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 2023 John Ben Snow Prize for the best book in pre-1800 British Studies. The book authored by Welsch, associate professor of history and South Asian studies at The College of Wooster, 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.