A Mathematical Lecturer for the City of London

One of the least-celebrated consequences of Spain’s failed attempt to invade Britain in 1588 was the establishment of the first public lecture series on the mathematical sciences in England. The new “Mathematical Lecturer to the City of London” post was filled by Thomas Hood, an instrument maker and author. The son of a member of the Merchant Taylors’ Guild, Hood stood at the center of the overlapping worlds of commerce and the sciences in early modern London. The guild, primarily involved in importing and exporting cloth, was then one of the wealthiest groups of incorporated tradesmen in the city. Hood likely was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School (f. 1561), which, in a period when numeracy was very rare, regularly taught arithmetic. He then went on to become the author of a series of textbooks on mathematics, astronomy and navigation. Tasked with helping to bring the riches of long-distance trade better within England’s reach, his lectures and publications introduced and popularized the use of terrestrial and celestial globes. In 1598, he invented a calculating instrument, later known as the Hood sector, that reduced the laborious work of calculating logarithms (useful for both commerce and navigation) to simple addition and subtraction.Footnote ¹

Hood gave his first lecture on November 4, 1588 in the Gracechurch Street house of the wealthy guild member Thomas Smythe. Smythe was prominent among a consortium of City merchants who, with the formal support of the Privy Council, had joined in the funding of the new post. Smythe also had colonial ambitions: with his friend Sir Walter Raleigh he was involved in the Virginia Company, and was also a founder of the Muscovy Company and a shareholder in the Somers Isles (Bermuda) Company. And, in 1600, when Queen Elizabeth first granted an exclusive charter to the newly formed “Company of Merchants of London, Trading to the East,” Smythe would be elected the first governor of the East India Company, a position he would keep (except for a few years) until 1623.

Figure 1.1

Drawing of the old India House on Leadenhall Street, 1628–1746, by George Vertue.

Copyright British Library Board (asset WD 1341).

London-based merchants, mariners and traders, including those involved in the early East India Company, played a critical role in the development of the sciences in early modern Britain.Footnote ² But while long-distance trade and attempts at colonization had always engaged with many branches of science, the structures that connected science to commerce would take various forms.

This chapter introduces the early East India Company and its modes of engaging with the sciences 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 technical 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. There were exceptions: the Hood lectureship is one of several important instances in which the Company or its close associates would directly fund or otherwise support research or education in the sciences. 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. And, as the second part of the chapter explains, science under the Company found space to grow by way of the peculiar structure and organization of Company trading. The Company’s allowance for malfeasance under the so-called private trade would be especially important to the growth of the curiosity and manuscript trade between Britain and Asia in this period.

Science and the Company before 1757

The Company was organized with the aim of entering the lucrative maritime spice and drug trade, then centered in Sumatra, Java and neighboring islands. Much earlier in the 1500s, first the Portuguese and then the Dutch had established regular and profitable ocean commerce with several kingdoms and port towns along the Indonesian archipelago, and as this trade flourished it threatened the profits of the English Levant Company’s overland Mediterranean trade in spice and other commodities from the East. The charter granted by Elizabeth in 1600 to the “Company of Merchants Trading to the East” gave this group a monopoly on English trade beyond the Cape of Good Hope (as it was then known) but only for a limited time; the monopoly was to be renegotiated every twenty years. On the Company’s third voyage in 1607/8 a treaty was negotiated with the Mughal emperor, granting the Company trading rights at the port of Surat. This was not, however, an exclusive treaty and the Portuguese effectively dominated the Surat trade with Europe. This would change in 1619 when, after the Company’s fleet defeated the Portuguese, the Mughal court granted the Company exclusive trading rights. By the 1620s, the East India Company had given up on the spice trade but had begun to discover that the European market for Indian textiles had unplumbed depths.

Figure 1.2

East India House after a re-facing in 1726. Illustrated London News, August 30, 1890.

Courtesy of Cornell University Library.

The Company was divided into the Court of Committees and the General Court, or Court of Proprietors. The General Court was made up of shareholders with holdings above a certain threshold. The Court of Committees (later Court of Directors) was made up of a governor (later chairman), a deputy-governor and twenty-four directors, each of whom was the head of an administrative committee. The governor and the directors were elected by ballot in the General Court.

Until well into the seventeenth century, Company investors were intensely aware of their relative insignificance and inexperience on the stage of inter-oceanic commerce, especially to any region beyond the transatlantic circuit. The informational foundations of England’s early attempts at transoceanic trade thus began in large part as a process of capturing and translating sources from their Iberian and Dutch trading rivals (a practice that, as we will see, would continue over several centuries). When assessing the opportunities and dangers in investing in trade to the East, early investors turned to the encyclopedic and compiling “cosmographers” such as the chaplain and geographer Richard Hakluyt and the astrologer-mathematician and antiquary John Dee. Hakluyt had managed to acquire rare and valuable Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch travel accounts.Footnote ³ The Iberian powers closely guarded much of their information, but recent English naval successes against the Portuguese had provided information-rich plunder, and Hakluyt also gained access to Spanish and French sources while chaplain to an English diplomatic mission to Paris in 1585. In 1601, after being appointed as an advisor to the newly formed East India Company, Hakluyt produced an English translation of a Portuguese manuscript compendium of “the different and astounding routes by which in times gone pepper and spice came from India to our parts … up to the year 1555.”Footnote ⁴ The Discoveries of the World, as Hakluyt titled it, gave vital information on not only sea routes but also friendly and hostile ports, as well as legal-historical documentation relating to rights of conquest and discovery. “The work,” announced Hakluyt, “though small in bulk containeth so much rare and profitable matter, as I know not where to seeke the like, within so narrow and street [straight] a compass.”Footnote ⁵

In seeking material to translate and compile, Hakluyt sometimes turned to the library of John Dee. Dee was a great “informer” of his day, an advisor to the Crown and colonial adventurers, and his library was rumored to be one of the largest in England, especially rich in accounts of travel and exploration.Footnote ⁶ From the 1570s onwards, Dee had been using his library to promote English economic and territorial expansion, drawing on his antiquarian collecting to make various arguments for British extraterritorial claims. His most ambitious work, The Brytysh Monarchy, was the first to use the term “British Impire,” and it also made the argument (based on Welsh folklore about transatlantic voyages) for Elizabeth to be titled “Queen of the New World.”Footnote ⁷

The collecting, translating, copying and publishing activities of antiquarian geographers such as Dee and Hakluyt were the routes through which the would-be English colonists and adventurers gathered both critical intelligence and an ideological-legal justification for their projects in the earliest years of English colonialism. While profiting from granting the Crown and various colonial companies access to their private collections, both Dee and Hakluyt also argued that the English nation desperately needed its own repository. Hakluyt argued in 1587, for example, that the English Crown should also “collect in orderly fashion the maritime records of our own countrymen, now lying scattered and neglected, and … bring them to the light of day in a worthy guise, to the end that posterity … may at last be inspired to seize the opportunity offered to them of playing a worthy part.”Footnote ⁸ Neither the English Crown nor the companies themselves attempted to form a centralized repository for information until nearly 200 years later.

Instead, as the colonial companies – the Virginia Company, the East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, to name a few – expanded their operations over the next century, this model of relying on the technical and informational resources of advisors would remain. From its earliest days, Company servants (i.e. employees) were engaged in a wide range of early modern sciences, but they tended to collect and (sometimes) publish as individuals, not for the Company. Wherever Company-hired ships landed, captains and crew voraciously sought information that might help them get home with a profitable cargo or provide future advantage over their European trading rivals.

By the early eighteenth century, the Company managed to establish a more solid presence in Asia, still only in a string of fortified ports on the subcontinent and in the Malay archipelago. Backed by a growing military, and as the political and economic stakes of the Company’s monopoly trade continued to grow, the Company became more deeply entangled in domains of knowledge upon which its operations always depended: knowledge of the science of navigation and of maritime defense, of fortification and surveying, and of the societies and natures within which its businesses were located. European foreigners now had to forge relationships with locals – both political or religious elites and workers of many kinds – through which it might be possible to gain insight into areas useful to the colonial project. In history, medicine, botany, agriculture, manufacturing, natural history, arts and crafts, linguistics, law, and many other fields, manuscripts and informants (such as local doctors, teachers and guides) were sought and their knowledge sometimes copied, appropriated, hybridized or even repressed by the foreigners. After a series of wars in 1757, the Company became a dominant territorial power, stepping in to take the reins of the Mughal Empire’s centuries-old systems of governance. It was now a mammoth task of both appropriation and invention for Company servants to gain even a partial understanding of the land, languages, laws, and religious and civil structures in the societies that it was purportedly now governing. All the while, at the level of the Company’s efforts to know itself and manage the many distant moving parts of which it was constituted, within the headquarters at India House a vast paper trail of colonial expansion was growing continuously.

But that bureaucracy – unlike, as we will see, in other European colonial administrations – did not yet extend to formally organizing, managing and producing what we would now call “scientific” or “historical” knowledge. Beyond its correspondence, accounting and finance records, and the (increasingly important) judicial and legislative records, the Company itself did not directly engage in collecting or natural knowledge resource storage and handling. Instead, until the late eighteenth century, the directors “outsourced,” or contracted out, much of the knowledge required for long-distance trade. Beyond the account books and correspondence, the one policy the Company did have that related to archives and information (possibly on Hakluyt’s advice) was that each ship captain had to deposit a ship’s logbook – where daily recordings of distance logs, observations for latitude and longitude (and, after 1791, chronometer readings), and other measures and comments would be entered in a standard form – with the directors of the Company.Footnote ⁹

Cartography and geography, for example, were initially managed not by any Company office but by the ship owners and, even more, by the captains hired separately for each voyage.Footnote ¹⁰ Generally, it was the ship captains who maintained their own chart collections as part of their set of navigational instruments. Captains, in turn, relied upon London’s thriving commercial market in navigational knowledge throughout the seventeenth century and well into the 1750s. The Thameside Chartmakers, a branch of the Draper’s Company, supplied both the captains hired by the Company and those of the Royal Navy with much of the charts, maps and plans used in commercial exploration and navigation.Footnote ¹¹ Until well into the eighteenth century in Britain, hydrographical information, like charts and maps in general, were not produced, managed or controlled by the state. London was also a leading European center for the manufacture of the practical mathematical instruments depended upon by astronomers, navigators and surveyors hired by the Company.Footnote ¹² The same outsourcing pattern held for the Company’s surgeons and naturalists, who were required to purchase their own medicines, books and instruments. In England, Company surgeons decided what medicines to bring and purchased them with their own funds from any apothecary they chose. Similarly, Company writers (as the entry-level positions were called) or factors (merchants) wishing to learn the foreign languages or other skills useful for trade and diplomacy were on their own until the late eighteenth century, when outgoing writers were granted a “munshi’s allowance” to hire tutors once they arrived in India.

At times the Company did directly fund or patronize experiments, publications or expeditions. For example, the directors gave free passage to the future Astronomer Royal Edmund Halley on his expedition to St. Helena to produce a chart of the southern stars in 1676.Footnote ¹³ Early in the seventeenth century, the Company, jointly with the Muscovy Company, funded expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage, and in the eighteenth century it supported the 1761 transit of Venus expeditions. The directors also gave periodic support to the Royal Society, for example by donating to its collections.Footnote ¹⁴ Generally, however, there was little in the way of Company-owned or produced science. Instead, the knowledge and technical skill that underpinned maritime commerce was something the Company rented or hired via the employment of individuals who themselves owned and possessed the relevant skills, knowledge and technology. To be clear: the Company was also itself the most important “contractee” of the Crown; in effect, the Company’s monopoly was a way for the Crown to contract out the project of long-distance trade and colonization. The Company managed England’s militarized trade with Asia and it, in turn, provided the Crown with revenue from import and export taxes, as well as lump-sum payments and loans from the Company.

None of the Company’s imperial rivals contracted out so much of their information management. The medical, nautical, commercial, cartographic and archival information in the Iberian empires was highly centralized. Portugal dominated the Eastern trade for the entire sixteenth and much of the seventeenth centuries. From its first overseas expansion in North Africa in the early 1400s, Portugal had by 1550 established a disparate network of maritime trading ports that stretched from Japan through Southeast Asia to Goa, the Caribbean and South America. The Casa da India was its headquarters in Lisbon and the Armazém da Guiné e Índias was the shipyard where all training, shipbuilding and management of maritime supplies, including maps and instruments, was organized. Navigational knowledge was directed by the cosmógrafo-mor (chief cosmographer) and a group of pilots and scholars. The chief cosmographer’s duties, according to a 1592 Regiment, included examining and rating makers of nautical instruments and charts and “authenticating” all charts, globes and maps. His office was also in charge of training future pilots in mathematics, astronomy and cosmography. All navigational information was kept in the strictest secrecy, including the officially sanctioned map for use by the pilots, the Padrão Real. The position was kept in this form until 1779, when it was completely reformed.Footnote ¹⁵

In Spain, the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) in Seville had since the early 1500s been the center of administration and information collection and production, including navigational, medical and natural philosophical works. The charts and surveys that went into the production of the Padrón Real, Spain’s version of the Padrão Real, were kept under equally strict rules of secrecy. In the 1580s, there was a push to reform and extend the medical, navigational, geographical and cartographical information being collected at the Casa. In stark contrast to the case of Britain, in Spain all drugs used and dispensed in the colonies had to be tested and approved by a royal apothecary.Footnote ¹⁶ By the 1580s the Council of the Indies had developed a systematic and relatively homogeneous process of information gathering, based around what came to be known as the relaciones (geographical accounts). The relaciones were the returned answers to a standard-issue questionnaire produced by the Council of the Indies. By 1730 the questionnaire, sent to all parts of Spanish America, had grown to 435 questions. The relaciones were being collected with the intention of producing, at some point, edited authoritative editions. But, as Daniela Bleichmar argues, when the replies arrived from across the Atlantic, they were generally put directly into the state archives, where they remained, and “failed to become the basis of government action.”Footnote ¹⁷

France, whose empire was second in size only to Spain during the seventeenth century, had begun to organize many branches of science and medicine hierarchically under the state from the time of Louis XIV. France’s “colonial machine,” as James McClellan and François Regourd have called it, became, during the eighteenth century, inseparable from the state’s institutions of science.Footnote ¹⁸ Under the king and the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, the Depôt des Carts et Plans and the Observatoire Royale managed astronomy and cartography for the colonial fleets. Royal naval hospitals and medical schools developed techniques and trained surgeons that were sent to the colonies. The Jardin du Roi and other state-run gardens and agricultural societies were clearing houses for botany and natural history. Under the Académie des Sciences, the network of scientific correspondence reached the colonies and supported the publication and exchange of information. Science and empire were part of one vast state enterprise, in stark contrast to the case of Britain.

