The Company’s Sword: The East India Company and the Politics of Militarism, 1644-1858

In the late eighteenth century, it was a cliché that the East India Company ruled India ‘by the sword.’ Christina Welsch shows how Indian and European soldiers shaped and challenged the Company’s political expansion and how elite officers turned those dynamics into a bid for ‘stratocracy’ – a state dominated by its army. Combining colonial records with Mughal Persian sources from Indian states, The Company’s Sword offers new insight into India’s eighteenth-century military landscape, showing how elite officers positioned themselves as the sole actors who could navigate, understand, and control those networks. Focusing on south India, rather than the Company’s better-studied territories in Bengal, the analysis provides a new approach, chronology, and geography through which to understand the Company Raj. It offers a fresh perspective of the Company’s collapse after the rebellions of 1857, tracing the deep roots of that conflict to the Company’s eighteenth-century development. About the speaker: Christina Welsch is The Robert Critchfield Chair of English History at the College of Wooster (Ohio, USA). Her work examines the role that soldiers and other military actors have played in shaping (and resisting) colonial policies and ideologies. Her first book, The Company’s Sword: The East India Company and the Politics of Militarism, 1644-1858 (Cambridge, 2022), on the Company’s southerly Madras Army, was awarded the Jon Ben Snow Prize for best book in British history (pre-1800) from the North American Conference on British Studies in 2023. Her second project seeks to situate the Anglo-Mysore wars of the eighteenth century as part of a set of global conflicts.