The Political History of India and the Creation of an Historiography of Imperial Conquest

Sir John Malcolm’s first major work, the Sketch of the Political History of India (1811), is a path-setting book in the historiography of the British conquest of South Asia. It was the first British narrative history of the period from 1784 to 1805. As such, it charted the final transformation of the East India Company from a body of merchants into the custodians of the British Empire in India. Put another way, it presented the history of British India in the late eighteenth century in terms of the futile resistance of Company’s directors to the growth of a British imperial state in South Asia. The Sketch is the first major historical work of this period to apply British theories about the unsuitability of the law of nations or the concept of a balance of power to British relations with the Indian princes. Written by a major actor in the diplomatic events it described, the Sketch expressed the historical consciousness of the Company officials who had pushed for imperial expansion in the generation after Warren Hastings.