The Dutch Republic’s Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) was, in contrast, similar in many ways to Britain and the East India Company, although the VOC was more closely tied to the state. Another major difference was that the VOC built and owned all of its ships, whereas after the 1660s the Company generally hired out ships for individual voyages; only in India after 1800 did the Company start to build some of its own ships (and these mostly stayed in Asia). Also, while the Dutch Secretariat at The Hague was in many ways the center of navigational and trade information management, the Dutch also established a major hydrographic office and map seller in Batavia (Jakarta) in 1650.Footnote ¹⁹ Otherwise regarded as one of the least secretive or protective trading companies, the VOC did sometimes petition the state for patents of protection on maps, plans and other resources related to the Eastern trade. Generally, Dutch cartography and other colonial publications circulated widely, especially in England.Footnote ²⁰

The flipside of the East India Company’s outsourcing of knowledge management was that those who the Company hired were largely free to profit from knowledge or information gained while under the employ of the Company. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, there was a robust market in travel accounts and histories of English (and increasingly Scottish) seamen and traders. Captains regularly published accounts of voyages, including diaries, routes and charts, hoping to defray some of the costs of their voyages in this way.Footnote ²¹ For the same reason, returned surgeons printed herbals, natural histories or their own travel accounts. Often the Company, or a group of directors, would contribute to the publication by agreeing in advance to purchase (i.e. subscribe to) a certain number of books.Footnote ²²

This model of decentralized resource management at the Company was not limited to the domain of knowledge; it appears to fit neatly within a well-established structural form that was especially prominent in the early modern English state. Some historians have suggested that this model was the precursor to the modern nation state. Arguing against earlier understanding of early modern states as unorganized and ineffective, and relatively unimportant compared to the pace of individual enterprise, John Brewer, for example, shows that states were in fact highly adept at the central function of raising armies. But this ability, in turn, depended upon being able to procure food, clothing, transport and weaponry, all of which, in its turn, required collaboration with private enterprise. The Royal Navy, for example, was in the period a major purchaser and consumer of goods but was not itself a producer. Instead, it contracted out to private firms everything from victualling to shipbuilding to gunsmithing.Footnote ²³ The contractor mode of state enterprise may also be applied to the provisioning of information and knowledge at the early modern Company. It captures the knowledge management practices of the Company up to at least the Seven Years’ War. As we will see in the next sections, that model began to change toward the end of the eighteenth century, as the Company began to accumulate its own stores of knowledge resources. The timing of this shift can also be aligned with a broader historical pattern away from the contractor model and toward the centralization of such functions under state offices.Footnote ²⁴

Figure 1.3

Fort St. George, Madras in the mid eighteenth century. From a print by Jan Van Ryne (1712–1760);

photo by Ken Welsh/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Collecting and the Internal Free Trade

Long-distance trade and associated new commodity regimes were essential to a wide range of practitioners, practices, institutions and cultures that came to define the new sciences of early modern Europe. Histories of collecting and natural history under the Company in the early modern period have often focused on individual collectors and their networks of correspondence and exchange. For good reason, many historians have organized their examinations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century knowledge and empire around a series of case studies of individual collectors or naturalists. In the early modern period, it was precisely at the level of individual agency that science under the Company was primarily organized (or unorganized) at this time. Emily Erikson has argued that it was this decentralized organization of the Company that fostered a robust information exchange in general: “When the English Company had a decentralized organizational structure, which is to say that significant autonomy lay in the hands of employees, social networks encouraged the transmission of local information and led to the incorporation of more ports and goods into the English trade network.”Footnote ²⁵ It was also within this decentralized mode of practice that a vibrant culture of “collecting” and natural history grew in Britain and its colonies in Asia.

Underneath the umbrella of the East India Company’s monopoly on all trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, there was a vibrant ecosystem of private trade conducted by individuals for their own profit. Some were illegal “interlopers”; that is, British individuals conducting trade between Britain and Asia without permission of the Company. But the bulk of the private trade, which has been estimated to be anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent of the total British Eastern trade, was legal and under license from the Company. Ship captains and other officers were a great beneficiary of the legal private trade, or, as Erikson calls it, the “internal free trade market” under the Company monopoly.Footnote ²⁶ The vast majority of individual income from a voyage would come from this. In 1740, for example, according to K. N. Chaudhuri, a commander’s salary might be £10, but he might be expected to make between £5,000 and £10,000 with his allotted space for his own capital goods if in command of a large ship.Footnote ²⁷ Some individuals were licensed to run private trading firms in the inter-Asian trade (this, for example, is how the majority of the opium trade with China worked). Critically, agents and servants of the Company were also, until the 1760s, allowed to accept personal gifts in the course of their duties. Within all ranks of the Company, from surgeons to governors, collecting in one way or another had long been common. In the period before territorial and wartime expansion under the Company, much of this collecting would be conducted on a small scale, for personal use, as piece-by-piece sale or barter, or – in the cities and towns in the East – by visiting the local markets or bazaars. Thus factors, governors and other servants based in the colonies were allowed to engage in a certain amount of direct trade between Asia and Britain; cargo holds, for example, contained space reserved for the “private trade,” which also had its own warehouse back in East London.

Together with the practice of contracting out knowledge management (described in more detail in Chapter 3), malfeasance encouraged a robust growth of collecting under the Company, if not really at the Company. Importantly, this is not to say the Company did not attempt to monopolize aspects of the knowledge trade or control the direction of information flows or of technology. As a corporation of shareholders, vulnerable to stock-price dips related to rumors of poor crops or lost cargoes, those involved in core businesses of shipping and trade had always tried in various ways to control the means of private communication to and from Asia, as evident in the many rules and regulations regarding personal correspondence. Miles Ogborn, Huw Bowen and others have documented the persistent belief among many directors in London that a shadowy, subterranean network was at work in their territories, attempting to undermine the authority and interests of India House.Footnote ²⁸ Company employees had a great deal of autonomy relative to other trading companies, and the threat of competition from other British groups was real. Bowen’s study of the arms and instruments trade between Britain and the subcontinent shows, for example, that the Company couldn’t even stop English companies from providing arms to its own enemies.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, as we will see, the Company certainly severely restricted who could travel to and collect information within its territories. Some governors were also notorious for trying to censor the press in India, shutting down English-language presses in Calcutta and Bombay, and even attempting to keep printing technology out of the hands of local rulers, most famously in explicitly forbidding its servants to provide printing presses.Footnote ³⁰ Even if, relative to other European empires, there were less restrictions on information and communication, the Company was very far from overtly pursuing a “free market” in knowledge.

Unlike textiles, spices, raw materials and other commodities, manuscripts and curiosities were not sold directly by the Company at the auction rooms within India House. Instead, this material passed directly into private hands. From the Americas to China, European traders could easily supplement their primary trade with natural and artificial curiosities as well as highly valued drawings and paintings of local flora, fauna and scenes produced specifically for European collectors.Footnote ³¹ Apothecaries, alchemists, physicians and gardeners were key purchasers of exotica from abroad. Already by the mid seventeenth century, the curiosity market was so well established that a regular global trade could form around popular items for cabinets or wunderkammer, such as the “most rare and precious Commodity” of the “Teeth or Horns of the fishes called Sea-Unicorns” (narwhals), which according to one captain in 1656 were sought across Europe for the “Closets of the Curious.”Footnote ³² By the mid seventeenth century, London was awash in natural and artificial curiosities.Footnote ³³ Fascinating evidence of its scope is found in a remarkable archive of records of the purchases made by the merchant and Barbados investor William Courten (1642–1702). Courten bought items from more than eighty individuals, many of them trading within walking distance of his rooms in London’s Middle Temple.

Out of this commerce would emerge the collection that would become the first public museum in England: the Tradescant’s museum. It was put together by London gardeners and plant merchants. John Tradescant and his son formed their collection by way of their status as semiofficial buyers for the royal gardens. They formed the Musaeum Tradescantium, which from the 1630s was open for viewing at a building christened “The Ark” in Lambeth. The museum was just one of many sites where seventeenth-century Londoners might come into contact with displays of collections or exotica from abroad. Traveling shows, outdoor exhibitions and even some public houses, such as Don Saltero’s coffee-house, all put on exhibitions of curiosities, usually for a small price.Footnote ³⁴ According to its Royal Charter, when the Royal Society was established in 1662, a key reason for organizing such an institution was the pressing need for a central repository or “storehouse” of information resources.Footnote ³⁵ And the scope and scale of these early modern museums, society collections and public exhibitions were matched and often exceeded by those of colonialists and plantation owners (such as Hans Sloane) or the Company servants (such as Elihu Yale and Josiah Child) who made huge personal fortunes in India.Footnote ³⁶

In Asia, collections were also expanding (and sometimes dissolving) in the context of increasing European presence. It was essential for would-be traders to bring out to the East items from Europe or elsewhere that could be offered as gifts in exchange for gaining commercial preferences and trading rights or bartered for other items. The social conventions of commercial diplomacy required the exchange of gifts and presents; the gift exchange was fundamental to the formation of British trading networks within Asia.Footnote ³⁷ It was therefore essential for Company agents to cultivate an understanding of the collecting interests of the local elite, who were as avid collectors of curiosities and exotica as their European counterparts.Footnote ³⁸ The factors at the Company’s ports in early seventeenth-century India reported constantly on the kind and quantity of gifts required. “Something or other, though not worth two shillings, must be presented every eight days,” writes the chief factor at Ajmere:Footnote ³⁹ “The Great Mogul was exceedingly delighted with anything strange …. Rich gloves, embroidered caps, purses, looking and drinking glasses, curious pictures, knives, striking clocks … if [you have] a jack to roast meat on, I think he would like it, or any toy of new invention.”

The governor of Surat requested a long list of items to be used as gifts, including “two suits of armour, swords” and live animals, preferably “mastiffs, greyhounds, spaniels, and little dogs.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Sir Thomas Roe asked for “pictures well-wrought, those of France, Germany, Flanders, &c. being fittest for that purpose.” On another occasion, the Company sent as a gift for a Mughal ruler “a coach and horses, with a coachman who had been in the service of the Bishop of Lichfield, to drive the coach.”Footnote ⁴¹ Likewise, Company servants also brought home a constant stream of gifts of rare or valuable curiosities for the royals of England. Jewels, artworks and live animals were especially popular among the royalty.Footnote ⁴² Such exchanges had long been a fundamental aspect of diplomacy and commerce.

*

Like all European trading empires in the early modern era, the successful expansion of Company influence in Asia depended upon a great deal of social, scientific and technical expertise. Unlike many of its rivals, however, much of the knowledge and expertise upon which the English East India Company depended was highly decentralized, with the production and management of natural and technical knowledge generally contracted out to the surgeons, ship captains and factors hired by the Company. The Company’s unique formalization of malfeasance – the “internal free trade” – further supported a system whereby a great deal of scholarship and collecting was done under the Company, but not by the Company. To be sure, some of the manuscripts, curiosities and works of art acquired by Britons in Asia – whether gifts, purchases or plunder – had found their way to the Company’s headquarters in India House since the seventeenth century. Although no evidence describing a cabinet or wunderkammer at India House has yet been found, a few references to curiosities and a more substantial collection do exist. For example, in the spring of 1667, during his monthlong tour of England, Prince Cosimo III of Tuscany visited India House, which was “full of rare and curious things, both animal and vegetable … which came from India, and are kept here to gratify the curiosity of the public.”Footnote ⁴³ There is also evidence, as Anna Winterbottom has shown, of interaction during this period between the Company’s collections and the early Royal Society of London (est. 1663), which had its own cabinet, and which offered financial encouragement to Company servants who would collect for the Royal Society’s repository.Footnote ⁴⁴ In these and other ways, even while collecting under the Company was restricted to private trade, India House was one of the sites where privately collected materials, as well as gifts offered to the directors or the Company itself, were stored and displayed. In the later eighteenth century, however, as the Company gained in political and economic standing on the subcontinent, the nature of the India House collections would begin to change.

Clearly, the opening of the library and museum at India House in 1801 did not by any means mark the start of collecting by Company servants or the first accumulation of curiosities and other artifacts at India House. What it did mark, however, as we will see, is a key moment in a structural reorganization of the sciences within the Company; in other words, a new relationship between the Company as an institution and the knowledge and expertise upon which its operations depended. But the beginning of that reorganization, as we will see in the next chapter, would be rooted first and foremost in a changed political economy within North India, after the Company’s first major defeat of the Mughals and the subsequent destabilization of the old networks of education, scholarship and expertise that had grown up around the Mughal courts.

Tipu Sultan’s Plunder

In an early phase of the third Anglo-Mysore wars in September 1790, the Mysorean army under the command of Tipu Sultan very nearly overwhelmed a contingent of the Company’s forces. The Company’s army was forced to quickly retreat to Coimbatore, leaving roughly 500 of their own dead and many of their supplies behind. Among these, Tipu’s men found trunk-loads of books, instruments and manuscripts. Those that were deemed valuable or useful were moved to the palace library at Seringapatam, where they were carefully shelved. Some manuscript works of science were considered so valuable as to be rebound in red Moroccan leather decorated with gold tooling.

Thus it was that when, a few years later, the royal palace at Seringapatam was stormed by British troops and Tipu’s famous library was seized by the prize agents, some Company officers found their own lost journals beautifully preserved in the palace collections. Francis Buchanan (later Buchanan Hamilton), a naturalist and surveyor who in the spring of 1800 was sent out on a mission to conduct a survey of the Company’s latest territorial acquisition, was one such officer who discovered his work had been preserved at the Royal Library. When he arrived in Seringapatam, he was greeted with a notebook of his own that he had lost over a decade earlier. As Buchanan explains in a note he later wrote on the frontispiece.

Some years later, Buchanan would return to Britain with not only his journal (which eventually ended up back at the library of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh) but also a major collection of specimens and records collected during his survey of Mysore. And now it was Tipu’s personal writings and favorite books – including one of his copies of the Quran and a journal in which the sultan recorded his dreams – that would be rebound and carefully preserved in his enemy’s library. Eventually, the majority of Tipu’s library would also, after a bitter internal struggle between the directors and the governor-general, be sent back to India House (see Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.1

Map of East India Company territory in Asia, 1795–1835.

Image courtesy of Vidya Chitr Prakashan, New Delhi.

Figure 2.2

The Old Court House and Writer’s Building, Calcutta. By William Daniell, 1787.

Copyright British Library Board.

This mutual capturing and recapturing of book collections between Mysore and the British is just one small example of the ways in which the capture of cultural property, including knowledge resources, was always, on all sides, a part of wartime plundering and looting. For centuries, Mughal powers on the subcontinent had, through war and other means, accumulated great collections.Footnote ² By the mid eighteenth century, however, patterns of accumulation would begin to shift toward European collections. This was a period in which, as recent studies have shown, in the wealthy, increasingly cosmopolitan towns on the subcontinent, foreigners were able to study and collect only through establishing relationships with locals willing to be intermediaries and knowledge brokers.Footnote ³

In this chapter, I trace some of the wider political and economic changes that would allow foreigners, and particularly the British, to increasingly access and engage with the existing world of collecting, education and the sciences on the subcontinent. The result would be a slowing of the growth of resources in Indian centers such as Seringapatam and an acceleration of the growth of individual European-owned collections. The chapter begins by exploring changes in the patterns of accumulation that accompanied the conquest of Bengal. Here, I focus on the early careers of several Company servants who would eventually bring significant collections to Britain: Robert Orme, Alexander Dalrymple and Charles Wilkins. Each of these individuals would play an important role in the establishment of Company science back in Britain. And each, in their modes and methods of acquiring collections of knowledge resources from Asia, illustrate the debt that the growth of British resources would owe, in this period, to two major factors: wartime conventions of looting and plundering and (in consequence of the wartime upheaval) deepening social and political interaction between the foreign and local elite.Footnote ⁴ The final section of this chapter follows the Company’s first steps toward moving from contracted-out to Company-owned science, with new spaces and institutions of knowledge management being established in the wake of major land reforms in the 1790s.

Disaster Orientalism and Private Accumulation

In the India House library and museum’s carefully kept day books, November 20, 1801 marks the first material to be deposited in the new collections: John Corse’s presentation of “three Elephant heads with several detached parts intended to illustrate the natural history of those animals, so far as relates to their curious mode of Dentition.”Footnote ⁵ Three days later Charles Wilkins, the librarian, deposited a copy of Corse’s 1789 Philosophical Transactions essay on “Asiatic Elephants.” On that day, Wilkins also deposited one of his own works, a catalog of “Sanskrita manuscripts presented to the Royal Society by Sir William and Lady Jones.”Footnote ⁶ Into the stores on that day also came a “Persian manuscript traced on Oil Paper” with the English title “Mogul History” and six brass statues of Hindu deities.Footnote ⁷ These were presented to the library by John Roberts, one of the directors of the Company.

A week later, the first large deposit was recorded: fifty-seven volumes of printed material relating to the history of the Company; twenty-three volumes of manuscripts on the subject of India; thirty-seven rolls of maps and plans; thirty-five books of maps, plans and views; and four portfolios of maps.Footnote ⁸ This would turn out to be a large part of the collections gathered by Robert Orme who had been hired as the Company’s historiographer in 1769. The Company’s India House collections started, like most large collections, by absorbing and reordering other existing collections, particularly those privately held collections discussed in the previous chapter. And Orme’s material was itself a collection of collections. Initially, his material was purchased at bazaars in India where local antiquities traders were often dealing in broken-up family collections. His collection also contained manuscript copies of Company records. And a great deal of his books, maps and manuscripts were acquired by “right of conquest”; that is, plundering, in wars with the Mughals, the French and the Spanish. Orme’s collection, as we will see, was also an individual project (i.e. not a Company project) and was gathered (even when taken from various state archives) and used as his own private property. Eventually it would become an important founding collection for the India House library, and its origins and movements – like those of close contemporaries discussed later – illustrate some of the key steps in the Company’s transition from a renter or contractor of knowledge resources to a manager and, eventually, producer of the same.

