Most scholars think state administrations vary because rulers attempt to maximize resource extraction given pressure from interstate competition and as constrained by the social structure of the societies they govern. This perspective cannot account for variations in British colonial tax administration in India from ca. 1770 to 1855. The British organized land revenue collection and administration as a whole through two different schemes. Both systems initially adopted a rhetoric of revenue maximization, but neither was decisively better matched to Indian social structure. Instead, administrators interpreted a seemingly opaque Indian society by understanding themselves as fundamentally similar to or different from Indians.
• 2010 Leo Lowenthal Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper, Department of Sociology, UC Berkeley.
• 2011 Best Graduate Student Paper Award, American Sociological Association Political Sociology Section.
• 2012 Charles Tilly Prize for Best Article, American Sociological Association Comparative and Historical Sociology Section.
Moral Accounting as Field Foundation in an Early Modern Empire
The English East India Company in the Late 18th Century
Abstract:
Field analysis--and the relational approach to historical social-scientific explanation of which it is an instance--helps illuminate the administrative dynamics of empires. While most studies of
imperial dynamics emphasize the “high imperialism” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article
extends field analysis to a crucial case from the second half of the eighteenth century: the English East
India Company’s transition from a (largely) merchant trading company to a territorial power. In this
disordered space of administration, officials struggling with one another for metropolitan recognition
provided moral accounts of themselves which, on the one hand, explained their behavior in terms drawn
from abstract, purportedly-universal social spaces, and, on the other hand, claimed credibility through a
personal “interest in disinterest.” I argue that these moral accounts helped delimit the boundaries of and
shape the dynamics within a distinctively imperial administrative field. To analyze this transformation, I
suggest a synthesis of three varieties of relational analysis: Bourdieu’s field theory, Fligstein and
McAdam’s analysis of strategic action fields, and Padgett and Powell’s work on network folding and
robust action.
The English East India Company as a Strategic Action Field, ca. 1763-1834
Abstract:
This paper considers the East India Company’s emergence as a territorial power from the 1760s until the revocation of most of its commercial functions in 1834. While this period has been a key episode for historians of the British Empire and of South Asia, social scientists have struggled with the Company’s ambiguous nature. In this article, I propose that a profitable way to grasp the Company’s transformation is to consider it as a global strategic action field. This perspective clarifies two key processes in the Company's transition: the enlargement of its territorial possessions; and the increased exposure of its patrimonial network to intervention from British metropolitan politics. To further suggest the utility of this analytic perspective, I synthesize evidence from a various sources, including data concerning the East India Court of Directors and the career histories of Company servants in two of its key administrative regions, Bengal and Madras, during this period of transition.
The Escalation of Administrative Politics in Early Colonial British India.
Abstract:
This paper addresses how the abstract moral arguments underlying differentiated ethical spheres of social life become features of intra-organizational conflict. By integrating the analysis of culture and power, it also shows how autonomous moral logics can become viable resources in political struggles. An analysis of the English East India Company's early colonial administration shows that a series of corruption scandals within the Company's administration escalated to include metropolitan authorities. As the Company's organizational protection from Parliament in London decayed after the Seven Years' War, these corruption scandals came under intense scrutiny from metropolitan political elites unfamiliar with the details of Indian administration. Consequently, administrators embroiled in the scandals—and hoping to successfully mobilize these new observers—used abstract moral arguments relying on the autonomous spheres of state, society, and economy in their appeals to those who lacked their local knowledge of India.
