History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1146–1180, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00617.x
Blackwell
Oxford,
HICO
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1478-0542
April
10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00617.x
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Company Publishing Ltd
History and Historiography of the English East
India Company: Past, Present, and Future!
Philip J. Stern*
Duke University
Abstract
This article explores recent developments in the historiography of the English
East India Company. It proposes that there has been an efflorescence of late in
scholarship on the Company that is directly tied both to the resurgence of
imperial studies in British history as well as to contemporary concerns such as
globalization, border-crossings, and transnationalism. These transformations have
in turn begun to change some of the most basic narratives and assumptions about
the Company’s history. At the same time, they have also significantly widened
the number and types of scholars interested in the Company, broadening its
appeal beyond ‘Company studies’ to have relevance for a range of historical
concerns, in British domestic history, Atlantic history, global history, as well as
amongst literary scholars, geographers, sociologists, economists, and others.
In the past few years alone, the English East India Company’s past has
been invoked as evidence before the U.S. Supreme Court on the legality
of Guantanamo detainees,1 as a rhetorical epithet in an international
cricket ball-tampering scandal,2 to contextualize Somali piracy in the
Indian Ocean,3 and of course, as a central villain in the last two, multi-billion
dollar Hollywood blockbusters in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy.4
A Malaysian department store now offers an ‘East India Company’ fashion
line that insists it follows in the European East India Companies’ ‘timeless
spirit and romance of adventure’ to produce clothes ‘cool, enduring,
and sophisticated’.5 An ‘East India Company Acquisition Corp.’ was
established in 2006 to raise capital for Indian private enterprises.6 Moreover,
the Company itself has been recently resurrected as an online high-end
art, antique, and furniture firm whose Web site once boasted not only of
its deep origins – ‘since 1600’ – but also that ‘the influence of its 400 year
legacy can be seen over most of the world as also in every one of its
products’.7 By the end of 2009, thanks to a Finnish software developer,
there will even be an East India Company: The Video Game.8
Where has all this come from? Four hundred years after its founding
and a century and a half after its demise, the East India Company seems
to have resurged as an exemplar of the vices, and for some the virtues, of
© 2009 The Author
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History and Historiography of the English East India Company
1147
colonialism, globalization, and, as the London ecologist and ‘socially
responsible’ investment manager Nick Robins has recently noted, the
power of multinational capitalism.9 Inevitably, the Company’s rediscovery
in the present has been tantamount to a growing attention to its past. If
nothing else, both Robins and Antony Wild, a director of that newly
constituted East India Company, have each recently published his own
version of the Company’s history.10
It would stand to reason, however, that the East India Company’s
dramatic resurgence of late, at least amongst professional historians, has
likely been inspired by a good deal more than Johnny Depp and Keira
Knightly. Like Jamestown in 2007, the Company’s quatercentenary in the
year 2000 and the ensuing events certainly lavished the Company with a
great deal of attention, in the form of conferences, catalogs, edited
collections, and museum exhibits, such as a symposium at the National
Maritime Museum, including a consequent volume and eponymous book
series, and the British Library’s ‘Trading Places’ exhibit in 2002, also
accompanied by a short illustrated companion history, public lecture series,
and a continuing online exhibition, complete with an ‘interactive virtual
voyage’.11 The relocation a few years earlier of the Oriental and India Office
Collection – from its diasporic isolation in south London to its incorporation in the new main British Library building at St. Pancras – has further
facilitated non-specialists’ access to Company records while likely pushing
Company scholars to engage in wider and more interdisciplinary work
and communities. The OIOC’s even more recent refashioning as the
‘Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections’ is further evidence still of a more
ecumenical present and future for the archive, even if what Antoinette
Burton has indicted as the ‘residual clubland feel’ of the reading room
itself endures (a vice for some, a virtue for others).12 Ongoing efforts
to publish Company documents13 and, even more influentially, the
cataloging, filming, and digitization of various Company-related records
by vendors such as ProQuest and Adam Matthew and academic endeavors
like the South Asian Microfilm Project (SAMP) continues to promise
greater and wider access to the Company’s history, only further assured
by the British Library’s own recent stirrings about an India Office records
digitization project of its own – and this is not even mentioning the
ongoing world-historical revolution that has been Google Books.
Structural and technological changes have thus certainly begun to
reduce a good many opportunity (and real) costs previously associated
with doing Company history, a phenomenon admittedly much more
widespread for the Company’s records in the U.K. than for its South Asian
archives. Still, as generations of its directors would insist, increased supply
might lower cost but cannot by itself generate demand. For this, I think,
one needs to turn to some of the same conditions that have both given
the Company its peculiar fifteen minutes in popular culture and that have
transformed many of the ways in which we understand and do history
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1148 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
(British history in particular) in the postmodern age. The great, almost
frenetic, interest in empire, along with its increasing links to ‘domestic’,
regional, transnational, and global history has certainly been a major salve
to the ‘contraction in numbers and in confidence’ in British studies David
Cannadine cautioned of in the mid-1980s, in the influential essay from
which this one cribs its title.14 As Cannadine himself has recently reassessed
the situation, the significant shift ‘from a national and a European perspective
to an imperial and global one’, has resulted in ‘more scholars . . . working on
the history of the British empire than ever before, and they are undoubtedly
approaching it from a wider variety of perspectives’.15 The consequent
renaissance in eighteenth-century studies, the ‘imperial turn’ and ‘new
imperial history’, the so-called ‘new thalassology’, and new directions in
the histories of culture, race, class, gender, and political thought all point
somewhat inevitably towards the East India Company as a natural wellspring
of new subjects.16 Moreover, as Cannadine also observed, as much as
historians may control the past, they are nonetheless ‘victims and prisoners’
of the present.17 It is thus hardly surprising that the East India Company
has come to seem more germane and look quite different in the age of
Halliburton, Microsoft, and ‘Gitmo’, of uncertain national-states and
international terrorists, of ‘disaster capitalism’, globalization, migration,
multiculturalism, and of course the second golden age of piracy – whether
of the Somali or Disney variety.
At the very least, it seems fairly clear that East India Company ‘studies’
can hardly be said at this point to be suffering from either a crisis of
numbers or of confidence. On the contrary, it appears to have evolved quite
recently from a niche market into a radically diversified boom industry.
The rest of this essay will attempt to track the nature of that change and
growth, focusing on its two major constituencies: the work of historians
of the Company and of British India, on the one hand, and the almost
cacophonous interest in the Company amongst a wider group of scholars
in British, European, Atlantic, and world history, as well as in a range of
disciplines beyond history, on the other. It contends that though no one
single theme or subject of study has emerged, the new concerns of both
sets of scholars reflect quite clearly those of British studies – and historians
and perhaps the public more generally – with border-crossing, globalization, and comparative, regional, and transnational history.
***
‘East India Company studies’ has traditionally been a fairly close-knit
subfield. It is no coincidence that some of the Company’s most prolific
early historians served at some point as either Company or India Office
employees: from Robert Orme and John Bruce in the eighteenth century,
to James Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay in the nineteenth, and
William Foster and George Birdwood in the early twentieth, not to
mention a host of other officials, lawyers, military officers, archivists, and
18
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History and Historiography of the English East India Company
1149
records keepers in London and India who were largely responsible for
documenting Company history during the ‘Raj’. The Company’s archive
itself developed as an extremely specialist enterprise, perhaps even from
the very start: before the Company was even two decades old, Samuel
Purchas was already echoing the complaints of later generations of the
‘tediousnesse’ of working with, and particularly transcribing, Company
papers under extremely tight and circumspect supervision.19
The tendency amongst Victorian and early twentieth-century historians to
treat ‘British’ history as distinct from the history of empire, and of Britons to
think of India as a peculiar case of empire in itself, only further contributed
to cordoning off the Company as a distinct subject of study. By the midtwentieth century, a few notable historians, such as Lucy Sutherland and Cyril
Philips, had successfully traversed that gap, detailing the Company’s history
in eighteenth-century London, but they remained simply the exceptions that
proved the rule.20 It was decades later still that the Company’s influence on
seventeenth-century politics or economy received much attention, most
notably from Robert Brenner, and the few occasional other microstudies
tended to be isolated to particular individuals or moments and, like
Sutherland and Philips, rather Namierite in their vision of party and politics.21
The lion’s share of the Company’s history has thus conventionally been
treated as a subset of imperial history, though a particularly independent
one, with its own sub-disciplinary rules, conventions, and languages. At
the same time, in its broadest strokes, its basic historiographical narratives
have tended to work in concert with those wider historiographical trends.
