This study originated in my fascination with the thought-worlds of British imperialists, and a sense that the ideological origins of British rule in India needed revisiting in the light of recent work on eighteenth-century British politics and political thought. As I was writing this book, an ‘imperial turn’ in the writing of British and European history has focused new attention on the role of empire in the political culture of eighteenth-century Britain, and in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment. My own study aims to contribute to these exciting revisions by providing an intellectual history of British politics and policy-making in Bengal, the ‘bridgehead’ to empire in eighteenth-century India.

This is not an intellectual history in the sense of being a history of intellectuals or of intellectual movements. Rather, following David Armitage's recent formulation, this is a study of how ‘various conceptions of the British Empire arose in the competitive context of political argument’. I am concerned with how policy-makers in Bengal sought to justify their political actions with reference to certain ‘conventions, norms and modes of legitimation’ operating in the wider sphere of British politics. I argue that British conceptions of empire were also shaped by tense encounters with indigenous political culture. The twin dynamics of imperial legitimation and colonial governance led British officials to engage creatively with India's pre-colonial past, and especially with the history of the Mughal empire.