This chapter examines Western infiltration into maritime Asia over the seventeenth century. I focus on three questions. First, how did Westerners establish territorial toeholds in maritime Asia? Second, why did Westerners find it so much easier to insinuate themselves into the Mughal Empire and other south and southeast Asian polities, compared to the Qing Empire? Third, how did this process of uneven insinuation pave the way for the West’s subsequent rise to at least partial dominance in Asia from the late eighteenth century? The chapter is organized as follows. The first section traces the gravitational pull of Asian prosperity for Europeans during the sixteenth century. The second section concentrates on the company-state as the main institution through which Europeans forged their Asian maritime empires. The third and fourth sections then contrast the varied success of European company-states in infiltrating the Mughal and Qing empires. I conclude by revisiting the larger parallels uniting the European maritime empires with their Asian terrestrial counterparts, and the legacies of their differential integration into South versus East Asia for the West’s later rise to global pre-eminence.

This chapter examines the English East India Company’s (EIC’s) rise to dominance in South Asia from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. The EIC followed Asian precedents by forging its empire through reliance on strategies of define and conquer and define and rule. Company officials first curated indigenous identities to mobilize a uniquely competitive multicultural conquest coalition. They then stabilized their rule through a diversity regime of ecumenical incorporation, which reified religious difference as the primary cleavage on which colonial divide and rule logics would rest. The chapter proceeds in six sections. The first charts the onset of competitive state-building in South Asia following the Mughal Empire’s decline. The second section recounts the EIC’s expansion, before critiquing existing explanations for this. The third to fifth sections advance my substantive explanation for the rise of the ‘Company Raj’. The discussion conforms to the template of emergence, institutionalization, legitimization and consolidation established earlier to explain the rise of the Mughals and the Manchus. The sixth section sums up the chapter’s findings and teases out its broader implications.

This chapter examines the rise of the Mughal and Qing empires, which together forged a template for rule that would define Asian and Western approaches to empire in the Old World down to the twentieth century. Mughal and Manchu conquest elites succeeded in establishing and maintaining rule over vastly more prosperous, populous and culturally sophisticated subject populations during the early modern era. They did so through strategies of define and conquer and define and rule, entailing the extensive customization and repurposing of indigenous normative and institutional resources for imperial ends. Imperial elites creatively remixed these resources, both to create local constituencies in favour of ‘barbarian’ rule, and also to generate the coercive reserves of hard power needed to defend their empires from internal and external hard challenges. Finally, rulers in both empires then stabilized their power through the establishment of distinct diversity regimes, which institutionalized existing practices of define and rule, while blocking the potential rise of anti-imperial coalitions.

This chapter introduces the book’s central puzzle, makes the case for considering Western imperialism through systematic comparison with its Asian predecessors and contemporaries, and previews the book’s central argument. I argue that the literature on international hierarchy and empires has neglected critical parallels between Western and Asian empire-building in the early modern period. Mughal, Manchu and British empire-builders each confronted significant barriers to conquest, in the form of cultural marginality and demographic insignificance relative to indigenous majorities. Each consequently relied on strategies of define and conquer and define and rule to mobilize the vast multicultural coalitions needed for large-scale territorial expansion. These parallels in turn yielded empires that foregrounded the management of cultural diversity – through the incorporation of difference rather than its assimilation – as the chief feature of imperial rule.

This chapter presents the book’s research design and central argument. I begin by considering accounts of the ‘rise of the West’ that explain Western expansion through reference to European exceptionalism, global logics of uneven and combined development, or the facilitating role of local networks and patterns of collective identity in enabling colonial conquest. Having critiqued these accounts, I then advocate an alternative Eurasia-centric approach that stresses the vital parallels and interconnections between ‘barbarian’ Mughal, British and Manchu conquests in early modern South and East Asia. A combination of military, economic, cultural and administrative developments across Eurasia made it easier for ‘barbarians’ to conquer and preserve empires on a subcontinental scale. After 1500, formerly stigmatized outsiders from Eurasia’s steppe, sea and forest frontiers capitalized on these opportunities to carve out the empires that eventually crystallized into the modern post-imperial states of India and China. These empires emerged from ‘barbarian’ efforts to overcome similar challenges, and yielded strikingly similar incorporative ideologies and models of imperial governance.

This chapter considers the parallel crises that convulsed the British Raj and the Qing Dynasty in the mid-nineteenth century, and that radically reconstituted international orders in both South and East Asia. The chapter proceeds in five sections. The first section presents a comparative overview of the British Raj and the Qing Empire in c. 1820. The second section then outlines the commercial and ideational pressures that propelled an attempted transformation of the EIC’s mode of rule in India, as well as stoking British commercial and military expansion into Qing-dominated East Asia. The third and fourth sections then explore liberalism’s corrosive impact on both the British Raj and the Qing Empire, detailing the crises that nearly destroyed both empires in the mid-nineteeth century. The fifth section concludes with a comparative examination of international orders in South and East Asia after 1860. The mid-century crises of empire that the chapter examines put paid to British attempts to coercively ‘civilize’ Asian polities for a generation, locking in conservative and incorporative diversity regimes that sustained the Raj and the Qing Dynasty down to their destruction in the twentieth century.

This chapter recapitulates the book’s arguments, before teasing out its larger implications both for International Relations scholars interested in the comparative evolution of international systems, and also for debates within the social sciences more broadly about the origins and character of global early modernity.

This chapter explains the Mughal and Qing empires’ diverging fates over the eighteenth century, owing to variations in their ability to accommodate cultural diversity over the course of territorial expansion. The Mughal Empire failed to extend its regime of syncretic incorporation as it expanded into the Deccan, prefiguring imperial overstretch, a legitimation crisis and subsequent decline. Conversely, the Manchus extended their diversity regime of segregated incorporation as they conquered vast new territories on the Eurasian steppe. The resulting divergence opened up opportunities for the East India Company’s later rise in India, even while continued Manchu dynamism limited Western expansion in mainland East Asia. The chapter proceeds as follows. The first section sketches the Mughal Empire’s fall, canvassing existing explanations for its decline, before advancing an alternative account in the second section. The third and fourth sections then respectively narrate and explain the Manchu Empire’s further expansion during the eighteenth century. The fifth section reviews the legacies of these empires’ divergent trajectories in shaping their respective regions’ subsequent evolution.

This chapter examines the Eurasian Transformation as a catalyst for the rise of the Asian and Western empires that together reshaped Asia during the early modern period. Specifically, I aim to understand how the Eurasian Transformation made it possible for ‘barbarians’ to establish primacy over pre-existing international systems in South and East Asia, despite their limited numbers and stigmatised status. I begin by offering a synoptic overview of Eurasia at c. 1500. I next introduce the Eurasian Transformation, a unique conjunction of military, economic, cultural and administrative macro-processes that together made new forms of empire-building possible from this time on. I conclude by considering the Eurasian Transformation’s diverse impacts on Eurasia’s sedentary power centres, and on the liminal ‘barbarian’ actors populating Eurasia’s land and sea frontiers.