I argue that the periphery while responding to a ‘jurisdictional imperialism’ upended interational law’s civilisation-giving thesis by exporting law to the metropole. I challenge the metropole’s claims of a one-way export to the colonies of the assumed normative surpluses. Put down in the British stationery as engagements, sunnuds and treaties, these colonial texts projected an imperially layered nature of the native sovereignty. After the Crown take- over of the East India Company in 1858, the British India Government carefully rebooted, even mimicked, the native polyandric relationship of the tribal chiefs, petty states and semi-sovereigns with the Mughal–Maratha complex using multi-normative legal texts. The Privy Council-before and after 1858-sanctified within com- mon law as the acts of state, both, the seizure of territories from Indian kings and the ossification of encumbrances attached to the annexed territories. The Indian princely states effected a gradual end of the Mughal and the Maratha confederacies while appropriating international legal language. The role of the roughly 600 Indian princely kingdoms in the transformation of the law of nations into international law during the 19th century is an overlooked episode of international legal history. By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Company’s aggressive imperialism formed part of a wider political project to create an absolute monarchy in England and to establish an autocratic English empire overseas. The corporation sought to centralise and militarise the English presence in Asia in order both to maintain its control of England’s trade to the East and in support of Stuart absolutism. The article contends that the Company’s aggressive overseas expansion was pursued for metropolitan and pan-imperial purposes as much as for South Asian ones. This article re-examines and re-interprets this burst of imperial expansion in light of political developments in England and the wider English empire during the later Stuart era. With important exceptions, most scholarship has viewed the Company’s coercive imperialism in the later seventeenth century and the First Anglo-Mughal War as the results primarily, if not exclusively, of political and economic conditions in South Asia. During the 1670s and 1680s, the English East India Company pursued an aggressive programme of imperial expansion in the Asian maritime world, culminating in a series of armed assaults on the Mughal Empire.
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