Over the course of the eighteenth century, India's Mughal empire (1526–1858) fragmented into a number of regional polities that were, in turn, gradually subsumed under the paramount authority of the British East India Company. This essay describes concomitant developments in the empire's Persianate political language, particularly with regard to ideas of sovereignty, statehood, and dominion. It argues that by the mid-eighteenth century, the Mughal “empire of Hindustan” was increasingly framed as a territorialised governing institution comprising emerging provincial sovereignties rooted in local ruling households. This conceptual dispensation, however, remained ill-defined until the 1760s, when a treaty regime dominated by the Company built upon this language to concretise the empire as a confederacy of independent, sub-imperial states. The essay contends that in the short term, this redefinition bolstered the authority of incipient dynasties in provinces like Awadh, but in the longer term generated conflicts that abetted the expansion of colonial rule and laid conceptual foundations for British paramountcy in India.

在18世纪的过程中，印度的莫卧儿帝国（1526-1858年）分裂为许多地区政体，这些地区政体又逐渐被归入英国东印度公司的最高权力之下。本文描述了该帝国波斯政治语言的伴随发展，特别是在主权，国家地位和统治理念方面。它认为，到18世纪中叶，莫卧儿的“印度斯坦帝国”日益被构筑为领土统治的管理机构，其中包括根植于当地统治家庭的新兴省级主权。然而，直到1760年代，这种概念上的分配一直没有得到明确定义，当时公司主导的条约制度以这种语言为基础，将帝国具体化为独立的次帝国制国家。