Territorial Conquest Research Articles

Gold, Slaves, and Trading Routes in Southern Blue Nile (Abbay) Societies, Ethiopia, 13th–16th Centuries

Abstract In the thirteenth century, the territories of Damot, Ǝnnarya, Ǝndägäbṭän, and Wäräb, located south of the Blue Nile, west of Awash, and northeast of the Gibe watershed, belonged to the realm of Damot. At that time, the motälämi dynasty ruled the kingdom and sought to assert authority over the Muslim states of eastern Ethiopia, šäwa, and Ifat. Following the accession of the Solomonic dynasty and its territorial conquests in the fourteenth century, the Kingdom of Damot gradually disappeared. It gave way to two different entities: the eastern part is known as medieval Damot—protectorate of the Christian kingdom—whereas the western part became the southern region of the Christian province of šäwa. South of this geopolitical entity were the kingdoms of Gamo and Janjero, which were famous for trading gold and slaves, particularly eunuchs, throughout the medieval period. Inhabited by agro-pastoralists settled in different areas of southern Blue Nile, Damot, Gamo, and Janjero were at the crossroads of an important trade in luxury goods. Slaves and gold originated from there and were then integrated into a long-distance commercial network. After passing through the Muslim states of eastern Ethiopia, the goods arrived in the ports of the Red Sea (Massawa and Zeyla) before reaching the Arabian Peninsula and Asia. This article analyzes the economic history of the region, draws the contours of the production of gold and slaves, and traces their routes to the Red Sea. It shows a relatively stable localization of the “production” of gold and slaves in Ethiopia during the medieval period. At the local level, this phenomenon raises questions about various aspects of the Ethiopian slave trade, such as the methods of slave acquisition (raids, wars, punitive expeditions), and the role of physical and cultural otherness (stigmatization and legitimization based on cultural denigration), and their impact on the transformation of political structures.

The territorial and strategic context of Stamford, Lincolnshire, in the early tenth century

A new view is put forward concerning the course of the early development of Stamford in southern Lincolnshire in its wider geopolitical context, through an analysis of its topography, archaeology and early history. It is concluded that a Mercian royal centre on the site of St Peter's church and the later castle was refortified by the Scandinavian forces in the late ninth or early tenth century, and that it was this stronghold which was taken over by the forces of King Edward the Elder in c. 918. The king thereupon built two burhs – defended quasi-urban settlements – on the two sides of the river Welland. These were linked by a bridge, forming a single strategic unit, on the West Saxon model. Each of these burhs was assigned a burghal territory, the inhabitants of which owed a range of services to the king at the burh. This process can be seen as the origin of what has been called the ‘Danish burh’ on the north bank. These burhs, with their associated territories, became the instruments for a new level of control of the area by Edward and subsequent West Saxon kings. This reassessment enables a new model to be articulated concerning the temporal and functional development of burhs and their associated cadastral units - shires, burghal territories, wapentakes, hundreds and town fields - in the context of the political changes involved in the early tenth-century conquest and reabsorption of the Viking-held territories in the eastern Midlands by the West Saxon king.

Archie Mafeje and the question of African philosophy: A liberatory discourse

Philosophy and the social sciences, at least in modern times, are largely a by-product of the West – Europe and the Americas. This is to say that the West has a monopoly over these disciplines. This may be largely attributed to the colonial conquest of many territories by European powers and the resultant subjugation of the peoples concerned. Africans, by and large, are victims of such atrocities on the part of the West. Hence the question of an “African philosophy” arises, or gains momentum, in the (post) colonial era, or at independence. This is because the impulse to philosophise is inextricably linked to the impulse to gain freedom among the bonded. This paper attempts to show how the present subject, Archie Mafeje, dealt with the question of whether or not there exists an “African philosophy”. In responding to the question, it will also be shown what philosophy really is (indeed, must have to be) and occasion will be had to remark as to its distinctive practices within the African context. This is to be understood as a broader philosophy of liberation which liberates philosophy from the received Euro-American contours and consequently liberates the colonised and oppressed, the African in particular, with its engagement with the (post) colonial, neo-colonial condition and remedies for the (dis)order thereof.

