ABSTRACT
Book-ended by two seemingly transformative phenomena – the decline of the Mughal Empire, following the death of the emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, and the emergence of the British Raj as the paramount power in the subcontinent in the early nineteenth century – the long eighteenth century has fascinated scholars interested in pinpointing key moments of social and political transition in South Asian history. Once the period was seen as the last blush of ‘traditional’ India, as a time of decline and stagnation awaiting the improving hand of British colonialism; now, while many scholars continue to point to continuities between the administrative and economic systems of the Mughals and the ‘successor’ states of the eighteenth century, 1 others stress the ways in which, particularly at the regional level, society and politics, during the 1700s, evolved and became reinvigorated.
