Priyasha Saksena , Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 272. £90.00, hardcover ISBN: 9780192866585

Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia by Priyasha Saksena is a study of the relationship between the British Empire and Princely States in India between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries.The book demonstrates how sovereignty as a "polysemic" concept became an instrument for various legal actors vying for political power in South Asia.With the changes in imperial strategy and power relations throughout the period of study, the focus of legal language shifted and evolved.The book shows how concepts of sovereignty, imperial law, and international law were deployed in varied ways by different political actors, including the British, rulers of princely states, and anti-colonial nationalists in India.Ambitiously and thoroughly, Saksena explores the central role of princely states in the evolution of ideas of sovereignty, the creation of the Indian nation-state, and the fraught boundaries of imperial and international law.Hundreds of princely states of various sizes and capacities spread throughout the length and breadth of South Asia, crisscrossing and interrupting the boundaries of British India.These states were not homogenous in size, structure, relations with the colonial state, or in their political ambition.Not only at its frontiers, but throughout the vastness of the Indian subcontinent, princely states proved the limits of British imperial territoriality and sovereign authority.Thus, the empire developed strategies and policies to ensure political supremacy using the language of law in general and sovereignty in particular.Debates on the legal status of princely states reflected how law was a vehicle for sovereignty, which circumscribed the relationship between categories of national, imperial, and international law.Saksena shows that legal limitations faced by the East India Company government in controlling and interfering in princely states led to the development and refinement of the concept of paramountcy-an offshoot of