The East India Company, the Company’s Museum, and the Political Economy of Natural History in the Early Nineteenth Century

Isis ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 107 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Ratcliff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Natural History ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

Colonizing the Sacred: Allahabad and the Company State, 1797–1857

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faridah Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Form ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Built Heritage ◽  
The Social

This article rethinks the complicated encounter between the East India Company and the built heritage of India in the early nineteenth century. Through an extended case study of the imperial mosque in Allahabad, which was periodically subject to British intervention over some sixty years, it traces vicissitudes in attitudes towards history, religion, and the social existence of Muslims in India generally and Allahabad in particular. The article argues for the need to look beyond the narrative of Britain's relationship with architecture as artefact or heritage—a relationship that took on institutional form in the 1860s—to the comparatively less familiar story of the Company State's prolonged and serious interest in the built environment, and specifically religious buildings, as part of the political economy of its rule. It demonstrates that such an interest was simultaneously a logical outcome of and a tension within the legitimating discourses that the Company State fashioned during the last half-century of its rule in India.

The Political Economy of Opium Smuggling in Early Nineteenth Century India: Leakage or Resistance?

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLAUDE MARKOVITS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Central India ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Political ◽  
Western India ◽  
Trading System

AbstractThis article looks at the political economy of opium smuggling in India in the first decades of the nineteenth century, in particular in relation to Sindh, one of the last independent polities in the subcontinent. After a description of the smuggling of ‘Malwa’ opium (grown in the princely states of Central India) into China—in defiance of the monopoly of the East India Company over ‘Bengal’ or ‘Patna’ opium, grown in Bihar—it considers the role of Indian merchants and capitalists in its emergence and development, and critiques the argument put forward in a recent book by Amar Farooqi that it represented both a form of ‘subversion’ and that it contributed decisively to capital accumulation in Western India. This article concludes by analysing the role of the opium trade in integrating Sindh into the British imperial trading system, arguing that it was more effective in boosting Empire than in nurturing indigenous capitalism in India.

Free Trade and State Formation: The Political Economy of Fisheries Policy in Britain and the United Kingdom circa 1780–1850

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Gambles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
State Formation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
British State ◽  
The Relationship

It is striking that historians of the early nineteenth century have been relatively reluctant to consider relationships between economic policy and the consolidation of the British state. In today's context, the economic and political challenges posed by both European integration and resurgent nationalism have generated hotly contested controversies on the political economy of state formation. From the perspective of the United Kingdom, the prospect of political and administrative devolution has forced us to address the implications of political decentralization for regional economic development (and vice versa) and to consider in turn the impact of these dynamics on the political integrity of a multinational state. For Britain, the period between circa 1780 and 1850 was characterized by unprecedented economic growth, imperial crisis and acquisition, and political consolidation. In a metropolitan sense the most dramatic feature of this process was, of course, the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. Insofar as historians of early nineteenth-century Britain have examined the relationship between “state formation” and economic policy, however, they have tended to focus on the ideas, politics, and pressures surrounding the retreat of the state from economic intervention. Thus in more general accounts it became axiomatic that the nineteenth-century state shrank progressively from social and economic intervention, liberating commerce, and resting the fiscal system on secure but modest direct taxation.More recently, the relationship between the concept of “laissez-faire” and British state formation has been dramatically revised and refined by Philip Harling and Peter Mandler.

scholarly journals Hand-in-hand with the survey: surveying and the accumulation of knowledge capital at India House during the Napoleonic Wars

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-166
Author(s):  
Jessica Ratcliff
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Knowledge Capital ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Information Order ◽  
Wide Range

In the early nineteenth century, the material culture of British science was being transformed by an increasingly centralized colonial information order. Surveys conducted during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars were particularly important to the growth of the East India Company's new collections in London. In the wake of territorial gains, surveyors and their staff bought, plundered, collected and otherwise acquired a wide range of materials related to arts, sciences, history, natural history and literature. Focusing on survey collections formed in Ceylon, Mysore and Java between 1795 and 1820, this essay explores the place of the Company's culture of surveying and collecting within both Company science and wider shifts in the political economy of colonial collecting. Such shifts include changes in property claims, the growing clout of the Company's library and museum in London and, most importantly, the Napoleonic Wars. The wartime context enabled not only basic access to new materials but also cheap modes of collection and a motive to collect—or to value collections—driven by commercial and territorial competition.

Contemplation and Criticism: Coleridge, Derrida and the Sublime

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
David Vallins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era

Recent criticism has often contrasted both deconstruction and Romantic idealism with diverse ‘progressive’ ideologies, whether historical-materialist in origin, or associated with the economic liberalism of British Whigs in the early nineteenth century. At the same time, however, Romantic idealism is often seen as involving a Platonic essentialism which distinguishes it from deconstruction as much as from historical materialism. My essay seeks to unravel these dichotomies and paradoxes, highlighting the political ambiguity of the advocates of Romantic-era political economy, as well as the anti-essentialist aspects of Coleridge's idealism, and the important elements it has in common with Derrida's questioning of ‘self-presence’ and logocentrism. The principal form of the sublime that I explore arises from Coleridge's and Derrida's recognition of the indefinableness of the origin of consciousness or the source of meaning in language – a recognition which, I argue, is progressive in its resistance to reductive and instrumentalizing definitions of humanity.

John Stuart Mill and Royal India

Utilitas ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin J. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Indian States ◽  
Policy Statements ◽  
Daily Occupation

Though John Stuart Mill's long employment by the East India Company (1823–58) did not limit him to drafting despatches on relations with the princely states, that activity must form the centrepiece of any satisfactory study of his Indian career. As yet the activity has scarcely been glimpsed. It produced, on average, about a draft a week, which he listed in his own hand. He subsequently struck out items that he sought to disown in consequence of substantial revisions made by the Company's directors or the Board of Control. He also listed items that achieved publication (mostly only in part) as parliamentary papers and they amount to about ten per cent of his drafts. The two lists, published in the most recent volume of his Collected Works, reveal, at the least, the ‘political’ despatches from which he did not seek to dissociate himself. The despatches were not entirely his work and authorship in the conventional sense may not be assumed. They were the product of an elaborate process, in which many hands were engaged. At worst, they were his work in much the same way that an Act of Parliament is the work of the Crown Solicitor who drafts the bill. At best they were his as are the drafts of a civil servant who believes in policy statements that he prepares for his political masters. The greatest English philosopher and social scientist of the nineteenth century was, in his daily occupation, an employee. His Company was charged with initiating policies for the Indian states and they were subject to the control of a minister of the Crown.

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