This concluding chapter considers the reforms of Governor-general Charles, Lord Cornwallis (1786-93) as the culmination of a decades-long process of imperial co-option, whereby British authorities had gradually expropriated and recast a late Mughal, Persianate system of taxation and justice. Cornwallis’s famous minute on civil justice from 1793 proclaimed itself as a great leap forward in its assertion of ‘British’ justice, making all civil disputes over land and taxation cognizable in separate law courts. Yet Cornwallis, like earlier British reformers, while he railed against the supposedly despotic practices of earlier Indian rulers, was also intensely aware of the multitudes of Indian petitioners and agents (wakils) crowding the Company’s ‘adalats and making legal claims on the Company. His minute on civil justice therefore did not simply announce the arrival of a new rule of law, but envisioned it as a crucial engine of colonial pedagogy, which would eventually turn clamorous and unruly Indian litigants into law-abiding subjects.

This chapter shows how the judicial reforms of Governor Warren Hastings in 1772 attempted to recentre sovereign authority in the British settlement of Calcutta byco-opting and recasting late Mughal venues and practices of petitioning and dispute resolution. It explores how Hastings attempted to found the Company's legal system, not just on 'religious' forms of Muslim and Hindu law, but on Mughal practices of revenue administration. Even after 1772, the chief revenue office in Calcutta (khalisa sharifa or ‘khalsa’) – retained an important role as a site for investigating disputes over land and revenues, and for discovering a new form of ‘civil law’ based on the Company’s interpretations of late Mughal precedents.

In this deeply researched and revealing account, Robert Travers offers a new view of the transition from Mughal to British rule in India. By focusing on processes of petitioning and judicial inquiry, Travers argues that the East India Company consolidated its territorial power in the conquered province of Bengal by co-opting and transforming late Mughal, Persianate practices of administering justice to petitioning subjects. Recasting the origins of the pivotal ‘Permanent Settlement’ of the Bengal revenues in 1793, Travers explores the gradual production of a new system of colonial taxation and civil law through the selective adaptation and reworking of Mughal norms and precedents. Drawing on English and Persian sources, Empires of Complaints reimagines the origins of British India by foregrounding the late Mughal context for colonial state-formation, and the ways that British rulers reinterpreted and reconstituted Persianate forms of statecraft to suit their new empire.

In early colonial Bengal, pervasive disputes between urban creditors and tax-paying landlords (zamindars) shaped the East India Company's emergent system of civil justice. Mediating conflicts between creditors and landed debtors was already an important aspect of rulership under the nawabs of Bengal. The Company’s efforts at fiscal centralization, raising tax demands on landholders, and auctioning off ‘revenue farms’ – rights to collect local revenues in return for payments agreed in advance – to wealthy merchants (banians), further intensified conflicts in the countryside. By exploring the controversial efforts of banians to accumulate land rights, and by tracing the Company's hesitant efforts to adjudicate disputes over land and credit, this chapter further reveals how the Company's strategies of legal and fiscal centralization depended on the adaptation and reworking late Mughal, Persianate practices of claimsmaking and dispute resolution. It shows how the Company's efforts to consolidate zamindari rights as a saleable, mortgageable form of taxable private property were being worked out as much in judicial inquiries and decrees as in central legislation.

This chapter explores how inheritance disputes involving landholders (zamindars) in early colonial Bengal became a site for the production of a Persianate form of Hindu law. By tracing in detail the process of judicial investigation in two complex cases of of zamindari inheritance involving elite Hindu zamindars, the chapter shows how British officials drew on the expert knowledge of khalsa revenue officials (especially qanungos) and of brahman pandits (experts on dharmashastra), and how the Company government tried to justify its judicial decrees on the basis of a reconstituted form of Mughal law. The records of judicial inquiries into zamindari tenures reveal the Persianate context for the Company’s early administration of Hindu law, as nawabi practices for hearing and deciding disputes among tax-paying zamindars were reformulated under the Company state.

This chapter explores the late Mughal context for colonial-state-formation, focusing on Persianate practices of claimsmaking and dispute resolution in nawabi Bengal. It examines Persian accounts of Mughal and nawabi governance circulating in the orbit of the East India Company government in late eighteenth century Bengal, as well as British views of Mughal institutions, highlighting the role of late Mughal tax officials administering justice to petitioning subjects in disputes about land and taxation. It shows how the central revenue office of the Bengal nawabs, the khalisa sharifa, became a key site for the Company's colonization and transformation of Mughal, Persianate practices of legal ordering.

Sayyid Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i (b. 1727) is best known as the author of the most comprehensive Persian history of eighteenth century India – the Siyar-ul-muta’akhkhirin. This chapter situates Ghulam Husain’s well-known history in the context his much less well-known political career as a late Mughal official and landholder (jagirdar). It argues that this history, sometimes read as a precociously ‘anti-colonial’ text, also constituted a kind of petition of appeal, a form of legal self-representation, designed both to defend Ghulam Husain’s family landholdings (jagirs) in Bihar as a form of hereditary property, and more broadly to persuade the East India Company government to restore the once-great Mughal system of intizam, or proper order, including Mughal practices of responsive and consultative rulership.Ghulam Husain’s history gives a petitioner’s-eye view of the Company state, showing how state-oriented late Mughal elites turned to the Company government after the destruction of the nawabi regime in an effort to secure their rights and status – drawing on the historical memory and documentary record of Mughal practices of legal entitlement.