During the 1730s, the nawab of Bengal, Shuja Khan, warned the Mughal court in Delhi against the renewal of the EIC's commercial rights, the most important of these being the duty-free trade farman granted by Emperor Farukhsiyar in 1717. According to him, although it had previously been possible for the Mughals to maintain control over them, the EIC had now become exceedingly entrenched in Bengal and could undermine the very imperial framework that had allowed and facilitated their presence in the first instance. The nawab made a rather stark assessment of the Company's affairs, stating:

As subsequent events were to prove, Shuja Khan was not wrong. While conventional narratives of Britain's imperial art usually commence with the late eighteenth century, imaginative visions of India had begun to permeate English visual arts earlier on. However, colonial overtures until that point take on a layer of meaning that remains to be fully explored.