Joshua Erlich on the East India Company

I just came across a ref to Joshua Erlich’s Harvard History Dept
dissertation on the educational, cultural, and political roles East India
Company in the period 1770-1830.  Harvard, admirably, provides open access
– a far cry from the days when Harvard theses were particularly hard to
find.  I had time only to glance through it so far, but I’m impressed,
partly because Erlich’s work has relevance beyond India.  Here are some
comments:

Opened this up and found it hard to put down. Packed with info, well-framed
for non-specialists about the roles of Hastings, Trevelyan, Macaulay, and
other figures in setting the standards of education in India, with refs,
useful in other fields like classics, to discussion (some of it critical)
of "orientalism" since David Kopf and Edward Said made it central.

I'm copying one publisher who might well want to handle this study, though
I'd bet it's already on someone's dance card.

Useful quotes that may spur others to read:

"... the Company’s changing legitimatory needs led it to deploy and
redeploy ideas about knowledge."

"... the botanical gardens of Calcutta and Madras ... took on ever-greater
functions in the early nineteenth century,... As microcosms of the
territorial state and the terrestrial sphere alike, botanical gardens
brought the great concerns of government and science within the scope of
individual exertion."

"Trevelyan had descried the final ideological bulwarks of the Company
state: 'We have nothing to give to the Natives but our superior knowledge.
Every thing else we take from them.'”

And so they did. "Education" mentioned 301 times here. NB (not in the book)
the soaring literacy rate, esp. women, after the Brits departed.
A very informative piece of work.

Best,

Dan

The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge
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Ehrlich, Joshua
Abstract

This study shows that debate over the relations among companies, states,
and knowledge is not new, but rather was integral to the politics of the
British East India Company. Reconstructing such debate among Company
officials and critics from the 1770s to the 1830s, the study makes several
further interventions. It argues against what has been perhaps the dominant
narrative about Company and British-imperial ideology in this period, a
narrative of reorientation from “Orientalist” to “Anglicist” cultural
attitudes. It shows instead how the Company shifted from a commercial idiom
of sovereignty, concerned with conciliating elites through scholarly
patronage, to a territorial idiom, concerned with cultivating popular
affection through state-sponsored education. Whereas the field of the
history of knowledge has largely developed as a history of structures of
knowledge, meanwhile, this study argues for a history of ideas of
knowledge. Such an approach is needed to elucidate the category of
knowledge and its discursive uses past and present.