Conquest and Incorporation: Merging French-Style Central Government Practices with Local Water Management in Seventeenth-Century Maritime Flanders

Abstract How does a new power impose new practices in water management and how does it deal with inherited customs and institutions? How, in practice, does the change of legal order, underpinned by territorial conquest, manifest itself? This article questions how the change of sovereignty affected water management in the border region of modern France and Belgium in the seventeenth century. In 1662 King Louis XIV of France bought the city and the territory of Dunkirk from the King of England. Maritime Flanders, as it was called from then on, became the northern border of the Kingdom of France. Water management was a major issue from the outset. The French administration restored the local water management institutions and integrated them into its own institutional framework. Doing so, the French deployed very harsh control under the authority of the intendant of Lille, the representative of the King in the whole of Flanders. By thus providing water to the port of Dunkirk and by planning large scale temporary defensive inundations, the French monarchy succeeded in militarising the regional water management.

The Last Crusade in the West: Castile and the Conquest of Granada

The Last Crusade in the West: Castile and the Conquest of Granada

Temporary as Indefinite: Horizons of the Future in 1967

Time is the most essential component of the legal regime that followed the 1967 war and the Israeli conquest of the Palestinian Territories. It is essential since one of the most basic components of a regime of occupation under international law is being temporary. First, I argue that occupation has been and still is the best definition for its control of these territories that Israel could have hoped for, since under the current framework Israel can argue that it can hold the territory both indefinitely and temporarily, without giving full civil and political rights to their Palestinian population. Second, and this is my main argument, that the choice of the occupation as the legal paradigm was an Israeli choice, despite the apparent controversy over it. Based on recent autobiographic publications and archival documents, this paper shows that the Israeli military legal system used the paradigm of occupation with relation to the takeover of these territories, starting 1963, and that has persisted ever since. Moreover, the emergency and mode of the military government that followed the conquest of the Palestinian Territories lasted only a few weeks, and has been swiftly replaced by a permanent and indefinite mode of government. In doing so, Israeli military legal advisors have shown incredible foresight of the future, which still enables the longest occupation in modern times. By opting for a regime of occupation, Israel could have practiced the de-facto annexation as it does, while maintaining a regime that is still considered legitimate and legal under international law. It has managed to equate temporary with indefinite.

Hourya Bentouhami-Molino , Race, cultures, identités : une approche féministe et postcoloniale , Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2015, 172 p.