Robert Orme was born in the kingdom of Travancore (now in Kerala) in 1728, joining the Company at the age of fifteen when he first returned to Fort St. George from his English boarding school years at Harrow. This was the beginning of a period of near-constant territorial skirmishes between the French Company and the English Company, going back to the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748), and engaging a range of Indian states that aligned themselves with either France or Britain. Orme rose steadily through the ranks of the Company from individual writer to factor to, by 1755, senior member of the Madras Council, the top political body in the presidency. Amidst the regular work of a Company writer and factor, such as managing correspondence and negotiating trade agreements, Orme had also been working his way through the largely unorganized records held at the Madras presidency. By the mid eighteenth century, the Company’s operations at Fort William and Fort St. George had been regularized long enough that within the fort a large, largely unexamined archive of Company records had also accumulated. It was this collection that Orme had been probing and copying. Building up his own private version of the corporate archives, he employed local scribes to trace copies of manuscripts on oil paper.Footnote ⁹ Orme had also been collecting manuscripts from many other sources since joining the Company in 1742.Footnote ¹⁰

During the early 1750s, Orme shared his collecting and archival passion with another young officer of the Madras administration, the Scotsman Alexander Dalrymple. Dalrymple had joined the Company at the age of fifteen, working first in the factory stores, then under the assay-master at the mint, and then on to various junior positions within governing committees. Meanwhile, as a clerk and secretary, he also had access to the Company records. As he tells it, he had been obsessed with the idea of an as yet undiscovered southern continent since his youth, and had set his sights on following “Magalhanes [Magellan] and Columbus”; thus, once in the Company’s employment, “the desire of information” led him to seek out and copy Company records of eastward voyages.Footnote ¹¹

Orme, meanwhile, had risen to the rank of senior administrator in Madras when the Seven Years’ War broke out. The decades between the Seven Years’ War and the start of the American Revolution in 1772 were the years of the making of what would become the infamous nabob fortunes in India. In 1756, at the outbreak of the war in Europe, long-simmering hostilities between the Company outpost-town of Calcutta and the French-backed nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, boiled over into armed conflict. The nawab’s forces successfully captured Calcutta. Robert Clive was sent as commander of the Madras forces to recapture it. Clive’s forces retook Calcutta and marched on to a surprisingly decisive victory over the nawab’s forces, and, in the first of a series of direct political interventions, the Company installed one of Siraj-ud-Daulah’s generals, Mir Jafar, as the new nawab. This was the beginning of a complex process that would result in the Company becoming politically and economically intertwined with the existing Mughal state. Perhaps most importantly, the Company had now secured significant revenue rights over the vast and wealthy region of present-day Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. After formally taking over the administration of Bengal, over the next several decades the Company increased land taxes, began promoting the cultivation of poppy (for the Eastern opium trade) instead of grains and effectively established control over the grain markets. The attempt to increase revenues from Bengal was in part a response to the Company’s deteriorating finances, which had been hit hard by the cost of army expansion and the popularity of cheap smuggled Dutch tea in Britain and the Americas, undercutting their main line of trade revenue.Footnote ¹² Meanwhile, in Bengal, food shortages beginning in 1768 were exacerbated by a poor annual monsoon season in 1769, and by 1770 the region was suffering a severe famine, which was followed by an epidemic of smallpox. Up to 10 million, or 30 percent of the population, were killed. During the famine period, even while the Company’s overall financial situation continued to deteriorate, the Company’s revenues from the region steadily increased.Footnote ¹³ So too did the individual wealth of many Company servants.

Clive became a patron of Orme, and, when he returned to London in 1769, so did Orme, bringing with him a massive private library. Dalrymple, meanwhile, continued to collect hydrographical material from the Madras archives. In 1759, he had obtained permission and support to attempt to discover a new route to China through the Molucca Islands and New Guinea. He would conduct three voyages between 1759 and 1764. Meanwhile, the Asian fronts of the Seven Years’ War had progressed. Not only had the Company established itself as the dominant European power in the northern Indian subcontinent and gained territorial control of a large portion of Bengal but it also now held Manila in the Spanish Philippines. The Admiralty and the Company had jointly invaded Manila, and the army plundered the city, invading private homes and burning, inadvertently, much of the state archives. During these voyages, and especially during his time in Manila in 1764, Dalrymple continued to amass his own personal collection.Footnote ¹⁴ As he later explained: “My peregrinations were of use even in this pursuit [i.e. building a collection]. I acquired amongst the Spaniards, some very valuable papers, and intimations from Spanish Writers, many of whose works [I] also procured.”Footnote ¹⁵

In this period, beyond the British-ruled territories, many native kingdoms extended their patronage to European naturalists, surgeons and engineers who had managed to gain a reputation on the subcontinent, and at this time Company servants were generally free to offer their employment to local British-aligned rulers. In the northeast, gardens and cabinets of curiosity were flourishing in Lucknow, capital of Awadh (Oudh), under the rule of Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula (ruled 1775–1795).Footnote ¹⁶ The Oudh Royal Library was particularly famous.Footnote ¹⁷ The Serampore gardens started out in 1771 as a public garden supported by local rulers.Footnote ¹⁸ In the south, the nawab of Arcot in the Carnatic (in which Madras was situated) employed in the late 1760s the first of Linnaeus’s “disciples” on the subcontinent. This Danish botanist, John Gerard Koenig, in turn became a prominent naturalist and collector and, via the nawab, supported a new generation of Company naturalist-collectors in southern India: James Anderson, physician general at Fort St. George in the 1770s; the physician and collector Patrick Russell; and botanist William Roxburgh (see Figure 2.3).Footnote ¹⁹ And, adjacent to the Carnatic, in the southern kingdom of Mysore, Sultan Hyder Ali was investing heavily in the growth of engineering, arts and sciences. Through his French allies, he imported European weaponry, instruments, works of art and literature and French military engineers.Footnote ²⁰ Koenig eventually became salaried as a botanist by the Company as well after doing survey work in Siam and the Malay Peninsula. Russell would succeed Koenig as Company botanist in the Carnatic and made collections for the Madras government.Footnote ²¹ When Russell returned to Britain in 1790 (leaving his collections with the Madras government), Roxburgh, who had been experimenting with the cultivation of pepper, sugar-cane, coffee and other valuable commodities, was hired to replace him. Four years later, Roxburgh then moved up to Calcutta to direct the Company’s new botanical gardens (more on that in the final section of this chapter).

Figure 2.3

Pandanus Odorifer (Pandanus Odorifissimus), known for its aromatic oil, detail from Roxburgh, William. Plants of the Coast of Coromandel: Selected from Drawings and Descriptions Presented to the Hon.

Court of Directors of the East India Company, vol. 1. London, 1795, plate 96. From the Biodiversity Heritage Library (www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/9711).

In the same period, a small number of Company servants were becoming immensely wealthy from their personal dealings in India, and an increasing number of these “nabobs” were now back in Britain with their riches on full display. At the same time, drought and famine were ravaging Bengal. The Company was in deep financial trouble and was at times in the early 1770s unable to pay the annual customs duties on its imports in London, which in turn was a significant blow to the income of the British government.Footnote ²² These and other factors combined to push the Crown to seek increased control over the Company. When the disastrous state of the Company’s first decade of territorial rule became fully known in Britain, Parliament acted to impose for the first time a layer of direct Crown control over the Company’s activities with the Regulating Act of 1773. The Act banned private trade and imposed a new organization on the Company’s administration in India, with a single governor-general now heading the Government of India from Calcutta.

The appointment of Warren Hastings as the first governor-general after the Regulating Act is often taken as a turning point in colonial science in British India under the Company. Hastings promoted a version of imperial rule according to the “native” or “natural” laws already in place. Thus, as Hastings sometimes argued, the route to prosperous Company governance of Bengal must be guided by increasing knowledge of the history, laws and resources of the region, by way of the work of orientalists, surveyors and naturalists. In this mode, Hastings positioned himself as a translator of India for the British and as a “liberal” (i.e. generous) protector and promoter of the arts and culture.Footnote ²³ With various forms of encouragement from Hastings, a new generation of Company servants also took on the collection and study of Indian language, history, geography and natural resources. These early British orientalists, such as Nathaniel Halhed, William Jones and Charles Wilkins, turned their interest to Sanskrit, Bengali and other languages that had so far been neglected relative to Persian, the language of state for the Mughal Empire. Such changes should not be read, as they sometimes have been, as primarily the result of Hastings’s own qualities, or of “Enlightenment values” reaching British India by way of Hastings’s patronage. Equally, if not more, important were the wider transformations in the British position in Bengal, which opened new opportunities for knowledge exchange, collecting and scholarship. For one thing, the new offices and administrative positions created in response to expanding British control over territorial revenue also created new sites and situations for British interaction with local scholars and administrators of the Mughal courts.Footnote ²⁴ Furthermore, Hastings’s generation of scholars were perfectly poised to take advantage of the radical cultural and economic upheaval left by the famine.

It is that conjunction of genuine amateur orientalism with the brutality of the Company’s expansion at the time that is critical to understanding the growth of British orientalism in the period. Before 1757, it had been common for Company servants to complain that the local administrative and learned elite were uninterested in sharing their knowledge. Hastings claimed there had long been a “jealous prejudice” against interlocution with the British, which led them to “guard” their knowledge from foreigners.Footnote ²⁵ By the early 1770s, however, with their student numbers decimated and many formerly wealthy patrons now unable to support them, the local intellectual elite increasingly turned to the British for employment. Pandits (experts in Persian) and munshis (experts in Sanskrit and Hindu jurisprudence) in Bengal at this time were often from long lines of families that had served as scribes, accountants and translators for the Mughal elites.Footnote ²⁶ In the kingdoms of southern India, scribal elites played a similar role, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries more and more had, out of necessity, shifted to working for the British. There was plenty of work of this kind to be had: in a partial step toward directly supporting officer education, all young men entering the India service in Calcutta or Madras were now granted a “munshi’s allowance” with which to hire a teacher for language instruction in their first few years of employment.Footnote ²⁷

Native experts on local laws and religions were also increasingly hired directly by the presidency governments to compile and translate the existing laws and statutes in practice in different regions. Jones, for example, was given approval in 1788 to hire ten native scholars and writers, on competitive salaries, to produce a digest of Hindu laws of inheritance and contracts. And, as Jones explained to the Supreme Council, salaries for these positions would have to be high in order to attract qualified applicants. After the project was underway, one Company administrator noted that it was remarkable Jones had managed to hire enough qualified and willing people, interpreting the change as a matter of trust: “it may be remarked, as an occurrence of no ordinary nature, that the professors of the Brammanical faith should so far renounce their reserve and distrust, as to submit to the direction of a native of Europe, for compiling a digest of their own laws.”Footnote ²⁸ Hastings would assert that his own government should take credit, attributing the dissipation of the “jealous prejudice” of the “Brahmans” to the “liberal treatment they have of late years experienced from the mildness of our government.”Footnote ²⁹ However, the root cause of this new alignment of interests lay not with the “mildness” of Company rule but with a totally transformed political economy of education and knowledge production in the region.

This relatively large-scale integration of the local scholarly elite into the Company’s administration in the presidencies marked a new shift in the way information was being accumulated by the British. The collections of the generation before the Seven Years’ War were made largely through gift exchanges, the occasional plunder of rival French, Spanish or Dutch ships and purchases and exchanges in bazaars. Those of Orme and Dalrymple’s time were formed in similar ways, and in addition sometimes drew on the Company’s own records. Now, however, there was an increasingly important interpersonal dimension. Through directly hiring local experts, much new work was being produced. The Company writer and future Member of Parliament Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, for example, employed a group of eleven pandits and munshis (or “most experienced Lawyers” and “Professors of the Ordinances,” as he calls them) to gather materials and produce interpretations and translations for one of the first of the British compilations and translation/interpretations of native legal codes, the Code of Gentoo Laws (1778).Footnote ³⁰ In his orientalist work, William Jones studied closely with Sanskrit tutors such as Ramlochan and munshis such as Bahaman, and when on the bench as a judge he depended on the advice of the court pandits Goberdhan Kaul and Ramcharan.Footnote ³¹

Charles Wilkins, the Company’s first curator of the India House library-museum, made his name in British India as a printer and authority on Sanskrit after managing to obtain access to renowned tutors in Benares. From a family of printers, Wilkins went to India as a Company writer and quickly became involved in producing the first native-language typefaces for such clients as the Raja of Tanjore.Footnote ³² Wilkins also focused on acquiring local languages and was allowed to remain on leave from his usual duties in Calcutta for a year in Benares, an important seat of Hindu scholarship and on the fringe of Company-controlled territory. Here, he was one of the first Europeans to be allowed to study Sanskrit under Indian Brahmin pandits.Footnote ³³ He worked especially closely with Kasinatha Bhattacharya on a set of transcriptions and translations that would establish his reputation as the first English translator of, and leading authority on, Sanskrit. In this collaborative context, collecting often took the form of copying out texts provided by the teachers, transcribing oral lessons, and making vocabularies, word lists and dictionaries.

During this time, under Kasinatha, Wilkins pieced together a first English translation of one of the central texts of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita. After Wilkins sent Hastings a manuscript copy of the translation, Hastings secured (without Wilkins’s knowledge) the patronage of the Court of Directors to publish the work in London. Wilkins’s Gita was a commercial success, the first Hindu work of literature to be widely read in Europe, and was sold to the public as “one of the greatest curiosities ever presented to the literary world”; becoming something of a sensation, it was published in French, Russian and German within a decade.Footnote ³⁴ Prefacing the work was a letter from Hastings to the chairman of the Company, Nathaniel Smith, which argues for the value (“if not utility”) of such projects to the interests of the Company: cultural exchanges will bond the British and the people of India in mutual understanding. On the one hand, having Company servants read the Gita will improve their virtue and trustworthiness.Footnote ³⁵ On the other hand, he suggests that in producing a translation of the Gita, the British were demonstrating that – in contrast to the Mughal rulers of old – the new rulers of Bengal were respectful of the knowledge of the “Brahmans.” Here, Hastings promotes the value of Indian literature for the English along the lines of what Uday Singh Mehta has termed a “cosmopolitanism of sentiments,” according to which the route to improving imperial rule is increasing understanding and a meeting of minds between the subjects of Britain and the subjects of British India.Footnote ³⁶ To Hastings and his generation, nothing could be so useful in creating a bond between Britain and India as an exchange of high art and knowledge.

Importantly for the subject of this chapter, Hastings also valorizes the very process of collecting and gathering knowledge as part of the meeting of British and Indian minds. In Hastings’s presentation, the social interaction around which the “accumulation” of knowledge occurs tends in itself to reduce prejudice and ill-feeling among both subjects and rulers, and both the inhabitants of India and of England:

The native centers of education, such as where Wilkins was based in Benares, are depicted here as a place of exchange, interaction and growing cultural understanding, a place where knowledge generates respect and respect generates further avenues for exchange.

Of particular relevance to the future creation of the Company’s library-museum at India House fifteen years later, Hastings argues that a lessening of prejudice among the inhabitants of England is also critically needed, hence the importance of accumulating knowledge of India back in Britain:

In direct contrast to some later Company idealogues, most notably James Mill, Hastings is arguing that it is to the mutual benefit of all that the British public and the people of British India to come to know each other through cultural exchange.

By the mid 1780s, the Company was beginning to bring responsibility for the education of its servants under even more formal control. Hastings had established the Calcutta Madrassa. Meanwhile, Kasinatha remained in Benares and became personal pandit to the British Resident Jonathan Duncan. Kasinatha convinced Duncan, and ultimately the Court of Directors, to establish a Company-funded “Hindoo College or academy” for the collection and transcription of ancient texts; and for the education of new pandits who could go on to serve within the colonial government.

Along with the new madrassas and colleges, orientalists and naturalists among the Company’s servants also organized themselves, under the patronage of Hastings, into a scholarly society. William Jones’s idea in 1784 to establish a scholarly society in Calcutta “to enquire into the arts, sciences and literature of Asia” envisioned a new communal organization for what had long been a fragmented and individualistic pursuit.Footnote ³⁹ The Asiatic Society of Bengal met at the Grand Jury Rooms of the Supreme Court, the same court of British-trained judges that had been imposed on the Company by the Regulating Act, where Jones himself (and several other founding members) was a junior judge. The Society had eighty-nine members by 1788, many of whom were drawn from the Company administration. The Court of Directors often extended support to the publications of Society fellows, usually subscribing in advance for a significant number (usually fifty) of books.Footnote ⁴⁰ In these formal and informal ways, both native scholars and Company servants were increasingly given material – if irregular – support by the Company.

