This impressive book debut by historian Tillman Nechtman offers a “revisionist study of the history of nabobs” (16) that seeks to illuminate the intricately entangled relations between empire and nation in an age of British expansion. The problem of nabobs is an indisputably hoary topic: Percival Spear, Philip Lawson, and William Dalrymple are among the topflight scholars who have analyzed the scurrilous treatment of nouveau riche colonial denizens returning “home,” only to find a hostile public and political nation. But Nechtman breathes new life into this trope of anti-imperial discourse, documenting its reverberations across polite and public culture and raising fresh questions for further research. Given their small number and empirically negligible influence in Parliament, why did nabobs become the symbol of an imperial rapaciousness that threatened constitution and polity at home? In providing the answer, Nechtman valuably sketches in one origin of the long-held belief—much decried by so-called new imperial historians and fervently upheld by the “old”—that empire and nation should best be kept apart and shows why such efforts were doomed to failure.

Nechtman restores the East India Company to the center of the story as a problematic, state-sponsored private trading company, perhaps the first deemed to be “too big to fail.” The mishaps that accompanied the Company’s transition from trade to territorial rule were exacerbated by political miscalculation, famine in Bengal and North American boycotts of tea that forced the Company to approach Parliament for a £1 million loan in 1772. Inquiries into the behavior of Company employees, from Robert Clive to Governor-General Hastings, galvanized parliamentary acts to rein in Company power, from the Regulating Act of 1773 to Pitt’s India Bill of 1784, thereby putting Company servants in India on notice that they were “merchants and not administrators” (19). And yet, parliamentary measures were seen among the broader public as not going far enough: British extraterritorial power allowed the Company to assert a sovereignty that had no real cultural or political legitimacy. As nabobs trickled home, draped in turbans and Eastern robes; dripping with diamonds, muslins, and cash; building India-inspired palaces and follies; cultivating gardens with Asiatic exotics; stuffing menageries with wild beasts; and puffing away on their hookahs, they appeared to contemporaries to be bringing the foreign and the imperial back to Britain’s shores. The illegitimacy of that act, and the figure of the nouveau riche nabob that came to symbolize it, accordingly mobilized antipathy, outrage, and envy among a diverse political public.

Nechtman also sheds light on the complexities of repatriating this wealth in eighteenth-century Britain. One pro-Hastings contemporary, Joseph Price, provided in a pamphlet a taxonomy of nabobery that ranked East India Company servants according to the degree of their perceived threat to the British nation—from “simple” through “reputed” to “mushroom” nabobs; only the latter, he argued, were the plunderers who made vast fortunes to the ruin of everyone else. But pamphlets like Price’s also point to the dilemma of many imperial adventurers, enriched by exploiting or subordinating non-Britons abroad, who sought to bring their fortunes home. Money in the form of specie, art, and textiles was heavily taxed and even expropriated by the British state; diamonds, furniture, and clothing were usually easier to get in undiminished. Indian diamonds in particular became a crucial currency through which acquired South Asian wealth could be domesticated and were used to buy up land and parliamentary seats in “a cross-cultural exchange of truly imperial proportions,” as Nechtman notes (165). Such transactions, however, were represented in press, cartoon, and theater as the crass maneuvers of a dangerous marauding horde—nabobs and “nabobinas” alike, as Nechtman styles Anglo-Indian women—intent on polluting the domestic polity with oriental tyrannies, sexual and otherwise.

Finally, Nechtman uses the nabob controversy to exhibit the wide range of responses of domestic publics to British global expansion. If West Indian nabobs got off comparatively lightly, it was because they were seen to accrue their wealth through land—a mode of capital accumulation that, because it aped social structures in Britain, was seen as less damaging, despite the fact of slavery, than Indian commerce. As part of a long-running confrontation with the foreign that reverberated across the public sphere of discussion, debate, and critique from the early decades of the century, the nabob controversy illuminates the composite of desire for the other and uneasiness with and even hostility toward any perceived encroachments on purportedly autochthonous cultural and political forms that contended at the heart of much eighteenth-century culture. At the same time, the tussles over East Indians’ status also revealed that not only the empire but also the nation were subject to competing definitions, and British identity could be understood differently by those residing in colonies—including the “internal” colony of Scotland—than in the metropolitan heart of empire, England itself. Those “well-informed Britons who accepted India as part of the British empire did not … care to see the empire as an integral part of the British nation” (224). Through this thorough and sparkling study of imperial discontents, we can see how this preference leads to projection and denial—in the eighteenth century and beyond.