Military Mobility, Authority and Negotiation in Early Colonial India*

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on the career of Muhammad Yusuf Khan, an officer in the British East India Company who sought to turn his military service into political and diplomatic authority, only to be executed as a rebel in 1764. His rise and fall occurred early in the so-called colonial transition, a period characterized in recent scholarship as one of relative fluidity in contrast to later, more rigid instantiations of colonial rule. Institutionally, the Company’s armies seem to contradict that pattern: their rapid growth in the eighteenth century produced new exclusions and restrictions, including some of the earliest formal articulations of a racial binary between Indian and European actors. Yusuf Khan, however, gained political capital by mobilizing elements of those intended restrictions in new contexts, imbuing the Company’s military hierarchies with alternate meanings outside of its formal infrastructure. His innovative reinterpretation of military prestige becomes clear when the Company’s records are read alongside Persian-language material from the Indian courts against which he fashioned his political identity. His career offers insight into how the inequitable, but dynamic relationship between the Company and its soldiers shaped the former’s approach to and understanding of India s political landscape