The Declaration of Independence has long anchored a familiar account of 1776 as the founding moment of American national sovereignty and the secession of the thirteen colonies from the British Empire.Footnote 1 This narrative has usually been told through the language of political rupture: the end of colonial dependence, the assertion of popular sovereignty, and the emergence of a new republican state in North America.Footnote 2 Yet this framing can also narrow the historical field by treating 1776 primarily as an American event rather than as a wider imperial crisis with consequences across the British world.Footnote 3 Recent work in British imperial history has instead encouraged historians to see the loss of what became the United States as part of a larger process of imperial reordering rather than a simple break between empire and nation. Britain’s loss of its North American colonies coincided with the consolidation of territorial power in India, suggesting that the later eighteenth century should be understood as a single phase of imperial transformation rather than as the neat transition from a “first” to a “second” British Empire.Footnote 4
This article approaches 1776 from a different angle within that wider imperial setting by asking: what did 1776 look like from the vantage point of subordinate polities that remained within the empire in other parts of the world? Instead of pursuing outright secession, the polities that remained sought survival, higher status, and negotiated standing inside an unequal imperial order. Rather than treating sites such as Malta, Mysore, and Kedah-Penang as passive objects of imperial expansion, this article scrutinizes their local rulers and political elites as actors who sought to convert vulnerability into recognized status through strategic accommodation, legal bargaining, and symbolic claims to legitimacy.
To capture this process, the article works with two analytical tools. The first is subordinate sovereignty: arrangements whereby rulers retained meaningful internal authority while accepting that external sovereignty would be constrained or managed by the Crown or the East India Company. As Lauren Benton has shown, imperial orders were characteristically built through layered and divided forms of authority rather than through cleanly bounded sovereignty, making such arrangements the norm rather than the exception across early modern empires.Footnote 5 The shift toward such arrangements in the decades after 1776 has been traced by P. J. Marshall in relation to the consolidation of the British Empire in India, by H. V. Bowen in the Company’s expanding administrative role, and by Kavita S. Datla in the emergence of hybrid sovereign spaces in Hyderabad.Footnote 6 The second is the politics of recognition: the process whereby both imperial authorities and local rulers adjusted their claims—through treaties, ceremonies, and public languages of protection and allegiance—to render hierarchy politically legible and institutionally durable.Footnote 7
Read together, these tools show how materially dependent polities translated vulnerability into recognized status, and how practices that later consolidated into protectorate forms were being improvised at the empire’s margins. This research reads treaties and ceremonies as sites where norms and institutions of hierarchy were renegotiated over time. I argue that 1776 should be read not only as a moment of American independence but also as a moment in which new forms of negotiated hierarchy became visible across the British world and began to be codified in law, diplomacy, and the everyday practices of rule.
For Britain’s governing elites, 1776 was more than an isolated colonial rebellion. It exposed the limits of parliamentary sovereignty, raised doubts about Britain’s ability to preserve authority across a dispersed empire, and sharpened anxieties about revenue, military credibility, and imperial prestige. The American crisis therefore forced British policymakers to ask not only how to defeat rebellion, but also how imperial authority could be reconstituted elsewhere after so public a failure in North America.Footnote 8 The resulting crisis was not only one of control, finance, or military capacity, but also an imperial catastrophe of legitimacy. Coercion remained indispensable, but coercion alone could not secure stable rule across the empire’s many peripheral and semi-autonomous spaces. What emerged in the wake of 1776 was a broader recalibration of who counted as a legitimate partner within the imperial system and on what terms such partnership could be maintained.
Subordinate sovereignty captures precisely this ambiguous status—neither fully sovereign nor straightforward dominion—that characterized polities whose internal jurisdiction survived even as their external relations came under British supervision. In the South Asian context, in particular, the British increasingly relied on treaty-based arrangements that split internal and external competencies, producing forms of rule that later became more familiar as indirect governance. Malta, Mysore, and Kedah-Penang serve as examples within this wider crisis, showing how treaties, charters, and ceremonies functioned as ways to bargain for recognition inside an empire that was learning to govern more through hierarchy than through uniformity.