The Sciences of the Permanent Settlement

By the time the Company’s charter was up for renewal again in 1793, France had just invaded Austria, Louis XIV had been executed and the new Republic had declared all old monarchies its enemy. With France a growing presence on the Indian subcontinent as well, the Company’s armies were within the penumbra of potential war. Company profits were healthy, as the recent lowering of taxes on tea in 1784 led to a boom in the China trade, and the Company’s tea sales at India House had risen from £6.5 million to £15 million within the last two years. In this political climate, the Company’s charter was renewed with minimal debate and only minor changes.Footnote ⁴¹ In India, meanwhile, the Company had initiated a vast reworking of the land-ownership system in Bengal. The Permanent Settlement Plan, begun in 1786 and finalized in 1793, aimed to increase land productivity by stimulating technical and infrastructural change in agricultural practices. The regional tax collectors (zamindari) were compelled to enter into a “permanent” fixed-rate contract with the Company, on the basis that this would secure more reliable revenue while at the same time encouraging the new landed class to reinvest profits in capital development.

Historians have argued that, while Hastings and the early orientalists such as Wilkins and Jones had been focused on understanding and interpreting India, by the 1790s the idiom of the Board of Control, and of British politics in general, was increasingly one of change and improvement.Footnote ⁴² The Mughal instruments of state that had once been seen as the necessary basis for Company policy were increasingly disregarded as degraded relics. If Company rule was not bound to Mughal traditions, the door to bringing British traditions to the subcontinent was opened.Footnote ⁴³ In the Permanent Settlement Act, the Company pursued liberal forms of “improvement” on a vast new scale according to a very British model of a landed class. The reworking of property relations would, it was hoped, create in Bengal a new class of improvement-minded landowners.Footnote ⁴⁴ Decades later, similar thinking would also lead Thomas Munro to institute land-ownership reforms (ryotwari), giving direct ownership to cultivators, in the Madras and Bombay presidencies.

In other parts of its empire in the final years of the eighteenth century, the Company’s pursuit of “improvement” ranged widely, from small interventions such as the introduction of a new plow in St. Helena, to the production of a history of Indian snakes and poison treatments (produced by Madras naturalist Patrick Russell, whose collections would end up split between Joseph Banks and the Company’s museum), to much more ambitious attempts to introduce new cash crops to India.Footnote ⁴⁵ Cash crop projects were one of the most contentious issues relating to science under the Company in this period. Especially in the wake of the loss of the North American colonies, manufacturers and politicians pushed for increasing the production of commodities of critical economic interest to Britain. In this period, the directors tended to act on this matter not by managing such projects directly but rather by offering individuals the chance to develop and profit from a new venture. For example, when Joseph Banks and the Board of Trade argued for the expansion of Indian hemp and flax, both being key materials for rope and cordage, and an absolutely critical naval supply, the Company, in response, granted passage to India for one agricultural projector named George Sinclair, “reputed to be well skilled in the culture and management of hemp and flax according to the most approved methods practiced in Europe.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Sinclair had submitted a pamphlet to the directors in which he proposed new methods for growing improved hemp in Bengal. Sinclair was then permitted to proceed to Bengal “for the purpose of ascertaining by experiments to be made on his own private account how far his ideas, as detailed in this work, shall appear to be well founded.” The dispatch makes clear that although the directors viewed research into hemp production as a matter “of important national advantage,” and while they offer Sinclair “every degree of protection that may be needful,” they stop short of funding the project: “We have not deemed it expedient that the Company should be subject to any expence on this account.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Fully flexing its monopoly on access to Asia’s nature, the Company offers only the right to travel and experiment in India and the “protection” of his ventures, in exchange for his self-funded pursuit of new agricultural projects. The Company also offers further encouragement to Sinclair in the form of a guarantee of wide freedom of movement and action. Should the hemp and flax project “fail to effect the improvements suggested,” Sinclair is given “liberty to engage in any other” so long as his operations remain strictly within the limits of the Company’s territories.Footnote ⁴⁸ Sinclair was initially successful and in 1799 the Company agreed to a large experimental station, still funded by Sinclair, for the production of hemp, flax, and sunn, contracted with the Marine Board. When Sinclair died later that year, the Court arranged to pass the contract to Banks, who funded the voyage out to India of six flax growers.Footnote ⁴⁹

Sometimes the directors developed interests in particular projects or regions from their informants or the pages of the Asiatic Society of Bengal’s journal. In these cases, again, the only direct action taken by the directors would be an expression of interest or a recommendation sent out to the presidencies, with the funding, personnel and details being left to those governments. For example, in 1797 the directors wrote in a public dispatch of their interest in obtaining more information about “the hill people of Tipperah, Garrow and Rajamhal,” about whom they had received some “first outlines” from an overland route journal of one “Ensign Blunt” that made its way into the hands of the Court of Directors. Desiring more information (“to be filled up with many particulars”) in order to “serve as the basis of opinion or of measures,” the directors “recommended this subject” to the attention of the governor-general. Another few paragraphs give some instructions (though the directors say they do not want to “prescribe minutely the mode or the instruments by which enquiry shall be prosecuted”) and stress that all should be done at minimum cost, with only “public utility” (not “private emolument”) in mind. The letter then goes on to give a list of “the subjects of investigation” – a list very similar to the “instructions for travelers” written by the Royal Society and other bodies seeking in some way to organize and direct the naturalist or surveyor’s attention. Also notable is the suggestion (likely at the behest of one of the Company orientalists back in London) of a comparative study of the languages of the hill regions and those of the plains, which “would probably throw much light upon the origin, perhaps also upon the early history, of both races, and upon other points of curious research.” But, again, while signaling support for research into questions of current natural philosophical interest, the directors also make it more than clear that the aim of these broad inquiries is “improvement”: to answer the question of “how the condition of these wild people may be improved, how they may be civilized.” And improvement of this kind, in turn, is meant to aid the Company in bringing these areas “within the boundaries of the Company’s government.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Under an intensifying interest in “improving” the agricultural districts and “civilizing” the hill districts, the directors continued some of the old modes of science patronage by way of irregular individual enterprise. But more change was also coming to the organization of Company science in India. One of the earliest of these was the growing administration surrounding medical practice and hospitals. Back in the early 1760s, the three presidencies had each established Medical Service branches. These were staffed by officers under the management of a head surgeon, and civil and military branches of the service were also established. The institutional scope of the Medical Service would continue to grow steadily throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵¹ In addition, new institutions of science under the Company stemmed directly from the new land policies being applied to Bengal. These policies would also reorder the Company’s relationship to knowledge of India. First and foremost, the Permanent Settlement stimulated a new wave of revenue surveys and maps of property lines (as would the ryotwari system in the south).

Geography was now the fastest-growing branch of Company-owned science on the subcontinent. Just as hydrographical knowledge had always been critical to the success of the long-distance trade, geographical knowledge was now essential to the Company’s territorial, tax-funded administration. As Colin Mackenzie, the Company’s first surveyor-general (and who, as we will see, amassed a vast collection of manuscripts), would put it in 1795, “knowledge of Geography” is merely “a useful preliminary” to the real target of Company interest: “The Revenues, Resources, Populations, Natural Productions and Manufacturers of a Country.”Footnote ⁵² But geographical expertise was not (and perhaps could not be) contracted out, as hydrography had been through the ship captains. The Company hired its first in-house surveyor, James Rennell, in 1767, over thirty years before it created (for Dalrymple) the position of in-house hydrographer. Rennell’s first assignments were to produced route maps and topographic surveys of the Company’s new territories in Bengal and Bihar. After his Bengal Atlas of 1780, Rennell next pieced together the first English map of the entire subcontinent, the Map of Hindustan. And as surveying and mapmaking grew under the Company, so too did the need for astronomical measurements to determine longitude and keep time. In 1792, the Company formally took over the running of a small private observatory in Madras that had been set up by the administrator William Petrie, thus establishing the first of what would become, by the 1830s, a disparate network of Company-owned observatories across the empire, with Madras the colonial center of that network. Soon the Madras observatory would also be collecting stellar positions from the southern sky, to be exported to India House, which would in turn forward the data to Greenwich Observatory.

Surveying and astronomy were closely connected to the military, and these new institutions show how the Company’s army was, around the turn of the century, becoming, as Christopher Bayly puts it, “a most important store of information available to the colonial state, rivalling the civilian service.”Footnote ⁵³ The army itself was becoming a form of “institutionalized knowledge.” As the army moved away from supplying by way of foraging, looting and forced extraction to formally engaging a wide range of supply contractors, procurement officers put together a web of local suppliers who provided to the army everything from maps and route guides to victuals and medicines to horses and armorers.Footnote ⁵⁴

Meanwhile, a different kind of investment in a new institution of science was underway in Calcutta. In 1788, the Court of Directors approved funding for a new botanical garden. Far from the ornamental pleasure gardens they would become, botanical gardens in the late eighteenth century were experimentation stations for horticultural and agricultural projects such as the hemp and flax investigations of Sinclair. The Company had only tried to establish a botanical garden once before, in 1760, at their small spice-trading factory in Sumatra, Bencoolen. At the time, the capture of Manila had raised hopes of new success for the British spice trade. Earlier attempts to develop spice plantations were revived, and while Dalrymple was plundering the archives of the Spanish Philippines, the Company made a (then) rare effort to formally organize botanical collecting and development. It had been staffed by Philip and Charles Miller, sons of the head gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden. The Millers were to develop “in the greatest secrecy” nutmeg and clove plantations, and there was hope that tea, ginger, turmeric and mulberries could also be cultivated. Spice plantations run by Chinese migrants already dotted the archipelago, and Bugis traders smuggled in seedlings purchased or gathered from these plantations or areas in which the British were not granted access.Footnote ⁵⁵

Company support for the idea of a botanical garden at Calcutta was very strong, and its plan, drawn up by a military inspector, Lt Colonel Robert Kyd, was ambitious.Footnote ⁵⁶ Upon receiving Kyd’s proposal, the Court of Directors sought the opinion of Joseph Banks, who was very enthusiastic about the idea. At this time, the closest the British had to a national botanical garden was George III’s Royal Gardens at Kew, where, since the early 1770s, Banks and others had conducted experiments in transplanting exotic flora. In support of a Company garden, Banks echoed Kyd’s rhetoric of the joint benefit to the inhabitants of India (food crops alleviating famine), the profit of the Company (developing produce for trade with China) and Britain (establishing export crops of use to British industry such as cotton or hemp). More surprisingly, in a report sent to the Court of Directors via the Royal Society’s president, Thomas Morton, Banks also argued that the Company’s proposal was too ambitious, large and expensive. Banks estimated the proposed garden was of an “immense size … which cannot be less than 50 or 55 acres” – much too large, he believed, to be managed successfully. Banks compared its proposed size to Kew, which he said was only about two acres, and he noted that even the large nurseries near London that supplied the whole city with “trees, shrubs and plants seldom occupy above 20 [acres].” He cautioned that “if the garden is established on this Extensive plan the seeds of its certain dissolution are sown at the very period of its institution.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Kyd had actually chosen a site that would be 310 acres. And when the directors authorized the proposal, no mention was made of curbing his ambitions. Their usual cautions about overspending were relatively mild: “so sensible are we of the vast importance of the objects in view, that it is by no means our intention to restrict in point of expense in the pursuit of it.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus, when George Sinclair first set out to make his fortune in hemp and flax (or some other new venture) in 1793, he was not entirely without formal Company support. Ahead of Sinclair, some seeds and other supplies were sent by him to the Calcutta gardens, where Sinclair would first test out some of his methods.Footnote ⁵⁹

It seems clear that the Court of Directors’ enthusiasm for the botanical gardens was tied to both the desperate crisis of the recent famines and new hopes for “improving” the political economy of Bengal via agricultural development. Recent histories of colonial science in India have documented the immense political and scientific significance of the Calcutta gardens.Footnote ⁶⁰ The disastrousness of the first years of Company rule in Bengal had, by the early 1770s, become fully recognized back in Britain. By the mid 1770s, the discourse surrounding how to improve or enrich the colony took on a new urgency.Footnote ⁶¹ There was, however, little agreement on the cause of Bengal’s woes and therefore how to proceed. Some British contemporaries saw the famines as evidence of the inherent defects of the land; others blamed the inhabitants, their character or husbandry.Footnote ⁶² Plenty others blamed the Company – both its policies from London and the apparently rapacious greed of its servants in India. Kyd’s proposal framed the key aim of the gardens in terms of alleviating the risk of famine in northern India. And although the directors agreed, the correspondence with Banks was much more focused on resources substitution and the possibility of introducing new cash crops such as tea. Over the next decades, as Zaheer Baber argues, “the possible role of the botanic gardens in alleviating the effects of famine on the population articulated in Kyd’s original proposal was forgotten and renewed attention to its contribution to enhanced revenue generation became salient.”Footnote ⁶³

It would be many more years before the Calcutta gardens became a distribution hub for the multiplying plantations of new cash crops, including cotton, tea, chinchona and eventually rubber. In the meantime, the gardens became a center for the accumulation of botanical and natural historical collections, with ever larger shipments sending many of these materials back to Britain. Kyd died soon after his proposal was accepted, and William Roxburgh, then the Company’s naturalist in Madras, took over in 1794. For the next twenty years, Roxburgh experimented with many different kinds of economic plantations (teak was the most successful, though the garden was also propagating coffee from Arabia and tobacco from Virginia and Bengal hemp) and planted thousands of new species in the gardens. He also commissioned hundreds of drawings of native plants, folios of which he had been sending to Joseph Banks since 1790. With Banks as an intermediary, the Company agreed to support the publication of the multivolume result of Roxburgh’s botanizing around Madras.Footnote ⁶⁴ This would be the beginning of a new pattern, continued first by Colebrooke and then Nathaniel Wallich, of regular exports of botanical collections from the Calcutta gardens to London, where, after 1801, for a time, the deposits would be placed at India House rather than with Banks or Kew.Footnote ⁶⁵

*

Speaking to the Asiatic Society of Bengal of the challenges and opportunities for scientific investigation in British India, William Jones lamented that what Company servants needed in order to pursue their investigations was more time: “‘Give me a place to stand on,’ said the great mathematician [Archimedes] ‘and I will move the whole earth.” Give us time, we may say, for our investigators, and we will transfer to Europe all the sciences, arts, and literature of Asia.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Whereas it had once been very difficult and expensive for Europeans to even gain minimal acquaintance with the “science, arts and literature of Asia,” now the greatest barrier was, according to Jones, time: time away from the official Company duties to which each and every British orientalist in India was tied. But that barrier, too, was beginning to fall as the Company started to create positions and offices devoted to knowledge management and production. Between the end of the Seven Years’ War and the beginning of the Napoleonic wars, the Company was beginning to engage much more directly in the organization and management of the sciences upon which its trade and governance depended. Kapil Raj calls this period “the first step in the transformation of the study of exotic peoples from an individual activity – mainly European missionaries – into a massive and institutionalized activity … [and] the first step in the transformation of the emerging British empire from one held by force of arms to one held – at least in theory – by information.”Footnote ⁶⁷ As we have seen, those changes began with the wartime transformations of the political economy of knowledge in Bengal. While foreigners in India had always collected, both wartime plundering and the Company’s new position relative to the Mughal Empire would open up many new avenues of access for Britons intent on acquiring manuscripts, curiosities and other knowledge resources. The Company’s financial support for the publication of the Gita is one example of the kind of patronage that was extended to naturalists and orientalists. But the large collections that were beginning to be brought back to London would remain, for now, part of the private trade, destined for personal collections or sale by individuals. And, as we will see in Chapter 3, as more and more servants returned to London with their collections and skills in tow, a new form of Company public–private science would begin to form by the 1790s, eventually reshaping the institutional structures of science in London.

