Imagining a British India: history and the reconstruction of Empire

Theodore Koditschek

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511975066.003

2 - Imagining a British India: history and the reconstruction of Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2011

Theodore Koditschek

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Theodore Koditschek: Affiliation:
University of Missouri, Columbia

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Summary

The writings and records of the antient inhabitants of Hindoostan, it is probable, encircle most of the branches of human knowledge. The current learning, however, of its present inhabitants is contracted within very narrow bounds, from the operation of many causes … It is, therefore, only from a diligent research into books that we can expect to become acquainted with the science and learning of the nations of the East.

W. B. Bayley, student essay presented at Fort William College, Calcutta, February 6, 1801, in Primitae Orientales, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1802–3), I: 40–1

This writer, it will be said, has never been in India; and … [has little] acquaintance, with any of the languages of the East. I confess the facts; and will now proceed to mention the considerations, which led me, notwithstanding, to conclude that I might still produce a work of considerable utility, on the subject of India. In the first place, it appeared to me, that a sufficient stock of information was now collected in the languages of Europe, to enable the inquirer to ascertain every important point, in the history of India.

James Mill, The History of British India, 6 vols. [1818] (New York, 1968), I: xx–xxi

In the still more important qualities, which constitute what we call the moral character, the Hindu, as we have already seen, ranks very low; and the Mahomedean is little, if at all above him. […]

Type: Chapter
Information: Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination
Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain
, pp. 56 - 98

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975066.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2011

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