This book implies that intellectual histories of European empires need to attend more closely, not just to the comparative analysis of European ideas of empire, but also to interactions of European ideas with conceptions of empire generated beyond Europe. In a landmark study, Anthony Pagden argued that European theories of civilizational and commercial progress were closely related to enlightenment critiques of earlier neo-Roman ideologies of universal lordship. Thus, enlightenment attacks on early modern European empires as cruel and rapacious tyrannies became the launching-off point for new theories of liberal imperialism in the nineteenth century. This is a powerful and persuasive account, but it tends to leave out the complex story of European interactions with non-European imperial traditions like the Mughal empire, a story of confrontation and conquest, but also of selective appropriations.

Historians of South Asia will continue to debate the relative balance of continuity and change in the transition to colonialism and the long-term impact of colonial rule in the region. Proponents of a continuity thesis are accused of obscuring the profound rupture of colonial conquest. On the other hand, insisting on a radical or typological difference between pre-colonial and colonial regimes is a strategy that has long been used by defenders of empire as well as its critics. This book has argued that British views of the state in India were shaped by political presuppositions exported from British politics, as well as by the distinctive will to power of foreign rulers.