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Christina Welsch™s The Company™s Sword makes John Ben Snow Prize shortlist

Christina Welsch™s book The Company’s Sword: The East India Company and the Politics of Militarism,1644-1858, is on the shortlist for the . The book authored by Welsch, associate professor of history and South Asian studies at ºÚÁÏÀÏ˾»ú, was published in August 2022 by Cambridge University Press. It is one of four books nominated for the shortlist by the North American Conference on British Studies; the winner of the Snow Prize will be announced at the NACBS national conference in November.

Welsch™s first book, The Company’s Sword: The East India Company and the Politics of Militarism,1644-1858, flips India™s traditional historical narrative about colonial India, shifting focus from the northeast to south India where the importance of the armies and soldiers to the understanding of India™s social and political history becomes clear. Welsch shows how Indian and European soldiers shaped and challenged the Company’s political expansion and how elite officers turned those dynamics into a bid for ‘stratocracy’”a state dominated by its army. Combining colonial records with Mughal Persian sources from Indian states, the book offers new insight into India’s eighteenth-century military landscape, showing how elite officers positioned themselves as the sole actors who could navigate, understand, and control those networks. The analysis provides a new approach, chronology, and geography through which to understand the Company Raj. It offers a fresh perspective of the Company’s collapse after the rebellions of 1857, tracing the deep roots of that conflict to the Company’s eighteenth-century development.

The John Ben Snow Prize is awarded annually to a North American scholar in any field of British Studies dealing with the period from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. The North American Conference on British Studies is a scholarly society dedicated to all aspects of the study of British civilization.

Posted in News on October 3, 2023.