Beginning in the 1840s, high-ranking officials within the East India Company began a concerted effort to confiscate and annex princely states, citing misrule or a default of blood heirs. In response, metropolitan reformers and their Indian allies orchestrated a sustained legalistic defense of native sovereignty in the public sphere and emerged as vocal opponents of colonial expansionism. Adapting concepts put forth by both law of nations theorists and contemporary jurists, they sought to preserve longstanding treaties and defend the princes' exercise of internal sovereignty. The colonial government's failure to adequately define the basis of its modern “paramountcy” invited such creative maneuvering. Reformist opposition to the annexation of Awadh, the dispossession of the Nawab of the Carnatic, and the confiscation of Mysore demonstrates that international law did not simply function as a Eurocentric tool of subordination, but could also provide a bulwark against colonial depredations.
Beginning in the late 1830s, a coalition of non-conformists, abolitionists, free traders, and disenchanted East India Company proprietors began to vocally challenge the exploitative policies of the colonial state in British India. Led by lecturer George Thompson, these reformers pursued a rhetorical strategy of associating groups who were converted into ‘mere tools’ by the Company abroad and the aristocracy at home. These monopolistic entities degraded Indian peasant cultivators, the British working classes, and princely sovereigns alike through forms of ‘virtual slavery’ that persisted in the post-Emancipation empire. In staging these protests, reformers ran up against an adversarial Board of Control and Court of Directors who obstructed their efforts to mobilize public opinion. Probing their agitation reveals the existence of a particularly combative strain of liberal imperialist thought that defied the political status quo.
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