The British Military–Fiscal State and Indigenous Resistance India 1750–1820

This chapter considers two closely related issues: first, the nature of the East India Company’s state as it evolved in India during the eighteenth century, and second, the form, incidence and timing of Indian resistance to that state. The resistance of indigenous and subject peoples to foreign rule has been a fashionable topic for Indian historians in recent years, but resistance cannot be explained outside its historical context, and underlying much of this work are assumptions about the nature of the colonial state in India. These need to be examined before the quality and form of the Indian response to British expansion can be properly understood.