Chapter 4 more resolutely follows Indian pilgrims beyond India. It thus surveys the remarkable ascendance, on the broader circuits of the hajj, of an institutional network meant for Indian Sufi pilgrims, a series of linked lodges that sprawled from Arabia, Syria, Anatolia, to Istanbul. Mainly through Ottoman sources, the chapter demonstrates how banded and corporatized attitudes formed among mobile and migrant South Asian pilgrims in the Middle East, and how these social formations in turn animated the authority and influence of “neo-Sufi” groups of Naqshbandis and Qadiris. Taking readers into the built environments of the so-called Hindi or “Indian” Sufi lodges of the Ottoman empire, the chapter additionally explores how the hajj gave way not only to forms of cultural cosmopolitanisms but also cultural differences among globally interacting Muslims. As the chapter argues, due to an influx of Indian pilgrims into the Hindi Sufi lodges, their institutional identities as sites and spaces of sociability for South Asian pilgrims abroad sharpened during the eighteenth century. Simultaneously, however, itinerant Indian Sufis also drew on Ottoman channels of social communications, legal petitioning strategies, and state and interstate linkages to successfully situate themselves as “transimperial subjects” straddling South Asia and the Middle East.

This chapter centers on the controversy between Lord Wellesley (1798–1805) and the Company’s Court of Directors over the College of Fort William. It shows that this controversy turned fundamentally on the danger Wellesley’s pet project posed to the Company state. The college served to aggrandize the governor-general at the directors’ expense and to establish his own legitimacy with multiple audiences. It would do this not through conciliation but through the projection of an image of grandeur consonant with a kingly territorial sovereignty. In a sign of the threat posed by Wellesley’s ideas, the directors continued to fear them long after his departure. Ongoing disputes over books, natural history, and scholar-officials suggested that his “revolution” was far from finished.

In 1700 the Mughals controlled much of the Indian subcontinent. By 1858 the British Crown ruled. Why did this transition occur? How did the relationship between the state and economic activity change? And how did the economy perform? This chapter provides an overview, discussing competing perspectives on the breakdown of the Mughal Empire, the rise of the East India Company, the increasing commercialization of the economy, and changes in the economic structure. The literature suggests that the East India Company’s political and military success partly came from more successful fiscal administration compared to its Indian rivals. After consolidating its rule, British policy favoured the export of Indian primary products and the import of manufactured goods, contributing to deindustrialization. In agriculture, the area cultivated increased with population, but technology stagnated. Per capita income, which was already low, may have fallen slightly. Conflicts between the state and local users of forests and other resources emerged, especially in conjunction with the introduction of a major technological innovation, the railways. Our period ends with the Mutiny, a formidable challenge to British rule, following which British policy became conservative, seeking to preserve the existing social order.

The fourth chapter argues that Dean Mahomet’s English memoir, The Travels (1793), and Abu Taleb Khan’s Persian travelogue, Masir-i Talibi-fi-Bilad-i-Afranji [“Travels of Talib in the Lands of the Franks”], are bookend ruminations on Ireland before and after the 1798 revolt. Their ambivalent feelings about war are implicated in the dense web of social relations that link India to Ireland. I first examine Mahomet’s account of the 1781 British capture of the Rajah of Benares Chayt Singh, as mediated by newspaper reports about Irish MP Edmund Burke’s condemnation of unmanly colonial abuses in India during the Hastings impeachment trial (1788–1796).Then I discuss Abu Taleb’s reaction to the 1799 British defeat of the sultan of Mysore Tipu Sultan, as celebrated in the Dublin circus production of Philip Astley’s The Siege and Storming of Seringapatam. These writers’ patriotic responses to the theatrics of power imply a kinship with Irish hosts who, in their minds, belong to an Indo-Celtic Eurasia.