In this earlier period, as we have seen, virtually all of the new developments in Company science were happening in the colonies: the ambitious new terrestrial surveys, which deployed state-of-the-art techniques; the generously funded botanical gardens at Calcutta; and the wider, more formalized employment of pandits, munshis and other native educators and scholars. These new spaces for knowledge production and management within the Company represent some of the many changes that accompanied the Company’s structural transformation during the late eighteenth century from a relatively marginal militarized maritime trading company to the subcontinent’s dominant territorial imperial power. As we will see, however, within a few short years, pressures from both the subcontinent and the home country would lead the Company to sharply increase investment in institutions of science and education back in Britain.

The Tigers of Leadenhall Street

In December 1803, while digging for new sewer lines at the Leadenhall Street entrance to the East India Company’s headquarters, workers hit upon something unexpected. Charles Wilkins, the orientalist, was called outside to investigate. Workers slowly dug out and around the object. It turned out to be a piece of mosaic Roman pavement – one of the first to be found and preserved in London – roughly 9 feet square and decorated at its center with a well-known scene from Greco-Roman mythology: Bacchus, dressed in purple and green robes, holding his wine cup and fennel frond, and reclining on the back of a growling tiger.Footnote ¹ (See Figure 3.3.)

The sewer work was part of a major reconstruction of the Company’s headquarters at India House. This plot in the middle of the City of London had been the Company’s administrative and commercial base since the mid seventeenth century (see Figure 3.1). In 1798, after nearly five decades of steady territorial and commercial expansion in Asia, the directors had found they also needed to expand their office space. At that time, the Company employed around 55,000 individuals, with 30,000 of those based in London.Footnote ² The new India House, completed in 1801, had consumed some of its old neighbors and now occupied nearly a full city block. What is now the site of the Lloyds of London skyscraper was then a sprawling five-story set of interconnected structures, gathered together behind a grand neoclassical façade. Just to the east of India House, across Whittington Lane, was the skin market, home to slaughterhouses, candlemakers, tanneries and leatherworks. The southern end of India House abutted the huge Leadenhall Market, one of the City’s oldest and largest centers for the sale of meat, vegetables and herbs. A few streets away in New Street and Cutler Street a massive new complex of Company warehouses was going up, covering five acres and twenty-five warehouses, each six stories high, and containing nearly 150 rooms. The warehouses were so impressive that foreign dignitaries often asked for tours.Footnote ³

Figure 3.1

Plan showing the site of the East India House within the City of London. Produced 1858–1860 in preparation for the demolition of India House.

Reprinted in Birdwood, George C. M. Relics of the Honourable East India Company: A Series of Fifty Plates. London, Quaritch, 1909. From the Collection of the Cornell University Library.

Figure 3.2

View of India House looking south down Leadenhall Street. From Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, June 1, 1817.

Copyright British Library Board (asset no. Maps K.Top.24.10.c).

Figure 3.3

The remaining central design of the Leadenhall Street mosaic.

© The Trustees of the British Museum (asset # 103463001).

The old India House had a simple pilastered façade and a naval scene painted over the doorway. Now, drovers on the way to the market would herd cattle past a huge ionic portico.Footnote ⁴ The new building was much statelier, and it fully embraced the popular discursive parallels between the ancient Roman and new British Empire. Some observers were, in fact, disappointed with the lack of any “Asiatic” design for the home of not only the center of Britain’s Asian trade but also the seat of government of British India: “there is nothing relative to the eastern world that presents itself to observation,” one architecture critic complained. But others argued that “it would be too shocking to the London eye were the building totally ‘oriental.’”Footnote ⁵ How serendipitous, then, for a part of Roman Britain to be unearthed at the entrance, and for this particular scene to neatly tie ancient Rome and Asia together. Bacchus, or Dionysus, was closely connected in Greek mythology to Eastern conquest. Various stories (most famously the poem “Dionysiaca”) tell of Bacchus traveling to India. The god of fertility, wine, and reproduction, Bacchus romped around the subcontinent, battled local gods and armies, made alliances, and introduced his favorite food and drink. Eventually he made a triumphant return with a great procession of captured treasure, including a long train of exotic animals (hence the tiger in the mosaic).

This ancient, if not entirely reputable, representation of an imperial collector now became part of the world’s latest imperial collection. The Bacchus mosaic was carefully excavated and carried into India House. Behind the architectural unity of the grand classical façade, India House was a sprawling and top-heavy set of offices through which any decisions passed painfully slowly. The Court of Proprietors still elected the chairman, deputy-chairman and twenty-four directors. But the Board of Control, appointed by the Crown, now oversaw, on political matters, the Court of Directors. Crucially, the Court of Directors still controlled the vast majority of the Company’s patronage; that is, the issuing of new army and civil service positions in British India. Company writerships were highly sought after, and control of the patronage gave the directors a significant amount of political capital in Britain. A wide range of sometimes clashing political and economic interests were gathered together here. For one thing, the Company’s commercial functions encompassed both the interests of those whose profits depended upon the sale of goods and those whose profits depended upon the shipping of goods. In addition, the close ties between the Company and Parliament meant that the Company’s administration also reflected or imported traditional political divisions at play in British politics. The East India Company in 1800 was, in form, with its formal monopoly over the Eastern trade, a deeply conservative (trade protectionist, anti-reform, Tory) institution. At the same time, the growing strands of liberalism (free trade, pro-reform, utilitarian, Whig) of the early nineteenth century were also increasingly represented within the Company.Footnote ⁶

British India was by now divided into governorships of three geographically distinct presidencies at Madras (which also included all British Indian regions east of the subcontinent such as the Straits Settlements and the Company’s factories in Chinese treaty ports), Bengal and Bombay. The Crown, with the approval of the Company, appointed and, in theory, presided over the governors in charge of each presidency. The governor-general of Bengal was the highest-ranking official in British India and in many ways the supreme authority on the ground. But the Court of Directors could (and often did) criticize, censure, revise and revoke the decisions of the governor-general. At the same time, however, with communication between Britain and British India taking six months at least, the governor-general was also able to subvert, ignore or otherwise disrupt the instructions from India House.

Having passed under the portico, the Baccus mosaic was then carried into a large central atrium, from which extended a maze of hallways and rooms cobbled together around a central open yard. Most of the Company business was conducted in the great rooms off the central hallway downstairs from the library and museum. Within these offices, hundreds of clerks kept the paper machinery of the Company’s empire running. To the right was the Grand Court Room, where the proprietors (stockholders with large enough holdings to be able to vote on Company matters) met to debate and vote. The room was richly decorated, with “an uncommonly fine Turkey carpet covering the whole flooring” and a vast marble chimneypiece. There was a bas relief of Britannia sitting on a globe being attended by figures representing Asia and Africa, who offered to Britannia various gifts and commodities. Clocks, mirrors and mathematical instruments associated with navigation – a signal of how fundamental the science of navigation and surveying was to the Company’s interests – were hung on the walls. On the panels of the “uncommonly handsome doors” were six large paintings giving a panorama of views of the Company’s key ports in the late eighteenth century: Fort St. George (Madras), Bombay, St. Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, Fort William (Calcutta) and Tellicherry. All of the India House spaces, or the public rooms anyway, were a spectacle of the Company’s geographical reach.Footnote ⁷

Another centerpiece of the new India House was the “New Sale Room.” Because of their monopoly on trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, all goods brought from Asia to Britain were sold by auction in India House. The New Sale Room was theater-like, with stepped seating and a large staging area at the front. Like some of the new shopping arcades cropping up at the turn of the century, the room was equipped with natural lighting from a glass and iron ceiling, a technique also now used in the Company’s most important warehouses. The New Sale Room was also comfortably warm, heated “without any visible fire, the result of a subterranean conveyance of heat.” The pilastered walls displayed more scenes of Asia’s “commercial attributes.”Footnote ⁸

Within the new India House were many spectacular spaces, and displays of oriental curiosities and works of art were scattered around the hallways and committee rooms. But the new India House also had within it a new space intended in part to differentiate mere plunder from a more public-minded (so it was argued) kind of collecting: the “Oriental Repository.” It was here that Wilkins directed the mosaic to be moved. Up a set of stairs off to the left of the vestibule was the newly added library and museum space. Here, as one early visitor guide put it, “every book known to have been published in any language whatsoever is to be found here, relative to the history, laws or the jurisprudence of Asia,” as well as “an unparalleled collection of oriental manuscripts in all the Oriental languages,” including the only printed Chinese-language books in England.Footnote ⁹ The library was not large, about 60 feet long and 20 feet wide, and was well lit with large circular skylights and tall windows facing Leadenhall Street and Lime Street. Above an ornate mantlepiece hung a painting of “the Emperor of Persia a young man with a long black beard in magnificent jeweled dress.”Footnote ¹⁰ Recesses in the wall displayed busts of Robert Orme and Warren Hastings. But the main attraction were the walls covered in bookcases and shelving designed specially to house a great material variety of written forms: from “the smooth silky paper of India” to “the Malayan manuscripts … etched with a sharp tool upon the leaves of the palm tree, joined at the ends and made to open like a fan.” Still others “folded up in the ancient manner [and] extend several yards in length when opened.”Footnote ¹¹ Two very personal items of Tipu Sultan’s – his personal copy of the Quran and a journal in which he wrote down his dreams – were on prominent display.

Adjoining the library was the museum, where the visitor guide reports seeing a stone covered in “Babylonian inscriptions,” a 2-foot-long fragment of jasper covered in carvings, antiquities from India, Chinese works of art including jade carvings, paintings and a massive silk lantern, and the Bacchus mosaic. A few years after the mosaic had been found, Bacchus would be joined by many more tigers, the loot from the storming of Seringapatam in 1799 finally having made its way back to India House. The solid-gold tiger-themed throne of Tipu Sultan, Britain’s great rival in southern India, had been broken up to be divided into customary prize payouts for army officers, but one of its solid-gold tiger heads did make it back to the museum. The most famous item from Tipu’s palace, however, was the celebrated “Musical Tiger” (see Figure 3.5).Footnote ¹² Now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tipu’s tiger was like a mechanical Enlightenment version of the Bacchus mosaic, but with the political imagery inverted. It was a life-sized painted wooden automaton of a tiger (representing Mysore) atop a pale-skinned soldier in redcoat, which, when wound up, would growl and claw at the squealing, squirming soldier.

This chapter follows the creation and early growth of Company science in London. As we have seen, in the late eighteenth century, the Company’s new investments in education, knowledge management and institutions of science were largely focused on British India. But around the turn of the century, the foundation of the new library-museum and colleges in Britain would sharply redirect the growth of new Company-run initiatives for science and education back to Britain and crystalize that shift into a new set of institutions and priorities related to knowledge management. It was a shift that took full advantage of the Company’s legal monopoly on access to Asia’s knowledge resources. And it would begin with the stepwise incorporation into the administration at India House of the work of the orientalists, naturalists and collectors covered in the previous chapters. The London careers of a set of nabob-scholars – Robert Orme, Alexander Dalrymple and Charles Wilkins from Chapter 2, as well as William Marsden – illustrate how the early beginnings of Company science in London flourished at the porous boundary between individual and corporate ownership.

Incorporating the Nabobs

At a meeting of the Antiquarian Society in London in 1772, Matthew Mite, a wealthy former servant of the East India Company, offered a procession of new presents to the Society’s museum. The gifts included a piece of lava from Vesuvius and a box of natural history specimens, which contained “for the use of my country … a large catalogue of petrifications, bones, beetles and butterflies.” The piece of lava, given special attention by Mite, was collected as a sample of foreign natural production worthy of study for the “useful” aim of introducing and propagating volcanoes within the English landscape:Footnote ¹³

To this and Mite’s other contributions to “national knowledge,” the fellows responded enthusiastically (“What a fund of learning!” “Amazing acuteness of erudition!” “Let this discovery be made public directly!”).Footnote ¹⁴

Matthew Mite is the titular character in playwright Samuel Foote’s satire The Nabob, which brings together and skewers late Georgian fashionable culture (including natural philosophy) and imperial politics. First staged in 1772, The Nabob – then a derogatory for the nouveau riche among returned Company servants – follows the schemes of Mr. Matthew Mite, who has recently returned from India and is now exercising his new wealth to advance his social position.Footnote ¹⁵ Mite’s riches have enabled him to buy his way into the elite world of learning embodied by such new institutions as the Society of Antiquaries (f. 1751), parodied here.Footnote ¹⁶ This is just one part of Mite’s larger scheme to secure for himself a place among the aristocracy, who, for their part, regard him as no more than a thief and plunderer. After being accused by one such family of impoverishing India to acquire his ill-got wealth, Mite retorts: “I am sorry … to see one of your fashion concur in the common cry of the times; but such is the gratitude of this country to those who have given it dominion and wealth.” To which the patriarch replies: “I wish even that fact was well founded, Sir Matthew. Your riches (which perhaps too are only ideal) by introducing a general spirit of dissipation, have extinguished [here in Britain] labor and industry, the slow, but sure source of national wealth.”Footnote ¹⁷

Mite claims his individual riches are but part of a larger contribution to the nation’s wealth and strength; the old aristocratic family, however, claims the opposite: colonial exploits are disrupting England’s traditional and reliable patterns of commerce and political economy. Act III, at the Antiquarian Society, brings those issues to bear on Enlightenment learned culture, suggesting that the colonial “spirit of adventure” and the dubious collections brought home offer only an illusion of progress in knowledge. Mite’s visit to the Antiquarian Society mocks the idea that nabob-scholars and their curious collections are contributing useful knowledge to the nation. Picking out for ridicule the growing discourse of “improvement” among the learned societies at the time, Foote presents Mite and his Antiquarian Society as deluded with the self-image of the Society as an important resource for national utility and publicly useful knowledge.Footnote ¹⁸ But, in fact, Mite’s contributions are trivial, misdirected and distinctly useless. Mite’s ideas for economic “improvement” by way of foreign resource substitution (i.e. propagating volcanoes) are downright destructive.

The character Matthew Mite could plausibly have been based on any number of returning Company servants whose wealth and status was, in part, based on an engagement with learned societies and cultures of collecting.Footnote ¹⁹ As in Foote’s Nabob, such collecting was of a piece with the wider debate about just how valuable to the nation was the mass of private wealth captured in the Company’s recent wars. In the next section, we will see how, with the establishment of the new oriental repository at India House, the Company would step in and attempt to gain control of – or at least a stake in – this thriving world of private collecting of Asia in Britain. But the first steps toward instituting new spaces for science at the Company would involve the returned nabob-scholars we met in the last chapter. These figures played a crucial role in establishing both a new London-based orientalism and new London-based institutions of science at India House Robert Orme would become the Company’s first historiographer; Alexander Dalrymple, the Company’s first hydrographer; and Charles Wilkins, the first curator of the Company’s library and museum. Several would also become part of the circle of Joseph Banks (who, at the time The Nabob was staged, had just returned from the expedition of the Endeavour to the Southern Ocean with Captain James Cook. And Banks, in particular, would, through resource substitution schemes such as those satirized in The Nabob, bring orientalism and natural history to bear on schemes to improve Britain’s trade balance).Footnote ²⁰

Increasingly, returning orientalists were able to find not only comfortable social networks but also, in the best cases, lucrative new positions in the home government at India House. To be sure, the majority of Company servants pursued more directly financially interested projects during their time in Asia. But personal collections generated significant financial as well as cultural capital and opened doors to new economic opportunities. One such nabob-scholar clearly explained his worldly interest in pursuing “disinterested” scholarship while stationed in Asia. William Marsden was born in Ireland to an Anglo-Irish family of bankers. He (like Orme) also went to Harrow, and he joined his brother as a Company writer at Fort Marlborough, the Company factory near Bencoolen (Bengkulu, Indonesia), at the age of sixteen. He spent nearly a decade in Sumatra, from 1771 to 1779. As he recalls this time in an autobiography, he spent much of those years devoting himself to “the Muses”: “what I had acquired of classical learning at school was not neglected, as after my arrival in Sumatra, I made translations of the Greek odes of Anacreon and Sappho.” And in fact, in the same year that The Nabob was staged in London, Marsden and his brother were staging Greek tragedies in a playhouse they had built in Bencoolen. But, as he continues, “my curiosity being ever awake to the objects around me, [t]he objects, indeed, of my literary pursuits were by no means of a confined nature. I had an ardent thirst for knowledge, both for its own sake and from the flattering, however distant, hope, of it enabling me to distinguish myself in the event of my future return to London.”Footnote ²¹ And so, to that end, he continues, “I seriously directed my attention to collecting materials for giving an account of the island.”Footnote ²²

Marsden decided (or was forced by bad health) to return to England before having achieved the customary level of financial success, which, as he explains, was “until the annual savings from the emoluments of offices would accumulate to what is termed a fortune – that is, such a sum as, when invested English securities, would permit the owner to enjoy the conveniences of life, without further exertions on his part.”Footnote ²³ Marsden’s understanding of the cultural capital and future financial possibilities of developing an expertise in Sumatra would have been unremarkable at the time. In both the colonial and the home-country context, many of this new class of well-off merchants, colonialists and industrialists participated in the growing number of scholarly clubs and societies all around Britain.

By the 1770s, returning employees of the Company were bringing huge quantities of goods from Asia, filling their homes and estates to such an extent that the material culture of empire became a defining feature of the English country home.Footnote ²⁴ Often having made a very comfortable sum abroad, sometimes having captured vast riches, returning nabobs as well as families connected with shipping, banking and Company administration filled their homes with materials from the Asian trade and, increasingly, wartime plunder. This included weapons, cloth, jewels, utensils and paintings, but also manuscripts and cabinets filled with naturalia, as well as exotic plants and live animals. The ultra-wealthy Child family, for example, which had been involved in Company shipping and administration since the seventeenth century, maintained at their lavish Osterly Park estate extensive gardens as well as a “menagerie full of birds that comes from a thousand islands which Mr. Banks has not yet discovered,” as Horace Walpole put it.Footnote ²⁵ The family of Edward Clive (son of Robert Clive) amassed back in England a vast “treasure,” as Lady Clive put it, of natural specimens, works of art and craft, and stuffed and live animals, many collected (some by the Clive daughters themselves) and others purchased or given as gifts to Lady Clive (Company officers were, by this time, barred from receiving personal gifts, but family members were a different story) while the family was on tour to the recently plundered kingdom of Mysore.Footnote ²⁶ And even beyond those who had served the Company or been to Asia, cabinets of natural history and foreign works of art, especially textiles and tableware, were common in upper-class households.Footnote ²⁷ The ultra-wealthy had, for example, their own glasshouses for exotic flora, “China rooms” to display porcelain collections, museum-like natural history displays and even menageries. For example, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, duchess of Portland (who was an investor in the Company), put together the largest natural history collection in mid eighteenth-century Britain. The “Portland Museum” at Bulstrode was also home to a menagerie, aviary and large botanical garden (see Figure 3.4). The vast, well-curated collection would be auctioned off, after her death, in 1787.Footnote ²⁸

Figure 3.4

Frontispiece to the auction catalog for the duchess of Portland’s museum, which then contained the largest natural history collection in Britain. Skinner and Co. (London, England) and John Lightfoot. A Catalogue of the Portland Museum, Lately the Property of the Duchess Dowager of Portland, Deceased: Which Will Be Sold by Auction by Mr. Skinner and Co. on Monday the 24th of April, 1786, and the Thirty-Seven Following Days … at Her Late Dwelling-House, in Privy-Garden, Whitehall: By Order of the Acting Executrix. [London], [Mr. Skinner and Co.], 1786.

From the Biodiversity Heritage Library. www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/243075.

Back in London, in the 1760s and 1770s, in the wake of the Company’s expansion after the Seven Years’ War, some of those individual collectors would parlay their private material gains into key positions within both India House and London’s wealthy philosophical circles. These collections would often initially occupy a “semiprivate” space in which they were owned by individuals but hired out in a newly formal way by the Company.Footnote ²⁹ One such collection is that of Robert Orme, who returned permanently (some said fleeing – with Clive) to London in 1760 during the war. He was now well off by English standards but not nearly as rich as those of the great nabobs such as Clive himself. More importantly for the future trajectory of his career, Orme had returned to London with records and archives that allowed him to produce the first detailed account of the Company’s recent wars, together with a study of Bengal. He bought a house in Harley Street, where he installed his personal library and settled into the life of a nabob-scholar. He began work on what would become the History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Hindoostan. It was in its time regarded as the most authoritative and complete English work on “India” (a relatively new term, which Orme explains is distinct from the “East Indies”) and it was also the first account of the recent wars that had so radically extended the Company’s territorial reach.Footnote ³⁰

Orme became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1769. That year, he was also appointed to the newly created position of historiographer to the Company, with a salary of £400. Although in some ways “the world’s first in-house corporate historian,” Orme’s own private library was most critical to his work.Footnote ³¹ Orme had a desk within the Examiner’s Office, but generally worked from home, surrounded by his massive collection. A few years later, in 1771, the directors, responding to complaints about the “confused and disorderly state” of Company records, established a new office devoted to document management.Footnote ³² The new Registrar’s Office was to take custody and arrange into a numbered catalog all books, papers and records. The office was also to oversee registering incoming and outgoing materials. With these two moves, and just in time for the coming debate over the Company’s charter renewal in 1773, the Company formally took over management of the production of its own history. The political importance of the Company historiographer was such that, after the charter renewal of 1773, part of the new Regulating Act, which increased Crown control of Company policy via the new Board of Control, was to allow the Board to also appoint another historiographer. Orme would thus soon be joined by the historian and philosopher John Bruce, a close ally of Henry Dundas, then president of the Board of Control.

The first volume of Orme’s History dealt with the years between 1751 and 1755, and a key duty of the new historiographer was to produce subsequent editions. It would not be until almost fifteen years later, in 1778, that Orme finally produced the next volume of his history. Some historians argue that his slow progress was largely due to his growing unease with the political events unfolding in India. As Orme wrote to a friend in 1767: “it is these cursed presents [i.e. gifts and bribes] that stop my history. Why should I be doomed to commemorate the ignominy of my countrymen, and without giving the money story [i.e. the question of corruption] that has accompanied every event since the first of 1757, I shall not relate all the springs of the action.”Footnote ³³ In later years, Orme switched to less fraught territory, working on a history of the Mughal Empire, publishing Historical Fragments of the Mughal Empire in 1782. The “fragments” in the title points to the fact that, as Orme explains, for this project, back in England, Orme had very little manuscript Persian or Sanskrit material, yet the number of manuscripts and printed works about India now circulating in England still made such a study possible.Footnote ³⁴

Alexander Dalrymple’s career followed a similar pattern as that of Orme, and was equally dependent upon his private library. After returning to London in 1764, Dalrymple established himself as an authority on the South Seas and the Southern Indian Ocean, joined the Royal Society and began advocating for further exploration of the Southern Ocean along with others who believed there was an as-yet-undiscovered major continent. The British government decided to support such exploration, to which the Company also gave £2,000. But when he lost out leadership of the expedition to James Cook, Dalrymple instead turned to the world of print. Dalrymple became a prolific editor and publisher of works related to seafaring, exploration and navigation in Asia. He began, as had Richard Hakluyt, with collected histories of voyages based on sources gathered from a wide chronological and geographical range. His first of these, An Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean (1770), brought together materials to make the case for there being an undiscovered continent to the south of Borneo and the Philippines. The subtitle declares the work’s value “Being chiefly a LITERAL TRANSLATION from the SPANISH WRITERS” and indicates, as Dalrymple elaborates in the introduction, that the work is not intended for popular enjoyment but for the information of the serious student of Eastern navigation. Distancing himself from the thriving travel writing genre, he presents the decision to produce a “LITERAL TRANSLATION” as a matter of unsparing scientific utility (and personal financial sacrifice): “the undress and uncouth sound of a literal translation is enough to frighten all readers except the very few who take up a book merely for information; but it was to these few I have devoted my labors.”Footnote ³⁵ And he signals his authority on the subject by way of his own history as a ship captain and in the East India Company, which, crucially, gave him access to this very rare information and enabled him to form “a collection of all the discoveries in the South-Sea” during the Seven Years’ War.Footnote ³⁶

Dalrymple also continued collecting after he returned to London in 1764. One contemporary describes him as a constant presence in certain bookseller shops and auction houses:

Of his London shopping, Dalrymple notes in particular being able to acquire a “curious collection of Spanish memorials; these greatly elucidate the printed relations, which without having this assistance, must have remained unintelligible.”Footnote ³⁸

Dalrymple’s History marked the start of a period of about three years in which he mined his own library to produce nautical and hydrographical charts and pilot guides about the China routes. His focus was on the area around Borneo, the Sulu archipelago (where for years he had advocated establishing a Company settlement at Balambangan) and the Philippines, based first on his own travels and later on the manuscripts and rare prints in his collection, becoming more of an editor than an author. In this period, the standard means of transferring nautical information was via manuscript copying. The Court of Directors was not entirely happy to have such routes and port descriptions published, and during a period when a Balambangan station was under active consideration, for example, they discouraged him from making the material publicly available.Footnote ³⁹ Dalrymple was also in close contact with the French hydrographer D’Aprés de Mannevillette, and in 1772 sent him the six publications he had so far produced, sanctioning him to “make what use you please of the Charts I have sent you,” which D’Aprés did in later editions of his widely read Neptune Oriental.Footnote ⁴⁰ Here Dalrymple found his focus: gathering, organizing, editing and publishing nautical works. His first set of charts comprised six drawn from a Dutch collection (of Van Keulen) and the rest from his own collection, producing in 1774 A Collection of Plans and Ports in the East Indies. This work also marked a new relationship between Dalrymple and the East India Company. Earlier tensions now dissipated, and Dalrymple now worked with an eye to gaining significant Company subscriptions for forthcoming works. The Company agreed, for example, to purchase fifty copies of A Collection of Plans and Ports in the East Indies.

In 1772, Dalrymple was formally re-hired by the Company as the Company’s in-house hydrographer. In 1777, his projects turned from his own collections to those at India House, examining ships’ logs and publishing charts on behalf of the Company. The Company hadn’t produced its own nautical charts since the early seventeenth century. By 1779, Dalrymple was receiving an annual salary of £500 for his hydrographic work. He still did most of his work at his home (in the household of his patron the former governor George Pigot). He also hired out engravers and printers and, when necessary, supplemented the Company’s annual £500 stipend for publication costs with his own funds.Footnote ⁴¹ But, beyond providing the Company with a required number of copies, he was allowed to do what he wished with the material and any further profit would be his.

By the mid 1780s, Dalrymple had produced hundreds of charts for the Company, based increasingly on the logbook collections at India House. He was also now selling collections of these to the public, packaging and repackaging the Company materials in an ever-changing number of forms. In 1791 he began his annual series The Oriental Repertory, which became a very widely used resource, a compendium of all kinds of travel and shipping information, updated route guides, charts, tables and so on. He had also been successful in getting the logs in more regular forms and in convincing captains to produce information of the kind he was seeking, including making use of new marine chronometers for longitude. In 1795, as tensions escalated between France and Britain yet again, the Admiralty followed the Company’s lead and began a program of organizing and processing its own vast archive of ships logs and miscellaneous charts. Dalrymple also became hydrographer to the Royal Navy, receiving the same salary from the state as from the Company. He would retain both positions until his death in 1809.

Not all Asian collections in London were being managed in semiprivate collaboration with the Company. There were plenty of much more independent collections being formed as well. Williams Jones, the puisne judge and orientalist in Calcutta, sent a significant collection of his manuscripts to the Royal Society in 1792 (the rest were retained by Lady Jones and eventually auctioned off with her library after her death in 1832).Footnote ⁴² In addition, the orientalist and administrator Henry Thomas Colebrooke, who was also Jones’s close associate and successor in the project to create a digest of Hindu laws, would also remain independent from the Company upon his return to London in 1815. Colebrooke instead founded in 1823 the Royal Asiatic Society (modeled on the Asiatic Society of Bengal). He had amassed an even larger collection than Jones, and though he left much of his library back in India with the missionary and printer William Carey (who had agreed to copy the lot and eventually ship the originals back to London), he also shipped about seven tons of books and manuscripts, over 2,500 items, then said to be the largest collection of material from Asia in Europe.Footnote ⁴³

William Marsden, who also formed a great private library at this time, presents a different trajectory. After nearly a decade in Bencoolen, he resigned and returned to London, where he helped to run an agency house. He also spent a great deal of time and money collecting Asian coins and manuscripts within London, from booksellers and private library auctions. Marsden was, above all, a collector of information about languages, particularly the languages of present-day Austronesia. He published the first English history of Sumatra and the first English dictionary of Malayan. The study of languages encompassed both the extremely practical, with word lists and dictionaries that circulated constantly among ship captains and seamen, and the philosophical, in which language was considered a window onto the history of civilizations.Footnote ⁴⁴ As the war with France took shape, Marsden also, like Dalrymple, joined the Admiralty as an undersecretary in 1795, becoming first secretary with a massive salary of £4,000 in 1807.

Along with Dalrymple and Rennell, Marsden also became part of the Company contingent of the naturalist Joseph Banks’s circle, joining his supper and breakfast clubs as well as being elected a fellow of the Royal Society.Footnote ⁴⁵ Banks, for his part, facilitated Marsden’s philological research by passing on material related to languages that came into his hands.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although his research interests never left South and Southeast Asia, Marsden did not court the Company for any official position – perhaps running an agency house provided him with sufficient financial independence. And perhaps this is why, as with Banks himself, the British Museum was much more his institutional base than was India House.Footnote ⁴⁷ He even purchased a home in Bedford Square to be close to, as he put it, “my philosophical friends in Soho Square.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, this area of London, about 2.5 miles west of India House, was the cultural center of the sciences, housing two of the most significant institutions: the British Museum and the Royal Society. Banks’s circle of influence also stretched further west to the botanical collections of the Chelsea Physic Garden, run by the Society of Apothecaries, the main suppliers of drugs to Company surgeons, and to King George III’s gardens at Kew. At his death, Marsden bequeathed his coin collection to the British Museum, and his library went to the newly founded King’s College (the Marsden library is now shared between King’s and the School of Oriental and African Studies [SOAS]).Footnote ⁴⁹

All of these institutions were connected in various ways to science under the Company in London in this period. Materials from Asia would make their way via Company servants into Banks’s vast herbarium, the king’s gardens, the Royal Society’s repository and the cases and stores of the British Museum. Social and intellectual ties were strong: surgeons and naturalists returning from Company service were frequently elected to the Royal Society, sometimes becoming prominent members. As we will see, Banks and other members of the Royal Society were also at times part of Company deliberations on administrative matters, and the Company subscribed funds to some voyages of exploration that the Society promoted. It should also be noted that many wealthy members of the Royal Society and other naturalists and collectors also had financial ties to the Company as stockholders. The towering Glaswegian collector William Hunter, for example, sometimes funded his massive purchases through the sale of Company stock.Footnote ⁵⁰

The New Library-Museum at India House

In 1798, the same year the Company first broke ground on the expansion of the new India House in the City of London, the directors announced their plan (see earlier) for a new “public repository.”Footnote ⁵¹

As first presented in the 1798 Dispatch, the primary aim of a Company repository was the “preservation” of an endangered “oriental literature.” The threat to India’s “literary stores” was described as threefold: first, according to the directors, very few new literary works of note were now being produced (the golden age of Persian and Arabic literature lay in the past); second (and echoing the argument in Foote’s Nabob that individual nabob wealth did not contribute to national wealth), the voracious private collecting and exportation of oriental manuscripts by Company servants was “thinning” the stock of original works in India (while at the same time this collecting was “not greatly enriching Britain”); finally, Sanskrit and other languages of pre- (and non-)Mughal India had “suffered greatly” under “foreign” (i.e. Mughal) rule. For all these reasons, so it was proposed, a safe harbor was needed in Britain for the literary and scientific material of the subcontinent.

Robert Orme had been making the case for a Company library at India House since at least 1792.Footnote ⁵³ It is unclear how directly Orme was involved in the directors’ final decision to allocate space in the new India House for a repository. The dispatch’s depiction of an endangered Persian and Arabic and a long-oppressed “Shanscrit” is much the same as arguments made by Charles Wilkins in his introduction to the Bhagavad Gita. In its first expression the repository was conceived as a collection designed to intervene in and incorporate the private manuscript trade; there is no discourse of “improvement” here, or even of “usefulness” beyond the narrowly presented aim of “preventing further injury to letters.” The directors’ first vision of the repository was not, like that of the botanical gardens or the surveyor’s offices on the subcontinent, as a new arm of an improving mission. And it was also, in expecting to grow at “no great expence” and by way of donations, not much of a departure from the old outsourcing model of knowledge management. It was merely a signal of a willingness to take “public” but, in effect, corporate ownership of these materials. But in that little shift was the making of what would become an important new institutional space for Company science in Britain.

London newspapers immediately reported on the plans and developments for a repository at India House. In the same year that the directors announced their plans for the library and museum, The Oracle reported on some “presents” including “two chests containing some very valuable jewels” for the “Oriental Museum at the India House” as well as alerting readers that “a magnificent and extensive Library is to make a part of the additions to the India-House.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Years before Tipu’s tiger arrived in London, the Morning Post had already learned that “a most curious piece of mechanism,” which was “proof (if any were yet wanting) of the deep hatred and extreme loathing of Tippoo Saib [sic] towards the English nation,” had been captured at Seringapatam and was to be shipped back to London (so the Post thought) to the Tower to go on display with other national war trophies.Footnote ⁵⁵ (Tipu’s tiger also appears in the Times’s earliest reference to the “Company’s Museum” in an account of the visit of a Mamluk envoy, Elfin Bey, in 1803, when the group played “Rule Britannia” on the organ of the tiger.)Footnote ⁵⁶

A year later, this modest idea had been spun into a plan for a small British Museum-like library and museum at India House. This new proposal was the work of Warren Hastings and Charles Wilkins, both of whom had returned to London in the mid 1780s. Wilkins had, as we now would expect, returned to London with a trove of Indological material he had collected while in India. He continued his translation work, publishing a book of Sanskrit fables, the Hitopadesha, in 1787, was elected to the Royal Society in 1788 and issued more sections of the Mahabharata in 1794 and 1795. A fire at Wilkins’s home in 1796 damaged much of his collections and destroyed all of his Bengali and Sanskrit typeface. Hastings had originally been called back to face accusations of corruption and mismanagement, and a subsequent trial of impeachment had dominated nearly a decade of intra-London Company politics. During the trial, which lasted from 1786 to 1795, Wilkins often attended court to speak in support of him. In addition, Kasinatha and the “Bengali Pandits of Benares” sent letters of support for Hastings, one with 112 signatures.Footnote ⁵⁷

After Hastings was acquitted, he passed to the Court of Directors Wilkins’s proposal for “A Sketch of a Plan for an Oriental Museum proposed to be established at the India House.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Wilkins’s proposal described a repository-like archive of “maps, charts, plans, views, manuscripts, printed books, coins, medals, statues and inscriptions.” But it also included three “cabinets”: “natural productions,” “artificial productions” and “miscellaneous articles.” Among the “natural productions” were the three categories of “Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral.” The general organization mirrored that of the British Museum, but the proposed items for collection were distinctly drawn from the world of the Company and its empire. Under “Animal” Wilkins included many highly sought-after items of trade and commerce, for example “animals, parts of animals, or produce of animals as are objects of commerce, and all in its natural state: the tusk of the elephant, the wool of the shawl goat, the musk in its bag, the cocoons of the different silk worms, lack [lac] with its colouring substance intact, the cochineal, and the edible birds’ nest.”

Wilkins does also suggest that the more typical specimens of natural history – stuffed or preserved animal trophies or large and merely “curious” animals offered as gifts – should also be found a place if they are “accompanied by an Abstract of its Natural history.”

In the curating of the “vegetable productions,” Wilkins suggests that the focus should be on the plants “whose produce is an article of commerce.” For example: “timber … for ship-building, [plants with] medicinal virtues or fragrant scents … sugar canes and tea trees, cotton plants … indigo and other plants used in staining and dyeing … oils, gums and resins which are the natural produce of the plants of Asia.” And all of these specimens should be well documented, accompanied by a “memorandum of its peculiar qualities, place of growth &c.”

Wilkins’s description of the “mineral productions” to be collected focuses, yet again, almost exclusively on known and economically significant materials:

Similarly, it was British manufacturing and trade interests, and the intense importance of the textile trade to Company profits, that dominated the collection of “artificial productions” proposed by Wilkins. He suggests ambitiously to procure “generally samples of all the manufactures of Asia, and, particularly, every article in silk and cotton, in every stage from the cocoon and pod to the cloth ready for the market; of the different sorts of colouring substances prepared in India; of sugar and sugar-candy; of saltpetre and borax &c &c.” Importantly, Wilkins also proposed to form a collection of Asian technology: “models of the various machines and tools used in the manufactures of Asia should form a part of the Collection; and also of the implements of husbandry, and instruments used in their sciences, mathematical, astronomical, musical &c. &c.” Finally, in acknowledgment of the centrality of gifts and the place of treasure within India House, he also proposed a space for “miscellaneous articles,” which he describes as “Curiosities, chiefly presents, such as cannot conveniently be classed under any of the former heads.”

Wilkins’s description of an imagined Company museum was entirely unique to the nature of British interest in, and the state of Company knowledge relative to, Asia. His is an ideal collection produced by someone with detailed knowledge of materials of commercial interest to the Company and its customers. Unlike the directors’ initial description of a “repository,” intended merely for “preservation,” and unlike the curiosity cabinets of the wealthy amateurs, Wilkins repeats again and again the aim of collecting well-studied objects of interest to commerce and manufacturing; this is a plan for an industrial or economic museum forty years before the boom in economic museums would begin (see Chapter 7). Although similar in some ways to the British Museum model, the Company’s model of a museum was also clearly not an Enlightenment-style encyclopedic or universal collection. James Delbourgo has stressed how the growth of Hans Sloane’s collection (which would become the founding collection of the British Museum) illustrates how global trade “enabled the pursuit of universal natural history, aimed at gathering as much of the world’s variety as possible.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The initial plan for the Company’s museum was, in contrast, specific to Asia, and with the apparent intention of gathering together not an ark of all of God’s creations, but a great warehouse of all of humankind’s material desires.

Hastings wrote enthusiastically to the Court of Directors, urging “the formation of a new and untried system for ingrafting the knowledge of India on the commercial persuits of the Company.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Echoing the early orientalism of Jones and Wilkins, but somewhat at odds with the directly commercial character of Wilkins’s proposal, Hastings suggested that an “oriental museum” at India House would distinguish the Company from other trading companies (“men associated for the purposes of pecuniary gain”) and demonstrate a more enlightened corporate character. As Hastings puts it (and does so in the language of trade), the Company has “joined a desire to add the acquisition of knowledge (and wonderful will be the stores which the projected institution under such auspices will lay open to them) to the power, the riches, and the glory which its acts have already so largely contributed to the British Empire and Name.”Footnote ⁶¹

Wilkins’s original proposal for the repository had also included a request to fund a scholarly society devoted to “Eastern learning … and the cause of science in general.”Footnote ⁶² Based on the model of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (“a Society similar to that now flourishing in Calcutta”), Wilkins proposed that the Society’s meetings could be held in the India House repository, members would be allowed free use of the collection for their research and the Society would also run a printing office, with the ability to print “in the Oriental Characters” for use by both the Company and Society business, with the Society payments in effect funding the press office itself.Footnote ⁶³ Apparently moved by at least part of Wilkins’s vision, the directors voted in favor of the repository portion of the proposal, although they declined to fund the scholarly society, and also voted to offer the new position of curator to Wilkins with a salary of £200 per annum.

Wilkins’s plan for the repository was well ordered, focused and comprehensive. But, for many years, the actual collection would be very different. In the first few years of the library and museum’s existence, its collections “grew” largely through the disgorging of materials – often curiosities and presents – from other rooms and shelves in India House. A new policy had, in November 1801, required all books and “articles of curiosity” dispersed throughout India House and Company warehouses to be deposited in the new repository.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus, for example, one director, Hugh Inglis, transferred to the museum a collection of rare books “of the Maharatta character” and a “silver image of the God Buddha or as he is called at Ava [Myanmar], Gowdona … with a curious Japanned [lacquered] Box.”Footnote ⁶⁵ John Roberts, another director, deposited typeface for the Telegu language cut by Vincent Figgins. Wilkins himself presented a set of newspaper clippings. Then came a “Persian manuscript,” “a silver ring with a black stone bearing an inscription in Nagari Characters,” “A Crystal with an Arabick Inscription,” “A Manuscript dictionary and grammar in French and Tamul [sic] by Father Dominique Pondicherry from 1743” and an “Egyptian Idol” from the Chairman’s Office. From the Treasurer’s Office arrived “the Horn, or rather Tusk, of a fish said to have been found many years ago sticking in the bottom of an Indiaman.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The same day, from the Secretary’s Office came a “curious ring, an opal set in gold” and an “Arabic manuscript on the small-pox printed at Cairo by the French,” as well as a set of books heavy on history and travel (i.e. “Dr Halde’s” Description of China [1738]), dictionaries (i.e. Richardson’s Persian Dictionary), and natural history and particularly botany (i.e. Hill’s British Herbal [1756], Dillenius’s Hortus Elthamensis [1732], Gerard’s Herbal [1633] and Grew’s Anatomy of Plants [1682]). That same day, seventy-five printed books were transferred from the Registrar’s Office to be cataloged by the library. The list included standard English reference works such as the journals of the House of Commons, volumes of Treatises and Charters, and Chamber’s Cyclopaedia. What might be called Company reference works were also well represented: Ben Marsden’s History of Sumatra, Nathaniel Halhed’s Code of Gentoo Laws, the East India Acts, Dalrymple’s South Sea Directory, Rennell’s Bengal Atlas. Recent works that the Company had subscribed for would have been deposited in the Registrar’s Office as well; thus the list also contained Symes’s Embassy to the Kingdom of Ava (1800), Vincent’s Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (1800) and a dozen other histories, travels and geographies printed in the previous decade.Footnote ⁶⁷ And so it went for the rest of 1802 and into 1803. The whole building seemed to turn out its pockets, and into the library was swept everything that fell out.

On December 30, 1802, amid a pile of recently published books sent to the library from the Director’s Office, was one curious manuscript: “The Original Manuscript Record of Tippu [Tipu] Sultan’s Dreams.” This was among the first shipments of plunder from the siege of Seringapatam in 1799 to arrive at India House. It is also an exceedingly intimate relic of one of the greatest challengers to Company rule on the subcontinent, first cherished in the room where the Court of Directors’ met and, as we have seen, later put on display in a glass case in the library.Footnote ⁶⁸ A month later, the Examiner’s Office deposited “Proceedings of a Jacobin Club at Seringapatam” and “a gold medal commemorating the fall of Seringapatam.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Soon these items were joined by a trickle then a flood of materials plundered from Mysore, although what arrived at India House was only a fraction of what had been taken when the last of the Anglo-Mysore wars ended with the storming of Tipu Sultan’s palace. The day-book records for later 1802 to 1806 are missing, but when the entries pick up again, another large deposit is recorded from India.Footnote ⁷⁰ The first waves of Mysore plunder enriched the India House collection in the form of manuscripts, rare books, the famous mechanical tiger (described earlier, Figure 3.5), war trophies and gold and jewels. In addition to what was considered Company booty, many valuable jewels, precious metals, household wares, works of art and military souvenirs would make their way in a semiorganized manner through the Company’s prize agents into private hands and hence back to family homes in Britain.Footnote ⁷¹ But, at least initially, the Company’s army retained in Calcutta the renowned royal library of Seringapatam. Far from a planned accumulation of examples of economically important materials as Wilkins had proposed, the early patterns of object accumulation in the museum followed the serendipitous patterns of wartime acquisition.

Figure 3.5

Tipu’s tiger, constructed in Mysore in the 1780s or 1790s. Now at the Victoria and Albert Museum (no. 2545 IS).

Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Wilkins was, however, somewhat intentionally shaping the printed book collection through regular book-buying trips. For the first decade or so, Wilkins preferred to shop at the Strand bookseller Francis Wingrave, who also counted among his devoted customers the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. The first purchases for the Company’s library come in late 1801, just a few weeks after the library begins to register acquisitions. Again, the subjects are botanical; Wilkins purchased two of the most authoritative Indian herbals from a sale at the auctioneers Leigh and Sotheby’s: the twelve-volume Hortus Malabaricus and the Thesaurus Zeylandicus. In early 1802, Wilkins was stocking the new library with dictionaries (Johnson’s Dictionary, Ainsworth’s Latin Dictionary and Boyer’s French Dictionary, in addition to a Portuguese dictionary). A week later, Wilkins was back in the Strand, this time on a larger shopping spree, and this time focused on Dutch, French, Italian and Prussian works of science, including, for example, Foucquet’s Observations Astronomiques de Chinois, Manucci’s Storia do Mogor, Du Bec’s Histoire du Grand Tamerlanes, Palafox’s History of China, Kolbe’s Description of the Cape of Good, several accounts of voyages, Bayer’s Museum Sinicum and Rumphus’s Herbarium.Footnote ⁷²

And so it went for the next three decades. The growing library purchased books in a wide range of subjects, but invested especially heavily in Asian languages, history, geography and natural history (especially botany).Footnote ⁷³ The librarian generally had at his disposal a budget of £200–£300 per year (about the same as his base salary) and seems to have done his best to collect for the Company as many new publications on Asia or the Middle East that would be sold in Britain, as well as many from continental Europe, that he could get his hands on through his favorite booksellers. In the first decade or so, much of what Wilkins purchased were French or Dutch works, but from the 1810s onwards, as more and more British publications relating to Asia appeared, the buying trips became largely a matter of trying to keeping up with all that was being published about Asia or the Company itself in (primarily) London. Starting in the 1830s, Prussian works would also be purchased in increasing numbers.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the 1820s, Wilkins shopped most often at Black and Company, and in the early 1830s also frequented Parbury and Company. But soon after William H. Allen and Co. opened a few doors down from India House on Leadenhall Street, it became the library’s main source for British and European printed books. W. H. Allen were also the booksellers through which the Company sold, in increasing numbers, their own publications (some printed in London, others in India). It also became a leading publisher of colonial material in general, including the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register. In addition to growing through purchases, many more books were “deposited” in the library by other branches of the Company or by shipments from presidency offices. Hence, for example, when the Court of Directors agreed to support a new publication by subscribing for (i.e. pre-purchasing) multiple copies of the work, a few copies would usually be deposited in the library. And from the 1830s onwards, many more books began to arrive from abroad. Most importantly, the Committee of Public Instruction of the Bengal Government and the Calcutta School Book Society, both of which regularly published works in native language, would (when prodded by the Court of Directors) send copies of these in bulk to be deposited in the library, where they often would be reserved for use by another pair of new institutions closely connected to the library: the Company’s civil and military colleges.Footnote ⁷⁵

Sample of extracts of library day-book entries, January 1810. BL MSS EUR F/303/2

Table 1.01

The Company’s British Colleges

At the same time as Wilkins’s proposal for a library-museum was being considered by the Court of Directors, developments in India were forming that would eventually propel the Company’s plans for London-based institutions of science in new directions. The new governor-general of India, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat Richard Wellesley was setting in motion an ambitious set of plans to make Calcutta the center of Company education and training. After his successful defeat of the kingdom of Mysore, Wellesley’s next move was to reform the system of civil service education. Wellesley, himself a collector, especially of natural history drawings and paintings, set up a natural history museum and menagerie at Barrackpore in 1800 (with Francis Buchanan the first director). In the same year, much more ambitiously, he announced plans for a sprawling new college at Fort William in Calcutta.Footnote ⁷⁶

Wellesley’s new college was symbolically and materially tied to the British defeat of Mysore. Wellesley wanted the college itself to stand as a perpetual monument to that victory, so he set a symbolic founding date of the same day as the fall of Seringapatam, May 4, 1800, even though the college was actually founded about four months later.Footnote ⁷⁷ In a more direct material way, the vast and valuable library of Tipu Sultan, which had been captured along with the rest of the state treasury, was transferred to Fort William with the intention of making it the founding collection of the college’s new library. Wellesley envisioned the college as an extension of the “benevolent intent” of the British Empire, which rules “in the mild and benign spirit of the British constitution.” Its aims were to promote “the prosperity and happiness of the people” of British India by way of better training for the (at this point exclusively British) civil service.Footnote ⁷⁸

Wellesley’s college plan was much more ambitious than what was then offered at the existing Calcutta Madrassa or other regional schools such as at Varanasi. At the time, the majority of writers, many of whom went to British India as young as sixteen, would be sent out with no special training. Company officers would start out as copying clerks, learning the business of Company administration on the job. They were given no special training in languages but were allowed a “Munshi allowance,” an extra sum of money that could be used to hire a native teacher. In 1798 Frank Gilchrist, author of A Hindustani Grammar and Dictionary, proposed to the Company directors that he be allowed to take on Company officers as students in exchange for the Munshi allowance. Out of Gilchrist’s plan came the first formal examinations; students of Gilchrist would from 1801 be given a standard examination, testing their knowledge of the laws and regulations of the Company as well as their proficiency in oriental languages.Footnote ⁷⁹

Wellesley proposed to expand this slight and loosely structured system of education into a three-year residential college, where all newly arrived Company officers would be taught both “European” and “Asiatic” subjects. The list of subjects to be taught was extensive, including nine of the major languages of the subcontinent. It also included Greek, Latin, “Mahomedan law, Hindoo law … English law,” political economy, classics, history, geography, mathematics, botany, natural history, chemistry and astronomy.Footnote ⁸⁰ Clearly many of these subjects fell under the then-expansive category of “useful knowledge” but Wellesley, who himself was educated at both Eton and Harrow and then Oxford, imagined the real utility of such an education was in the construction of habits and the shaping of the minds of Company servants. With chauvenistic venom, Wellesley claimed this was especially critical for the case of civil servants working in British India because the general environment of India was, so he argued, dangerously degraded and depraved:

Wellesley had brazenly put this grand plan into motion without informing or receiving approval from the Court of Directors. And, upon finally receiving the communications of Wellesley’s plans in April 1801, the directors ordered the college – already up and running – to be immediately abolished and replaced by a much less ambitious school for language instruction only. A Wellesley biographer and admirer, writing in 1847, put the harsh decision down to a clash of sensibilities between the old corporation and its new role as state: “the men of mere facts, figures and money bags were not reasoned out of their predilection for the old routine of mere mercantile utility.”Footnote ⁸² But, in fact, the Court was not at all against such an ambitious education plan; it was only against basing it in Calcutta rather than in England. Wellesley’s vision for the education of the Company’s servants would indirectly form the foundation for a new education regime back in the home country. The Company’s stated reasons for closing Wellesley’s college were that the expense was far too great, there were too many professorships, the emphasis on European subjects was unnecessary and a better plan would in any case place separate colleges in each presidency. Unstated was the fact that, if civil service appointments were made by the governor-general after graduation from a college in Calcutta, this would greatly reduce the highly valued patronage power held by the Court of Directors. Furthermore, Wellesley had taken individual initiative one step too far.Footnote ⁸³

The Court’s decision to close Wellesley’s college was widely criticized in London by both critics and some supporters of the Company. The Board of Control and the Court debated the future of the college throughout 1802 and finally in September 1803 an agreement was reached. The college at Fort William was to focus on language training, for writers within its presidency only, and its funding was reduced by half.Footnote ⁸⁴ Then, in 1805, in a public dispatch the Court of Directors announced the opening of a new college, to be located 30 miles north of London in Hertford, for the training of all civil servants headed to India.Footnote ⁸⁵ The powerful Director and Clapham Sect evangelical Charles Grant was one of the driving forces behind the scope and scale of Haileybury, which he often referred to as his “child.”Footnote ⁸⁶ It was to be temporarily located in Hertford Castle while the architect William Wilkins, who had previously worked on several Cambridge colleges, was commissioned to build a grand neoclassical college, complete with a vast interior quadrangle and an elegant dining hall.Footnote ⁸⁷

Company professorships paid well, and they attracted and retained eminent scholars, virtually all of whom were clergymen and fellows of Cambridge colleges (the connection between Cambridge and Haileybury was tight, although after Haileybury closed in 1855, its successor in Indian civil service training would be the Oxford India Institute [f. 1875]). The first principal was Reverend Samuel Henley, a religious writer, Shakespeare scholar and fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge.Footnote ⁸⁸ Wilkins accepted the additional position (and pay) of examiner and visitor to the college. The curriculum was very similar to the one Wellesley had designed, with professors of mathematics; natural philosophy; classical and general literature; political economy and history; the general laws and policy of England; Persian, Arabic, Hindustani, Bengali and Sanskrit (and later Telugu); Hindu literature and the history of Asia; and drawing and penmanship. Of the first generation of Company professors, two of the most prominent were the political philosopher the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (whom the students took to calling “Pop” or “Old Pop,” i.e. Population Malthus), who taught political economy, and the Scottish orientalist and philosopher Alexander Hamilton, who taught Bengali and Sanskrit.Footnote ⁸⁹ Charles Stewart, who had initially been appointed a professor at Wellesley’s college, returned to Britain in 1806 to teach Arabic, Persian and Hindustani. The Reverend William Dealtry, a Cambridge wrangler, friend of Grant and fellow Church Missionary Society co-founder, was appointed the first mathematics professor, along with another wrangler and future vicar Bewick Bridge. Yet another clergyman and Cambridge wrangler, Henry Walter, was hired to teach natural philosophy. The artist and engraver Thomas Medland was hired to teach drawing and oriental penmanship.Footnote ⁹⁰

Figure 3.6

Sketch of Haileybury College, with cows and students in the foreground, by Thomas Medland, 1810.

Copyright British Library Board (asset maps_k_top_15_74).

On July 16, 1806, a large section of Tipu Sultan’s famed library finally arrived in Britain: 197 boxes of highly valuable Arabic and Persian manuscripts, plus a dozen especially rare volumes that Wellesley had suggested should be presented “to the King and Universities of the United Kingdom.”Footnote ⁹¹ This effectively represented the final dismantling and relocation of Wellesley’s vision for Company science from Calcutta to Britain. The supporters of Wellesley’s Calcutta plan had once hoped that it would “be rendered brilliant and dazzling” and “attract the notice of surrounding nations and attract the various literati.”Footnote ⁹² Now, to the satisfaction of India House, the centrifugal force of Haileybury College, together with the India House repository, would draw attention to London, to the British orientalists and the growing network of institutions of knowledge connected to the Company in Britain.

Despite the failure of Wellesley’s grand plan, however, later in the nineteenth century Calcutta would become a major center of education and intellectual output in the region.Footnote ⁹³ But the growth of Calcutta’s scientific and educational capacity was also undoubtedly slowed by the pull of these Company resources back to Britain. Wellesley’s college continued in a different form, without dedicated buildings or housing for students, into the 1830s. Still, under the umbrella of language studies, the Calcutta College eventually employed over 100 native scholars. Its library would also grow immensely, eventually to become a founding collection for the first Calcutta Public Library. But the native teaching positions were subordinated to the heads of language departments, which were invariably held by Europeans. These positions were often held by collectors and orientalists such as William Carey, Frank Gilchrist and Henry Thomas Colebrooke. The college also fit awkwardly within the machinery of the Calcutta administration, and students attached to the college often fell into debt. Even the presidency government itself suggested abolishing it and returning to the Munshi system. In the Bombay presidency, no college was ever established, although the government occasionally floated the idea. The Court of Directors had asked the Madras government to propose a plan for a language college in 1802, and in May 1812 the College of Fort St. George opened. It had no professors (the examinations were conducted by Company writers and translators) but a large staff of Munshis.Footnote ⁹⁴

With the establishment of the East India College at Haileybury, the Company had taken full control of the training of its servants.Footnote ⁹⁵ It had done so without reducing the Court of Directors’ patronage power. And Haileybury, together with the library and museum at India House, would form a critical new institutional infrastructure for the growth of orientalist studies and all that entailed, including Asian-language printing capacity, translators and tutors, and manuscript and print libraries in Britain. In 1809 the Company expanded its educational landscape even further, establishing a separate training college for cadets joining its large private army. Previously, those entering the engineering or artillery branches of the Company’s army would have been trained either privately or at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich (f. 1741). Now they would spend two years at the Company’s Military Seminary in Addiscombe. The curriculum included mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, surveying, gunnery and fortification, as well as French, Latin and Hindustani.

All of this represented a vastly expanded role for India House in science and education.Footnote ⁹⁶ Before the foundation of Haileybury, although outgoing servants were required to demonstrate proof of certain skills (legible writing and account or bookkeeping), the Company did not involve itself in providing those skills. The only Britain-based education provided by the Company was a period of internship required for junior servants starting out in the China tea trade: after 1789, writers elected for Canton were required to spend a year in London in order to observe the quarterly tea sales and, under a tea broker and the head warehouse keeper, be taught “knowledge of the different qualities of the Teas … [and] the nicer distinctions necessary to guide the buyers in their purchases.”Footnote ⁹⁷

The directors had firmly asserted the Company’s interest in pulling both patronage power and the growing domain of British orientalism and Company science back into the orbit of London. But this new geography of Company science remained controversial for several more decades. In British India there was, initially, little interest in voluntarily feeding the growth of the institutions back in London. At a 1798 meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, for example, the issue was raised whether the Society should endeavor to directly support the new India House repository by collecting materials for it. The motion was ridiculed and dismissed. In fact, in general, while wartime collecting and surveying was steadily yielding results, voluntary donations from Company servants in Asia were so slow to materialize that, in 1805, the directors sent out another public letter, once again soliciting donations: “As our Original views in establishing this library have by no means been abandoned, and we still entertain hopes, that the invitation held out to individuals in India … would be successful, if properly seconded by our supreme government, we again refer you to them, and desire that the subject may be entered into with alacrity and zeal.”Footnote ⁹⁸

There were, to be sure, several very significant donations in the first few decades, but these would come from individuals who had already returned to Britain. The vast manuscript collection of Robert Orme finally came under Company control after his death in 1801 when his will left the collection to one of the directors. And, in 1819, Henry Thomas Colebrooke donated his well-known collection to India House.Footnote ⁹⁹ The largest private individual donation to India House up to that time, Colebrooke’s collection was instrumental in establishing the India House library-museum as the most important repository of Asian materials in Britain, if not Europe. As Roseane Rocher and Ludo Rocher have argued, it was Colebrooke’s collection, which “surpassed all in size and scope,” that catalyzed a shift in the European center of orientalism from the National Library of France (and its largely missionary-sourced collections) across the Channel to Leadenhall Street.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Colebrooke’s donation cemented the authoritative status of the Company’s collections, but it also indicates how far the reputation of Company science had come by this time. Colebrooke was very active in London’s scientific networks and was deeply invested in promoting orientalist scholarship in Britain, but his relationship with the Company was always uneasy to say the least.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It is thus especially striking for such a prominent figure in British science to choose to support the fledgling India House library-museum in this way.

Still, by no means did all major Company collectors based in London follow suit. William Marsden’s collection was auctioned off at his death in 1836. When administrator and naturalist Sir Stamford Raffles died in 1826, his wife donated his large southeast asian collection to the Linnean Society and the new Zoological Society of London, which he and the Company naturalist Thomas Horsfield had been instrumental in launching. William Farquhar, while the British Resident in Melaka from 1803 to 1818, sent many specimens and drawings to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. After returning to Britain, he donated a valuable collection of natural history drawings to the Royal Asiatic Society in the 1820s.Footnote ¹⁰² Even the vast private collection acquired by Colin Mackenzie while surveyor-general (see Chapter 2) was not donated; instead, the Company had to purchase the materials – much of which controversially remained in India – from his widow for the eyebrow-raising sum of £10,000.

Meanwhile, Haileybury was off to a rocky start. The new college buildings boasted the largest quadrangle in England, but the structures were ridiculed in the press as quite possibly the ugliest in Britain. Pupil misbehavior was regularly reported in the press, and student “riots” in 1809 and 1811, during which students marauded around the school breaking windows, blowing horns, and otherwise terrorizing the staff, led to much handwringing and worry over the moral and ethical qualities of the future India administrators.Footnote ¹⁰³ Yet the directors were seen to be lax in their punishment of disruptive students. Most expelled for misbehavior were readmitted a year later; evidence, according to critics, of corrupt patronage and the iron influence of the old “Indian families.” In other cases, students expelled for taking part in the rioting were still given a writership and sent off to India, and a parliamentary committee found in 1809 that a few writerships were still being sold by directors (in one case, a seat in Parliament was offered in exchange for a writership, though the exchange never seems to have happened). In all of these ways, as the Board of Control complained, the Company was not following its own new rules for education and the distribution of patronage.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ If, as has sometimes been argued, Haileybury in the first decades was “the Directors’ public relations gimmick to protect its patronage,” in many ways the public relations part of the gimmick went terribly awry.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ At the same time, however, with the high salaries for professors and unique resources including its connections to the Company’s library and museum, Haileybury was attracting and retaining prominent and influential scholars.

*

The Company’s investment in a new “oriental repository” came just as new threats to the Company’s monopoly were gaining traction. However, what seems even more consequential to the Company’s decision to establish the library, museum and colleges were two dimensions of a changing geography of knowledge resource accumulation within the empire: first, the now-flourishing domestic trade in manuscripts, antiquities and specimens, and second, Wellesley’s plan to make Calcutta a major new center of learning. These were both threats to the perceived authoritative status of India House and also represented new opportunities for the expansion of the domain of India House authority. Together, they drove the directors to intervene in and take more direct control over the political economy of knowledge between Britain and colonial India.

The growth of the Company’s repository may not have been off to a very strong start. Those generous donations that the directors had hoped would be tucked in among their tea and textile imports did not at first materialize. But grow it eventually did, and the rate of accumulation at India House would, as we will see in the next chapter, continue to accelerate over the next half-century. The discovery of Bacchus on his tiger would also turn out to be a very fitting prelude to the wartime plunder that would flow into India House from the Company’s successful campaigns during the Napoleonic wars. For the next half-century, Bacchus’s tiger and Tipu’s tiger were witness to the continual procession of material from Asia, some purchased or received as gifts, much of it plundered or collected in the context of wartime territorial expansion. In France, in the 1790s, Napoleon’s army went so far as to explicitly copy the Bacchic parades of wartime plunder, with crowds gathering to cheer the arrival at the Musée Napoleon of precious works of art, cabinets of rare natural curiosities, manuscripts and books, jewels and gems, and even live animals.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In the case of the East India Company, however, the wartime loot and plunder that would go on display at India House (and later at Britain’s other national museums) arrived with little fanfare. More and more, the unremarkable carts moving between the warehouses and India House were transporting crates of manuscripts, specimens, works of art and antiquities along with the textiles, tea and spices on their way to auction. Instead of crowds cheering, the steadily increasing flow of acquisitions was marked only by a carefully kept logbook of objects incoming and outgoing.

At some point in the next several decades, even the Bacchus mosaic would be taken down from the library and museum to make room for something else. The soot-filled basements, the dusty attics and the damp, open courtyards all became places where deposits for the library and museum would end up being stored – sometimes unopened and uncatalogued – over the next fifty years. The courtyards were where sculptures and other large metal or stone objects were deposited – left to the polluted air and fluctuating temperatures. The Bacchus mosaic appears to have been left largely forgotten in one of these yards for several decades. On some accounts this is when the pavement disintegrated, leaving only the central image of Bacchus and the tiger.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ At some point one of Wilkins’s successors rescued it from the elements, had it fastened to a slab of slate and hung it in the old Tea Sale Room, now (in 1856) refashioned (much to the tastes of those who wanted India House to have a more “oriental” appearance) as a Mughal-style sculpture gallery. In its last installation at India House before eventually being donated to the British Museum (where it now resides), Bacchus and his tiger shared space with ancient Indian sculptures from the Amaravati temple complex in central India, fossils from the Siwalik Hills below the Himalayas and ghostly white plaster-casts of the faces of Tibetan and Nepali villagers.

The establishment of the Company’s library, museum and colleges in London represented an important turning point in the Company’s knowledge management. But as the fate of the Bacchus mosaic, and many other manuscripts and objects that passed into India House, makes clear, this is not a simple story of growing power-knowledge. Scholars once took the growth of information collection by nineteenth-century states as evidence of, or even synonymous with, the extension of modern forms of state authority. However, recent studies have emphasized a more complex relationship between state power and systems of knowledge. The growth of these London collections and colleges did not unproblematically establish new forms of authority or power. Rather, the new library-museum and colleges would become yet another site for ongoing contests among competing interests of the sciences, the Company and other commercial and colonial stakeholders. In consequence, as the century progressed, the growing tension between the advance of liberalism and the Company’s defense of its monopoly privileges would begin to be felt within Britain’s emerging new cultures of science.