Most notably, the Company’s history has traditionally mapped quite neatly
onto the more general bifurcation between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ British
empire: the former, a maritime, Atlantic empire of settlement, and the
latter a territorial, Asian empire of rule, pivoting on the Seven Years War
and the loss of the mainland American colonies in the mid-eighteenth
century. In the Company’s history, this distinction has been articulated as
a rift between ‘trading’ and ‘imperial’ eras, divided by the Company’s
victory at the battle of Plassey in 1757 and its territorial expansion following
the acquisition of the diwani (rights to collect revenue and administer) in
Bengal in 1765. Work on its ‘trading’ era focused on narratives of adventure, exploit, and the frenzied mercantile ‘expansion of Elizabethan England’, or consisted of impressive but weighty documentary and antiquarian
tomes, produced under the stewardship of Foster and Birdwood, as well
figures like Charles Fawcett, Henry Dodwell, James Talboys-Wheeler,
Henry Davison Love, Noel and Ethel Bruce Sainsbury. The Company’s
history after Plassey and diwani focused then on more recognizably ‘political’
stories dominated, like the political history of its domestic brethren, by
administration, high politics, governance, policymaking, and heroic (or
anti-heroic) figures like Hastings, Cornwallis, or Wellesley.22
Despite increasing nuance, the basic outlines of this chronological
distinction between (to borrow the titles from the two volumes of essays
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1150 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
in Patrick Tuck’s 1998 six-volume edited set) an earlier period of ‘trade,
finance, and power’ and a later British India defined by ‘warfare, expansion,
and resistance’ have endured, creating virtually insuperable sub-disciplines
within Company studies itself.23 This distinction was suborned in the
decades after World War II and decolonization, as the Company’s ‘trading
era’ became of increasing interest, predictably, to a growing field of
economic and commercial historians. Some, like Holden Furber in his
early work, envisioned the period as a somewhat prelapsarian ‘age of
partnership’,24 while Marxist historians, motivated in part by Marx’s own
writings on India, tended to understand it as a product of the inexorable
logic of modern capitalism and its expansion into Asia.25 Some of the
most enduring foundations for our understanding of the early Company
were laid by the 1960s and 1970s, and in particular through the offices of
Niels Steensgaard and Kirti Chaudhuri. Inspired by Braudel and the
Annales school – as well as for Chaudhuri, the new econometric and
quantitative possibilities afforded by the computer – they placed great
emphasis on the Company’s commerce and its role in the long-term
structural shifts occasioned by the ‘trade revolution’ of European
joint-stock, maritime trading Companies in the ‘trading world of Asia’.26
This work went hand-in-glove with influential work on the Indian Ocean
maritime trading world more broadly – a subject of concern to Furber
and Chaudhuri, but also the likes of Ashin Das Gupta, Kenneth MacPherson,
Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Michael Pearson, and others.27 Furber and
subsequently Peter Marshall and Bruce Watson also emphasized the
importance not of official commerce but of the development of Company
servants’ private intra-Asian ‘country’ trade, which they agreed was one
key element drawing the Company into imperial expansion in the
mid-eighteenth century.28
A striking feature of much of this body of literature was its ability to
see the Company in comparative perspective, particularly with respect to
its other European rivals – a concern which seems sadly to have faded
from a large amount of more recent work on the Company.29 Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, Femme Gaastra, and Om Prakash are amongst the
notable exceptions, having picked up this mantle; it is no coincidence,
however, that their work largely originates from Dutch, Portuguese, and/
or South Asian historiographies, rather than the English.30 (Subrahmanyam’s recent edited collection of three ‘classics’, by Furber, MacPherson,
and Arasaratnam, is a case-in-point of the enduring value of this older
perspective, as well as the evident sense that there is still a need to remind
current scholars of what they had to say.)31
Of course, some of the questions posed by this vibrant tradition in the
early Company’s maritime and commercial history did not rest entirely in
the Indian Ocean world. The East India Company and its ships, for
example, also came to be incorporated as a subset of European maritime
and naval history,32 though it is worth mentioning that the history of its
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History and Historiography of the English East India Company
1151
garrisoned land forces remains almost entirely a concern only for the postPlassey historiography.33 This work on the Company’s commerce was also
reflected in an even older set of concerns, as Furber once put it, ‘to show
how the “permanent joint-stock” organization had evolved out of earlier
forms’.34 In the hands of business historians, the seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century Company becomes interesting not as a future colonial
state or a harbinger of global capitalism in the abstract, but instead as
forebear of the modern joint-stock, multinational firm. Treated as a global
business enterprise, the Company can thus be interrogated for a range
of related organizational problems, such the control and discipline of
employees, regulation of commercial information, manipulation and
prediction of markets, or a range of other business practices and attitudes
germane to its transnational context.35
Despite continuing interest in these subjects, there have been of late
emerging alternative ways of perceiving the early Company in its early
modern context not just as commercial body or business, but through a
variety of social, cultural, political, and intellectual histories as well. Indications
of such an approach have appeared in the work of established Company
scholars from Furber and Watson to Subrahmanyam and Chris Bayly,
though often on the margins of their larger bodies of work.36 I have in my
own work attempted to question the fast distinction between a ‘commercial’
and ‘imperial’ era in the Company’s history, arguing that we need to see
the foundations for a Company empire in its early period and envisioning
the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Company not as merely
a trader but as a form of early modern body politic unto itself. This entails
taking seriously its political institutions, behaviors, and ideas in the period
before Plassey, but doing so by thinking about the historical and
historiographical relationship between the Company and its Atlantic
contemporaries as well as European and Asian rivals.37 Though focusing
on an ostensibly more traditional subject – private trade – the Danish
historian Søren Mentz has recently offered a new way of thinking about
Furber’s notion of an Anglo-Indian ‘partnership’ in late seventeenth- and
early eighteenth-century Madras, imagining English traders in India not
as products primarily of Asian trading world but as a constituent element
of a global early modern English diasporic mercantile community. In
conceiving his thesis, Mentz is self-consciously indebted to a broad
sampling of recent historiographical interventions, ranging from work
linking ‘domestic’ and ‘imperial’ history and the early modern Atlantic and
Asia to P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins’s concept of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’.38 A seeming spate of recent innovative dissertation work on the early
Company from James Vaughn, Aparna Balachandran, Rahul Govind,
Rupa Mishra, Mitch Fraas, and others, further offers new perspective on the
nature of the ‘Plassey revolution’, the social, legal, intellectual, and political
foundations for the Company’s rule in India, and its role in early modern
‘domestic’ British politics, political economy, and society.39
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1152 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
Of course, the Company has come to be an integral part of a number
of ‘domestic’ stories, such as the making of the modern financial
revolution,40 early modern and modern economic thought,41 and, especially
since the 1980s, the ‘consumer revolution’.42 Yet, as each of these conversations has evolved, so too has the Company’s role in shaping them.
The Company has been increasingly integrated, for example, as an important
feature in the history of British state formation, critical to both the
‘military’ and ‘fiscal’ aspects of the military-fiscal state.43 Steve Pincus has
maintained that debates over the Company in the late seventeenth century
embodied the ideological rift between Whig and Tory forms of political
economy, that not only defined the Glorious Revolution but made for
the foundations of modern Britain itself.44 Other work has seen the
Company as an integral part of the making of an early modern British
‘public’, whether pointing to the importance of the Company in political
discourse or in its related role in providing the commodities that underwrote
some of that new public’s institutional spaces, like the coffee house.45 Still,
in all of this work, the Company remains one part of a ‘larger’ story. It
still remains for someone to undertake the kind of demographic and
network analysis of the role of the Company, its investors, and its employees
in the making of the modern British state, akin to what Julia Adams has
done for the Dutch Company and the Netherlands.46
If the Company has been fully implicated in the making of the British
state, since Linda Colley’s Britons at least it has also been intimately
wrapped up with debates over the making of ‘Britishness’. This conversation
has tended to be particularly concerned with the (famously disproportionate)
Scottish participation in the Company’s military and administration in
India following the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707.47 Andrew Mackillop
has recently cautioned, however, that this eagerness to see Scots turned
‘British’ in Company service risks discounting both Scotland’s own
vigilant attempts at an East India Company in the 1690s or the persistent
ties between Scots and other European East India interests in the early
eighteenth century.48 The ‘affinities’ between Ireland and India have also
had resonances in work on the Company period, though much of this
literature tends to focus more on the Irish in India in the nineteenth
century, and parallels between India and Ireland’s paths to independence
in the twentieth.49 Of course, historians such as Michael Fisher have
increasingly pointed out that the Company, from its earliest days, laid
the foundations for a different kind of modern British identity through its
facilitation of the movement and immigration of South Asians, creating
the foundations for Britain’s modern Indian community while also
establishing and underwriting colonial power.50
***
All of these examples suggest at the very least that the fast nineteenthcentury distinctions between ‘commerce’ and ‘empire’, as well as ‘home’
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History and Historiography of the English East India Company
1153
and ‘abroad’, are rapidly breaking down, and that we are now able to
interrogate the pre-Plassey Company not just with economic questions
but a range of political, social, cultural, and intellectual concerns in mind.
