Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Alan Sharlin Memorial Award Fellows, 2009-2010

Nicholas Wilson, Department of Sociology: Economies, Moralities, and State Formations in the English East India Company, 1757 to 1858.

This project explores how the English East India Company (EIC) changed from a commercial organization to a territorial sovereign, coming to rule, by the 19th century, most of the Indian subcontinent. It asks how different governmental policies emerged in different parts of India, focusing on how administrators created boundaries between and sought to untangle the relationship among the state, society, and the economy. Wilson argues that administrators disentangled the three using their moral understandings of the relationship between themselves and other people, European and Indian, drawn partly from the moral philosophy of the Scottish enlightenment. Wilson’s research is based on quantitative analysis of administrators’ career patterns; archival and secondary research on the development of and variation in administrative policy among the EIC’s subsidiary administrative units; and an analysis of moral attitudes in 18th and 19th century England and Scotland.