In Perspectives, I lay out the broad historical concerns of the study. Historians viewing the transformation of the East India Company from a trading corporation to an imperial power have tended to focus on the eighteenth century, rightly seeing this as the moment when large swathes of land in the Indian subcontinent were annexed. What I offer as an alternative is an argument that the ideological, legal, political and economic requisites for the acquisition of land were laid in the seventeenth century. The founding charter empowered the Company to annex lands in non-Christian countries, and from the outset the Company embarked on a determined quest to realize that ambition. It met, however, determined resistance from Mughal authorities and rival imperial powers, and only with the passage of time and migration to the Coromandel Coast beyond Mughal control did it first gain the rights to a permanent settlement at Madras, later to be followed under very different circumstances by Bombay and Calcutta.

In this chapter, I develop a fuller picture of the puzzlingly intense demand for government jobs across lower- and middle-income countries. The evidence for this chapter draws upon administrative data, a large-scale survey of applicants to the Indonesian civil service, and a series of online survey experiments also conducted in Indonesia. In the first part of this chapter, I draw on administrative data on civil service examination scores paired with original survey responses gauging respondents’ monthly wages to estimate the public sector wage premium for entry-level employees. In the second part of the chapter, I use a survey experiment to estimate the wage elasticity of demand for government jobs. In the third part of the chapter, I turn my attention to evaluating the alternative explanations for the high demand for public sector jobs – focusing specifically on the role of status-seeking.

Drawing on four historical case studies, this chapter develops a picture of the paths toward civil service reform by interrogating the motivations of reformers, searching for clues as to whether they believed the merit system to be a democratizing reform or not. The first part of the chapter thus trains its sights on the period prior to reform in the United States and the United Kingdom. Whether reformers achieved their goals is a separate question. The second part of this chapter thus focuses on the distributional and representational consequences of civil service reform, looking at two different cases: China and India. In China, the merit system introduced during the seventh century was, in comparison to what preceded it, a democratizing reform, enabling ambitious office-seekers from regional hinterlands to share in power. India's brief interlude with unmediated meritocratic recruitment while under British colonial rule, meanwhile, was not democratizing and was ultimately criticized for effectively shutting the door to government representation among the less well-to-do.

The second chapter is devoted to the lure of India felt increasingly by the English merchant community, and the Company’s first, tentative attempts to gain a foothold in the great Mughal port of Surat. Frustrated by repeated failures to gain a favourable hearing from the emperor Jahangir, and the hostility of the Portuguese who were determined to resist any challenges to their trading privileges in the region, the EIC court petitioned James I to appoint Sir Thomas Roe as an ambassador. Although he was treated with respect, at the end of the three years of his embassy, Roe returned to London having gained few trading privileges. In the meantime, mounting hostilities between the EIC and Dutch VOC prompted protracted negotiations invoking the fledgling law of nations and culminating in the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1619.

Over thirty years ago, Benedict Anderson asked students of Southeast Asia: Why did French Indochina eventually splinter into three political units, while the Dutch East Indies emerged as a single national polity? This chapter takes up Anderson's challenge to evaluate the central claim of this book: That variation in the institutions governing colonial-era bureaucratic selection proved influential in either forging or undermining the horizontal camaraderie constitutive of multi-ethnic nations. This chapter shows that where colonial rulers introduced the meritocratic selection of local civil servants – as the French did in Indochina – privileged groups tended to outstrip marginalized groups in the competition for coveted government jobs. Meanwhile, where colonial regimes relied on indigenous elites to select local staff – as the Dutch did in the East Indies – there was little inter-group competition for government jobs, as elites tended to dole out jobs to members of their ethnic in-group, with the consequence of siloing grievances.

What is the definition of both the state and the nation? How did these two concepts emerge – and what explains their comparative advantage in supplanting alternative forms of political organization and identity? This chapter critically reviews the scholarly literature on these questions, placing a particular emphasis on how the state and the nation are “built,” and arguing that questions of bureaucratic selection constitute the key element of state-building. The chapter concludes by developing a theory about the relationship between rulers’ efforts at state-building and nation-building.

The first chapter explores the background to the 1600 Charter setting out the conditions for the establishment of the East India Company. Here I am interested in the rights of acquisition inherited from the exploratory age of the Tudor state rather than the more familiar story of its formal constitution. The language of charters granted to trading companies revealed something of the discursive complexity shaped by European powers striving to legitimize claims to overseas territory. England had few jurists of note and so the state drew partially and selectively on Roman and common law to foreground the precept of possession, not least because it conveniently rendered obsolete all challenges to the means of acquisition. The chartered companies of unprecedented size, capital and ambition which rose to power in the second half of the sixteenth century inherited this repertoire of legal pluralism but found in practice that the quest for conquest of overseas territory was compromised by geography and the existence of rival European powers with similar ambitions.

Worldwide, more than 125 countries have enacted legal provisions against disability-based discrimination; such legislation was also a core demand of Japanese and Korean disability rights activism. Despite the rapid diffusion of non discrimination norms, we know less about why their forms vary and how they have affected rights-claiming options. Through a paired comparison of activism surrounding statutes enacted in Korea and Japan in 2007 and 2013, respectively, Chapter 5 shows how advocacy for such legislation and related litigation transformed governance and created legal opportunities. To a greater extent in Korea than in Japan, people with disabilities gained non discrimination rights, mechanisms for redressing discrimination, support from NGOs and state agencies, and the legal tools with which to solidify and expand anti discrimination protections in court and through statutory revisions.

In this chapter, I take the theoretical predictions developed earlier to a near-global dataset using techniques of statistical inference. The analyses relate variation in country-year bureaucratic selection to two genres of outcomes: (1) a measure of representational inequality and (2) the incidence of internal conflict. I establish two core findings in this chapter. First, I show that countries in which civil servants are recruited more meritocratically are also those with higher measures of bureaucratic between-group inequality. Second, looking at the incidence of internal conflict in a given country-year observation, in a sample of post-colonial countries over the period 1941–2021, I find that internal conflict is more likely in countries that recruit civil servants meritocratically.

Bombay did not progress steadily from its uncertain beginning for it was beset by an uncompromising topography, a Portuguese landed class which refused to forfeit its valuable estates, hostile rival powers and a malarial climate which regularly took its toll on English lives. For decades, its very survival was in doubt. Even the governorship of Gerald Aungier, long celebrated for its achievements in setting Bombay on the path to modernization and legal and municipal reform, actually did little to guarantee its survival. Fortifications were neglected and the administration of justice was left in abeyance, particularly at the time of Keigwin’s rebellion of 1683 and the aftermath of the siege of 1689 which brought Bombay close to total collapse. But progress there was. Faltering it may have been but for the Company there was sufficient evidence to encourage a transition of power from Surat. And by the third decade of the eighteenth century, a Mayor’s Court was established as a decisive new phase in the administration of justice. By then, the Company could claim a certain sovereign authority over a defensible Bombay, essential conditions for the explosive growth of the eighteenth century.