Malta: Reaffirmed Allegiance as a Recognition Strategy
Malta’s trajectory in the decades after 1776 demonstrates how the imperial crisis reshaped British strategic priorities in the Mediterranean. The connection to 1776 was indirect but significant: the loss of American harbors had sharpened Britain’s search for reliable naval stations across the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds, making the question of Malta’s strategic value inseparable from the wider imperial reordering that followed American independence. In the decades around 1800, Malta sat at a vulnerable crossroads between European and imperial rivalries.Footnote 9 The islands had long been a fortified Catholic stronghold under the Order of St John, facing toward North Africa and the Ottoman world, but Napoleon’s invasion in 1798 ended Hospitaller rule and briefly brought Malta under French control.Footnote 10 French attempts at reform and expropriation quickly provoked local resistance, and by late 1798 Maltese notables and clergy were seeking external support against the occupiers.Footnote 11 Britain, already looking for reliable naval bases in the Mediterranean as its imperial commitments shifted toward India and the eastern seas, was well placed to answer that call.Footnote 12
Maltese leaders did not present their appeal to Britain as a “bid” for independence. Instead, they framed it as a voluntary act of allegiance that would place the islands under the protection of the British Crown while preserving key local rights. Petitions and proclamations emphasized the Maltese people’s Catholic faith and their desire to remain attached to their religion, laws, and customs even as they invited British forces in and accepted a British civil commissioner.Footnote 13 British representatives, for their part, issued assurances that the Roman Catholic religion would be protected, that church property would be respected, and that local institutions would not be arbitrarily overturned.Footnote 14 When the Treaty of Paris in 1814 confirmed Malta as a British possession, Maltese actors could portray the outcome not simply as the result of great‑power diplomacy but as the ratification of their earlier choice to align with Britain against France.Footnote 15
What emerged from this exchange was a “bargain” of recognition. Maltese elites offered a strategically placed harbor and demonstrable loyalty at a moment when Britain needed secure Mediterranean stations and used that leverage to press for formal guarantees of their distinct status. In effect, they traded consent and cooperation for written assurances that their religion would be safeguarded and that existing legal and social arrangements would be largely maintained.Footnote 16 British officials, in turn, relied on this language of voluntary allegiance and protection to justify their right to rule Malta in the years before the island was turned into a full Crown colony. Loyalty thus functioned as a currency of status: by presenting themselves as faithful subjects rather than conquered enemies, Maltese notables claimed a differentiated place within the imperial order.
Seen in this light, Malta exemplifies a form of subordinate sovereignty negotiated from below. The islands did not secede from the empire and were not simply absorbed into a uniform colonial pattern. Instead, Maltese actors sought to shape the terms on which British authority would be exercised, arguing that imperial rule should take the form of protection extended to a loyal Catholic people.Footnote 17 Malta thus demonstrates that subordinate sovereignty was not confined to colonial Asia: the same grammar of loyalty, protection, and institutional guarantee operated across the empire’s disparate peripheries in the wake of 1776.
