scholarly journals Styles of mastery of a Calcutta Brahman family: Krishnachandra Ghoshal’s pilgrimage to Gaya, Kashi and Prayag, 1769, in Vijayram Sen’s Ti-rthaman.gala

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-123
Author(s):  
David L. Curley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Gift Exchanges ◽  
And Control

This article examines styles of mastery practised by a wealthy, managerial Brahman family in late eighteenth-century Bengal, when managerial Brahmans found new opportunities in association with the English East India Company. It is based on Tīrthamaṅgala by Vijayram Sen, a verse narrative of a pilgrimage in 1769, led by Krishnachandra Ghoshal for the purpose of performing the trayasthalī śrāddha in Gaya, Kashi and Prayag. Krishnachandra was the elder brother of Gokulchandra Ghoshal, who then was the chief banian of Governor Harry Verelst. The poem describes agencies that enabled the Ghoshals’ success and purposes that shaped their identity. It represents the family’s practices of accountancy, patronage and charity. It represents Krishnachandra’s self-control and control of others, his austerity and munificence in shraddha rites (obsequies), and his use of both Indo-Persian and Sanskrit codes of conduct in gift exchanges and formal conversations. In quite different settings, he used ‘pleasing conversations’ or discussions of knowledge in Sanskrit texts. Both kinds of formal conversation revealed the ‘character’ or ‘dignity’ of participants, and introduced them to important men whom they did not already know. Portraying agencies and purposes that were both this-worldly and spiritual, the poem does not categorically distinguish them. It does de-emphasise courtly aesthetics.

Women, Monastic Commerce, and Coverture in Eastern Indiacirca1600–1800 CE

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
INDRANI CHATTERJEE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Commercial Networks ◽  
Commercial Presence ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Made In

AbstractThis article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter prevailed. The results were the establishment of coverture and wardship laws interpellated from British common law courts into Company revenue policies, the demolition of buildings. and the relocation of the markets that were attached to many of the buildings women had sponsored. Together, these historical processes made women's commercial presence invisible to future scholars.

Representations of India, the English East India Company, and Self by an Eighteenth-Century Indian Emigrant to Britain

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 891-911 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Cultural Mores ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
The Revolution

By writing about the late eighteenth-century revolution which led to the East India Company rule, members of a largely Muslim pre-colonial administrative elite in eastern India sought take control over their own history. They explained the society and ancien régime of India, as well as themselves, to the new British rulers for whom they worked. In so doing, they strove to inform and guide the new British colonial authorities into employing them in the new administration as well as into valuing the cultural mores and bureaucratic experience which they embodied. They also wrote introspectively for the own class, trying to understand the causes of the revolution that had displaced their own traditional rulers and themselves with rule by Europeans and administrations staffed increasingly by Indians with backgrounds different from their own.

scholarly journals The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras

1999 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravi Ahuja
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Labour Policy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
English East India Company

This article challenges the view that the English East India Company was unable effectively to dominate society in the colonial metropolis of Madras before the end of the eighteenth century. Instead it is argued that colonial interventions, even into the social organization of labour, were persistent in goals and methods and acquired institutional forms in the latter half of the century. Hence an early colonial labour policy is clearly discernible. The ruling block's strategies concerning the regulation of labour were not based on laissez-faire ideas but rather on a paternalistic brand of contemporary English social theory. This ideological disposition found practical expression in interventions into the city's labour relations by means of various “police committees”. Moreover, British legal techniques were used to regulate labour relations in Madras. On the whole, early colonial labour policy was distinguished from contemporary practices in Britain by a far higher level of coercion.

History as Self-Representation: The Recasting of a Political Tradition in Late Eighteenth-Century Eastern India

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 913-948 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kumkum Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
English East India Company

If power is mediated by knowledge, then the early decades of British colonial rule in India were indeed, as Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, the intellectual and historian par excellence of those times wrote, a time of ‘half-knowledge’.The decades between 1757 and 1772 witnessed the implantation of this colonial regime in Eastern India through the transformation of the English East India Company from a mercantilist trading corporation into the paradoxical status of ‘merchant-sovereign and the sovereign merchant’ at the same time. The role of sovereign thrust upon the officials of the company the far from easy task of administering this society in ways that were most conducive to the extraction of the largest possible surplus from it for its new masters.

Fast and slow ships from China: The speed of Dutch East Indiamen reconsidered

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-322
Author(s):  
Johan de Jong
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ship Design ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Inland Waterways ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slow Adaptation ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
New Research

This article questions the commonly held assumption that the ships of the Dutch East India Company VOC were slower than those of other East India companies. Recently, Solar and De Zwart showed that Dutch ships were slower on outward voyages to a number of Asian destinations during the periods 1770–1775 and 1783–1792. They cited as plausible explanations differences in ship design resulting from constraints imposed by the Dutch shallow inland waterways and the slow adaptation of copper sheathing in the late eighteenth century. Research by the author of this article leads to a critical assessment of these explanations. Moreover, additional new research into homebound voyages from China undertaken by ships of four East India companies, for the periods 1730–1740, 1750–1755, 1770–1775 and 1783–1792, leads to the outcome that – concerning speed – Dutch ships could compete very well with those of the English, Swedish and Danish companies.

scholarly journals Hospitality and the Nation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Romantik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wawrzinek
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Commercial Exchange ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
And Control ◽  
National Borders

<p>In the summer of 1795, when Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed to Scandinavia, she was disillusioned with human society and the possibility of meaningful relation with others. She had recently been in Paris, where she had seen many of her moderate revolutionary friends executed under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and by the time of her arrival in Scandinavia her unsatisfactory relationship with Gilbert Imlay was coming to an end. The book that resulted from this journey, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is remarkable for its critique of sovereignty and the reification of difference inherent to the construction of national borders and the drives of commercial exchange. The article argues that Wollstonecraft insists upon openness to the people and cultures she encounters through configuring epistemology as a twin process of experiential contact and sceptical inquiry. This a process that remains inherently and necessarily ethical because it resists the structures of tyranny, domination, and control, which Wollstonecraft perceives to be afflicting late-eighteenth-century Europe, whilst simultaneously allowing for a re-conception of politics and justice according to the demands both of the present and the not-yet-formalised future.</p>

Edge of Enlightenment: The Akbar tradition and ‘universal toleration’ in British Bengal

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (06) ◽  
pp. 1956-2006
Author(s):  
JUSTIN BIEL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Policy Framework ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Street Violence ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Indian Secularism

Abstract‘Toleration’ is a notoriously slippery concept, and yet, as recent scholarship on the historical roots of Indian secularism has implied, it was a guiderail for East India Company decision-making in Bengal in the late eighteenth century. What, then, was the outcome when Europeans encountered what they were quick to regard as South Asian patterns of ‘toleration’? This article argues, first, that a medley of competing policy visions emerged from this interaction and, second, that where these visions overlapped was in perceiving political gain to ensue from facilitating existing South Asian devotional practices. A corollary consequence of this still-emergent policy framework was that most East India Company personnel were loath to intervene in any way but a reactive one when conflicts between devotees of Durga on parade and observers of the Shia Muslim holy day ashura escalated into reprisals and street violence in Calcutta in September 1789.

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