Hourya Bentouhami-molino, Race, cultures, identites: Une approche feministe et postcoloniale [Race, cultures, identities: a feminist, post-colonial approach] Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2015, 176 p.This book probes the unstable, indefinable nature of the notions of race, culture, and from a perspective described as feminist and postcolonial. According to the author, all attempts to understand the notion of should take into account not only the historical situation - decolonization - but also the economic conditions in which postcolonial racism operates: redistribution in a globalized economy, fragmentation of the working class, international labour law. Postcolonial racism differs from biological racism in that it is 'non-differentialist, race-free, as it were, seeming to assert that biological races do not exist while insisting that cultural differences between peoples are irreducible (p. 8).The author develops her thinking over six chapters that aim to demonstrate the relevance of the postcolonial approach in a range of humanities and social science fields: geography, law, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature and gender studies.In the first chapter Bentouhami-Molino undertakes to forge a new geography of knowledge. She shows that the geographical representations that began to develop in Europe in the seventeenth century were not neutral but driven by imperialist aspirations of entrepreneurial and territorial conquest: an irremediably 'ethnocentric' system of geometrical rationalization based on value asymmetry between the (European) centre and peripheries at varying distances from that centre. She also notes the semantic slippage from physical attributes and climatic specificities (warm south, temperate north) to moral and sexual qualities (effeminate, cruel East, virile yet gentle West). This slippage, characteristic of Montesquieu's writings, occurs even today: the man of the south is assumed to be hypersexualized and Oriental women to be subject to his male desire and violence. To rethink the situation, the author suggests provincializing Europe; in other words, making an effort to understand how life is experienced in non-Western societies. Here she draws heavily on Indian subaltern studies, which restore subaltern collective memory such as that of the peasantry.In the second chapter she examines the contribution of postcolonial studies to the field of law, mentioning first the role of law in the constitution of different categories of persons: in this case those to be granted the status of citizen or subject and those to be refused that identity, a refusal used to justify colonization. In the colonial conquest, people were subjugated through identity expropriation (p. 43). The author inquires into the legal processes that produced race and made a property right - a paradoxical right because is inalienable (it cannot be sold). As she sees it, inalienability is precisely what gives the attribute of whiteness its value, making it a morally desirable marker but also a resource for accessing a considerable number of social advantages.Philosophy is the subject of the third chapter, which begins with a long passage on defining the real: definitions must take into account both the content of reality and the problem of granting legitimacy to utter or name the real. Racialized persons or slaves could be denied all ability to speak for themselves and to utter the real. The author's key reference here as she examines the relevance of Hegel's master-slave dialectic to the colonial period is Frantz Fanon. There are three components to her critique. First, whereas according to Hegel the struggle between master and slave is for mutual recognition, in the colonial scheme of things, acquiring freedom requires surrendering freedom and therefore implies asymmetry of consciousness. Freedom here was offered rather than acquired through struggle; it was therefore merely a hollow word. …

Horror beyond Death: Geopolitics and the Pulverisation of the Human

Biopolitics often enters the sphere of geopolitics in the form of a series of necropolitical or thanatopolitical interventions.1 From territorial conquests or wars of attrition to the concentration camps or policies of control of displaced populations, the biopolitical capture of human life and bodies in configurations of (geo)political power has generally involved the putting to death of large swaths of populations, whether they are directly targeted or they happen to be 'in the way'. Michel Foucault argued that biopolitics emerges when the power of the sovereign shifts from a 'right to take life' to a capacity to 'let live'.2 Thus, political power, the power of the geopolitical sovereign (generally), becomes concerned with the management, control, and enhancement of people's lives, with the 'health' of a population/body politic, and with the efficient utilisation and incorporation of individual bodies into political preoccupations (including the concern with the survival of the state or sovereign). Yet, as Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, among others, have also argued, while Foucault's recognition that biopolitical power is primarily concerned with the maintenance of life is crucial, this capacity to 'make live and let die' is never completely separate from the old modality of sovereign power and geopolitical force that was/is premised upon a right to put to death. Thus, as Mbembe puts it, biopolitics is also about the 'subjugation of life to the power of death'.3 Agamben adds that 'if there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones'.4 The distinction between biopolitics and thanatopolitics/necropolitics can no longer be guaranteed. When biopolitics - the concern with the enhancement of human life/living - is the main object of geopolitical operations, what Mbembe calls 'the creation of death worlds' often becomes modern and late-modern geopolitics' primary objective (Necropolitics, p40).This essay, however, is not interested in reprising the many biopolitical arguments that have been advanced to demonstrate the close connections between biopolitics and necropolitics. It is clear and, in a way, it was so already for Foucault that, in order to maximise the life/living potentials of some populations and bodies, other populations or other bodies have to be sacrificed or must disappear (Society, pp254-258). Put differently, what brings geopolitics and biopolitics together is their devotion to making populations and bodies die (in other words, their attachment to necropolitics). This essay is also not concerned with the many necropolitical dimensions of latemodern geopolitics (whether we are looking at World War II and the camps, for example, or, more recently, at techniques of exclusion of bodies and disappearance of life in the long era of the global war on terror). Again, many studies have targeted this late modern condition of (geo)political life.5 Instead, my goal in this essay is to push further the biopolitical/necropolitical argument by showing that, in key contemporary instances of geopolitical violence and destruction, the life and/or death of populations and individual bodies is not a primary concern. What is of concern, rather, in some contemporary geopolitical configurations is what I have called the pulverisation of the human,6 or, to borrow Adriana Cavarero's language, a radical violence that, 'not content merely to kill because killing would be too little, aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body'.7 What is at stake in some geopolitical scenarios is 'not the end of human life, but the human condition itself' (Horrorism, p8). With Cavarero's help, I have called this targeting of the human condition, of the fact of the human, or of humanity itself a matter of horror.8 Horror's aim, when it enters the domain of geopolitical violence and destruction, may appear to be to put bodies to death. …

