Women, Wealth and the State in Early Colonial India - (States Before Modernity) by Nicholas J Abbott

About the Book

Examines wealthy Indian matriarchs as essential makers of states--and ideas of 'the state'--in pre- and early colonial India

Book Synopsis

Few polities were more instrumental to the rise of the East India Company and the advent of British colonial rule in South Asia than the Mughal successor state of Awadh (c. 1722-1856). And few individuals influenced the making of the Awadh regime and its pivotal relationship with the Company more than the chief consorts (begams) of its ruling dynasty. Drawing on previously unexamined Persian sources, this book centres the begams of Awadh within a revised history of state-formation and conceptual change in pre- and early colonial India. In so doing, it posits the begams as essential, if contested, builders of both the Awadh regime and the Company state, and as ambivalent partners in forging evolving political economies and emerging conceptual languages of statehood and sovereignty in early colonial India.

Review Quotes

An erudite, thorough and thoughtful break with androcentric colonial-postcolonial historiography of 'the native state'. Abbott's book also pioneers as the first monograph on women in propertied households as pivots of early modern South Asian finance and political culture. It considerably deepens modern feminist debates on Indian women's political and property rights--Indrani Chatterjee, University of Virginia

Nicholas Abbott is breaking new ground in writing about South Asia's eighteenth century from predominantly Persian source materials. This monograph offers a fresh approach to early colonial history as well as an exhaustive and imaginative treatment of source material. Abbott is particularly innovative in using philological and semiotic tools to think about the evolving concept of "sarkar" and in his capacious and thoughtful treatment of gender; by foregrounding the role of Awadh's matriarchs, he presents a gender-sensitive reading of state and colonialism at a time of profound transition.--Samira Sheikh, Vanderbilt University