Abstract

This article focuses on the career of Muhammad Yusuf Khan, an officer in the British East India Company who sought to turn his military service into political and diplomatic authority, only to be executed as a rebel in 1764. His rise and fall occurred early in the so-called colonial transition, a period characterized in recent scholarship as one of relative fluidity in contrast to later, more rigid instantiations of colonial rule. Institutionally, the Company’s armies seem to contradict that pattern: their rapid growth in the eighteenth century produced new exclusions and restrictions, including some of the earliest formal articulations of a racial binary between Indian and European actors. Yusuf Khan, however, gained political capital by mobilizing elements of those intended restrictions in new contexts, imbuing the Company’s military hierarchies with alternate meanings outside of its formal infrastructure. His innovative reinterpretation of military prestige becomes clear when the Company’s records are read alongside Persian-language material from the Indian courts against which he fashioned his political identity. His career offers insight into how the inequitable, but dynamic relationship between the Company and its soldiers shaped the former’s approach to and understanding of India s political landscape

中文翻译：

---

早期殖民印度的军事动员，权威和谈判*

摘要

本文着重介绍英国东印度公司的一名官员穆罕默德·优素福·汗（Muhammad Yusuf Khan）的职业，他试图将其兵役转变为政治和外交权威，但直到1764年才被叛军处决。所谓的殖民过渡，这一时期的特点是最近的学术研究是相对流动性的一个时期，与后来殖民统治的更为僵化的实例形成鲜明对比。从制度上讲，公司的军队似乎与这种模式背道而驰：他们在18世纪的快速发展产生了新的排斥和限制，包括印度和欧洲参与者之间最早的种族二元性表达。但是，优素福·汗（Yusuf Khan）通过在新的背景下动员了那些意图限制的要素，从而获得了政治资本，在其正式基础架构之外，将公司的军事等级赋予替代含义。当公司记录与印度法院为他树立政治身份的波斯语材料一起阅读时，他对军事威望的创新性重新诠释就变得清晰起来。他的职业生涯为公司与士兵之间不平等但充满活力的关系如何影响前者对印度政治格局的态度和理解提供了见解。