scholarly journals MATERIAL TURNS IN BRITISH HISTORY: II. CORRUPTION: IMPERIAL POWER, PRINCELY POLITICS AND GIFTS GONE ROGUE

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot C. Finn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
British History ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Material Politics ◽  
The Family ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Dynastic Politics

ABSTRACTThis address examines the ‘Old Corruption’ of Georgian Britain from the perspective of diplomacy and material culture in Delhi in the era of the East India Company. Its focus is the scandal that surrounded the sacking of Sir Edward Colebrooke, the Delhi Resident, during the reign of the penultimate Mughal emperor, Akbar II. Exploring the gendered, highly sexualised material politics of Company diplomacy in north India reveals narratives of agency, negotiation and commensurability that interpretations focused on liberal, Anglicist ideologies obscure. Dynastic politics were integral to both British and Indian elites in the nineteenth century. The Colebrooke scandal illuminates both the tenacity and the dynamic evolution of the family as a base of power in the context of nineteenth-century British imperialism.

Gender, Family, and the Policing of the ‘Criminal Tribes’ in Nineteenth-Century North India

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 1669-1711
Author(s):  
JESSICA HINCHY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Period ◽  
North India ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Central Target ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The Family ◽  
And Gender

AbstractIn the South Asian setting, the fields of gender history and family history are still predominantly concerned with relatively elite social groups. Few studies have examined issues of gender and the family in the history of Dalit, low-caste, and socially marginalized communities, especially those that were labelled ‘criminal tribes’ from the mid-nineteenth century on. This article explores the ways in which gender patterned criminalized communities’ experiences of everyday colonial governance under Part I of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in the first two decades that it was enforced in northern India. In this early period, the colonial government did not closely regulate marriage practices, domestic arrangements, or the gendered organization of labour within communities categorized as ‘criminal tribes’. Nevertheless, notions of sexuality and gender underlay colonial knowledge of the ‘criminal tribes’, which emerged in dialogue with middle-class Indian gender and caste politics. Moreover, the family unit was the central target of the CTA surveillance and policing regime, which aimed to produce ‘industrious’ families. Officially endorsed forms of labour had complex implications for criminalized communities in the context of North Indian gender norms and strategies of social mobility. Gender power dynamics also shaped criminalized peoples’ interpersonal, embodied interactions with British and Indian colonial officials on an everyday basis. Meanwhile, different forms of leverage and evasion were open to men and women to cope with their criminalization and so the colonial state was experienced in highly gendered ways.

The Imperial Coronation of 1819: Awadh, the British and the Mughals

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Other ◽  
North India ◽  
Gangetic Plain ◽  
Indian History ◽  
The Face ◽  
English East India Company

The interaction among the expanding British, the regional rulers of the Gangetic plain, and Mughal Emperors stands central to Indian history during the first half of the nineteenth century. Each of these three groups determined to advance its own political and cultural values in the face of the conflicting expectations and assumptions of the other two. The English East India Company regarded itself as under the authority of the British Parliament and the sovereignty of the British crown. At the same time, the Company continued nominally to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Mughal Emperor, at least in India. The various regional rulers of north India, most prominently the rulers of the province of Awadh, acted and apparently perceived themselves as de facto independent of the Mughals while also symbolically submitted to Mughal sovereignty. The Mughal Emperors, whose power to command armies had faded to nothingness during the last half of the eighteenth century, continued to pretend to absolute sovereignty over virtually all of India until 1858. Each of these three groups wished to see the 1819 imperial coronation by the Awadh ruler as an overt proof of their own cultural values and of their understanding of their relationships to the others.

scholarly journals MATERIAL TURNS IN BRITISH HISTORY: III. COLLECTING: COLONIAL BOMBAY, BASRA, BAGHDAD AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT MUSEUM

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Margot C. Finn
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
History Of

ABSTRACTThis lecture explores the history of Enlightenment-era collecting of antiquities to probe the claims to universality of Western museums. Focusing on the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery, it underscores the imperial and familial contexts of British collecting cultures. Questioning received narratives of collecting which highlight the role played by individual elite British men, it suggests that women, servants and non-European elites played instrumental parts in knowledge production and the acquisition of antiquities. The private correspondence of the East India Company civil servant Claudius Rich – the East India Company's Resident or diplomatic representative at Baghdad 1801–1821 – and his wife Mary (née Mackintosh) Rich illuminates social histories of knowledge and material culture that challenge interpretations of the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery which privilege trade and discovery over empire.

