English East India Company cultural knowledge and governmental responses to South Asian religious diversity between 1601 and 1700

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how encounters with South Asian religious diversity shaped the English East India Company’s systems of knowledge, governance, and authority between 1601 and 1700. Moving beyond interpretations that emphasise commerce or geopolitics, it argues that religion was central to the company’s early development as a governing institution. Drawing on company correspondence, travel accounts, administrative records, and the writings of figures such as Streynsham Master, the study demonstrates how concerns about conversion, loyalty, and moral discipline informed corporate policy and administrative practice. The company’s responses to religious plurality were profoundly shaped by engagement with Mughal and regional traditions of governance, which employed forms of religious accommodation to maintain political stability within diverse populations. Rather than imposing a purely English model, company officials adapted existing South Asian practices of sufferance, communal representation, and negotiated authority. The article also explores the role of brokers and intermediaries, whose fluid religious identities complicated European confessional categories while facilitating commercial and political relationships. Simultaneously, the company developed classificatory forms of knowledge that rendered religious communities increasingly legible and governable. By tracing the intersections of religion, knowledge production, and administration, the article shows how the company’s management of plurality laid important foundations for later British imperial governance in India.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2026 · DOI ↗