Compressions of Scale: World Literature in Miniature

Fifty years ago, in 1966, Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey published a famous book called The Tyranny of Distance that argued how spatial distance from other centers of civilization had been the most important factor in determining the trajectory of Australian history. Now, under the impact of communications revolutions and environmental theory of various kinds, such tyrannies are more likely to be those of propinquity, with scholars of world literature and culture intent upon examining ways in which different parts of the globe are now, and indeed always have been, tightly imbricated within one another’s orbits. Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents is a distinguished contribution to these contemporary critical discourses of planetary scale, with Lowe being particularly incisive in her deconstruction of what she calls “the violence of liberal universality” (7). One purpose of her book is to show how it was an Anglo American cultural tradition, “best exemplified” by John Stuart Mill (106), that provided a key rationale not only for the expansion in the nineteenth century of an international trade in manufactured goods and migrant labor, but also, more implicitly, for styles of writing that worked as a corollary to such rhetorical invocations of liberty. Lowe has an excellent discussion in her second chapter of Olaudah Equiano, where she challenges the received idea of “transition” upon which his Narrative (1789) is predicated, along with its associated suggestion “that the system of slavery was gradually superseded by a new system of free wage labor” (46). She argues instead that slavery and “free” wage labor are closely intertwined with each other, with autobiography, “the liberal genre par excellence,” performing “the important work of mediating and resolving liberalism’s contradictions” (46). Lowe has done much productive research for this project in colonial archives, and she illuminatingly juxtaposes Lord Aberdeen’s 1841 declaration, in a letter to the first governor of Hong Kong, that “a secure, well-regulated trade, not conquest, is all we desire” with the twentieth-century “imperial governmentality” of the US, which was similarly less concerned with “direct conquest or occupation of territory” than with “managing the biopolitical circulation of goods and peoples within an expanded international market” (132).

Multiple and Fluid: Religious and Diasporic Belonging in Venice’s Maritime State in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period

As a result of the Ottoman territorial conquests, the Venice of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a site of an unprecedented influx of immigrants from its colonies in the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean. Venice’s own polycentric and plural legal and institutional system provided a backdrop for complex processes of accommodation and contestation of cultural difference. Both state institutions and legal categories struggled to respond to the demands of Venice’s increasingly diverse populations. Immigrants themselves negotiated the legal and social categories of the state, and drew on different conceptions of social membership, in order to formulate their own claims about identity and belonging. This article focuses on two specific social sites where notions of community and belonging were elaborated: the establishment of Venetian civic ritual and the resulting negotiation of local religion in the eastern Adriatic commune of Kotor (Cattaro), and the working of lay religious corporations of foreigners in Venice, which complicated metropolitan and colonial perspectives and created a more reciprocal understanding of the world in which both colonial administration and local populations picked their way between multiple legal, linguistic, and ethnic boundaries. Religious devotion emerges not simply as a reflection of wider social, economic, and cultural changes, but as a dynamic and active agent in their negotiation.

Tracing residential mobility during the Merovingian period: An isotopic analysis of human remains from the Upper Rhine Valley, Germany.

