From the middle of the eighteenth century the British in India used treaties with South Asian rulers to give legal form and sanction to their growing military and territorial power. While the British East India Company used treaties to subordinate or ally with other Indian regional states, British critics of the Company’s military conquests questioned the legitimacy of its diplomatic activities and accused the Company of violating the principles of the law of nations. Thus treaty making became a critical site for generating new imperial imaginaries in Britain, as well as for extending British power in South Asia. By the end of the eighteenth century British officials were using increasingly unequal treaties with Indian states, justified by pervasive stereotypes of “faithless” and despotic Indian rulers, to assert their imperial hegemony (Abstract).
Travers, Robert. “A British Empire by Treaty in Eighteenth-Century India.” Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900. Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 132-60.