My wager in this book is that the modern idea of the literary as a sovereign order of textuality since the late eighteenth century – autonomous, autotelic, and singular – was coproduced with an extraordinary model of colonial sovereignty in the far-flung colony of British India. I track the proliferation of this model of the literary sovereign then through the conceptual grid of Weltliteratur or world literature and show how this colonial history made its mark across literary cultures in Europe. From the eighteenth century onward, this colonial history shaped and reshaped literary cultures on a global scale, and laid the foundations of what can be defined as the modern culture of letters.