scholarly journals George IV’s Coronation as Festival

2022 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-235
Author(s):  
Danielle Kinsey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Modern Era

This article analyzes George IV’s coronation as a multisensory festive experience in order to understand the meanings of diamonds within British material culture in 1821. Reframing the coronation as a festival allows historical scholars to bridge the premodern/modern divide in early nineteenth-century historiography and demonstrates the ongoing centrality of festivals in consumer culture in the modern era. It also offers a vantage point from which to study sensory paradigm shifts and clashes that occurred in this context and evaluate diamonds in relation to other pieces of material culture outside of the confines of a formal marketplace. The article argues that the coronation shifted how diamonds were thought about in Britain, though this shift was subtle and deeply embedded in the turmoil of the moment. On a widespread scale, the event normalized the association of diamonds with monarchy, imperial power, and light, in ways that made diamonds seem like quotidian items. The article is based on accounts of the event in newspapers, periodicals, and official histories.

scholarly journals MATERIAL TURNS IN BRITISH HISTORY: IV. EMPIRE IN INDIA, CANCEL CULTURES AND THE COUNTRY HOUSE

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Margot C. Finn
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
East India Company ◽  
First Century ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
British History ◽  
Country House ◽  
The Public ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
The Public Sphere

ABSTRACTThis lecture seeks to historicise the so-called cancel culture associated with the ‘culture wars’ waged in Britain in c. 2020. Focusing on empire and on the domestic, British impacts of Georgian-era imperial material cultures, it argues that dominant proponents of these ‘culture wars’ in the public sphere fundamentally distort the British pasts they vociferously claim to preserve and defend. By failing to acknowledge the extent to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British men and women themselves contested imperial expansion under the aegis of the East India Company – and decried its impact on British material culture, including iconic stately homes – twenty-first-century exponents of culture wars who rail against the present-day rise of histories of race and empire in the heritage sector themselves erase key layers of British experience. In so doing, they impoverish public understanding of the past.

“In that One the Ālif is Missing”: Eunuchs and the Politics of Masculinity in Early Colonial North India

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-116
Author(s):  
Nicholas Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Successor State ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Bodily Difference

AbstractAlthough ostensibly gendered as men and frequently maintaining independent, patriarchal households, enslaved eunuchs (khwājasarās) in pre- and early colonial regimes in South Asia were often mocked for their supposed effeminacy, bodily difference, and pretensions to normative masculinity. In the Mughal successor state of Awadh (1722-1856), such mockery grew more pronounced in the wake of growing financial demands from the British East India Company and attempts by eunuchs to alienate property with wills and testamentary bequests. Through examples of verbal derision directed at eunuchs, this essay shows that not only did ideas of normative masculinity serve as a vehicle for Awadh’s rulers to defend their sovereign authority from colonial encroachment, but that notions of normative manhood continued to inform eunuchs’ own self-perception into the nineteenth century.

The Dupont family: collectors, dealers and naturalists in nineteenth-century Paris

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Mearns ◽  
Laurent Chevrier ◽  
Christophe Gouraud
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family History ◽  
Natural History ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Anatomical Models ◽  
The Family ◽  
Small Collection

In the early part of the nineteenth century the Dupont brothers ran separate natural history businesses in Paris. Relatively little is known about their early life but an investigation into the family history at Bayeux corrects Léonard Dupont's year of birth from 1795 to 1796. In 1818 Léonard joined Joseph Ritchie's expedition to North Africa to assist in collecting and preparing the discoveries but he did not get beyond Tripoli. After 15 months he came back to Paris with a small collection from Libya and Provence, and returned to Provence in 1821. While operating as a dealer-naturalist in Paris he published Traité de taxidermie (1823, 1827), developed a special interest in foreign birds and became well known for his anatomical models in coloured wax. Henry Dupont sold a range of natural history material and with his particular passion for beetles formed one of the finest collections in Europe; his best known publication is Monographie des Trachydérides (1836–1840). Because the brothers had overlapping interests and were rarely referred to by their forenames there has been confusion between them and the various eponyms that commemorate them. Although probably true, it would be an over-simplification to state that birds of this era named for Dupont refer to Léonard Dupont, insects to Henry Dupont, and molluscs to their mother.

Translating the Scribe: Lithographic Print and Vernacularization in Colonial India, 1857–1915

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
North India ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.

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