This introduction sets out Major’s view of his age, "the experimental century," in relation to curiosity and curation. Although curiosity had been recuperated from a vice to a virtue in early modern Europe, Major continued to relate curiosity to original sin as a faulty, bodily lust for knowledge. This insatiable desire drove all people since Adam, but it did so more than ever in his age when the bounds and divisions set upon knowledge in the traditional encyclopedia were torn down. Curators applied cura or care (from the same root as curiosity) to knowledge. By acknowledging their own flaws, curators could guide the passion for knowledge closer and closer to truth, which, however, always remained out of human reach.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the origins of the West India Regiments in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean. It then introduces key concepts that will be used throughout the book, especially that of ’military spectacle’ (from Scott Myerly) as well as ’martial hybridity’, which is a take on Homi Bhabha’s formulation. The chapter goes on to argue that the Black soldiers of the regiments are an important but hitherto ignored feature in what Catherine Hall termed the ’war of representation’ that was fought over slavery and the image of people of African descent. It ends by outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

The Introduction lays out the theoretical and political stakes of the book. It shows how abolitionist white radicals saw enslavement as a diseased part of the national body that had to be lopped off. Through an exploration of political speeches, cartoons, song-sheets, sermons, fiction, and poetry, the author shows how the amputated bodies of Civil War veterans represented the possibility of a new kind of nation that had Black citizenship at its core.

In conventional narratives of Britain’s empire overseas, the Company’s territorial empire in Bengal looms large, overshadowing the more nebulous history of its nominally independent, but practically subordinate, allies in the subcontinent. Yet, the subsidiary alliance system as it developed in India in the late eighteenth century set an important precedent that reverberated across Asia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean World. Empire of Influence furnishes a new perspective on an understudied yet vital period in the history of indirect rule when its future role in sustaining and expanding Britain’s empire remained unclear. Contrary to their depiction as cosmopolitan contact zones, the Residencies were as much spaces of empire as the courthouse or the counting room. Far from being oases sheltered from broader imperial currents, many of the divisions within the Company become most visible at the Residencies, where issues of distance, distrust, and the tensions between domination and exchange were at their most acute. From the vantage point of the Residencies, a period of the Company’s history that is usually associated with bureaucratization and standardization begins to look much more complicated.

This book reconstructs and critically assesses the theories of property developed by Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx. It aims to clarify how these philosophers understood the concept of property and to explain their different views concerning the specific form that this concept ought to have in society. I emphasize how in the writings of these philosophers the idea of a pre-social and pre-political right to property is undermined by how social recognition forms a constitutive moment of the concept of property. Any account of how the concept of property is instantiated in specific property rights or forms of property must therefore accommodate this moment of social recognition. Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx are shown to provide different accounts of how this is achieved. Each time, however, the specific form of property is shown to be justified in terms of the same idea and value, namely freedom.

The introduction traces the main arguments of the book and provides an overview of key events discussed. It begins with the Sullivan Campaign of the American Revolution. This campaign ethnically cleansed Haudenosaunee people from territory that would later be ceded by the British to the Americans after the Revolution. The chapter asks what this campaign can tell us about the larger history of Indigenous–settler relationships. Among other things, it takes the campaign as an example of the rejection of real and fictive kinship ties between Indigenous peoples and settlers that was, I argue, a necessary precursor to the creation of settler nations. At the same time, some prominent imperial policy makers would struggle, as the book to come will also argue, to maintain different conceptions of Indigenous–imperial kinship in an effort to create a manageable and moral colonialism. The introduction outlines the book’s methodology of using microcosmic analyses to illuminate a macroscopic process: the project of British settler colonialism as it sprawled across time and space during this critical period of the creation and consolidation of settler colonial states. It gives an overview of pertinent scholarship and describes the topics of chapters to come.

By the late eighteenth century, it was cliché to observe that the British East India Company ruled India “by the sword.” Scholarship on the colonial state, though, has tended to pay more attention to the Company’s civil infrastructure. This chapter argues that the army was in fact an influential part of this empire, at times approaching a “stratocracy” – a state ruled by its army. It situates the Company’s armies simultaneously within India’s political landscape and British imperial networks and provides a brief overview of these contexts. It further explores what it means to bring soldiers to the forefront of historical analysis. Such an approach requires acknowledging the sharp inequities in the Company’s military, most dramatically between its white officer corps and the Indian sepoys (soldiers) and officers who made up the bulk of its forces. Such inequities pose difficulties for historical research, since the former group is far more visible in the archive, but also points to a key historical process. White officers used the systemic inequity to their own advantage – not just to assert power over sepoys but to claim influence in the colonial project.

Rather than understanding irony as the simple opposite of earnestness, sincerity, or genuineness, I want to suggest that it represents a mode of playful engagement with the hidden connective tissue that links the various commitments – serious or flippant, affirmative or destructive, quiescent or contentious – of a work, object, or discourse. Irony activates the latent trace of the one in the other, demonstrating how each of these serve ulterior motives beyond their stated purpose. Earnestness in turn can intensify its credibility and seriousness of purpose by confronting and working through the contradictions and tensions that ironic scrutiny exposes. A discourse or ideology is defined not only by what it values but also by what it attacks and rejects, by what it finds beautiful as well as by what it finds amusing, silly, or ridiculous. Irony activates, interrogates, and reorganizes the different possible combinations and permutations of commitments that organize any value system.

William Jones observed in 1780 that “compositions are like machines, where one part depends upon another: the art is to use method as builders do a scaffold, which is to be taken away when the work is finished; or as good workmen, who conceal the joints in their work, so it may look smooth and pleasant to the eye, as if it were all made of one piece.”1 As he noted, relations between parts of a composition are not necessarily obvious because, in good writing, the method of construction is artfully concealed. The same may be said of the contemporary thinking on which a method of construction draws and upon which it rests. This chapter therefore offers an overview of the scaffolding. It addresses the formal conventions and the ideas that good narrative-epistolary builders used their joints to connect during the period book-ended by Trollope and Behn, and concludes by discussing some key continuities and changes during this extended period in writers’ treatment of history, narrative, and letters.

Early in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written when Byron’s wanderings had led him at last to a more settled residence in Italy, he balances all that he has acquired in exile with a new wistfulness about England