In this sense, it has also allowed for Company historians to respond to the
influential call by John Pocock, amongst others, for a history of ‘Greater
Britain’, which, as Philip Lawson quickly pointed out, failed to account
for the East India Company and ‘the fundamental importance of Indian
issues to the history of the 1760s and early 1770s’,51 or as Sudipta Sen
later suggested, did not manage to address fully ‘the division of historiographical labor between histories of England, the British Empire, and
colonial India, and at a stretch, Ireland in the seventeenth and Scotland in
the eighteenth centuries’.52
Huw Bowen has certainly been amongst the most prolific and influential
since Sutherland in remedying the shortfalls in our understanding of the
‘metropolitan context’ of the eighteenth-century Company as well as the
role the ‘Indian problem’ played in British politics after Plassey.53 His
recent The Business of Empire turns this around yet again, drawing attention
to the ‘far less obvious’ history of the transformation of the East India
Company as a political and business entity in its British context in the
wake of territorial expansion.54 Bowen’s work – along with others, such
as James Thomas on the East India Company’s networks in the British
provinces55 – has shed new light on the developing nature of the Company
as an institution in Britain in the eighteenth century, while pointing even
more fundamentally to the ways in which the Company helped shape the
British ‘public’ in the later century as well.56
Of course, much of the Company’s role in late eighteenth-century
politics was as a figure of controversy, embodied perhaps no more infamously
than in the tumult over its first Governor-General of Bengal, Warren
Hastings. The interest in Hastings’s remarkable impeachment trial is by no
means new.57 Still, the spectacle, and particularly the seductiveness of
Edmund Burke’s florid prose, continues to appeal to a range of scholars
interested in the moral discourses surrounding the establishment of modern
empire. Kate Teltscher and Sara Suleri, for example, led the charge amongst
postcolonial literary critics in the mid-1990s in engaging the trial as part
of a longer and wider set of discursive moves key to the establishment of
the political and racial hierarchies of British rule in India.58 Burke’s
perennial interest to intellectual historians and political scientists also met
the new concern in empire with fervor, particularly as the history of
political thought has come to take a keen interest in critique of empire as
well as in reconciling Burke’s take on the Company with everything
from his broader political and aesthetic writings to modern problems of
corruption, state authority, and empire.59
Perhaps the most controversial intervention into this conversation of late
has been Nicholas Dirks’s Scandal of Empire. Dirks admits a host of reasons
for engaging in a new reading of the trial, including the fact that the
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1154 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
project was initially conceived with the impeachment of President Clinton
in the backdrop. Still, it is clear Dirks’s real interest has much more to do
with blue water imperialism than with blue dresses. For Dirks, Burke’s
pursuit of Hastings was not a critique but a whitewashing of empire, a
sanitization of the project effected by the creation and subsequent resolution of the Hastings ‘scandal’, which, he argues, continues to plague the
way imperial history is written today. Dirks thus calls for a new kind of
history of empire that recognizes that empire itself was a scandal, and
which treats the subject from the start as possessing an inherent moral evil,
much like we tend to understand the history of slavery or of the
Holocaust.60 Though particularly provocative, Dirks is actually not the only
recent historian to see the Hastings trial as a form of ‘scandal’. Anna Clark
has pointed to the gendered and sexualized rhetoric in the trial as part of
a longer history of the interrelationship between sex scandals and modern
constitutional politics. Unlike Dirks, however, Clark argues Burke’s
scandal was incomplete and ineffective, in its failure to convict Hastings
and the Company either in the House of Lords or in the court of
public opinion.61
The continuing interest in the Hastings trial is emblematic of a range
of ongoing historiographical discussions about the role the Company
played in later eighteenth-century Britain. Javier Cuenca-Esteban, an
economic historian, has recently intervened in a decades-old debate,
arguing that the Company’s balance of payments in the second half of the
eighteenth century was in fact not only positive, but a positive contribution
to the British economy and a necessary source of finance for its warmaking.62
Daniel O’Quinn, a literary critic, has argued that the controversy over the
Company, as expressed on the London stage and as a form of theater in
themselves (including the Hastings trial), transformed domestic social
and cultural discourses, particularly concerning sex and family.63 Natasha
Eaton, an art historian, has described the effects the Company’s expansion
in India had on eighteenth-century aesthetics and taste, by transforming
the meanings of nostalgia and the exotic, while Christina Smylitopoulos
has argued that the figure of the nabob – the nouveaux-riches Company
servants and their wives who returned to Britain and bought their way
into cultural and political power – was actually fit into a pre-existing
‘visual language’ already prevalent in critical graphic satire in the early
eighteenth century.64 Tillman Nechtman, a cultural historian, has also
recently explored the nabob as well as his female counterpart, the nabobina,
as figures that could easily represent the anxieties that occasioned the
increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the British nation and its empire,
as well as onto whom more routine economic anxieties – from rising
prices to anti-Semitism – could be projected.65
Clearly, a good deal of this work further reveals the degree to which
Company history has been influenced by a much greater sensitivity to the
history of women, gender, and sexuality, especially in creating, conditioning,
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History and Historiography of the English East India Company
1155
and compounding the ‘anxieties’ in Britain and India that we now know
occasioned the expansion of Company rule.66 ‘Sex’ in Company India,
such as it was, had traditionally been about how male sexual relationships
(and diseases), particularly in the military, were constituted and regulated.67
Newer work in this field has firmly turned its attention to the women,
European and Asian, either available or hidden in the colonial archive, as
a way of accessing not just heretofore undocumented social and political
histories but also the gendered nature of colonial power itself. Betty
Joseph, for example, has argued that Company power was established in
part through intensely gendered language, predicated upon the silencing
of actual British and Indian women in the archive.68 Joseph’s intent to read
on and between the lines of the colonial archive to recover both the
gendered languages of colonial power and the women silenced by
the racial and political anxieties of colonialism resonates with work by
historians, such as Lata Mani on the sati debate.69 Durba Ghosh’s recent
account of the sexual, familial, and cohabitational relationships between
European men and Indian women in Company Calcutta is both deeply
suggestive of and potentially formative to a range of new directions of this
scholarship.70 Ghosh rehabilitates native women as colonial subjects, by
documenting their use of Company courts and other political institutions.
At the same time, she problematizes the notion of ‘agency’ in a system
defined and circumscribed by both gendered and colonial power. This
work speaks to a growing sensitivity not only to an ongoing critique
of the colonial archive, but to the variety of forms of family and the
malleability of racial identities both under Company rule and beyond such
a critique can reveal.71 It also signals a related and growing concern in
the Company’s legal history, focused on questions of subjecthood, jurisdiction, and the great anxieties amongst Company administrators, as
Ghosh has put it elsewhere, to resolve messy dilemmas about who ‘counts’
as a ‘native’ in Company colonies.72
All of this work also indicates just how increasingly blurry the old lines
between ‘competition’ or ‘collaboration’, and ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ in
the making of the Company’s empire have become.73 Those who emphasize
continuity in the transition to colonial rule have tended to be rooted
in social and economic history, which, like similar trends in British
historiography from the 1960s on, self-consciously rejected the older,
‘high’ political histories, as well as the subsequent postcolonial and subaltern
visions, inspired by Foucault amongst others, of a powerful and totalizing
colonial state. Chris Bayly’s work in particular has probably done more
than any other over the past several decades to highlight the pre-colonial
economic, social, credit and information networks on which Company
rule depended from the mid-eighteenth century onward.74 Following on
this, Rajat Datta has also recently argued for great continuity in the
Bengali market, particularly in grain, across the colonial divide, again
emphasizing the limits of Company power in its transition to a colonial
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1156 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
state.75 Of course, the contrary position has also had its strong advocates,
who have argued more critically that the coming of Company rule not
only represented but required a great disruption in the Indian economy,
reinterpreting and altering traditional commercial, credit, legal, and political
relationships.76 An interesting subsection of this debate has also come via
the history of cartography, in work that has shown just how crucial
mapping, surveys, and the geographic imagination was to the appropriation
of territory and the establishment of colonial power.77
Though this debate between continuity and change has hardly dissipated,
a more ambiguous middle ground has clearly begun to emerge. One new
subject, for example, that seems to fit neither position neatly concerns all
those previously ignored Britons and other Europeans that lived under the
jurisdiction of Company settlements in India, and the nature of their
interactions with, and adaptations to, South Asian society, politics, and
culture.78 The vision of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century India
offered by Maya Jasanoff, for example, is not one of an abstract and
imposing colonial state but of a society filled with collectors – from Swiss
mercenaries to Tipu Sultan, the sultan of Mysore – who represented a
synthesis of European and Asian concerns about status, display, and
cultural capital.79 William Dalrymple’s White Mughals similarly emphasizes
the extent to which individuals working for the Company, like James
Kirkpatrick, a former Company soldier and Resident at the nizamat of
Hyderabad, crossed boundaries – culturally, sexually, and even politically
– to produce, in Dalrymple’s words, a ‘fecund multicultural, multiethnic,
and multireligious confusion of rival modes of living’.80 This kind of
border-crossing (literally and figuratively) is also evident in Kate Teltscher’s
recent fascinating account of George Bogle, who, sent by Warren Hastings
in the late eighteenth century to try to open trade with China through
Tibet, found himself between two worlds, at times more contemptuous
of Britain and the Company than his new Tibetan friends, driven by
intellectual curiosity, and ultimately reflecting the difficulty, rather than
the inexorability, of the expansion of Company trade and empire.81
This question of the fluidity, translation, and mediation between
‘European’ and ‘Asian’ forms has been taken up as well by Robert Travers,
especially in his recent Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India.82
Travers, however, turns our attention to the history of political thought
in the immediate aftermath of Plassey and diwani. Amongst its many other
important interventions, this work emphasizes the ideas and concepts
Company administrators employed to grapple with their new form of
government and the nature of their authority and jurisdiction in India.
These shared concepts, most notably the idea of a Mughal ‘ancient
constitution’, were not imported wholesale but were transformed, modified,
and challenged by Company officials and their South Asian interlocutors,
as they struggled with fitting these ‘British’ tropes of political thought into
their understanding of South Asian history, customs, law, and politics.
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Travers’s work is an exhortation to a literature to take ideology and political
language seriously, not only after the full establishment of Company
empire but in the very early phases of Company territorial expansion
as well.83 It also persuades that it was not monolithic impositions or
interpolations, but the complex intersections, syntheses, and debates over
ideas, that inevitably shaped and defined the colonial state.