Mysore and Penang-Kedah: Bargaining Under Threat
In late eighteenth-century South India, Mysore under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan emerged as one of the most formidable regional powers in the subcontinent. Historians have emphasized the speed and scale of Mysore’s transformation from a relatively minor principality into a militarized state capable of threatening British positions along the Coromandel coast and projecting influence deep into the interior.Footnote 18 Strategically, the kingdom stood at the intersection of British, French, Maratha, and Hyderabadi rivalries across the Deccan. The Anglo-Mysore wars brought these rivalries into sharp relief and turned Mysore’s search for security into a sustained struggle over recognition. The First Anglo-Mysore War (1767–69) ended with the Treaty of Madras, which restored conquered territories and committed both sides to mutual defense in the event of a third-party attack.Footnote 19 British commentators later remembered the treaty as a humiliation, not least because it forced the Company to promise aid to an Indian ruler who had nearly marched on Madras.Footnote 20 A decade later, the Second Anglo-Mysore War (1780–84), fought in the shadow of the American War of Independence and renewed Anglo-French conflict, culminated in the Treaty of Mangalore.Footnote 21 That agreement provided for mutual restitution of conquests and the release of prisoners, and contemporaries noted that it was one of the last occasions on which an Indian power negotiated peace with the British on apparently equal terms. In both cases, Mysore used the outcome of war to insist that its ruler be treated as a negotiating partner rather than as a rebellious subordinate.Footnote 22
If Mysore shows how status could be bargained through war, the acquisition of Penang from Kedah in 1786 illustrates how sovereignty itself could be reconfigured through peaceful negotiation. In the 1780s, Kedah occupied a precarious position on the northern Malay Peninsula. It faced pressure from Siam, whose renewed assertion of suzerainty over Patani and neighboring sultanates heightened the risk of invasion, and it competed with other Malay polities for control of maritime trade along the Straits of Malacca.Footnote 23 At the same time, the East India Company was searching for a secure port in the region that could support its China trade and provide a naval foothold in the Bay of Bengal and the Straits.Footnote 24 In this conjuncture of local vulnerability and imperial opportunity, Penang became the object of a bargain rather than a straightforward conquest.
The outlines of that bargain are well-known. Acting on behalf of the Company, Francis Light approached the Sultan of Kedah, Abdullah Mukarram Shah, to secure the right to occupy Pulau Pinang. Contemporary correspondence and later reconstructions agree that the sultan sought British military protection against Siam and Burma, as well as financial compensation in the form of an annual payment and assistance with existing debts.Footnote 25 In return, Kedah would grant the Company the use—often described in the language of lease or cession—of Penang Island as a base for trade and defense. In one version of the 1786 agreement, Light referred to the sultan as “our friend and ally” and promised that the Company would “assist His Highness against his enemies,” language that was read as a commitment to protection against Siam.Footnote 26 Light’s own letters suggest that he portrayed British support as more forthcoming than London or Calcutta were willing to guarantee, and much subsequent controversy has turned on whether he promised more than the Company later honored. Nevertheless, in 1786 Light landed on the island, renamed it Prince of Wales Island, and raised the British flag, inaugurating the first permanent British outpost on the Malay Peninsula.Footnote 27
From Kedah’s perspective, this arrangement was designed to translate a condition of practical dependency into a form of recognized legitimacy. Facing stronger neighbors, the sultan sought to lock in British protection and to secure an ongoing subsidy that would compensate for loss of control over Penang’s trade and help manage obligations to Siam.Footnote 28 The surviving texts of the 1786 agreement and the subsequent 1800 treaty that formalized British possession of Seberang Perai (Province Wellesley) repeatedly refer to friendship, alliance, and mutual assistance, casting Kedah not as a conquered territory but as entering into a relationship of protection with a powerful foreign ally.Footnote 29 In exchange for allowing the Company to fortify Penang and control its customs, Kedah expected its sovereignty over the remaining mainland territory to be acknowledged and its ruler’s position vis‑à‑vis Siam to be strengthened.Footnote 30
For the Company, by contrast, Penang was above all a strategic acquisition. Light and his superiors in Bengal sought a secure harbor along the route to China.Footnote 31 Yet they chose to secure that foothold not by direct annexation but through a chartered arrangement with the Sultan of Kedah, codified in letters and later treaties. The Company accepted an obligation to pay an annual stipend—6,000 Spanish dollars at first, later increased—to the sultan, thereby recognizing Kedah as the prior owner of the island and as a political entity worthy of contractual relations.Footnote 32 In practice, as critics then and now have noted, the Company proved reluctant to fulfill the spirit of its protective promises, and Kedah’s attempts to retake Penang in 1791 and subsequent disputes over unpaid obligations underline how fragile this recognition bargain could be.
