Nicholas Wilson

His dissertation traced a series of corruption scandals within the English East India Company’s colonial administration of India in the second half of the 18th century. These scandals structured the development of British colonialism; they also offer an analytical window into how colonialism, state formation, and knowledge intersect with organizational politics, morality, and agency.

Nicholas has developed several aspects of his dissertation into standalone articles. In “From Reflection to Refraction: State Administration in British India, ca. 1770-1855”, published in the American Journal of Sociology, Wilson argues that administrators’ conceptions of Indian similarity and difference were key factors in the development of forms of land revenue administration throughout the Indian subcontinent. He is also writing articles comparing both the macro and micro dimensions of corruption scandals in the Indian colonial administration, suggesting that these scandals led colonial administrators to an epochal social transition in which they distinguished state and society as different moral worlds. Finally, Wilson is analyzing a database, which he constructed, of administrators’ career histories to show how colonial administrative labor markets varied and how new strategies of governance diffused within them.