Chapter one surveys the shifting relationship between colonial law and Islam during the first century of colonial rule. The chapter shows how the term “personal law,” absent from earlier discussions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, became entrenched as a core organizing principle of colonial law between the 1830s and the 1870s. Global revolutions in law, including territorial sovereignty and legal historicism, inflected specific developments in India, including the channeling of evangelical enthusiasm into projects of “secular conversion,” which looked to law as a civilizing influence.