Penang and Kedah thus exemplify what might be called co‑produced sovereignty.Footnote 33 The island became a British settlement, administered as Prince of Wales Island under Company authority, while Kedah remained formally sovereign over its remaining domains but now bound into a relationship of asymmetrical partnership.Footnote 34 Titles, seals, and ceremonial exchanges helped stabilize this arrangement by providing a symbolic language in which both parties could claim that their status had been preserved.Footnote 35 Kedah surrendered significant autonomy over a key part of its territory, but the treaties and ceremonies through which this surrender was negotiated offered a script in which the sultan’s authority was recognized rather than simply overridden. In this sense, Penang’s acquisition captures the dynamic: small polities translating practical dependency into recognized legitimacy, and imperial authorities, in turn, relying on that recognition to legitimize their own expanding power along the edges of the British world.Footnote 36
Taken together, Malta, Mysore, and Kedah-Penang show how, in the decades around 1776, British imperial rule was increasingly negotiated through forms of subordinate sovereignty rather than imposed solely through annexation. None of these polities seceded from the empire or from its orbit. Instead, they bargained for specific combinations of rights and obligations: Malta traded allegiance and a naval base for guarantees of Catholic privilege; Mysore translated battlefield performance into treaties that acknowledged its ruler as a negotiating equal before progressively restricting his external freedom; Kedah ceded Penang in return for promises of protection against Siam and an annual stipend that recognized its residual authority on the mainland. In each case, British officials accepted that some internal jurisdiction would remain with local rulers while reserving for themselves decisive control over war, diplomacy, and key economic nodes.
These arrangements did not yet carry the formal label of “protectorate,” and administrators in London or Calcutta did not conceive of them as a single, coherent model. But viewed side by side, they reveal a shared grammar of negotiated sovereignty. Loyalty and protection were paired with tribute and subsidy; clauses about friendship and alliance sat alongside provisions that constrained external alliances; ceremonies of allegiance and symbolic practices, flags raised and titles exchanged, helped to stabilize relationships that were, in substance, deeply unequal. Later nineteenth‑century protectorates in West Africa, the Persian Gulf, and the Malay states would routinize this repertoire, installing residents or political agents to “advise” local rulers while leaving internal administration formally intact.
Conclusion: 1776 and the Politics of Recognition Today
What the late eighteenth‑century cases suggest is that the basic logic of such arrangements—rule exercised through recognized intermediaries, rather than solely over conquered subjects—was beginning to form as Britain recalibrated its imperial strategy after the loss of North America. Seen from this angle, 1776 appears less as a break between empire and nation and more as a moment that forced Britain to learn how to rule with subordinate polities, at least at the level of language, law, and ceremony. The imperial crisis triggered by American secession did not end imperial hierarchy; it prompted its remaking through treaties, charters, and recognition bargains that bound places such as Malta, Mysore, and Kedah‑Penang into the British world on newly articulated terms.
On the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, looking at 1776 from Malta, Mysore, and Kedah‑Penang reminds us that the Declaration’s world was never simply divided between a new nation and an old empire. It was also populated by less visible actors who chose not to secede but to renegotiate their positions within imperial structures. Their efforts to turn dependence into legitimacy, and hierarchy into managed relationships, show how hierarchy and legitimacy could be sustained not only through force, but through recognition; negotiated status; and bargains of protection, loyalty, and status that remain familiar in world politics long after the age of empires has formally passed.
Nguyen Truong Giang is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (Japan), where he also completed an MSc in International Relations as an Asian Development Bank-Japan Scholar. His research focuses on international relations theory, historical politics, and the negotiation of symbolic authority, legitimacy, and political survival in East and Southeast Asia.
I am grateful to Tammy Proctor, Nadja Durbach, and Chelsea Reutcke at the Journal of British Studies for their editorial guidance and suggestions on this article. I owe particular thanks to my supervisor, Steven B. Rothman, for his mentorship and intellectual guidance. I also thank Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University for institutional support and access to research materials and historical sources. Any remaining errors are my own. Please address any correspondence to: truong17@apu.ac.jp
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