Before empire

James Fraser was a Scottish writer for the East India Company, and was based in Surat and other port cities throughout the Indian Ocean world for various stints from the 1730s to the 1750s. Over the course of these decades, Fraser feuded with the British governor of Bombay, wrote a history of Nadir Shah, learned Persian in Surat, studied Sanskrit with a Brahmin in Khambayat and amassed an extensive collection of Indian manuscripts, most of which are still housed at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Throughout his tenure in India, Fraser was frequently critical of attempts by East India Company (EIC) administrators to expand their power on the Subcontinent's western coast and wrote of the Mughal dynasty as the primary legitimate source of political power in the region.

How can scholars working in the context of postcolonial, 21st-century Southasia make sense of the careers of individuals like Fraser? How should we view Europeans who wrote about the Subcontinent in the centuries and decades preceding European military and political domination? Given what we know about the expansion of imperial control in the late 18th century, how do we accurately contextualise the writings and careers of Europeans who operated in moments of shifting power? And what do answers to these questions tell us about European production of knowledge of Southasia?