Residents succeeded in devising strategies to build their credit within the Company and to cement their influence at court, based on broad similarities in how British and Indian social and political life were structured. Yet, this process was rocky and fraught with difficulty. The controversies that plagued the early Residency system reveal conflicting visions about the basis and legitimacy of Company power in the subcontinent and provide powerful illustrations of how ideological questions manifested themselves in the routine business of empire. Even where Company policy was clear, translating these policies into practice was easier said than done, and the gap between ideals and reality produced recurring tensions between the governor-general-in-council, who issued the instructions, and the Resident, who was responsible for making them happen. The relationships that developed between Residents and the Indian courtly elite were equally troubled. While Residents devoted a great deal of time and energy to harnessing the influence and expertise of courtly elites, they also inspired widespread opposition. Loyalties were rarely set in stone, and individuals who had previously shown an unwillingness to work with the Resident were apt to change tactics if the stakes were high enough, while those who had previously supported the Company could and did revolt if the opportunity presented itself. The picture of Company paramountcy that emerges is one which is far more contingent and fragmentary than previously thought. Still, this political framework endured up until Indian independence, and it did so through the combination of intelligence gathering, violence, gift-giving, and patronage outlined in this book.

Despite their diplomatic function, the Residents in office between 1798 and 1818 often preferred intimidation to accommodation. To some extent, their interventionist attitude reflected wider assumptions about the prevalence of ‘tyranny’, ‘inhumanity’, and misgovernment in India. These moral imperatives, combined with the supposed ineffectiveness and untrustworthiness of Indian allies, led Residents to argue for the necessity of unequal alliances backed by force. These convictions shaped the Residents’ relationships to the military, leading them to try and assert control over subsidiary forces in the region, and to panic when forces were disordered or insufficient. Subsidiary forces might have posed problems for the Resident, not least in the form of open mutiny, but they were also seen as essential to his control. Residents explicitly equated military and political power, and were determined to make a show of strength, contrary to the governor-general-in-council’s emphasis on conciliatory conduct. These differences of opinion become most apparent in the controversies that occasionally erupted around the Resident’s acts of judicial violence. Whereas superiors in London and Calcutta worried about undermining the Company’s claims to civilizational superiority through brutal acts of corporal punishment, in the Residents’ view civilization was instead a hindrance to be cast aside.

Conspicuous consumption and display were central to the Residents’ representational strategies at court. Britons in India are often assumed to have dismissed gift-giving as mere bribery and regarded regal pageantry as empty spectacle; in fact, the opposite is true. Residents were very aware of the symbolism of gifts and their efficacy at securing relationships both vertically and horizontally; this awareness is clearly manifest in their efforts to monitor and regulate these exchanges at court. The attempt on the part of the Company to impose a rigid, contractual framework on gift-giving was therefore not a sign of ignorance or disregard, nor was it simply an attempt to preclude corruption at court. By situating these debates within wider disagreements about the Residents’ expense claims, it becomes clear that there were other, more abstract issues at stake. These squabbles about money were a product of ambivalent attitudes about conspicuous consumption and display and reflect serious differences of opinion regarding the basis of the Company’s legitimacy in India.

In a hereditary monarchy, kinship mattered; yet, royal family members are too often relegated to the background in contemporary scholarship on the princely states. This chapter shows that royal family members could muster significant social, political, cultural, and economic capital in support of their various personal and political projects, and often figured prominently in the records as the Resident’s greatest allies, or greatest foes. Residents developed a range of strategies for co-opting or side-lining younger brothers, uncles, and nephews, who, despite being useful informants, were also destabilizing forces in regional politics, and a drain on the Company’s time and resources. Women played an even more important role at court, one that has been obscured in previous accounts of the Residencies. This chapter shows not only how the Resident sought to mobilize royal women for his purposes, but also how royal women themselves laid a claim on the Resident’s services through the idiom of kinship and protection, often with significant consequences for the Resident’s political strategy at court. Rather than simplifying their job, the Residents need to work through royal families in fact introduced significant complications.