Written sources have provided information about the rise of Merovingian power and their territorial conquests after the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, but the extent to which altered power relations in the newly annexed territories reshaped regional and local communities is poorly understood. The early medieval cemetery of Dirmstein, located in the Upper Rhine Valley, is one of the rare sites bearing archeological evidence of simultaneous use by an indigenous community and newcomers from outside the Merovingian core area, and it offers the opportunity to investigate residential mobility at the former Roman Rhine frontier during the Merovingian period. We conducted strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotope analyses on human tooth enamel recovered from 25 sixth century inhumations at the Dirmstein cemetery to establish the presence of newcomers to the Upper Rhine region. The low δ(13) C values exhibited by the Dirmstein individuals revealed ingestion of a C3 terrestrial based diet, with no detectable contribution of C4 plants, which indicates the absence of individuals from regions where a C4 -based diet was common. Human (87) Sr/(86) Sr values well outside the local range of bioavailable strontium, in combination with low δ(18) O values, suggest a notable presence of newcomers from more eastern or high altitude regions. The isotopic evidence indicates that residential mobility was important and new settlers, most likely from outside the Merovingian core area, contributed to the settlement of the northern Upper Rhine Valley during the sixth century AD.

Threats to Territorial Integrity, National Mass Schooling, and Linguistic Commonality

Why are some countries more linguistically homogeneous than others? We posit that the international environment in which a state develops partially determines the extent of its linguistic commonality and national cohesion. Specifically, the presence of an external threat of territorial conquest or externally supported secession leads governing elites to have stronger incentives to pursue nation-building strategies to generate national cohesion, often leading to the cultivation of a common national language through mass schooling. Comparing cases with similar levels of initial linguistic heterogeneity, state capacity, and development, but in different international environments, we find that states that did not face external threats to their territorial integrity were more likely to outsource education and other tools for constructing identity to missionaries or other groups, or not to invest in assimilation at all, leading to higher ethnic heterogeneity. States developing in high threat environments were more likely to invest in nation-building strategies to homogenize their populations.

“Engelond” and “Armorik Briteyne”: Reading Brittany in Chaucer's Franklin's Tale

Abstract This article argues that Chaucer's imaginative depiction of the topographical and cultural otherness of Brittany and the fraught triangular relationship of the main characters in the Franklin's Tale is influenced by his awareness of Brittany's entanglements with England and France in the Hundred Years' War. Fourteenth-century Brittany was a strategic border region, differentiated from other French territories by its Brythonic language and culture, yet inextricably bound to England by ties of kinship, fealty, and occupation extending back to the Norman Conquest. The Franklin's Tale explicitly links each of its main characters with one of the three polities involved in this conflict, associating Dorigen most strongly with Brittany itself. The love story between Dorigen and Arveragus and the challenge posed to it by Aurelius play out in an emphatically Breton colonial setting, where the erotics of sexual conquest become conflated with territorial and political conquest.

Commercial Conquest: Empire and Property in the Early US Republic

AbstractAlthough consent and commerce were dominant principles of revolutionary political culture, early American expansionists engaged in the continual appropriation of indigenous land. How were these principles of consent and commerce combined with processes of territorial conquest? Rather than a Lockean right of conquest where labor establishes the right to property, architects of early American expansion drew on a possessory right to property in which property is established by social convention rather than natural right. Political thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox enlisted the possessory right to property in the justification of early US colonization, emphasizing the importance of purchasing Indian land. Yet when Indian nations refused to sell their land, these same figures cast indigenous resistance and coercive reactions to it as exceptions to the norm of commercial expansion, giving rise to a discourse of commercial conquest that aided in the justification of native dispossession.

Building God's City: The Political Economy of Prayer Camps in Nigeria

AbstractThe proliferation of religious spaces is a relatively recent development in Nigeria. Nowadays there are more than a hundred religious camps belonging to different religious groups in the country. The most popular of these camps, the Redemption Camp of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, is located 42 kilometres outside of Lagos and measures several thousand acres. Although initially not designed as such, developments in and around Lagos have compelled the managers of the Redemption Camp to present it as an urban alternative to the city of Lagos, which is generally deemed chaotic. The prestige of this camp and its activities have led to expansive urban development that involves the creation of numerous residential estates stretching from Lagos to beyond the Redemption Camp. Based on a recent ethnographic study of the Redemption Camp, this article argues that the process of urban expansion in and around Lagos is propelled by an aggressive form of religious revival that transcends the borders between economics, spirituality and territorial conquest. This article thus illustrates how church‐driven, religio‐urban developments follow a different logic of city making than often presumed by theorists of African cities, who generally neglect the religious forces that inform urban transformations in Africa.