***
Given this work on the individuals who administered the Company’s
polity or were subject to it, it has become increasingly impossible to see
the Company, as an institution, simply as a commercial corporation gone
astray or a self-evident extension of European imperial ambitions. The
Company’s particular blend of European and Asian forms of finance,
governance, and warmaking ranked it with, as Doug Peers has argued, the
‘hybrid, contingent, and often malleable forms of social, political, and
military organization that were characteristic of most empires’.84 This was
a Company empire dependent not just on its employees, but, as Bhavani
Raman has demonstrated, a critical bureaucratic infrastructure that
incorporated South Asian familial, social, and cultural practices and
networks, evident in the offices of the kacceri and constructing colonial
power through what she has suggestively called the ‘document Raj’.85 All
of this had great implications on the articulation of Company sovereignty
itself, which Sudipta Sen has argued was ‘distant and disputed’, ill-defined,
messy, and inextricably tied to Mughal forms; at the same time, for him,
the Company-State served as an ‘historical mirror’ of sorts for ‘Britain’s
political economy, public conduct, and national character’, a ‘colonial
frontier’ of a British state-in-formation, and a distant outpost for nascent
British nationalism.86 More recently, Jon Wilson has suggested that the
anxieties about the instability and novelty of Company rule in India
actually required the contrivance of completely novel ideas about the
nature of government. In particular, Wilson argues, Company India gave
birth to the abstract idea of the subject as ‘stranger’, which in turn he
suggests has become the characteristic way of understanding modern
subjecthood. Thus, he flips the usual formula on its head: it was in
Company India, rather than in Hanoverian Britain, that ‘political modernity’
was born, with global ramifications in determining the shape of modern
state authority.87
The result of all this new work inside ‘Company studies’ has been a
forceful if incipient challenge to some of the most influential and enduring
of nineteenth-century imperial taxonomies: colonies of ‘rule’ and colonies
of ‘settlement’; ‘pre-modern Asiatic’ and ‘modern European’ modes of
empire; the ‘maritime’ and ‘territorial’; and, as a result, the fundamental
distinctions between the early modern and modern British empire. As
many of the above examples reveal, ‘Company’ scholars have come to see
their subjects in much more global terms, either in the union between
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1158 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
British ‘domestic’ and ‘imperial’ history or in the historical and historiographical crossings that have become increasingly common across many
fields of scholarship. For example, Chris Bayly’s recent work on Rammohan
Roy shows how Hindu ‘reform’ and middle-class civil society in early
nineteenth-century Calcutta, a subject once treated as largely part of a local
response to Company rule, was in fact constituent of a global moment of
rethinking of constitutional liberalism, from London to Latin America.88
This impulse to globalize our stories about empire has increasingly
incorporated the Company into the wider orbit of British imperial
experiences and thus into the research of a number of British, imperial,
and world historians, who had not previously been particularly concerned
with British Asia. Kathleen Wilson, whose early work had focused on the
impact of largely European and Atlantic imperial wars on British identity
and nation-making at home, is now raising a wide range of questions
about the global impact of empire on British identity. Company colonies
like Bengkulu, St. Helena, and Calcutta certainly play a critical role in her
current and forthcoming projects on sexuality, family, governmental
practices, colonial statemaking, and colonial theater across the early modern
empire.89 This approach has been particularly salient for those interested
in comparative and global legal histories of empire. For Lauren Benton, a
legal and world historian whose early work focused on the Iberian Atlantic,
the early modern Indian Ocean, and the English Company in particular,
has become critical to a comparative and global understanding of the
establishment and nature of imperial maritime jurisdiction and authority.90
Such approaches also lend themselves to comparative questions, such as
the sort Hannah Weiss’s forthcoming dissertation work asks about the
nature of law, jurisdiction, governmental practice, allegiance, and the
making of colonial ‘subjects’ across the British Empire, from Calcutta to
Quebec.91 Paul Halliday’s forthcoming history of habeas corpus – the fruits
of which were cited in the legal historians’ amicus brief on behalf of the
Guantanamo Bay detainees, and raised by lawyers and justices in the case
itself – shows quite clearly how late eighteenth-century Company courts
were wrapped up in a global history of a legal idea that stretched from
the early seventeenth century Anglo-Scottish border to the Atlantic,
Australia, and, of course, Company India.92
This emerging vision of a ‘global eighteenth century’,93 as well as a
growing awareness of the variety of networks and state forms that
constituted the ‘early modern’ across Eurasia94 has led to a new sensitivity
to the global frame in which many early modern Britons lived. Alison
Games has quite provocatively translated her earlier interests in transatlantic
migration into her recent account of peripatetic, cosmopolitan, globetrotting
English diplomats, merchants, migrants, preachers, administrators, and
others, who inevitably incorporated Company Asia into a transhemispheric
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century story.95 This interest in the global
movement of early modern Britons in the eighteenth century is evident
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1159
in Linda Colley’s most recent book on one such eighteenth-century
globetrotter, Elizabeth Marsh,96 or Maya Jasanoff ’s research into a global
history of loyalism in the wake of the American Revolution that ‘scattered
as far afield as India’, including for two of Benedict Arnold’s sons who
enlisted in the Company’s army.97
Thus, whether at the center or the margins, the Company has become
part of our understanding of an early modern ‘global’ moment, as much
for historians as well as for a host of scholars from other disciplines. For
example, Miles Ogborn, a historical geographer, has, like Games and
Colley, used the stories of a number of ‘global lives’, many of which are
connected in some way to the Company, to explore the phenomenon
both of early modern globalization and the foundations for imperial
power.98 At the same time, sociologists like Emily Erikson and Peter
Bearman have seen the foundations of ‘globalization’ in the Company
by mapping its shipping networks and the extensive private trade of its
captains and other servants.99
Seeing the Company as a ‘global’ body or network has thus exposed a
number of concerns about the nature and limits of networks of exchange,
and the collection, transmission, and codification of knowledge and
information in a number of fields, such as historical geography, literature,
and the history of science. Ogborn, for example, has also recently written
a study of the ways in which forms of writing in the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century East India Company, both manuscript and print,
transformed the nature of authority, power, and even global geographical
space.100 Similar themes have also emerged in the work of literary critic
Richmond Barbour, who has examined both early seventeenth-century
writing about India (particularly in drama) as well as the writing of
particular Company figures, like Anthony Marlowe and Thomas Roe.101
Picking up on Ranajit Guha’s powerful arguments about the relationship
between knowledge, power, and history in early colonial India, Mary
Poovey has argued that the material conditions of the Company’s data
gathering in the early nineteenth century expose the fissures in the
Baconian ‘universal knowledge project’, and especially the problems that arise
when empirical data runs up against (and is trumped by) contradictory
‘epistemological, political, or institutional’ assumptions.102 Anna Winterbottom’s forthcoming dissertation work in the history of science and
medicine has pointed towards yet another global history of the early modern
Company, in this case to trace the connections between the Company,
the Royal Society, natural knowledge, and the ‘scientific revolution’,
in places ranging from Ceylon to St. Helena.103 Indeed, there may be no
clearer signal of the explosion in Company studies than the fact that even
‘St. Helena studies’ seems to have exploded into a veritable subfield in its
own right; to the other works, already mentioned, by myself, Kathleen
Wilson, and Winterbottom, we can add Stephen Royle, an historical
geographer whose interest in islands seems to have led him to explore the
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1160 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
Company’s early settlement efforts as St. Helena, and to make an argument
about the inherent inadequacy of Company-run colonies generally.104
Actually, in light of these larger historiographical trends, it is not that
hard to understand why St. Helena has begun to seem so interesting. Not
only is it a site for a set of peculiar social and political concerns; in itself,
its situation as an East India Company colony west of the Cape of Good
Hope calls to mind a range of critiques implicit in the new imperial
and global histories of the boundaries of their contemporary ‘oceanic’
histories, and of the Atlantic in particular.105 That the most recent work
of the doyen of Company studies, P. J. Marshall, has traversed this global
terrain to ‘[bring] together what is conventional to keep apart, that is the
loss of a British territorial empire in much of North America and the
creation of a new territorial empire in eastern India’ is testimony enough
to the power of this particular historiographical moment.106 Company
India has quickly become a popular point of comparison for American
historians, such as Carl Nightingale, who has argued for parity in the
perception of race and of colonial cities in early eighteenth-century New
York and Madras.107 Others, like Elizabeth Mancke, have begun to
incorporate the Company into a rethinking of the relationship between
empire and state and the transformation from corporate enterprise to
national empire, which finds its historiographical roots in a concern with
the Atlantic.108 In general, it seems as if there is a rising tide – possibly a
threatening flood – of interest in the ways the Company and Company
India was reflected in the colonial Atlantic and in the new American
republic, from debates on liberty in anticipation of the American Revolution
to ones on slavery in the run-up to the Civil War.109 Increasingly putting
their subjects in global frame, early Americanists have also come to pay
greater attention to the actual commercial, cultural, and political
interchanges between the Atlantic and India, from the earliest plantations
to the early Republic.110 After all, it seems, all that tea in Boston harbor
had to come from somewhere.
***
Whether treating the Company as an institution or examining the lives
of the individuals inside and within it, this new work on the Company
has clearly sounded variations on a few similar and increasingly familiar
themes. As in the study of British history and the British empire more
broadly, the Company’s history continues to be milled through postmodern
sensibilities about hybridity, malleability, flexibility, border-crossing,
globality, and interdisciplinarity. What is clear is that Company studies,
like imperial studies more broadly, has now truly become a ‘big tent
historiography’,111 and there is no sign of any imminent retraction or
retrenchment. Of course, the good and bad thing about big tents (or the
people underneath them) is often their lack of coherence or discipline. In
history writing, this can lead both to great creativity and stimulating
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1161
discovery as well as great confusion, especially as it has underscored the
continuing need to break down old barriers: for example, between
domestic and imperial history, the British Atlantic and British Asia, India
and the empire, the ‘trading’ and ‘imperial’ eras of the Company’s history,
politics and commerce, and so on.
