International historians have shown that governmental and nongovernmental organizations, most prominently the League of Nations and United Nations, have played key roles as both actors and arenas for internationalism. This panel studies the institutions created within South Asia as tools of global outreach, as well as the ways South Asians engaged with extant institutions for internationalist aims. Collectively, this theme explores institutions as spaces of internationalism while also using them to reflect on different scales of global engagement.

Speakers

Tanja Bührer (University of Bern), "Foreign Relations between the British East India Company and South Indian States and the Global Transformations of Internationalism during the Long Nineteenth Century"

Swati Chawla (O.P. Jindal Global University), “Himalayan, not Chinese or Indian: Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet at the Twilight of Empire, 1946-49”

Marc Reyes (University of Connecticut), “In the Circle of Great Powers: India's National and International Quest to Master the Atom"

Chair

Avinash Paliwal (SOAS)

REGISTER HERE

Tanja Bührer (University of Bern), "Foreign Relations between the British East India Company and South Indian States and the Global Transformations of Internationalism during the Long Nineteenth Century"

Studies on the British East India Company’s (EIC) transformation from a merchant company to a territorial Empire during the second half of the eighteenth century are preoccupied with British colonial state-building in Bengal. Simultaneously, however, the Company launched a diplomatic expansion covering the most important Indian rulers, who had build their own de facto sovereign states given the turbulent years of the withering Mughal Empire. Like the EIC’s formal expansion that build on local state structures and societies before transforming into foreign domination, the EIC’s interstate relations with Indian regional states build on Mughal diplomatic practices before transforming into indirect rule, which would become likewise a crucial component of the Pax Britannica and later of the British Raj. British apologetic narratives on this historical process argue that the presumably ‘lawless Asiatic despots’ did neither recognize nor truly understand the characteristics of European treaty making and international legal regulations because of the sharp differences between the “East” and the “West” regarding political cultures. By contrast, my paper aims to show that British and Asian diplomatic intermediaries managed to negotiate a common ground of engagement and transcultural forms of state interaction. Moreover, Indian rulers’ diplomatic missions to Europe give evidence of their attempts to become a member of the European diplomatic system and the European family of nations. This presentation therefore argues that a truly global internationalism would have been possible around 1800, but that both the British national authorities and the Company government pursued the forced exclusion of Indian regional states from international relations because they sought to exploit imperial wealth through domination. This exclusive legal regulation regarding South Asia crucially shaped nineteenth century’s discriminatory international law and European relations with the global south.

Swati Chawla (O.P. Jindal Global University), “Himalayan, not Chinese or Indian: Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet at the Twilight of Empire, 1946-49”

The brief years leading up to and soon after India’s Independence from colonial rule involved territorial consolidation through the merger of 500-odd princely states into the Union. Additionally, along its long northern and eastern borders, India re-negotiated colonial treaties with neighboring governments, including the Himalayan nations of Bhutan, Sikkim, and Tibet. Closely tied together by shared language and faith, as well as networks of trade, intermarriage, and monastic patronage, all three states were apprehensive about what the change in political leadership would mean for their relations with India. All restated old territorial claims. Tibet brought up the validity of the McMahon Line from the Simla Convention of 1914. Sikkim and Bhutan demanded the retrocession, respectively, of Darjeeling, and of Buxa Duar and Dewangiri, which had been ceded to British India. With simultaneous political upheavals in both India and China, intelligence reports at the time mention talks about the Governments of Bhutan, Sikkim, and Tibet forming a federation of these Tibetan-speaking countries, to resist incorporation into the two newly emerging states on either side of the Himalayan mountain range. The presentation traces the imagination of this “Himalayan federation” by drawing on correspondence and intelligence reports from Delhi, Gangtok, Lhasa, and London from the beginning of the Cabinet Mission negotiations (1946) to the signing of new friendship treaties between India and Bhutan (1949), and India and Sikkim (1950).

Marc Reyes (University of Connecticut), “In the Circle of Great Powers: India's National and International Quest to Master the Atom"

Even before India achieved its 1947 independence, the future state had already established its own Atomic Energy Commission. The first generation of Indian leaders, especially the commission’s founder, Homi J. Bhabha, believed Indian expertise in atomic power would accelerate the new nation’s industrial and technological development. To build this knowledge, however, India needed both indigenous and international knowhow. While the nation educated and trained the next generation of Indian atomic specialists, to meet its immediate needs it turned to the scientists of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada for funding and assistance. This presentation examines how atomic energy, from 1947 to 1974, emerged as a crucial foreign policy matter between India and the aforementioned three countries. While India professed only an interest in atomic energy’s peaceful uses, it also refused to close off any options on how it might harness such power, even the ability to produce atomic bombs. Incorporating sources from multiple countries, the study views India’s atomic energy program as a transnational project shaped by Indian and non-Indian actors. The presentation concludes that India’s quest to master the atom went beyond scientific prestige and recognition as a modern state.

This talk unfortunately had to be cancelled.