Violencias contra las mujeres negras: Neo conquista y neo colonización de territorios y cuerpos en la región del Pacífico colombiano

Resumen: En este ensayo cuestiono la apreciación generalizada por parte de funcionarios y funcionarias del Estado colombiano de que los asesinatos de mujeres que se suceden en número alarmante en los últimos 10 años en Buenaventura, no son más que violencia intrafamiliar y que la crueldad con la que son cometidos son solo expresión de prácticas culturales tradicionalmente violentas de las comunidades negras que allí habitan. Me pr0pongo probar que la violencia contra las mujeres es parte de la estrategia de desterritorialización de la población negra por parte del capitalismo global que necesita de esos territorios para la ejecución de sus megaproyectos de gran inversión. Planteo que lo que se vive hoy en la ciudad colombiana de Buenaventura es un proceso de neo conquista y neo colonización de los territorios, los cuerpos y los imaginarios de sus habitantes, las comunidades negras e indígenas.
 Palabras claves: violencia, mujeres negras, desterritorialización, población negra, neo colonización.
 Violence against Black Women: Neo Conquest and Neo Colonization of Territory and Bodies in the Colombian Pacific Region
 Abstract: In this essay I question the widespread acceptance by Colombian government officials of the murders of women, occurring in alarming numbers over the last 10 years in Buenaventura, Colombia’s main port on the Pacific, as being merely domestic violence and that the ruthlessness with which these murders are being committed are simply an expression of a tradition of violent cultural practices within the black communities living there. I aim to show that this violence against women is part of the strategy of deterritorialization of the black population on the part of global capitalism in order to obtain territory needed to implement their large investment megaprojects. I argue what is happening today in the Colombian city of Buenaventura is a process of neo conquest and neo colonization of territories, bodies and imaginaries of its inhabitants, the black and indigenous communities.
 Key words: Violence, black women, deterritorialization, black people, neo colonization

The perduring Maya: new archaeology on early Colonial transitions

Abstract

De Facto Sovereignty and Population Displacement as Tools of Conflict

Two largely debated questions in the realm of international relations are the roles of post-Cold War Russia and China within the current global context. However, the debates in the literature fails to take into account the fact that both superpowers employ the same tactic: the asymmetrical conquest of new territory as promoted by historical claims, retroactively justified through population displacement. Subsequently, debates on the topic mistakenly focus on elite motivations rather than what can be controlled: the responses of the international community to the abovementioned tactics. I will document why mainly Russia but also China have opted to use the tactic of territorial conquest and demonstrate how the international community has tacitly promoted the use of this tactic. I will ultimately argue that there is a need to create international standards for sovereignty and that a move from inactive conflict avoidance to active conflict resolution is necessary.

‘Spatial Play’ at the Ends of Europe: Oyapock Bridge, Amazonia

AbstractDrawing on the work of philosopher‐semiotician Louis Marin, this contribution to Outlook on Europe reveals the ‘spatial play’ of contending outlooks hovering fitfully over the construction of a bridge at the ‘ends of Europe’, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, on that very spot where French Guiana and Brazil, the European Union and Mercosul, physically touch one another over a muddy tributary, the Rio Oyapock. The inter‐play of visions colliding around the Oyapock bridge, it is argued, illuminates the paradoxes and contradictions of European territorial governance in the globalised time‐space of its postcolonial frontiers. In spite of the high geopolitical rhetoric seeking to unite both continents, the peculiar blindness of Europe's metropolitan gaze vis‐à‐vis indigenous difference sets the stage for perverse effects of exclusion and disempowerment in and around the site of the bridge itself, extending far into its regional hinterlands. Framed against the backdrop of a long, ‘utopian’ modernity of European imperial expansion and territorial conquest, the ghostly spatial dynamics surrounding the Oyapock River bridge project serve to illuminate wider challenges to the projection of EU influence ‘in the world’. A close examination of similar dynamics elsewhere may help bring into focus the lineaments of a more fully confident and mature postcolonial European border studies.