Breaking down barriers, of course, often requires erecting new ones in
their stead, and the broad church of Company studies still faces certain
dilemmas. How are we to understand the Company as an early
modern, a proto-modern, or a postmodern institution, all at the same
time? If we have begun to break down familiar chronological and
geographical categories, which ones ought we use to replace them? Do
the great potentials of interdisciplinarity come at the cost of any particularly useful policing mechanisms – that is, the discipline – that defined
generations of relatively small but extremely impressive coteries of
Company scholars?
If nothing else, in light of all this particular scholarship, a new general
survey of the Company’s history would be quite welcome.112 Moreover,
one could easily overstate just how quickly this work is succeeding in
breaking down old stories. There remains, for example, vastly more work
on the century following Plassey than the hundred and fifty years preceding
it, though the vibrancy of early modern studies in general seems to
imply this situation will not endure. Given the new ‘global’ frame that has
helped drive a return to the Company’s early history, this work also could
do more to think more about and integrate the Company’s early history
beyond India, in East Asia, Java and Sumatra, Persia, Arabia, eastern and
western Africa, not to mention various understudied places throughout
India itself. New perspectives on the links between maritime and
territorial history, in light of recent meditations on the nature and
boundaries of the modern Indian Ocean region and of ocean basins in
general,113 might serve to revive the sorts of comparative and broad
European approaches exemplified in the work of Furber, Steensgaard,
Chaudhuri, and others, now inflected by even more exciting ideas about
state formation, political thought, political economy, and subjecthood in
Asian polities as well.
Regardless of the directions it takes, it is seems reasonable to expect
that the flood in the market for Company history has not immediately
threatened to deflate its value, but rather – given the new subjects
uncovered and the potential of a surprisingly inexhaustible archive –
promises a continuing rise in its stock and the expectation of great dividends. Whether what we are witnessing is a consistent growth in the
Company’s intrinsic value or merely a speculative bubble, destined
someday to burst, is impossible to know. Still, whatever it says about the
state of the historiography as well as the world in which we live, for
now at the very least it seems certain that the supply seems endless and
demand insatiable.
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1162 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
Short Biography
Philip Stern is an historian of early modern Britain and the British
Empire. His current work focuses on the East India Company in the later
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which forms the subject of his
forthcoming book with Oxford University Press. Stern has published on
the subject in a variety of journals, including the Journal of British Studies,
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, The William and Mary
Quarterly, The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, as well as published
and forthcoming pieces in edited collections. His research interests
focus broadly on the political and intellectual history of empire in the
early modern period; he is also currently at work on projects concerning
the history of early modern British overseas exploration and cartography
in Africa, the historiography of British India, early modern economic
thought, and the history of companies and colonization. Stern is Assistant
Professor of History at Duke University. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan
University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Department of History, Duke University, Box 90719, Durham, NC
27708-0719, USA. Email: philip.stern@duke.edu.
1
As an example of courts granting the common law rights of habeas corpus in extra-sovereign
territory on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainees, though the justices on both sides of the
decision seemed skeptical of the analogy. United States Court of Appeals For the District of
Columbia Circuit, Boumediene vs. Bush no. 05-5062 (argued September 8, 2005, decided
February 20, 2007); United States Supreme Court, Boumediene vs. Bush, No. 06-1195 (argued
December 5 2007; decided June 12, 2008); Jonathan Hafetz, James Oldham, and Michael
Wishnie, counsel for amici, ‘Brief of Legal Historians as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioners’,
Amicus Brief in Boumediene vs. Bush (August 2007); ‘Categorically Imperative’, ‘Habeas
History: GTMO is the British East India Company’, The Daily Kos, February 27, 2007, http://
www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/27/17488/5246.
2
The International Cricket Council having been accused by South Asian cricket officials of
‘behaving like the East India Company’: ‘Bindra Spits Venom against ICC’, The Times of India,
October 14, 2006, online edition, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2171477.cms;
‘I Don’t Take Modi’s Comments Seriously: Speed’, The Hindu, October 17, 2006, online
edition, http://www.hindu.com/2006/10/17/stories/2006101707792100.htm; ‘Speed Slams
Modi’, The Tribune, October 17, 2006, online edition, http://www.tribuneindia.com/2006/
20061017/sports.htm.
3
‘A Somali Pirate with Historical Leanings Might Scoff at the Outrage’, The Guardian,
November 22, 2008, online edition, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/22/
piracy-somalia.
4
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Dir. Gore Verbinski, Perfs. Johnny Depp, Orlando
Bloom, Keira Knightley (Walt Disney Pictures, 2006).
5
http://www.metrojaya.com.my/.
6
Nick Robins, ‘The East India Company: The Future of the Past’, September 12, 2006, http://
www.opendemocracy.net/node/3899/pdf.
7
The Web site has since been stripped down significantly: http://www.theeastindiacompany.com/.
8
http://www.eic-game.com/.
9
Robins, ‘East India Company’.
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1163
10
Antony Wild, The East India Company: Trade and Conquest From 1600 (New York, NY: Lyons
Press, 2000); Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company
Shaped the Modern Multinational (London/Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006).
11
H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (eds), The Worlds of the East India
Company (Suffolk/Rochester, NY: Boydell Press in association with the National Maritime
Museum and the University of Leicester, 2002); Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East
India Company and Asia, 1600–1834 (London: British Library, 2002); ‘Trading Places’, http://
www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/trading/tradingplaces.html.
12
Antoinette Burton, ‘Archive Stories: Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories’,
in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 281.
13
In the last decade, for example, Anthony Farrington has published a Biographical Index of East
India Company Maritime Service Officers, 1600–1834 (London: British Library, 1999), an extensive
Catalogue of East India Company Ships’ Journals and Logs, 1600–1834 (London: British Library,
1999), as well as more recently a two-volume set documenting the Company’s factory in Siam:
The English Factory in Siam, 1612–1685 (London: British Library, 2007).
14
David Cannadine, ‘British History: Past, Present – And Future?’ Past and Present, 116 (August
1987): 191.
15
David Cannadine, ‘“Big Tent” Historiography: Transatlantic Obstacles and Opportunities in
Writing the History of Empire’, Common Knowledge, 11/3 (2005): 379–80.
16
The literature on all of these subjects is much too vast to survey here. Briefly, on the ‘imperial
turn’ and its afterlife, see Antoinette Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and
Through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); on the ‘new imperial history’,
see Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and
the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); for a critique, albeit
more of the methods than of the intention, of the ‘new imperial history’, see Richard Price,
‘One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture’, Journal of British Studies, 45
( July 2006): 602–27; on ‘oceans’, see, amongst many others, ‘AHR Forum: Oceans of History’,
American Historical Review, 111/3 ( June 2006), though conspicuously absent an essay on the
Indian Ocean; on this, see Markus P. M. Vink, ‘Indian Ocean Studies and the “New Thalassology”,’ Journal of Global History, 2/1 (2007): 41–62. On rethinking the eighteenth century in
South Asian history, see Seema Alavi (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in India (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002); P. J. Marshall (ed), The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution
or Revolution? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robert Travers, ‘The Eighteenth
Century in Indian History: A Review Essay’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 40/3 (2007): 492–508.
17
Cannadine, ‘British History’, 191.
18
Though having a relatively wide colloquial currency, the term itself seems to have only been
used formally in the literature in a festschrift for C. H. Philips in the mid-80s: Kenneth
Ballhatchet and John Harrison (eds), East India Company Studies: Papers Presented to Professor Sir
Cyril Philips (Hong Kong: Asian Research Service, 1986).
19
Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, in Five Bookes (London: William Stansby for Henrie
Fetherstone, 1625), 1:630.
20
Lucy Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1952); C. H. Philips, The East India Company, 1784–1834 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1961). For a recent biographical engagement with the Company’s eighteenthcentury domestic administrative history, see George K. McGilvary, Guardian of the East India
Company: The Life of Laurence Sulivan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).
21
Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s
Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). See, for example,
D. C. Coleman, Sir John Banks, Baronet and Businessman: A Study of Business, Politics, and Society
in Later Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); Bruce G. Carruthers, City of
Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 137–59; Arnold A. Sherman, ‘Pressure from Leadenhall: The East India Company
Lobby, 1660–1678’, The Business History Review, 50 (1976): 329–55; Henry Horwitz, ‘The East
India Trade, the Politicians, and the Constitution: 1689–1702’, The Journal of British Studies, 17
(1978): 1–18; Robert Walcott, ‘The East India Interest in the General Election of 1700–01’,
English Historical Review, 71 (1956): 223–39; James Bohun, ‘Protecting Prerogative: William III
and the East India Trade Debate, 1689–1698’, Past Imperfect, 2 (1993): 63–86.
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1164 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
22
Robert Frykenberg, ‘India to 1858’, Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 5, Historiography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 194–213. One exception for the earlier period is
Shafaat Ahmad Khan’s, The East India Trade in the XVIIth Century in its Political and Economic
Aspects (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), though Khan puts a great deal more emphasis
on the economic than the political. On the ‘expansion of Elizabethan England’, see A. L.
