatedly throughout the volume, by the end of the eighteenth century India had become a key battleground in metropolitan politics, as the company's Indian regime was dissected in Parliament and was central in the broader public contest over the powers and limits of the state.

Just as Sen insists that the uniqueness of British India's ideological formations has been overplayed, he also suggests that most reading of Britain's imperial venture in South Asia has flattened out imperial discourses relating to Indian culture to produce “the essential dyad of dominant and subordinate, colonizer and colonized.” While Sen is sensitive to the operation of power in the accounts of India produced by the company, its officials, and its historians, he suggests that we must recover the place of what he terms as “skewed correspondence” as well as otherness in the imperial imaginary (xxvii). Here Sen is cautioning us against taking the hardened racial boundaries and firm social distinctions of the post-1858 period as symptomatic of the colonial project as a whole. The stark racial polarities of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth were not simply born out of the British reaction to the revolt of 1857 but were the product of a long history of intellectual, political, and cultural struggle. As the company's rule in India was consolidated, the cultural difference between authority-wielding Britons and subject Indians was articulated in a growing number of ways and with greater urgency. Sen clearly demonstrates that new forms of colonial knowledge were central in explaining and justifying this gap. He identifies the tradition of history writing that developed under the company as perhaps the most important of these innovations. The British discovery of the Indian past provided a potent imperial script. In the waves of conquest and the rise and fall of successive empires that company historians and British orientalists believed to be at the heart of India's long history, they found legitimation for their own imperial project. Sen suggests that as well as legitimating British power by framing India as a fallen civilization, these histories encouraged and reinforced the growing gap between colonizer and colonized. These histories imagined Britain and Britons as being outside Indian society, as superior and separate, and as such were one important element in a broader set of arguments that instituted “the sanguinary divide” that increasingly distanced East India Company officials from South Asians in the final two decades of the eighteenth century (133–34).

Thus, in Distant Sovereignty, Sen offers a sensitive historical sociology of colonial authority in India, charting its idioms, textures, and turning points. He clearly connects the development of the colonial state in India to the development of an expatriate “imperial nationalism,” a patriotism that was part of a wider set of discourses that circulated within the United Kingdom, Ireland, and remnants of the Atlantic empire about the connections between empire and nation and the nature of Britishness itself. Just over a decade ago, C. A. Bayly argued that British ideologies and institutions had received thin treatment in South Asian historiography. Distant Sovereignty not only begins to fill that historiographical gap but also suggests the analytical riches that come from a serious historical engagement with both British and South Asian political cultures. It stands at the forefront of a new body of work that is reassessing India's place in the empire between the 1760s and the 1830s.