scholarly journals Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India by Nilanjana Mukherjee

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sutapa Dutta ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British History ◽  
National State ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Complex Phenomena

Nilanjana Mukherjee’s book looks at construction of space, leading from imaginative to concrete contours, within the context of the British imperial enterprise in India. Fundamental to her argument is that colonial definitions of sovereignty were defined in terms of control over space and not just over people, and hence it was first necessary to map the space and inscribe symbols into it. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, imperialism and colonization were complex phenomena that involved new and imminent strategies of nation building. No other period of British history, as Linda Colley has noted, has seen such a conscious attempt to construct a national state and national identity (Colley 1992). Although the physical occupation of India by the British East India Company could be said to have begun with the battle of Plassey (1757), nevertheless the process of conquest through mediation of symbolic forms indicate the time and manner in which the ‘conquest’ was conscripted

Mysore’s Pre-colonial Potentialities for Capitalist Development and Industrialization

Capitalisms ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 152-179
Author(s):  
Kaveh Yazdani
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South India ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Economic Developments

This paper enquires into Mysore’s potentialities for a proto-capitalist development and a sort of industrialization during the reigns of Haidar ‘Ali (r. 1761–82) and Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–99)—the first Muslim rulers of the sultanate of Mysore. During the second half of the eighteenth century, these two autocrats were not only among the most powerful modernizers of South India but also of the subcontinent and Asia as a whole. The threat posed by the growing power of the British East India Company lubricated the wheels of political, fiscal, and military reforms and fuelled profound efforts at centralization. In conjunction with the already existing advances in commerce, artisanry, and incipient capitalist relations of production, the changes that were set in motion suggest that Mysore found itself in an interim stage and historical conjuncture with multiple prospects of socio-economic developments, as well as the potential scope for a transition towards a type of industrial capitalism.

The shipping losses of the British East India Company, 1750–1813

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-336
Author(s):  
H.V. Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Full Information ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Navigational Aids ◽  
India And China

This article establishes and examines the shipping losses of the British East India Company between the middle of the eighteenth century and 1813 when it lost its trade monopoly with India. This was the most important period in the history of the East India Company because it greatly expanded its trade with India and China and established what became a very large territorial empire on the subcontinent. It was also a time when Britain was often at war with France. This is the first publication to present full information on all of the East India Company’s shipping losses. They are set out in the Appendix, which presents details of the names of every ship lost, the date of loss, the cause, and whether the ship was sailing to or from Asia. This information, discussed in the article, shows that 105 ships were lost on 2,171 voyages, a rate of loss that stood at just under 5%. The causes were primarily wrecking, foundering and enemy action, which contributed to far higher shipping losses on voyages outward to Asia than homeward. The East India Company did little itself to rectify this situation because the ships they used were hired from private owners, but some specialists within the Company did take it upon themselves to improve some navigational aids and shipbuilding techniques, although with little overall effect upon the rate of shipping losses. This meant that the East India Company was plagued by shipping losses throughout the period, and this had a very negative effect upon its commercial affairs and profitability.

A Mulk of One's Own: Languages of Sovereignty, Statehood, and Dominion in the Eighteenth-Century “Empire of Hindustan”

Itinerario ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 474-501
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Conceptual Foundations

AbstractOver the course of the eighteenth century, India's Mughal empire (1526–1858) fragmented into a number of regional polities that were, in turn, gradually subsumed under the paramount authority of the British East India Company. This essay describes concomitant developments in the empire's Persianate political language, particularly with regard to ideas of sovereignty, statehood, and dominion. It argues that by the mid-eighteenth century, the Mughal “empire of Hindustan” was increasingly framed as a territorialised governing institution comprising emerging provincial sovereignties rooted in local ruling households. This conceptual dispensation, however, remained ill-defined until the 1760s, when a treaty regime dominated by the Company built upon this language to concretise the empire as a confederacy of independent, sub-imperial states. The essay contends that in the short term, this redefinition bolstered the authority of incipient dynasties in provinces like Awadh, but in the longer term generated conflicts that abetted the expansion of colonial rule and laid conceptual foundations for British paramountcy in India.

Courts of Law and Styles of Self in Eighteenth-Century Madras: From Hybrid to Colonial Self

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTISON MINES
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Public Life ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Independent Judiciary ◽  
Indian Thought ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Judicial Proceedings ◽  
The Law

My concern is public representations of individuals and how these were affected by British East India Company courts, judicial proceedings, and the law in Madras city during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Company records reveal that this was a period of dramatic transformation in self-representation, just as it also was in Company rule. My purpose is to trace the transformation of the manner in which individuals represented themselves and others and what this process reveals about the constitution of Madras society and Company rule before and after the establishment of an independent judiciary at the end of the eighteenth century. Most particularly, in this paper I seek to demonstrate how the transformation of East India Company courts of judicature from interested courts, strictly controlled by the Company, to independent courts is associated with changes that greatly affected the manner in which individuals—both British and Indian—thought of themselves and others in Madras city public life. This transformation was of a piece with the establishment of independent judiciaries in England and North America at the time and indicates how Madras too was influenced by these political developments.

Identity and Invisibility

2018 ◽  
pp. 26-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Nachowitz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
James Cook ◽  
Extant Literature ◽  
European Contact ◽  
British East India Company

Shipping logs reveal that the first Indians to set foot on New Zealand soil were two young lascars from Pondicherry who arrived on a French East India Company ship in 1769—the year that James Cook first visited the country. Indian arrival in New Zealand was, therefore, contemporaneous with first European contact, a fact never before recognized in the extant literature on nation-building. Since then hundreds of Indian sepoys and lascars accompanied British East India Company ships to New Zealand, many going through Australian ports seeking work with sealing expeditions and on timber voyages. In the early nineteenth century, some of the lascars began to jump ship, marry local Maori women and settled down in New Zealand. This chapter argues that Indians in New Zealand can claim a history that goes as far back as the earliest Maori–European (Pakeha) contact.

PROTESTANTISM, NATIONALISM, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY, 1660–1832

2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. D. CLARK
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
British History ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

National identity, nationalism, patriotism, state formation, and their present-day policy implications now constitute one of the most vital areas of scholarship on British history. In no other period is the debate currently as focused as it is in the long eighteenth century, that crucially contested territory in which older assumptions about a fundamental transition between pre-modernity and modernity have now been called in doubt. This article offers an overview of recent work. It argues that much writing on these years has framed misleading models both of state formation and of national identity. It adds that this period is nevertheless a key one in revealing that the processes at work in sustaining collective identities in the British Isles did not originate with ‘nationalism’ in its historically correct meaning, and need not follow its trajectory.

Liberty, Property and Popular Politics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
The University

Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career. Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The book includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.

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