Although historians have long recognized the important role that Indians played in the English East India Companys operations, the focus has usually been on the mechanics of direct rule in British India. Yet, the expertise of Indian cultural intermediaries was arguably even more important, as well as more contested, in the context of the Companys growing political influence over nominally independent Indian kingdoms. Focusing on the relationship between Residents and their Indian head secretaries (or munshis), this chapter considers how these relationships were conceptualized and debated by British officials, and reflects on the practical consequences of these relationships for the munshis involved. The tensions surrounding the role of the munshi in Residency business exemplify some of the practical dilemmas posed by the developing system of indirect rule in India, where the Resident had to decide how much responsibility to delegate to Indian experts better versed in courtly norms and practices, while at the same time maintaining his own image of authority and control. Although the Resident–munshi relationship was in many respects mutually beneficial, these relationships nevertheless spawned anxieties about transparency and accountability within the Company itself, as well as exciting resentments at court. Both Residents and munshis were required to negotiate between two political and institutional cultures, but it was the munshi who seems to have borne the brunt of the risks associated with this intermediary position.

Political intelligence was vital to the Company’s subsidiary alliance system; to enforce it, Residents needed to be able to identify when its conditions were being breached. Yet, the Residents’ papers indicate that the problem was not so much collecting intelligence as determining how to use it. Fraud, or the possibility of fraud, was an important consideration; Residents devised elaborate strategies for identifying forgeries as well as for managing the composition and transmission of letters at court. News passed by word of mouth proved even more ungovernable. Residents were prone to distrust rumour, viewing it as either idle gossip or as insidious disinformation propagated by enemies. Still, they sometimes had no choice but to engage with rumour, particularly when allegations of Company brutality circulated in the streets. Mistrust might have been a common feature at royal capitals, but it also permeated the Residents’ relationship with his superiors in the Company. Residents sometimes misrepresented their activities as a means of shoring up their authority, but they also relied on keeping lines of communication open; frequently, it was Calcutta that remained frustratingly silent. In sum, though gathering and disseminating intelligence was one of the Residencies’ primary functions, fulfilling this responsibility was never simple.

In conventional narratives of Britain’s empire overseas, the Company’s territorial empire in Bengal looms large, overshadowing the more nebulous history of its nominally independent, but practically subordinate, allies in the subcontinent. Yet, the subsidiary alliance system as it developed in India in the late eighteenth century set an important precedent that reverberated across Asia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean World. Empire of Influence furnishes a new perspective on an understudied yet vital period in the history of indirect rule when its future role in sustaining and expanding Britain’s empire remained unclear. Contrary to their depiction as cosmopolitan contact zones, the Residencies were as much spaces of empire as the courthouse or the counting room. Far from being oases sheltered from broader imperial currents, many of the divisions within the Company become most visible at the Residencies, where issues of distance, distrust, and the tensions between domination and exchange were at their most acute. From the vantage point of the Residencies, a period of the Company’s history that is usually associated with bureaucratization and standardization begins to look much more complicated.

Between 1798 and 1818, a theory and practice of paramountcy was forged, with lasting consequences for the Company’s empire in India. Though the subsidiary alliance system first emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, and the first Residents were posted to Indian courts in the 1770s, British conceptions of their own role in the subcontinent were initially limited to maintaining the status quo. Governor General Richard Wellesley, however, replaced the older emphasis on the balance of powers with a new, more moralizing vision of tranquillity in the subcontinent, with the Company acting as the ultimate political and military arbiter. Though Wellesley’s ambitions were repudiated initially, his insidious legacy lived on through the Residents who matured under his influence. By 1818, the Company’s right to intervene in allied kingdoms had moved beyond the realm of debate, even if the appropriate degree of intervention was never conclusively settled. Precedents from 1798 to 1818 would be cited as late as 1929 to justify the British government’s sweeping powers relative to its Indian allies. While 1857 is usually presented as a point of rupture in the history of the princely states, the period 1798–1818 set the terms for debates that rumbled on until Indian independence.