Tiraana Bains is a historian of modern Britain and the global British Empire. Her work examines the contentious making and remaking of the British Empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
She is currently completing a book-length project titled Instituting Empire: The Contested Makings of a British Imperial State in South Asia, 1750-1800. This project asks how and why a strong, centralizing British imperial state emerged in South Asia in the eighteenth century. The project shows that continuous and multi-sited contestation drove British imperial state-building in South Asia. The formation of a centralizing British imperial state in South Asia was not only violent and coercive but, akin to the concurrent emergence of the United States of America and revolutionary France, also a momentous and participatory experiment in state and empire making. Elite and non-elite South Asians and Britons alike routinely deliberated over and opposed imperial governance and underlying political economic schemes. Not unlike their “revolutionary” counterparts in North America, South Asians articulated their own conceptions of imperial rule, vociferously debating taxation, labor, and political authority.
