Through an examination of changing notions of sovereignty and statehood in the North Indian polity of Awadh (1722-1856), this dissertation charts the conceptual emergence of the modern state among dynastic polities in early colonial South Asia. A provincial governorship that achieved de facto independence from South Asia’s Mughal empire in the early eighteenth century, Awadh became an important ally of the British East India Company in the mid-1760s and remained a linchpin of the emergent colonial order until it was annexed by the Company in 1856. Using Persian, Urdu, and English-language sources, the dissertation illustrates transformations in the political language of early colonial North India that were precipitated by moments of collaboration and contestation between East India Company officials, Awadh’s ruling nawabs, and rival members of the ruling dynasty. In particular, it demonstrates how Company officials and the Awadh nawabs fashioned a mutually (if temporarily) acceptable vision of sovereignty as comprising exclusive proprietorship and patriarchal authority, and of the state as conceptually distinct from constituent royal households and the wider ruling family. It argues that in the short term this project allowed the nawabs to consolidate territorial dominion and to assert greater control over powerful members of the dynasty. In the longer term, however, it asserts that the conceptual differentiation of “the state” from royal households and the ruling family abetted the expansion of British control in Awadh and ultimately helped build the case for British annexation. In so doing, the dissertation contends that the conceptual vocabulary of so-called Mughal “successor states” like Awadh were shaped not solely by their pre-colonial intellectual inheritances but also by their complex ideological engagements with East India Company and the shifting gender and generational tensions of their own ruling dynasties.