Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
18
result(s) for
"East India Company Historiography."
Sort by:
The making of modern Afghanistan
Examines the evolution of the modern Afghan state in the shadow of Britain's imperial presence in South Asia during the first half of the nineteenth century, and challenges the staid assumptions that the Afghans were little more than pawns in a larger Anglo-Russian imperial rivalry known as the 'Great Game'.
eBook
Tipu and the Turks: An Islamicate Embassy in the Age of British Expansion
In 1786, several hundred subjects of Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–99), ruler of the kingdom of Mysore in southern India, travelled to the Ottoman Empire on a diplomatic mission. This essay revisits the embassy's travels, and travails, across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean by drawing attention to a rich cache of administrative documents. I suggest that this collection, hitherto unexamined, can illuminate some significant aspects of diplomatic conduct and procedure in Islamicate Eurasia, yet underexplored. The essay accordingly highlights such overlooked themes as the bureaucratic complexities that were involved in long-distance ambassadorial tours, the role ceremonials played in elite intercourse, and the myriad ways in which material culture mediated interstate exchanges. While its significance lies also in how it decentres a dominant scholarly focus on encounters between Europe and its others, scrutiny of this collection, I additionally argue, can enhance historical understanding of how reciprocal relations between Islamicate polities transformed due to growing European influence. As contemporary configurations of imperial power changed in both South Asia and the Middle East, the Mysore-Ottoman embassy hence at once reflected and anticipated the advent of European—and more specifically, British—hegemony in non-European diplomatic contexts.
Journal Article
Visions of Indian Economic Unity On the Eve of Partition: A Tale of Two Companies
This article examines Mahindra & Mohammed (now Mahindra & Mahindra) and the Muhammadi Steamship Company through a microhistory of late colonial Bombay. The paper reveals companies committed to the economic unity of India shortly before the anticolonial struggle culminated in the violent and chaotic Partition of British India in August 1947. In Bombay, the center of Indian industry and not typically associated with the Partition’s dislocations, economic partition was unanticipated even by economic actors closely allied with the Muslim League. The two firms examined here highlight the understudied impact of decolonization and the Partition of the sub-continent on Indian capitalism, and suggests that postcolonial territorial realities implied an economic rearticulation that has often been overlooked.
Journal Article
Prussia all at Sea? The Emden-based East India Companies and the Challenges of Transnational Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century
Against the prevailing view of the smaller, \"interloping\" East India companies as either national instruments of imperial expansion or mere covers for foreign enterprise, this article demonstrates that they were genuinely transnational operations with strong links to the state. Such transnationalism made it possible for small Central and Eastern European enterprises to engage in early modern globalization processes alongside the larger chartered companies of Europe's \"Atlantic fagade.\" Focusing on Prussia's Emden Companies, this article evaluates the challenges and opportunities of such a transnational institutional set-up. Using Flemish, German, British, French, and American archives it analyses the roles of state-intervention, international relations, selection and enforcement problems to demonstrate that the development of commercial capitalism was a transnational and transimperial phenomenon. It thus reinforces the argument that European economic and imperial expansions were not purely market-driven and national processes but transnational phenomena that relied on private transnational networks as much as on state and state-like institutions.
Journal Article
Asian empire and British knowledge : China and the networks of British imperial expansion
British knowledge about China changed fundamentally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than treating these changes in British understanding as if Anglo-Sino relations were purely bilateral, this study looks at how British imperial networks in India and Southeast Asia were critical mediators in the British encounter of China.
eBook
The Trade in Domestic Servants (Morianer) from Tranquebar for Upper Class Danish Homes in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century
This paper explores the Danish East India Company's slave trade practice in Tranquebar in the first half of the seventeenth century. In particular it focuses on a practice of acquiring black Morianer (Moors) as prestigious servants for aristocratic homes. The court of the Danish king Christian IV was familiar with the exotic inlay of Morians as represented in pictures, theatre, carrousels, and other artistic manifestations of the upper classes of that time. In this sense, I suggest that Hans Hansson Skonning's Geographia historica Orientalis (1641) provides seminal clues about ideology justifying slavery and representations of Africa and Asia in Scandinavian countries before they entered the slave trade.
Journal Article
‘Inhabitants of the universe’: global families, kinship networks, and the formation of the early modern colonial state in Asia
New 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.
Journal Article
Individual Interests Behind the Institutional Façade: The Dutch East India Company’s Legal Presence in Seventeenth-Century Mughal Bengal
VOC officials as well as the Mughal administrators conducted their trading activities in Bengal under different systems of jurisdiction. They both used local brokers and ordinary villagers who became simultaneously part of the VOC and Mughal jurisdictions. But what happened when conflicts broke out between the Company and the Mughal officials? In which jurisdiction did the brokers then participate and why? This article explores such questions through the study of two legal cases involving the VOC in Bengal. It argues that the institutional binary of the VOC and the Mughal as administrative entities were not stable in the face of personal interests and factional ambitions.
Journal Article
The Scandal of Empire
Many have told of the East India Company's extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company's exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company's corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England's development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.
eBook