CHRISTIANITY AS AN ARM OF EMPIRE: THE AMBIGUOUS CASE OF INDIA UNDER THE COMPANY, c. 1813–1858

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1025-1054 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAN COPLAND
Keyword(s):  
East India Company ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Ambiguous Case ◽  
The Relationship

For many years it was widely assumed that there was a close connection between the rapid expansion of European imperial power and acquisition of territory overseas during the nineteenth century, particularly in Asia and Africa, and the congruent Protestant Christian missionary project to save the ‘heathens’ of these places by persuading them to embrace the ‘redeeming’ message of the Gospels. Over the past several decades, however, the thesis that empire-building and Christian evangelizing were mutually supportive activities has come under sustained attack from a group of British historians led by Brian Stanley and Andrew Porter – to the point where the Stanley–Porter revisionist line now occupies centre-stage. This article shows that, contrary to the dominant consensus, the relationship between church – in the form of the missionary societies – and state – in the shape of the English East India Company, initially cool, gradually warmed as the two parties came to realize that they had a common interest in providing ‘civilizing’ Western education to the Indian elites. Indeed it provocatively suggests that the colonial state might well, in time, have given its endorsement and even its support to the spread of Christianity had not the Mutiny intervened in 1857. However the analysis of the benefits generated by this South Asian partnership finds, paradoxically, that it undermined the Company’s authority, and may well have deterred many Indians from converting to Christianity – which had come to be widely seen as a privileged and imperialist religion.

‘Inhabitants of the universe’: global families, kinship networks, and the formation of the early modern colonial state in Asia

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Veevers
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Kinship Networks ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
Political Borders ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
New Research

AbstractNew research on the early modern colonial state in Asia has emphasized the agency of actors and their networks in a process of state formation, while the rise of global history has similarly highlighted the importance of global connections in forming sites of empire. This article seeks to contribute to this growing literature. It does so by revealing that the families of English East India Company servants, following their counterparts in other European East India companies in Asia, underwent a global transition in which they established Asian-wide networks of kinship, transcending the local and regional spaces in which they had previously operated. Through their increasing ability to operate across the social, cultural, economic, and political borders of Asia, Company kinship networks facilitated the formation of a politically amorphous colonial state. Furthermore, while previous scholarship has confined colonial state formation to the later eighteenth century, this article challenges the historiography by relocating this process to the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

A Company with Sovereignty and Subjects of Its Own? The Case of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1670–1763

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Cavanagh
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Land Resources ◽  
Hudson's Bay Company ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Company ◽  
Hudson’S Bay Company

AbstractQuestions about the ways in which colonial subjects were acquired and maintained, and how it was that multiple and often contradictory sovereignties came to overlap in history, may not be purely academic. We raise them today because they spring from issues that remain unresolved, concerning rights to land, resources, and self-determination. Following recent scholarship on the English East India Company, the author redefines the Hudson's Bay Company, during the period before widespread settler colonialism, as a state (or “company-state”), and in this way argues that the HBC-state possessed its own kind of sovereignty. The article make three main arguments: that it was up to the HBC, not the Crown, to found Rupert's Land, defend its establishments, make alliances with locals, and challenge intruders; that HBC rule extended to cover not only the company's employees but, eventually, an indigenous “home guard” population; and that the HBC welfare regime transformed the relationship between ruler and ruled.

John Company Armed: The English East India Company, the Anglo-Mughal War and Absolutist Imperialism, c. 1675–1690

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

During the 1670s and 1680s, the English East India Company pursued an aggressive programme of imperial expansion in the Asian maritime world, culminating in a series of armed assaults on the Mughal Empire. With important exceptions, most scholarship has viewed the Company's coercive imperialism in the later seventeenth century and the First Anglo-Mughal War as the results primarily, if not exclusively, of political and economic conditions in South Asia. This article re-examines and re-interprets this burst of imperial expansion in light of political developments in England and the wider English empire during the later Stuart era. The article contends that the Company's aggressive overseas expansion was pursued for metropolitan and pan-imperial purposes as much as for South Asian ones. The corporation sought to centralise and militarise the English presence in Asia in order both to maintain its control of England's trade to the East and in support of Stuart absolutism. By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Company's aggressive imperialism formed part of a wider political project to create an absolute monarchy in England and to establish an autocratic English empire overseas.