Rowse, The Expansion of Elizabethan England (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1955). See
also, Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of
the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge/New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
23
Patrick Tuck (ed.), The East India Company 1600–1858, Vol. 4, Trade, Finance, and Power
(London/New York, NY: Routledge, 1998); Tuck (ed.), The East India Company 1600–1858,
Vol. 5, Warfare, Expansion, and Resistance (London/New York, NY: Routledge, 1998). The
other volumes consist of reprints of ‘classic’ works on Company history, including those of
William Foster, C. H. Philips, and P. J. Marshall.
24
Holden Furber, ‘Asia and the West as Partners before “Empire” and after’, Journal of Asian
Studies, 28/4 (1969): 711–21; Blair King and M. N. Pearson (eds), The Age of Partnership:
Europeans in Asia Before Dominion (Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii, 1979).
25
For example, Ramkrishna Mukherjee, Rise and Fall of the East India Company, 2nd ed. (New
York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
26
See, amongst others of their work, K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English
East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge/New York, NY: Cambridge University Press,
1978); Niels Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India
Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago
Press, 1973).
27
For a useful survey, see Vink, ‘Indian Ocean Studies’, esp. 42–6.
28
Holden Furber, John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in the Late
Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948); P. J. Marshall, East Indian
Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); I. B.
Watson, Foundation for Empire: English Private Trade in India 1659–1760 (New Delhi: Vikas,
1980).
29
The original insight, though not its blunt restatement above, here belongs to Robert Travers;
many thanks to him for it, and for his insightful read of this piece more generally.
30
Amongst others of their work, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce:
Southern India 1500–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Om Prakash,
Bullion for Goods: European and Indian Merchants in the Indian Ocean Trade, 1500–1800 (New
Delhi: Manohar, 2004); Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Prakash (ed.), European Commercial Expansion
in Early Modern Asia (Aldershot/Hampshire/Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1997); Femme Gaastra,
‘War, Competition and Collaboration: Relations Between the English and Dutch East
India Companies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Bowen, Lincoln, and
Rigby (eds), Worlds of the East India Company, 49–68; Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra (eds),
Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companies During the Ancien Régime (Leiden:
University Press, 1981).
31
Sanjay Subrahmanyam (ed.), Maritime India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).
32
See, amongst others, Jean Sutton, Lords of the East: The East India Company and its Ships
(1600–1874), reprint ed. (London: Conway Maritime Press, 2000 [1981]); Jaap R. Bruijn and
F. S. Gaastra, Ships, Sailors, and Spices: East India Companies and their Shipping in the 16th, 17th
and 18th Centuries (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1993); Andrew Lambert, ‘Empire and Seapower:
Shipbuilding by the East India Company at Bombay for the Royal Navy 1805–1850’, in P.
Haudrère with R. E. Bouédec and G. Bouédec (eds), Les Flottes Des Compagnies Des Indes,
1600–1857 (Vincennes: Service historique de la Marine, 1996). See also the essays by Lambert
and Andrew Cook in Bowen, Lincoln, and Rigby (eds), Worlds of the East India Company, 119–
52. See also, Farrington, Catalogue of East India Company Ships’ Journals.
33
Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–
1830 (Delhi/New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995); Douglas Peers, Between Mars and
Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth-Century India (London/New
York, NY: Tauris, 1995). Despite their titles, T. A. Heathcote, The Military in British India: The
Development of British Land Forces in South Asia, 1600–1947 (Manchester: Manchester University
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1165
Press, 1995); Stephen Cohen, Daniel Marston, and Chandar Sundaram (eds), A Military History
of India and South Asia: From the East India Company to the Nuclear Era (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University, 2007), also dedicate very little time to the Company before the 1760s. One
exception might be D. F. Harding’s Smallarms of the East India Company, 1600–1856, 4 vols.
(London: Foresigt, 1997–99), but this very useful set remains largely focused on the
material aspects of warfare than a survey of the ideas, practices, or broader consequences of
their employment.
34
Holden Furber, ‘The History of East India Companies: General Problems’ (Paris, 1970), in
Furber, Private Fortunes and Company Profits in the India Trade in the 18th Century, ed. Rosane
Rocher (Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum, 1997), 416. A classic study of the Company in this
context is found within William Robert Scott’s much more comprehensive survey of The
Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols.
(London, 1912; repr. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968). See also K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘The
English East India Company in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Pre-Modern Multinational
Organization’, in Blussé and Gaastra (eds), Companies and Trade (Leiden: Leiden University
Press, 1981), 29 – 46.
35
For example, Bruce Buchan, ‘The Emergence of the Technostructure: Lessons from the East
India Company, 1713–1836’, Journal of Management History, 41 (2003): 105–16; Ann M. Carlos
and Stephen Nicholas, ‘Giants of an Earlier Capitalism: The Chartered Companies as Modern
Multinationals’, Business History Review, 62 (1988); Carlos and Nicholas, ‘Theory and History:
Seventeenth-Century Joint-Stock Chartered Trading Companies’, Journal of Economic History, 56
(1996): 398–419; Santhi Hejeebu, ‘Contract Enforcement in the English East India Company’,
Journal of Economic History, 65/2 (2005): 496–523. For a recent reading of the transformative
power of the Company’s early understanding of its business practices through Marx, see Valerie
Forman, ‘Transformations of Value and the Production of “Investment” in the Early History
of the English East India Company’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34/3 (Fall
2004): 611–42.
36
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Frank Submissions: The Company and the Mughals between Sir
Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris’, in Bowen, Lincoln, and Rigby (eds), Worlds of the East
India Company, esp. 70; C. A. Bayly, ‘The British Military-Fiscal State and Indigenous
Resistance: India 1750–1820’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from
1689 to 1815 (London/New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 324–5; I. B. Watson, ‘Fortifications
and the “Idea” of Force in Early English East India Company Relations with India’, Past and
Present, 88 (1980): 70–87; Holden Furber, ‘The Growth of British Power in India 1708–1748’
(1969), in Furber, Private Fortunes, 16.
37
A fuller treatment of the political and intellectual history of the early modern Company will
be the subject of my forthcoming book (Oxford University Press, 2010). See also, Philip J.
Stern, ‘“A Politie of Civill & Military Power”: Political Thought and the Late SeventeenthCentury Foundations of the East India Company-State’, Journal of British Studies, 47/2 (April
2008): 253–83; Stern, ‘Politics and Ideology in the Early East India Company-State: The Case
of St. Helena, 1673–1696’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35/1 (March 2007):
1–23; Stern, ‘British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections’, The William and
Mary Quarterly (October 2006): 693–712.
38
Søren Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London 1660–
1740 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005). On ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, see P. J.
Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000 (Harlow/New York, NY: Longman,
2002).
39
With my sincerest apologies to those I have not mentioned or do not yet know about: see,
for example, James Vaughn’s recent dissertation rethinks the foundations of the Company’s role
in domestic party politics (and vice versa), and the shifts in Company politics and political
economy in Britain, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, that laid the
foundations for Plassey (Ph.D. diss, University of Chicago, 2009); conversely, on how the
Company’s changing role in India from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth century
transformed British visions of political economy, see Rahul Govind, ‘The Antinomies of
Political-Economy within the Dialectic of Imperialism: The East India Company as Perspective,
1689–1821’, Ph.D. diss. (Columbia University, 2008). On the social, political, and religious
foundations for Company rule in Madras, with a particular eye to the Company’s role in labor
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1166 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
relations, see Aparna Balachandran, ‘Christ and the Pariah: Colonialism, Religion and Outcaste
Labor in Company Madras, 1780–1830’, Ph.D. diss. (Columbia University, 2008). Rupa
Mishra’s ongoing work also promises to offer exciting new ways to think not only about the
Company’s role in early seventeenth-century English politics, but also the social and cultural
foundations for its early factories in India, particularly at Surat. See Rupali Mishra, ‘Merchants,
Commerce and the State: Public Interest and Private Enterprise in Early Stuart England’, Ph.D.
diss. (Princeton University, forthcoming).
40
The literature on the financial revolution is too extensive to review here, though it is worth
mentioning that it all deals with the Company as part of a larger British story, rather than as a
history of the Company per se. For a recent intervention, however, see Pilar Nogués Marco and
Camila Vam Malle-Sabouret, ‘East India bonds, 1718–1763: Early Exotic Derivatives and
London Market Efficiency’, European Review of Economic History, 2 (2007): 367–94.
41
The interest in the Company and political economy is nothing new. On the history of
economic thought, see Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century
England ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); William Barber, British Economic
Thought and India 1600–1858: A Study in the History of Development Economics (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975); Andrea Finkelstein, The Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of
Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
2000). For a recent intervention in the modern period, see Mark Donoghue, ‘William Thomas
Thornton’s Career at East India House: 1836–1880’, History of Political Economy, 36/2 (2004):
295–322.
42
See, amongst many others, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a
Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1982); Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, The Management of
Monopoly: A Study of the East India Company’s Conduct of its Tea Trade, 1784–1833 (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia, 1984); Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century
England (Kingston, Ont: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989); Philip Lawson, A Taste for
Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas Expansion, 1660–1800 (Aldershot/Hampshire/
Brookfield, VT: Variorium, 1998), esp. xiv, xv; James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce
and British taste, 1660–1800 (New York, NY: NYU Press, 1997).
