Robert Travers

Robert Travers specializes in modern British history and the history of the British Empire with a particular focus on colonial India, and he studies how new ideas about political life were generated through colonial encounters. His earlier research looked at how British officials of the English East India Company approached the government of vast Indian territories conquered in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. His book, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: the British in Bengal 1757-93 examined British ideas about restoring an ‘ancient constitution’ in India, apparently discovered among the remnants of the Mughal Empire, and how this project floundered in the chaotic aftermath of colonial conquest. His new work focuses on issues of political economy, and how the early colonial regime in India addressed issues of famine, grain markets, land rights, the organization of textile production, money and banking.