Nicholas Abbott is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. His research focuses on gender, political culture, and state formation in late-Mughal and early colonial India. His first book, Women, Wealth and the State in Early Colonial India: The Begams of Awadh (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press), examines senior matriarchs in Mughal successor regime of Awadh (1722–1856) and the ways their management of semi-autonomous households and dynastic wealth reshaped political economy and Persianate discourses of statehood in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century North India.