43
John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State (New York, NY: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1989); Carruthers, City of Capital, ch. 6; Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early
Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
44
Steve Pincus, ‘The Making of a Great Power? Universal Monarchy, Political Economy,
and the Transformation of English Political Culture’, The European Legacy, 5 (2000): 531–45;
Pincus, ‘Whigs, Political Economy, and the Revolution of 1688–89’, in David Womersley with
Paddy Bullard and Abigail Williams (eds), ‘Cultures of Whiggism’: New Essays on English
Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark, DE: University of Delaware
Press, 2005).
45
See, for example, Anthony Milton, ‘Marketing a Massacre: Amboyna, the East India
Company and the Public Sphere in Early Stuart England’, in Steve Pincus and Peter Lake (eds),
The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester/New York, NY: Manchester
University Press, 2007), 168–90; Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the
British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. 56–78.
46
Indeed, such an approach to the English Company is suggested by Adams’s work itself, which
she employs as a point of comparison and foil for the Dutch case. Julia Adams, The Familial
State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005).
47
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1992). Recently, see George McGilvary, East India Patronage and the British State: The Scottish
Elite and Politics in the Eighteenth Century (London/New York, NY: Tauris, 2008); Martha
McLaren, British India & British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and the
Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001).
For a later period, see Philip Constable, ‘Scottish Missionaries, “Protestant Hinduism”, and the
Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century India’, The Scottish
Historical Review, 86/222 (2007): 278–313.
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1167
48
Andrew Mackillop, ‘Accessing Empire: Scotland, Europe, Britain, and the Asia Trade, 1695–
c. 1750’, Itinerario, 29/3 (2005): 7–30.
49
See C. A. Bayly, ‘Ireland, India and the Empire: 1780–1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 6th ser., 10 (2000): 377–97. See also Craig Bailey, ‘Metropole and Colony: Irish
Networks and Patronage in the Eighteenth-Century Empire’, Immigrants and Minorities, 23/2–
3 (2005): 161–81.
50
Michael Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857
( New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006). See also, for example, Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain:
400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002); Shompa Lahiri, ‘Contested Relations: The
East India Company and Lascars in London’, in Bowen, Lincoln, and Rigby (eds), Worlds of the
East India Company, 169–82.
51
Philip Lawson, ‘The Missing Link: The Imperial Dimension in Understanding Hanoverian
Britain’, Historical Journal 29 (1986): 751. Presciently, Lawson anticipated these broader turns in
the British historiography, engaging in the course of his career with ‘domestic’ Parliamentary
history, eighteenth-century British Canada, British India, and ultimately their intersections. See,
amongst others, Lawson, Taste for Empire and Glory; ‘Robert Clive, the “Black Jagir”, and
British Politics’, Historical Journal, 26/4 (1983): 801–29; Lawson, ‘Parliament and the First East
India Inquiry, 1767’, Parliamentary History, 1 (1982): 99–114.
52
Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York,
NY: Routledge, 2002), 2.
53
See H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–1773
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Bowen, ‘British India, 1765–1813: The
Metropolitan Context’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2, The
Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 530–51; Bowen, ‘“No Longer
Mere Traders”: Continuities and Change in the Metropolitan Development of the East India
Company, 1600–1834’, in Bowen, Lincon, and Rigby (eds), Worlds of the East India Company,
19–32.
54
H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
55
James Thomas, The East India Company and the Provinces in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 1,
Portsmouth and the East India Company 1700–1815 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999);
Thomas, The East India Company and the Provinces in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 2, Captains,
Agents, and Servants, A Gallery of East India Company Portraits (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen
Press, 2007); Thomas, ‘East India Company Agency Work in the British Isles’, in Bowen,
Lincoln, and Rigby (eds), Worlds of the East India Company, 33–48.
56
See also Jeremy Osborn, ‘India and the East India Company in the Public Sphere of
Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Bowen, Lincoln, and Rigby (eds), Worlds of the East India
Company, 201–22.
57
The classic work on the Hastings trial is still P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).
58
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
ch. 2–3; Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi:
Oxford University Press. 1995).
59
The literature is voluminous and growing every day. For just a sample, see Jennifer Pitts, A
Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005), ch. 3; Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in NineteenthCentury British Liberal Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Frederick
Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire ( Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh, 1996); Richard Bourke, ‘Liberty, Authority, and Trust in Burke’s Idea of Empire’,
Journal of the History of Ideas (2000): 453–77; Sunil Agnani, ‘Jacobinism in India, Indianism in
English Parliament: Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity with Edmund Burke’,
Cultural Critique, 68 (Winter 2008): 131–62 ; Julie Murray, ‘Company Rules: Burke, Hastings,
and the Specter of the Modern Liberal State’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41/1 (2007): 55–69;
Mithi Mukherjee, ‘Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke’s
Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings’, Law and History Review,
23/3 (2005): 589–630; Brian Smith, ‘Edmund Burke, the Warren Hastings Trial, and the Moral
Dimension of Corruption’, Polity, 40/1 ( January 2008): 70–94.
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1168 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
60
Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For a response to the latter sentiment, see C. A. Bayly,
‘Moral Judgment: Empire, Nation and History’, European Review, 14/3 (2006): 385–91.
61
Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004), ch. 4.
62
Javier Cuenca-Esteban, ‘India’s Contribution to the British Balance of Payments, 1757–1812’,
Explorations in Economic History, 44/1 (January 2007): 154–76; Cuenca-Esteban, ‘Fiscal Dimensions
of Britain’s Regulated Trade with Asia, 1765–1812’, in Rafael Torres Sánchez (ed.), War, State
and Development: Fiscal-Military States in the Eighteenth Century (Pamplona: Eunsa, 2007), 69–85;
Cuenca-Esteban, ‘The British Balance of Payments, 1772–1820: India Transfers and War
Finance’, Economic History Review, 53/1 (February 2001): 58–86.
63
Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
64
Natasha Eaton, ‘Nostalgia for the Exotic: Creating an Imperial Art in London, 1750–1793’,
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39/2 (2006): 227–50; Christina Smylitopoulos, ‘Rewritten and
Reused: Imaging the Nabob through “Upstart Iconography”’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 32/2
(Spring 2008): 39–57.
65
These issues will be dealt with in his forthcoming book, Nabobs: The Struggle for Empire and
Nation in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain, and are foreshadowed in Tillman Nechtman, ‘A Jewel
in the Crown? Indian Wealth in Domestic Britain in the Late Eighteenth Century’, EighteenthCentury Studies, 41/1 (2007): 71–86; Nechtman, ‘Nabobinas: Luxury, Gender, and the Sexual
Politics of British Imperialism in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Women’s History, 18/
4 (2006): 8–30; Nechtman, ‘Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and
the Indian Question in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain’, History Compass, 4/4 (2006): 645–
67. For a more exclusively political perspective, see the older work of Philip Lawson and Jim
Philips, ‘“Our Execrable Banditti”: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain’,
Albion, 16/3 (1984): 225–41.
66
See Joseph Sramek, ‘A Moral Empire? Anxieties about Masculinity and Colonial
Governance in Company India, ca. 1780–1857’, Ph.D. diss. (City University of New York,
2007).
67
See for example, Kenneth Ballhatchet’s classic study, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial
Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980).
68
Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender
(Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
69
Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). For a recent intervention, Norbert Schurer, ‘The Impartial
Spectator of Sati, 1757–84’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42/1 (Fall 2008): 19–44.
70
Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
71
For three examples, see Indrani Chatterjee (ed.), Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in
South Asia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Buettner, Empire
Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford/New York, NY: Oxford University Press,
2004); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2002).
72
Durba Ghosh, ‘Who Counts as “Native?”’: Gender, Race, and Subjectivity in Colonial
India’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 6/31 (2005); for a similar phenomenon in
London, see Michael Fisher, ‘Excluding and Including “Natives of India”: Early-NineteenthCentury British-Indian Race Relations in Britain’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and
the Middle East, 27/2 (2007): 103–14. On the law, see, amongst others, Radhika Singha, A
Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India ( Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Kolsky, ‘Codification and the Rule of Colonial
Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India’, Law and History Review, 23/3 (2005): 631–85;
Sudipta Sen, ‘Imperial Subjects on Trial: On the Legal Identity of Britons in Late Eighteenth-Century India’, Journal of British Studies, 45/3 (2006): 532–55. This is also the subject of
stimulating new work just coming to fruition; see Hannah Weiss, ‘An Empire of Subjects: Unities
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and Disunities in the British Empire, 1760–1790’, unpublished Ph.D. diss. (Princeton University,
forthcoming); Mitch Fraas, ‘English Law, Asian Subjects, and the Development of a British
Colonial State in India, 1664–1773’, unpublished Ph.D. diss. (Duke University, in
progress).
73
For an excellent survey of the debate, see David Washbrook, ‘South India 1770–1840: The
Colonial Transition’, Modern Asian Studies, 38/3 (2004): 479–516.
74
See, C. A. Bayly, Rulers Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British
Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Bayly, Indian Society
and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Bayly,
Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
75
Rajat Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c.1760–1800
( New Delhi: Manohar, 2000).
76
See, for example, Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics, and Society in Early Modern India:
Bihar, 1733–1820 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India
Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1998); Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants,
and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
77
Ian J. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c.1756–1905 (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical
Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Conceit of the Globe in Mughal Visual Practice’, Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 49/4 (2007): 751–82.
