The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge

Ehrlich reveals how the East India Company used its commitment to knowledge to justify its commercial and political power.

Joshua Ehrlich (Author)

9781009367981, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 April 2025

256 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.375 kg

'… offers an original and densely populated intellectual history of the changing ways that the East India Company's sovereign obligations and its enduring interests as a merchant came to be tied to the cause of 'enlightenment'.' Thomas Newbold, The American Historical Review

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. He shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics.

Acknowledgments
Note on the text
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Warren Hastings and the idea of conciliation
2. Conciliation after Hastings
3. The politics of the College of Fort William
4. Scholar-officials and the company state in the early nineteenth century
5. Education and the persistence of the company state
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]