Challenging the Terms of Order: Representations of the Detroit Rebellions, 1967–1968

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan T. Camp
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Civil Structures ◽  
Us History ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
John Clarke

While many analysts have commented on the representation of 1968 campus events and antiwar demonstrations, less attention has been paid to the global significance of the dramatic struggles in industrial Detroit during the period. The meanings of events in the city were intensely fought over. As Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts observed, the events of 1968 were “an act of collective will, the breaks and ruptures stemming from the rapid expansion in the ideology, culture and civil structures of the new capitalism . . . in the form of a ‘crisis of authority.’” In Detroit the crisis of authority was expressed in the form of popular political struggles against racism, state violence, and the contradictions of life in the industrial capitalist city. This article asks and answers the following research questions about the struggle over the meaning of this decisive turning point in US history: What was the relationship between racial ordering, uneven capitalist development, and mass antiracist and class struggles? How did Black working-class organic intellectuals resist and alter hegemonic definitions of the situation? How are the dialectics of insurgency and counterinsurgency to be best theorized during this precise historical conjuncture? 

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Degree Of Acceptance ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State ◽  
The Relationship

This volume charts the development of protestant Dissent between the passing of the Toleration Act (1689) and the repealing of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828). The long eighteenth century was a period in which Dissenters slowly moved from a position of being a persecuted minority to achieving a degree of acceptance and, eventually, full political rights. The first part of the volume considers the history of various Dissenting traditions inside England. There are separate chapters devoted to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers—the denominations that traced their history before this period—and also to Methodists, who emerged as one of the denominations of ‘New Dissent’ during the eighteenth century. The second part explores the ways in which these traditions developed outside England. It considers the complexities of being a Dissenter in Wales and Ireland, where the state church was Episcopalian, as well as in Scotland, where it was Presbyterian. It also looks at the development of Dissent across the Atlantic, where the relationship between Church and state was rather more loose. The third part is devoted to revivalist movements and their impact, with a particular emphasis on the importance of missionary societies for spreading protestant Christianity from the late eighteenth century onwards. The fourth part looks at Dissenters’ relationship to the British state and their involvement in campaigns to abolish the slave trade. The final part discusses how Dissenters lived: the theology they developed and their attitudes towards Scripture; the importance of both sermons and singing; their involvement in education and print culture; and the ways in which they expressed their faith materially through their buildings.

Anti-Politics, Depoliticization, and Governance

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Collective Agency ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Varied Range ◽  
The Relationship

There is a growing body of evidence pointing towards rising levels of public dissatisfaction with the formal political process. Depoliticization refers to a more discrete range of contemporary strategies politicians employ that tend to remove or displace the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation. This book examines the relationship between these trends of dissatisfaction and displacement, as understood within the broader shift towards governance. It brings together a number of contributions from scholars who have a varied range of concerns but who nevertheless share a common interest in developing the concept of depoliticization through their engagement with a set of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions. The contributions in this volume explore these questions from a variety of different perspectives by using a number of different empirical examples and case studies from both within the nation state and from other regional, global, and multilevel arenas. In this context, this volume examines the limits and potential of depoliticization as a concept and its contribution to the larger and more established literatures on governance and anti-politics.

This Is an Abridged Account of Delhi Which Is an Old City and One of the Chosen Ones amongst the Cities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirza Sangin Beg
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Work Spaces ◽  
History Of ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The City ◽  
Cost Of Construction

The second part of the translation has three segments. The first is dedicated to the history of Delhi from the time of the Mahabharat to the periods of Anangpal Tomar to the Mughal Emperor Humayun as also Sher Shah, the Afghan ruler. In the second and third segments Mirza Sangin Beg adroitly navigates between twin centres of power in the city. He writes about Qila Mubarak, or the Red Fort, and gives an account of the several buildings inside it and the cost of construction of the same. He ambles into the precincts and mentions the buildings constructed by Shahjahan and other rulers, associating them with some specific inmates of the fort and the functions performed within them. When the author takes a walk in the city of Shahjahanabad, he writes of numerous residents, habitations of rich, poor, and ordinary people, their mansions and localities, general and specialized bazars, the in different skills practised areas, places of worship and revelry, processions exemplifying popular culture and local traditions, and institutions that had a resonance in other cultures. The Berlin manuscript gives generous details of the officials of the English East India Company, both native and foreign, their professions, and work spaces. Mirza Sangin Beg addresses the issue of qaum most unselfconsciously and amorphously.

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