78
For example, Sudipta Sen, ‘Uncertain Dominance: The Colonial State and its Contradictions
(with notes on the History of Early British India)’, Nepantla: Views from the South, 3/2 (2002):
391–406; Natasha Eaton, ‘The Art of Colonial Despotism: Portraits, Politics, and Empire in
South India, 1750–1795’, Cultural Critique, 70 (Fall 2008): 69–93; Eaton, ‘Mimesis and Alterity:
Art, Gift and Diplomacy in Colonial India, 1770–1800’, Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 46/4 (2004): 816–44; Margot C. Finn, ‘Colonial Gifts: Family Politics and the
Exchange of Goods in British India, c.1780–1820’, Modern Asian Studies, 40/1 (2006): 203–31;
Robert Travers, ‘Death and the Nabob: Imperialism and Commemoration in EighteenthCentury India’, Past and Present, 196 (August 2007): 83–124.
79
Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East 1750–1850 (New York,
NY: Knopf, 2005).
80
William Dalrymple, ‘Assimilation and Transculturation in Eighteenth-Century India: A
Response to Pankaj Mishra’, Common Knowledge, 11/3 (2005): 456. See Dalrymple, White
Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Harper Collins, 2002).
81
Kate Teltscher, The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama and the First British
Expedition to Tibet (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).
82
Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
83
The classic examples here are Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994); Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1963); Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement
( Paris: Mouton, 1963; repr. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). In my own work, I have
attempted similarly to think about the Company leaderships’ earnest engagement with political
ideology and a sense of its own sovereignty in era much earlier than usually treated in Company
history, albeit in different places and with relation to a much different kind of polity than that
which emerges in the 1760s. See, for example, Stern, ‘Politie of Civill and Military Power’.
84
Douglas M. Peers, ‘Gunpowder Empires and the Garrison State: Modernity, Hybridity, and
the Political Economy of Colonial India, circa 1750–1860’, Comparative Studies of South Asia,
Africa, and the Middle East, 27/2 (2007): 247.
85
Bhavani Raman, ‘Document Raj: Scribes and Writing under Early Colonial Rule in Madras,
1771–1860’, unpublished Ph.D. diss. ( University of Michigan, 2007).
86
Sen, Distant Sovereignty, xvii, xxiv, 1ff.
87
Jon E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India 1780–1835
( London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
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1170 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
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C. A. Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India’, Modern
Intellectual History, 4/1 (2007): 25–41.
89
In addition to a number of forthcoming articles and books, see Kathleen Wilson, ‘Rowe’s
Fair Penient as Global History: Or, A Diversionary Voyage to New South Wales’, EighteenthCentury Studies, 41/2 (2008): 231–51; Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender
in the Eighteenth Century (London/New York, NY: Routledge, 2003) also engages to some
degree with Company history as well. (My many thanks to Kathleen Wilson for sharing aspects
of her work-in-progress with me.) On familial connections and networks across the early
modern empire, see also Richard Grassby, Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and Business
in the English-Speaking World 1580–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
which includes a number of observations throughout on social life in Company cities in Asia.
For a broader comparative frame, see Patrick Manning, ‘Frontiers of Family Life: Early Modern
Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds’, Modern Asian Studies, 43/1 (2009): 315–33.
90
See, amongst others of her work, Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in
World History 1400–1900 (New York, NY/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Benton, ‘Spatial Geographies of Empire’, Itinerario, 30/3 (2006): 19–34; Benton, ‘Legal Spaces
of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism’, Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 47/4 (October 2005): 700–24.
91
Weiss, ‘Empire of Subjects’.
92
Halliday is currently completing a book on this subject. In the meantime, see Paul D. Halliday
and Edward G. White, ‘The Suspension Clause: English Text, Imperial Contexts, and American
Implications’, Virginia Law Review, 94/3 (May 2008), esp. 651–66. (Many thanks to Paul
Halliday for sharing some of this work-in-progress.)
93
For example, roughly 1/3 of the essays in Felicity Nussbaum’s edited collection on this subject
touch on Company Asia in some way. See Felicity Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth
Century (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
94
See, for example, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to
the Ganges (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global
History of Empire (New York, NY: Allen Lane, 2007). More broadly, see A. G. Hopkins (ed.),
Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local (Basingstoke/New York, NY:
Palgrave, 2006); Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002).
95
Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660
( New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008).
96
Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: Woman in World History (New York, NY/
London: Pantheon Books and Harper Press, 2007).
97
For a prolegomenon to a forthcoming book on the subject, see Maya Jasanoff, ‘The Other
Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 65/2
(April 2008): 205–32.
98
Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
99
For this, they rely very heavily on Farrington’s Catalogue. See Emily Erikson and Peter
Bearman, ‘Malfeasance and the Foundations for Global Trade: The Structure of English
Trade in the East Indies, 1601–1833’, American Journal of Sociology, 112/1 (July 2006): 195–
230.
100
Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company
(Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
101
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003); Barbour, ‘The East India Company Journal of Anthony Marlowe,
1607–08’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71/2 (2008): 255–301; Barbour, ‘Power and Distant
Display: Early English “Ambassadors” in Moghul India’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 61/3–4
(1998): 343–68; Barbour, ‘“There Is Our Commission”: Writing and Authority in Measure for
Measure and the London East India Company’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 99/2
(April 2000): 193–214.
102
Mary Poovey, ‘The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East
Indiamen’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (Autumn 2004): 183–202; Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without
Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997).
© 2009 The Author
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Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
History and Historiography of the English East India Company
1171
103
Anna Winterbottom, ‘The Royal Society, the East India Company and Mapping the World
in the Seventeenth Century’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Queen Mary, London, in progress);
Winterbottom, ‘Producing and Using the Historical Relation of Ceylon: Robert Knox, the East
India Company, and the Royal Society’, British Journal for the History of Science (forthcoming).
Many thanks to Anna Winterbottom for allowing me to consult and cite this piece in draft.
104
Stephen Royle, The Company’s Island: St Helena, Company Colonies, and the Colonial Endeavour
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).
105
Stern, ‘St. Helena’, 2; Alison Games et al., ‘Forum: Beyond the Atlantic’, The William and
Mary Quarterly, 63/4 (October 2006): 675–742; Peter Coclanis, ‘Drang Nach Osten: Bernard
Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History’, Journal of World History, 13/1
(Spring 2002): 169–82.
106
P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1. This concern in Marshall’s work is not unprecedented; see, for example, his extremely persuasive case about the relationship between the birth
of British India and the campaign to abolish the slave trade: Marshall, ‘The Moral Swing to
the East: British Humanitarianism, India and the West Indies’, in Kenneth Ballhatchet and John
Harrison (eds), East India Company Studies: Papers Presented to Professor Sir Cyril Philips (Hong
Kong: Asian Research Service, 1986). See also the essays in Marshall, A Free Though Conquering
People: Eighteenth-Century Britain and its Empire (Aldershot/Hampshire/Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2003).
107
Carl H. Nightingale, ‘Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early
Colonial Madras and New York’, American Historical Review, 113/1 (February 2008): 48–71; for
a later example, see also Nightingale, ‘The Transnational Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century
American Urban Segregation’, Journal of Social History 39/3 (Spring 2006): 667–702.
108
Elizabeth Mancke, ‘Empire and State’, in David Armitage and Michael Braddick (eds), The British
Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke/New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), esp. 188–9.
109
See, for example, Elizabeth Kelly Gray, ‘Whisper to Him the Word “India”’: Trans-Atlantic
Critics and American Slavery, 1830–1860’, Journal of the Early Republic, 27 (Fall 2008): 379–406;
H. V. Bowen, ‘Perceptions from the Periphery: Colonial American Views of Britain’s Asiatic
Empire, 1756–1783’, in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (eds), Negotiated Empires:
Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York, NY/London: Routledge, 2002),
283–300; John Crowley, ‘A Visual Empire: Seeing the British Atlantic World from a Global
British Perspective’, in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (eds), The Creation of the British
Atlantic World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), ch. 12; Eric A.
Goldman, ‘The “Black Hole of Calcutta” in Charles Brockden Brown’s America: American
Exceptionalism and India in Edgar Huntly’, Early American Literature, 43/3 (2008): 557–79; Jee
Yoon Lee, ‘“The Rude Contact of Some Actual Circumstance”: Hawthorne and Salem’s East
India Marine Museum’, ELH, 73 (2006): 949–73.
110
There are an ever-increasing number of examples of this. With apologies to those I have
not mentioned, see for example, Susan Bean, Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural
Encounters with India in the Age of Sail, 1784–1860 (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001);
David Hancock, ‘“An Undiscovered Ocean of Commerce Laid Wide Open”: India, Wine, and
the Emerging Atlantic Economy, 1703–1813’, in Bowen, Lincoln, and Rigby (eds), Worlds of
the East India Company, 153–68; James Fichter, ‘The United States, Britain, and the East Indies,
1773–1815’, Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University, 2006); Jonathan Eacott, ‘Owning Empire: The
Matter of India in the Anglophone World’, Ph.D. diss. ( University of Michigan, 2008).
111
See Cannadine, ‘“Big Tent” Historiography’, 388.
112
The two most reliable and often used are now over fifteen years old: Philip Lawson’s short
but scholarly The East India Company: A History ( London/New York, NY: Longman, 1993)
and John Keay’s more popularly-oriented The Honourable Company: A History of the English East
India Company ( London: Harper Collins, 1991).
113
See, for example, Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena,
1860–1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Sugata Bose, A Hundred
Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006). For reflections on the future of Indian Ocean studies within the ‘new thalassology’,
see Vink, ‘Indian Ocean Studies’, esp. 52–62.
© 2009 The Author
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Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1172 History and Historiography of the English East India Company
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