The Strange Case of Lord Pigot recounts some interesting and true stories from English settlements in India in the 17th and 18th centuries. It traces several instances of grave insubordination and rebellion at those settlements, and culminates in the public furore over the arrest, imprisonment, and death in confinement, of one of the greatest English governors of Madras. It also recounts the remarkable tale of the rise of the Nawab of Arcot, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, to power; his contracting of huge debts to private European creditors, and the public attention and parliamentary discussion his liabilities drew for over 40 years. Drawing mainly on contemporary publications, this narrative travels from the time of Francis Day through that of Dupleix, De Bussy, De Lally, Clive, Calcutta, the siege of Madras, and the fall of Pondicherry, to Pigot’s second governorship, and the events that followed.

Trust and Distrust offers the first overview of Britain's history of corruption in office in the pre-modern era, 1600-1850, and as such will appeal not only to historians, but also to political and social scientists. Mark Knights paints a picture of the interaction of the domestic and imperial stories of corruption in office, showing how these stories were intertwined and related. Linking corruption in office to the domestic and imperial state has not been attempted before, and Knights does this by drawing on extensive interdisciplinary sources relating to the East India Company as well as other colonial officials in the Atlantic World and elsewhere in Britain's emerging empire. Both 'corruption' and 'office' were concepts that were in evolution during the period 1600-1850 and underwent very significant but protracted change which this study charts and seeks to explain. The book makes innovative use of the concept of trust, which helped to shape office in ways that underlined principles of selflessness, disinterestedness, integrity, and accountability in officials.

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.

The Art of a Corporation is a comprehensive study of artworks that were commissioned and collected by the East India Company from the early seventeenth to the midnineteenth centuries. These items range from oil paintings on canvas and marble statuary, to sandstone Buddhas and metal figurines of Hindu deities. The book takes a chronological approach and focuses on provenance to show that objects are valuable primary resources for understanding the East India Company’s history. The artworks illustrate how one of the longest-surviving multinational corporations in the Western world changed over its three-century history and provide a powerful visual account of its perpetually reinvented image. This book is a must read for scholars and researchers of art history, colonial art, colonial studies, British history, economic history, business history, South Asian history, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

This biographical history of the English Civil War profiles the lives and ultimate fates of the nearly 60 men who sentenced their king to death. On January 30th, 1649, King Charles I was executed on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall. The parliamentarian High Court of Justice declared him guilty of treason, disregarding the Divine Right of Kings. Fifty-nine commissioners signed his death warrant. These killers of the king were soldiers, lawyers, Puritans, Republicans—and some mere opportunists—all brought together under one infamous banner. In Charles I’s Executioners, James Hobson explores the lives of these men, shedding new light on their backgrounds, ideals, and motives. Their stories are a powerful tale of revenge and clashing convictions; their futures determined by their one fateful decision. When Charles II was restored, he enacted a deadly wave of retribution against the signatories. Some pleaded for mercy, many went into hiding or fled abroad, while others stoically awaited their sentence.

In Sufi Women of South Asia. Veiled Friends of God, Tahera Aftab, drawing upon various sources, offers the first unique and comprehensive account of South Asian Sufi women, from the eleventh to the twentieth century.