Willoughby’s Minute: Treaty of Nownahar, Fraud, and British Sindh

Description

Willoughby’s Minute describes events that surround the 1842 Treaty of Nownahar.

Its focus is on how the indigenous sovereign Mir Ali Morad committed a fraud when he altered the treaty. Authored by John Pollard Willoughby, a career East India Company civil servant and Bombay Council Board member, the Minute provides an alternative genealogy to contextualize British debates about Sindh’s annexation. This genealogy does not focus on Britain’s aggressive anti-Russian imperial policy in Afghanistan (i.e., the Great Game). Instead, it demonstrates how a local treaty—that did not involve the British directly—contextualizes Sindh’s annexation and the institutional relationship between civil and military authority within the East India Company.

Histories often link British actions in Sindh to an aggressive anti-Russian imperial policy in Afghanistan (i.e., the Great Game). While these histories capture the politics and policies that surround British imperialism in the 1840s, they also strip Sindh’s history of complex local interactions. In this historiography, indigenous players and circumstances are lost to the Great Game as the only legitimate context for understanding British actions in Sindh. Willoughby’s Minute, which describes events surrounding the 1842 Treaty of Nownahar, illustrates how a fraud by a local Talpur ruler named Mir Ali Morad informs Sindh’s subsequent annexation by the British. The Minute also demonstrates how a local treaty that did not involve the British provides an alternative genealogy to historically contextualize British debates about the East India Company’s actions in Sindh. This genealogy focuses not on the Great Game but a debate secretly involving the Minute’s author and his beliefs about the institutional relationship between civil and military authority within the Company.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Main body of the Willoughby’s Minute
3. Appendix: Genealogy of the Talpurs
4. Endnotes
5. Index

Author Biography

Matthew A. Cook, Associate Professor, Department of History and the Department of Language and Literature, North Carolina Central University

Matthew A. Cook is Associate Professor at the Department of History and the Department of Language and Literature at the North Carolina Central University, USA. His past teaching appointments include: North Carolina State University, New York University (NYU), Columbia University, Hofstra University, and Duke University His research focus is on Sindh, colonialism in South Asia, and the methodological conjunction of anthropology and history.

He is editor or co-editor of three books by Oxford University Press: Observing Sindh: Selected Reports by Edward Paterson Del Hoste (2008); Interpreting the Sindhi World: Essays on Society and History (2010); and his latest Willoughbhy’s Minute: Treaty of Nownahar, Fraud, and the British in Sindh (2013). Cook recently completed a book manuscript titled, Annexation and the Unhappy Valley: The Colonization of Sindh by the East India Company.

Cook recently completed a book manuscript titled, Annexation and the Unhappy Valley: The Colonization of Sindh by the East India Company. He is also the author of book chapters, journal articles, and reviews published by Oxford University Press, Edwin Mellen Press, Eastern Anthropologist, Sagar, Columbia Journal of Historiography, Columbia Historical Review, Educational Practice and Theory, Curriculum and Teaching, South Asian Review, Pacific Affairs and Itinerario.