India experienced several turbulent decades after the official takeover by the British Crown, following the Indian Mutiny, in 1858. Becoming an official territory of the British Empire came with promises of progress. Already by the 1870s, though, the promises seemed hollow. The textile industry, once a flourishing sector that supplied fabrics to most of the world, was dwindling. The average Indian was sinking into deeper poverty. And millions died in the three largest famines of India’s history between 1873 and 1901. It goes without saying that India’s large territory, rich history and its dependent position within the British Empire rendered its context dense and complex. India was extensively linked to the global economy and had a long history of trading in the subcontinent, primarily in textiles during the Mughal period, and later as one of the main suppliers of raw materials to the growing textile industry in Manchester in northern England. This chapter aims to contextualise the first generation of modern Indian economists by identifying the major trends and events affecting India in the past four decades of the nineteenth century.

The seventh chapter argues that Lutfullah Khan’s critical views on empire went viral after he left Britain in 1844, as he garnered positive reviews in London magazines commenting on the 1857 Indian mutiny. Published in June of that year and edited by his friend and former employer, Captain Edward Backhouse Eastwick, Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohamedan Gentleman encodes the two men’s divergent politics: a Company conservative who campaigned against Crown rule in India and a munshi patriot perceived by the Victorian press as opposing a belligerent Company. By integrating picaresque fictions on Indian thugs, the memoir enabled periodical readers to imagine retrospectively the transition from a Mughal Empire under the Company’s inept custodianship to direct rule under Victoria. Her 1858 proclamation that the feelings of the natives of India were to be henceforth respected was felt by Lutfullah’s readers before these feelings congealed into a new ruling ideology. Autobiography shows that the nation state’s attempt to repair its intimate relationship with Asian subjects was mediated by those subjects’ struggle to claim a stake in the national body.