Imperial Rule and the Denial of Statehood: British Paramountcy and the Princely States of South Asia

It is widely assumed that the British, as part of their rapid imperial expansion in South Asia during the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, annexed most parts of the region and subjected it to direct rule. It is, in addition, a common perception that postcolonial India and Pakistan were largely an immediate extension of the British Indian Empire, both in terms of the territories that they spanned and the institutional legacies that were left behind by the British. What these assumptions, however, fail to take into account is the fact that South Asia, throughout British presence in the region, was comprised of a range of varied and, in crucial regards, sovereign polities that existed parallel to the provinces that made up British India. These were known as 'princely states', of which 565 still remained in 1947 – i.e. when the British Indian Empire ceased to exist. The present monograph project is intended to rectify the many misunderstandings and omissions that exist when the history of the British Empire in South Asia and its postcolonial legacies is told. By emphasising the role of the princely states, we gain a more nuanced understanding of what direct and indirect rule exactly consisted of, and of how the British Empire was consistently grounded in divisible forms of sovereignty and overlapping layers of authority. It also counters dominant, yet mistaken, ideas of decolonisation as equalling the final, and given, stage of a global diffusion of the nation state form.