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.

This chapter challenges the idea that the classical Roman jurists were “pioneers of human rights.” The jurists had no doubts about the legitimacy of the hunt for human prey in war. Quite the contrary: they thought of the capture and enslavement of enemies as a paradigm of just acquisition. It is crucial that we come to terms with this ancient belief system: We must recognize that the classical jurists did not see any need for justification for slavery beyond the fact of victory in battle or in the sack of cities. The use of theories like Aristotelean natural slavery or the teaching that slavery arose out of the consent of the victim date only to the early modern period. The chapter closes by discussing how the jurists used the model of the hunt for human and animal prey as the basis for analogical reasoning.

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.

This chapter explores how homosexuality as a term and as a particuar culture was transformed around the time of its legalisation. Through the records of Michael Jaffé, Noel Annan, Alan Turing, Frank Adcock and contemporary figures, the contemporary experience of gay men in Cambridge is explored against the post-war generation. It articulates how a particular style of college life, a hidden centre to the British Establishment, has largely passed away.

This chapter explores how the category of homosexuality was invented and disseminated and how it became part of the self-representation of a generation of men. It explores the revelation and concealment of male desire through the archival records of J. K. Stephen, A. C. Benson, Oscar Browning, E. F. Benson, M. R. James and their friends. It analyses how a public life interfaced with a sexual identity in changing ways.

This chapter explores the anthropology of early human property. Making use of the ethological distinction between territoriality and social dominance, it argues that norms of social dominance largely governed early human property orders as nthropologists reconstruct them. Rights in land, rather than taking the Blackstonian form familiar from modern legal orders, were “use rights,” granted out in line with the social hierarchical of society. An important form of “ownership” also attached to rights in prey taken in the hunt. The chapter closes by challenging the economistic accounts found in the well-known “tragedy of the commons” literature, as well as economistic theories intended to explain that some societies display the ownership of humans rather than the ownership of land.

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.