Administrator-scholars and the Writing of History in Early British India: A review article

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 826-843
Author(s):  
JAMES LEES
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Times

AbstractThe histories of Asian peoples penned by British East India Company officials during the early years of colonial rule—rightly—have long been considered to be doubtful source material within the historiography of South Asia. Their credibility was suspect well before the middle of the twentieth century, when Bernard Cohn's work began to present the British colonial state as one that relentlessly sought to categorize Indian society, and to use the distorted information thus gained to impose its government.However, the histories of these administrator-scholars still retain value—not as accurate studies of their subjects, perhaps, but as barometers of the times in which they were written and also in the unexpected ways in which some continue to resonate in the present. To illustrate that point, this paper will review three recent monographs which deal with the writings and historical legacies of some of the Company's most prominent early nineteenth-century administrator-scholars. These are: Jason Freitag's Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan; Jack Harrington's Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India; and Rama Mantena's work centred around the antiquarian pursuits of Colin Mackenzie, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780–1880.1

Imperialism, Botany and Statistics in early Nineteenth-Century India: The Surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762–1829)

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marika Vicziany
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Data Base ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Early Years ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Economy ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The People

Buchanan arrived in India in 1794 and left in 1815. He was employed by the East India Company for these twenty years in a number of capacities but he is chiefly remembered today for two surveys he conducted: the first of Mysore in 1800 and the second of Bengal in 1807–14. These surveys have long been used by historians, anthropologists and Indian politicians to depict the nature of Indian society in the early years of British rule. Recently economic historians, Bagchi in particular, have used the ‘statistical’ tables compiled by Buchanan as a data base against which later statistical evidence about the Indian economy is measured. Bagchi believes that by doing this he can furnish firm proof of the extent to which British rule was detrimental to the people of India in the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Fading Legacy of the Architectural Heritage of the Historic Core of Karachi

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 2735-2740
Author(s):  
T. A. Soomro ◽  
M. A. Soomro ◽  
A. N. Laghari ◽  
D. K. Bhangwar ◽  
M. A. Soomro
Keyword(s):  
East India Company ◽  
Architectural Heritage ◽  
British India ◽  
British Occupation ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town ◽  
Over Time

In 1839 British East India Company captured the town of Karachi. After an effortless resistance from the locals the fort was conquered by the British commander sir Charles Napier. The village of Kolachi then was annexed to British India and the city was labeled as Karachi. With the British occupation a phase of new sophisticated architecture and development started. Before that the city was based upon the vernacular mud architecture. These developments resulted in an influx of economic migrants who helped in making Karachi as a multinational and a multicultural city. This paper investigates the architectural attributes that the historic core of the city offers. It also discusses the side by side development of the native and British towns. The paper also researches about the existing state of the architecture precedent of the British colonial past of the city and the urban blight occurred to them over time in various forms like vandalism, encroachments, illegal repairs, etc.

scholarly journals “Imperium in Imperio”: The Corporation, Mining, and Governance in British Southeast Asia, 1900–1930

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
DAVID BAILLARGEON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
State Model ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
State Regulations ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Corporate Ventures

This article examines the history of mining in British Southeast Asia during the early twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the histories of the Burma Corporation and the Duff Development Company, which were located in British-occupied Burma and Malaya, respectively. It argues that despite being represented as “rogue” corporate ventures in areas under “indirect” colonial rule, the contrasting fates of each company—one successful, one not—reveal how foreign-owned businesses operating in the empire became increasingly beholden to British colonial state regulations during this period, marking a shift in policy from the “company-state” model that operated in prior centuries. The histories of these two firms ultimately demonstrate the continued significance of business in the making of empire during the late colonial period, bridging the divide between the age of company rule and the turn toward state-sponsored “development” that would occur in the mid-twentieth century.

The Facilitators I: Policing

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-105
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Structural Violence ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Government ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Set Up

Focusing on the role of atrocity facilitators, particularly colonial officials and the British government, in the governmentalization of torture by the police and other officials in colonial India, this chapter examines the ways in which, following the transfer of India’s governance from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858, the extra-legal violence of torture became systematized as a technology of colonial rule. Beginning with an analysis of what led to the perpetration of torture by state officials, the existence of which had long been known in both India and Britain, to erupt into scandal in 1854, the chapter interrogates how the commission set up to investigate torture led to the emergence of a new facilitatory discourse that served both to deny the existence of torture and the structural violence that underpinned it, as well as to displace blame for it from the colonial regime to its Indian subordinates. The chapter further explores how police reform in the commission’s aftermath was designed not to eradicate torture or ensure the welfare of the Indian populace but to safeguard the coercive and terrorizing powers of the colonial state

scholarly journals “No former travellers having attained such a height on the Earth’s surface”: Instruments, inscriptions, and bodies in the Himalaya, 1800–1830

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lachlan Fleetwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Himalaya ◽  
Colonial Science

East India Company surveyors began gaining access to the high Himalaya in the 1810s, at a time when the mountains were taking on increasing political significance as the northern borderlands of British India. Though never as idiosyncratic as surveyors insisted, these were spaces in which instruments, fieldbook inscriptions, and bodies were all highly prone to failure. The ways surveyors managed these failures (both rhetorically and in practice) demonstrate the social performances required to establish credible knowledge in a world in which the senses were scrambled. The resulting tensions reveal an ongoing disconnect in understanding between those displaced not only from London, but also from Calcutta, something insufficiently emphasized in previous histories of colonial science. By focusing on the early nineteenth century, often overlooked in favor of the later period, this article shows the extent to which the scientific, imaginative, and political constitution of the Himalaya was haphazard and contested.

