The writ­ings of the Found­ing Fathers of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca include many a ref­er­ence to the likes of Cicero, Mon­tesquieu, and John Locke. That the names Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sul­tan nev­er appear may not sound like much of a sur­prise, even if you hap­pen to know that they ruled the Indi­an region of Mysore, now offi­cial­ly called Mysu­ru, at the time. But his­to­ry records that more than a few Amer­i­cans, includ­ing Thomas Jef­fer­son and John Adams, fol­lowed with great inter­est the strug­gles of that father and son against the British. Those strug­gles took place from the mid-eigh­teenth to the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry — a time when the Amer­i­can colonies, of course, had their own con­flict brew­ing with the moth­er­land. Hyder became the Sul­tan of Mysore in the sev­en­teen-six­ties: “a dan­ger­ous time to come to pow­er in South Asia,” writes Blake Smith at Aeon, giv­en that “the British East India Com­pa­ny was expand­ing its pow­er through­out the Sub­con­ti­nent.” Ally­ing with France, much like the rebelling Amer­i­can colonists, Hyder “held off the British …