MUSTECIO's aim is to produce, for the first time, a history of transitions from pre-colonial to colonial musical fields in the eastern Indian Ocean. It will focus on India and the Malay peninsula, largely during the period of British expansion, c.1750-1900, and combine research methodologies from both history and ethnomusicology. Previous scholarship has argued that colonialism created a rupture with past systems of knowledge in colonised musical fields. We will seek to show that the story is more complex: although musical fields did undergo large-scale changes, the continuity of pre-colonial systems alongside these changes suggests gradual transformation, not radical disjuncture. Colonial infrastructures in the eastern Indian Ocean did not, in other words, wholly displace the long-standing networks that preceded them, and even facilitated new exchanges of indigenous cultural capital that were otherwise unmediated by the colonising powers. The process we will map entails overlapping but chronologically staggered layerings of pre-colonial, colonial and hybrid discourses, undertaken in several language-cultures and by different constituencies over time. We will also suggest that viewing India and the Malay peninsula as a single, multiply-connected region (and not as separate cultural arenas as is still paradigmatic in ethnomusicology) throws substantial and unexpected light on these patterns of transition. Finally, we will suggest that the best way to map these patterns of transition is to bring pre-colonial and colonial musical pasts, and multiple indigenous- and European-language archives, into sustained critical dialogue. By doing this on an unprecedented scale, MUSTECIO will seek to develop a new historical model for the interactions of music and colonialism: one that will persuasively account for both continuities and transformations in musical knowledge systems in the eastern Indian ocean.