The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A grand strategic interpretation by G.J. Bryant (review)

Reviewed by: The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A grand strategic interpretation by G.J. Bryant Joshua Ehrlich The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A grand strategic interpretation By G.J. Bryant. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2013. The Emergency of British Power in India addresses a classic historical question: how the British East India Company evolved in the eighteenth century from a trading corporation into the dominant political power in South Asia. Looking at the “roles, opinions and contributions” of the Company’s leadership, it seeks to explain the transformation on military-political grounds (x). “The grand strategic history of British engagement in India,” it argues, “morphed from a reactive-defensive phase (1746 to 1761), primarily externalised against the French menace, to a proactive… phase (1757 to 1784), internalised to problematic relations with the Indian states” (29). Part One examines the first phase, in which successive wars between Britain and France militarized the contest between their respective India companies for control of European trade with the subcontinent. Chapter One examines the onset of hostilities during the War of Austrian Succession, the largest consequence of which for the British Company was the traumatic, albeit temporary, loss of Madras in 1746. This disaster, coupled with French interference in dynastic struggles in the Deccan and Carnatic, stirred the Company from complacency, prompting it to make local alliances and engage its counterpart in a proxy war—the subject of Chapter Two. Chapters Three and Four treat the climax of the Anglo-French rivalry, in the Carnatic and Bengal respectively, during the Seven Years’ War. In the author’s analysis, the British Company’s forces were hampered by a comparative lack of coordination, both with the London directorate and between the far-flung governments of the three presidencies. Yet the manpower and revenues of the Compagnie des Indes proved less stable, and the low priority Versailles accorded the eastern theater made it loath to allocate resources there. The British Company won a decisive victory in 1761. Even at this point, however, the author attributes to its leadership an overriding concern with securing trade and profits rather than building an empire. Part Two traces the evolution of the Company’s “reactive” posture into a “proactive” one through its military and political entanglements from 1762–84. Chronologically overlapping chapters on Bengal (Five and Seven), Madras (Six and Nine), and Bombay (Eight) treat the Company’s efforts to manage perceived threats from Indian “country” powers and prevent the French from regaining their former position. These chapters witness increasing coordination between the Company’s presidencies and the extension of its military and political thinking into the heartland and into the future. According to Bryant, officials were coming to understand Indian politics in terms of a balance of power among states, which the interests of peace and stability demanded they maintain. Differences persisted as to the means appropriate to this end. The directors reiterated their longstanding aversion to territorial conquest, but leaders in India—notably Warren Hastings—were prone to “realpolitik,” wielding the sword or the olive branch as necessary (224). In any case, there was now “no denying that the Company was itself on the way to becoming a highly active ‘country’ power” (151). While finding that the Company engaged increasingly in “‘imperialist’ behaviour,” Bryant concludes that it did not, in the period before 1784, “evolve a conscious imperial ambition to dominate India” (325). He argues instead for something like path dependency: despite the lack of a “collective perception of where it might lead in the long run,” “a generally coherent pattern of responses to specific threats did begin to emerge” (325, 327). Drawn repeatedly into conflict by its pecuniary interests, pursuing only limited and intermittent territorial conquests, insensible to any greater destiny, the Company nonetheless emerged as the dominant power in Indian politics. There is nothing particularly novel about this interpretation: commentators and historians have advanced versions of it since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. The author dismisses recent accounts, which have traced the Company’s imperial ambitions as far back as the 1600s, on the basis of a rigid distinction between the concerns of a government (“the security...