decades of Company rule, focusing on how a key issue of previous chapters – how contemporaries grappled with the question of just how Company science should serve national interests – was resolved, in part, by the rise of the “economic museum” movement and by new claims regarding the economic utility of the natural and human sciences. The first section considers new institutional developments in the connections between the India House library-museum and collections-based science institutions in the colonies. Increasingly, the India House library and museum would be represented as at the top of a hierarchy of respect to Company science establishments, reaching from London to the presidency governments and out into the rural divisions and settlements. The chapter then turns to the growing economic focus within the India House library-museum. The Company itself was no longer directly participating in trade, but it was responsible for the agricultural, industrial and other trade-related policies for British India, and the museum became closely tied to this. Some of the new responsibilities of the Reporter on the Products of India position were meant to aid the administrators in such areas of state. But the turn to a science of trade and industry was also, in part, the result of the directors more fully embracing the mission of making the library and museum useful for the (British) public by addressing industrialists, manufacturers and consumers in particular. Altogether, with a new, more clearly defined role as a mediator of industrial, educational and scientific relations between the home country and the colonies, these developments combined to bring new energy and purpose to the library and museum at India House. In almost exactly the same moment, however, the decisive undoing of the Company was brewing, brought on not by the free-trade liberals in Britain but by the resolute defiance of native soldiers in British India.

This chapter introduces the early modern East India Company and its modes of engaging with the sciences in the period before the mid eighteenth century. Two aspects of science and the early modern Company are emphasized. First, before 1757, the Company generally contracted out many of the navigational, historical, medical, mathematical and other areas of expertise that supported and were supported by overseas trade. As an institution, the Company did directly own and manage a vast amount of information related to logistics, regulations and accounting. However, although the Company also depended upon technical and scientific expertise, it did not directly fund, manage or organize the other branches of science upon which its operations depended. Thus, in this period, and following a general pattern of early modern “contractor states,” science generally grew and developed under the Company, if not at the Company. Second, science under the Company found space to grow by way of the peculiar structure and organization of Company trading that historians have called the “internal free trade.” The Company’s practice of allowing individuals to profit under the “private trade” would be especially important to the growth of the curiosity and manuscript trade between Britain and Asia in this period.

The Company’s remarkable ability to control access to Asia, and to dominate the accumulation of information about Asia in Britain, had, by the 1830s, given Company science a prominent role in shaping the material culture of science in Britain. The Company’s influence was now exercised not only through restriction and protection but also through selectively opening access and sharing resources. The Company’s formal monopoly was gone, but Company science now operated within a different social configuration of access and exclusion: the narrow social networks of club-society cultures of science. This selective opening up also coincided, as Chapter 6 will make clear, with even more radical changes to the Company’s remaining monopoly rights and its sovereignty with respect to the Crown. In consequence, even within Britain, there was a growing debate and disagreement over the nature and scope of access to the Company’s library and museum, including accusations that the Company was maintaining an illegal knowledge monopoly.

The establishment of British dominance within the colonial political economy of science had to do with how the material was put to use, and in particular, at this moment, the systematic, intellectual possession of Asia through the placing of data about Asia within local theoretical and taxonomic systems. This chapter examines the practices of orientalists and naturalists at India House and the Company’s colleges. For both orientalists and naturalists (i.e. for both philosophical history and philosophical natural history), questions of classification and ordering were paramount. In nearly every discipline, the growing mass of information was seen as both a boon and a crisis. Orientalists, political economists and naturalists at work at India House and the colleges thus focused in similar ways on questions of systematics (i.e. how to produce knowledge through the sorting, classification and comparison of information). It would be only later in the nineteenth century, when modes and practices of European science began to establish a global presence, that the long-term consequences of the growing cultures of science in Britain would become clear. In the early nineteenth century, however, the philosophical and taxonomic work of Company science in Britain was – although certainly deeply acquisitive and possessive – by and large a provincial, inward-looking world.

The British East India Company is credited with great and terrible things. It is said to have had a direct hand in creating global capitalism, while at the same time contributing to modern forms of state.1 “The corporation that changed the world” built an infrastructure of armies, ships, fortified port cities and a global financial network that moved vast resources between Britain and Asia.2 The “original evil corporation” also forged a modern world economy in which imperialism and free markets went hand in hand.3 The Company transformed the political and economic landscape of huge portions of South and Southeast Asia, brought the Chinese Empire into war and left some formerly affluent regions of the Indian subcontinent utterly impoverished. It gave shape to the modern sense of “Britishness” and was instrumental in the creation of the largest, most densely inhabited and possibly dirtiest city the world had yet seen: London c. 1830.

While the legal ownership of the Company’s knowledge resources could be transferred to the Crown with the passage of a new charter, just what it meant to be a “public” knowledge resource was up for debate. In this period, just as natural philosophy was resolving into separate disciplines with separate institutional structures, the cultural space of knowledge production was separating into new and separate spheres: public versus private, national versus imperial, professional versus amateur. The Company’s piecemeal absorption into the British state was not so much the erasure of a historical anomaly but part of the very process by which “states” and “publics” came to be more clearly defined against corporations and “private” interests. This chapter considers how the public–private status of the Company was also debated and constructed in relation to science, education and access to knowledge resources. At a time when a coherent British imperial identity was only just beginning to crystallize, the extremely convoluted property relations for the library-museum (held in trust by the Company for the Crown, which in turn held it in trust for the people of British India) raised awkward questions about the very coherence of the idea of an imperial public.