SEEMA ALAVI is Professor at the Department of History and Culture at Jamia Milia Islamia, Central University, New Delhi. She has twice been a Fulbright Fellow as well as a Smuts Fellow at Cambridge University, from where her PhD was revised and published as The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770-1830 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). She has co-authored (with Muzaffar Alam) A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The Ijaz-I-Arsalani (Persian Letters, 1773–1779) of A.H. Polier (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). She has edited The Eighteenth Century in India, Oxford Debates Series (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). She has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard.