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

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

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

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

This chapter lays the foundational framework for the relation between language, culture, and identity. Through an analogy, it illuminates the developmental parallels between heritage language and the rhizomatic growth of bamboo. Introducing the method of serial narrative ethnography, it underscores the significance of narrative knowing across the lifespan as a means for scientific understanding and the power of multiple stories through voices. It also presents an outline of the book.

Chapter 6 portrays two adolescent speakers of Chinese as a heritage language and their respective families.  Drawing upon interview data as well as face-to-face conversational data in everyday interactions, it situates the adolescents’ attitude toward the Chinese language in the contexts of talking about their respective families in terms of values, behavioral patterns, and accents, talking for their families as they interpret and translate from Chinese to English for their parents and polish their parents’ English in everyday social encounters, and talking with their families in digital communication across three generations. It explores second-generation immigrant children’s perceptions of their parents’ attitudes toward child rearing, college preparation, and career choices. It also investigates the impact of the parents’ triumphs and challenges in their immigration experience on the children’s language choices.

Chapter 2 uses one first-generation immigrant mother’s narrative as a basis to outline the language background of the family and to explore the construction and the characteristics of the bilingual space at home, as well as the history and the forces behind the shift of linguistic repertoire in the household during the early years of children who are speakers of Chinese as a heritage language.

Chapter 5 takes the reader to a community-based weekend Chinese language school. Drawing upon reflections from a Chinese language teacher there, it delineates the historical complexity of Chinese language traits and cultural values as well as the challenges in choosing what to impart to children who speak Chinese as a heritage language and how to instill a cultural ethos which may be divergent from mainstream culture. It explores the history and evolving emphasis of Chinese language schools over time, the nature and cultural significance of the Chinese writing system as well as the challenges it poses to learners of Chinese as a heritage language, the culturally specific ways of conceptualizing education, and the cultural shift that accompanies and motivates language shift.

Chapter 7 follows a young adult college student who speaks Chinese as a heritage language and his girlfriend as they explore language, life, and race relations during the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to use the Chinese language to transform the very Chinese-American communities they grew up in and transcend the cultural identity that is assigned to them by society. It explores societal language ideologies regarding Americans of Chinese origin, cultural legitimacy and authenticity for second-generation Chinese immigrants both in the U.S. and in China, the relation between diaspora and domesticity, and the transformative role of Chinese as a heritage language in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the nonlinear nature of language shift.