Between Mars and Mammon; the East India Company and Efforts to Reform its Army, 1796–1832

1990 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Peers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
Anglo Indian

The history of the East India Company's rule of India is marked by sporadic outbursts of civil-military conflict. It was not unknown in India for European officers to down tools and commit acts that bordered on outright mutiny. Perhaps this could be expected when, on the one hand, the Company, as a commercial body, sought to maximize its profits, while on the other, the army was essentially a mercenary force, ever grasping for a larger slice of the fiscal pie. If, however, we penetrate deeper into the labyrinth of their relations, we find that the issues at stake lose their simplicity. In the early nineteenth century, a third group came into play, further confusing the state of civil-military relations in India. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, which had incorporated military attitudes into the operating system of British India, had begun to assert itself. Through such spokesmen as Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe and Mountstuart Elphinstone, an increasingly militarized rule of British India was put forward, angering the court of directors and allowing the officers to mask their private interest under the guise of the national interest. This ideology of militarism, however, must be firmly placed within the context of nineteenth-century British India for it bore little resemblance to those strains of militarism witnessed elsewhere.

scholarly journals PIRIṬṬIṢ KĀLAṈIYA ĀṬCIYIṈPŌTU MALĀYĀVĀḺ TAMIḺC CAMUTĀYAM AṬAINTA MĒLĀTIKKANILAI [THE HEGEMONISM ON TAMIL COMMUNITY DURING THE BRITISH COLONIAL RULE]

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
MANIYARASAN MUNIANDY
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Study Data ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Car Industry ◽  
Rubber Plantations ◽  
South Indian ◽  
British Colonial

Malaya was under colonial rule by the British at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the world. Rubber was considered an essential commodity for the car industry. The UK government approached East India Company entrepreneurs and advised them to set up rubber plantations in Malaya. Those suggestions were accepted and arrangements were made for deforestation in order to plant rubber trees throughout Malaya. The locals retreated to do the work. On the advice of the British rulers, South Indian Tamils ​​were brought to Malaya by the kangani system and by contract system and settled in rubber plantations. The Tamil people destroyed the jungles surrounding Malaya and planted rubber trees. Later, they were hired as rubber tapper in rubber plantations. The Tamil people who worked in this way suffered from the British investors, the Sri Lankan Tamils ​​who worked as plantation managers and the non-Tamil Indians who worked as clerks. C.Vadivelu, a senior Malaysian Tamil writer, has made clear through his short stories the cruelty of the hegemonism of British investors. His three collections of short stories are considered as the primary sources of this study and the historical references of Malaysia as supporting sources of the study. Data collected from short stories have been analyzed based on postcolonial theory. This study reveals the fact that the Malay Tamil people were sociologically and economically dominated by the British colonial rulers.

A family affair: John Bacon’s monument to Jane Russell, 1810-13

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322
Author(s):  
Viccy Coltman
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Social History ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
English East India Company

Focusing on John Bacon the younger’s monument to Jane Russell, this article illuminates death and memorialization in early nineteenth-century British India, with a social history focus regarding issues of gender and family. The monument in its first iteration was lost at sea in a shipwreck, and a later replacement is still in situ in St Mary’s Church at Fort St George, in the former Madras Presidency. The narrative arc traces the life cycle of a memorial to a young woman whose husband and father were leading English East India Company employees, including its commission by correspondence, execution in the metropolis and transport to the Indian subcontinent. Russell’s death and its commemoration in visual and material culture were, it is argued, a family affair on various interpretative strata, including but by no means limited to the iconography of her marmoreal ‘deathscape’.

Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi ◽  
William Dalrymple
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Conducting Research

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859), Lowland Scottish traveller, East India Company civil servant and educator, was one of the principal intellectual architects of British colonial rule in South Asia. Imbued with liberal views, such that Bombay's wealthy founded Elphinstone College in his memory, he pioneered the scholarly, scientific and administrative foundations of imperialism in India.  Elphinstone's career was launched when he was picked to lead the inaugural British diplomatic mission to the Afghan court. His Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815) became the main source of British information about Afghanistan. He is best known for his periods as Resident at Poona and Governor of Bombay in the 1810s and 1820s, when he instituted innovative and lasting policies in administration and education while also conducting research for his extremely influential History of India (1841).  This volume examines Mountstuart Elphinstone's intellectual contributions and administrative career in their own right, in relation to prominent contemporaries including Charles Metcalfe and William Moorcroft, and in the context of later historical study of India, Afghanistan, British imperialism and its imperial frontiers.

The Early Years of the Mombasa Club: A Home Away From Home for European-Christians

2001 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 71-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.J.L. Frankl
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Early Years ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Major Purpose ◽  
Living Space ◽  
The Military ◽  
New London ◽  
Temporary Accommodation

The word “club” as employed in “Mombasa Club” derives from the late eighteenth century and signifies “an association of people formed mainly for social purposes and having premises, providing meals, temporary accommodation, etc., for the use of members.” The early nineteenth century saw a spate of new London clubs such as the Travellers in 1819 (for gentlemen who had traveled abroad), and in 1824 both the Athenaeum (the most intellectually elite of all the London clubs), and the Oriental (founded by officers in the service of the East India Company who were not eligible for the military clubs of Pall Mall). One purpose of these clubs was to give gentlemen living space from which their womenfolk were excluded. The expansion of a new British empire, from the beginning of Queen Victoria's long reign, saw the establishment of “English” clubs in Asia (especially in the Indian subcontinent) and in Africa (especially from Cape Town to Cairo). A major purpose of these “English” clubs abroad was to give members living space from which natives were excluded. The Mombasa Club, dating from the end of Queen Victoria's reign, fits into this pattern.

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