The East India Company and the Politics

of Knowledge

The East India Company is remembered as the world’s most powerful,

not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from
the 1770s to the 1850s, it was also the world’s most enlightened one.
Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral
to the Company’s ideology. He shows how the Company cited this
commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commer-
cial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism,
colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the his-
tory of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the
Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the
political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors
highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in
the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company –
just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.

Joshua Ehrlich is Assistant Professor at the University of Macau.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press
 The East India
Company and the
Politics of Knowledge
Joshua Ehrlich
University of Macau

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press &

Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge.
We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the
pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international
levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009367950
DOI: 10.1017/9781009367967
© Joshua Ehrlich 2023
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction
of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge
University Press & Assessment.
First published 2023
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.
Names: Ehrlich, Joshua, 1987– author.
Title: The East India Company and the politics of knowledge /
Joshua Ehrlich, University of Macau.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge
University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022060967 (print) | LCCN 2022060968 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781009367950 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009367967 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: East India Company – History. | Elite (Social sciences) –
India | Learning and scholarship – Political aspects – History. |
Education – India – History – 19th century. | India – Colonization. |
India – History – British occupation, 1765–1947.
Classification: LCC DS465 .E176 2023 (print) | LCC DS465 (ebook) |
DDC 954.03/1–dc23/eng/20230131
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060967
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060968
ISBN 978-1-009-36795-0 Hardback
Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the
persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites
referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on
such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 The East India Company and the Politics
of Knowledge

The East India Company is remembered as the world’s most powerful,

not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from
the 1770s to the 1850s, it was also the world’s most enlightened one.
Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral
to the Company’s ideology. He shows how the Company cited this
commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commer-
cial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism,
colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the his-
tory of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the
Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the
political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors
highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in
the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company –
just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.

Joshua Ehrlich is Assistant Professor at the University of Macau.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press
 The East India
Company and the
Politics of Knowledge
Joshua Ehrlich
University of Macau

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press &

Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge.
We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the
pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international
levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009367950
DOI: 10.1017/9781009367967
© Joshua Ehrlich 2023
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction
of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge
University Press & Assessment.
First published 2023
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.
Names: Ehrlich, Joshua, 1987– author.
Title: The East India Company and the politics of knowledge /
Joshua Ehrlich, University of Macau.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge
University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022060967 (print) | LCCN 2022060968 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781009367950 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009367967 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: East India Company – History. | Elite (Social sciences) –
India | Learning and scholarship – Political aspects – History. |
Education – India – History – 19th century. | India – Colonization. |
India – History – British occupation, 1765–1947.
Classification: LCC DS465 .E176 2023 (print) | LCC DS465 (ebook) |
DDC 954.03/1–dc23/eng/20230131
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060967
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060968
ISBN 978-1-009-36795-0 Hardback
Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the
persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites
referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on
such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 The East India Company and the Politics
of Knowledge

The East India Company is remembered as the world’s most powerful,

not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from
the 1770s to the 1850s, it was also the world’s most enlightened one.
Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral
to the Company’s ideology. He shows how the Company cited this
commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commer-
cial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism,
colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the his-
tory of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the
Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the
political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors
highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in
the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company –
just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.

Joshua Ehrlich is Assistant Professor at the University of Macau.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press
 The East India
Company and the
Politics of Knowledge
Joshua Ehrlich
University of Macau

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press &

Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge.
We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the
pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international
levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009367950
DOI: 10.1017/9781009367967
© Joshua Ehrlich 2023
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction
of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge
University Press & Assessment.
First published 2023
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.
Names: Ehrlich, Joshua, 1987– author.
Title: The East India Company and the politics of knowledge /
Joshua Ehrlich, University of Macau.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge
University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022060967 (print) | LCCN 2022060968 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781009367950 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009367967 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: East India Company – History. | Elite (Social sciences) –
India | Learning and scholarship – Political aspects – History. |
Education – India – History – 19th century. | India – Colonization. |
India – History – British occupation, 1765–1947.
Classification: LCC DS465 .E176 2023 (print) | LCC DS465 (ebook) |
DDC 954.03/1–dc23/eng/20230131
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060967
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060968
ISBN 978-1-009-36795-0 Hardback
Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the
persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites
referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on
such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 For my family

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Contents

Acknowledgments page viii

Note on the Text x
List of Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1

1 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation 21

2 Conciliation after Hastings 62

3 The Politics of the College of Fort William 94

4 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State 123

5 Education and the Persistence of the Company State 169

Epilogue 198

Bibliography202
Index238

vii

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 Acknowledgments

In the summer of 2013, I encountered the following statement in

a prospectus for the London Literary Lyceum penned in 1783 by
Jacques-Pierre Brissot:

Commerce may be rendered subservient to the promotion of

Science, and the same ship that carries the East-India Company’s
orders to Calcutta, may likewise carry the new instruments or the
new work, and may bring back the Indian book for the Student of
Gottingen, or the professor of oriental Languages at Paris.1

These words intrigued me. Why, at a time when the East India
Company was conquering and ruling vast swathes of India, did the
expatriate philosophe Brissot describe it in stubbornly mercantile
terms? Why, at a time when its actions were drawing criticism from
numerous quarters, did he envision the Company as an enlightened
benefactor? I soon discovered that Brissot’s rhetoric was scarcely
original: Advocates of the Company had employed it for some years
and would do so for many more. To explain this rhetoric, I would
need to revisit the Company’s ideology, its political–commercial
constitution, and its engagements with knowledge.
This project first took shape as a doctoral dissertation at
Harvard University. All those who guided and supported me in that
undertaking have, and will ever have, my sincerest gratitude. I must
mention specifically my committee members Sugata Bose and Emma
Rothschild, and my writing group mates Kit Heintzman and Joe La
Hausse de Lalouvière. But I am indebted to a hundred others and I
hope they will forgive me for not listing their names here.

1
Jacques-Pierre Brissot, London Literary Lyceum; or, an Assembly and Correspondence
Established at London [London, 1783], p. 9.

viii

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 Acknowledgments ix

In 2018, after defending my dissertation, I began the process of

developing it into a book. I received more help than I had any right to
expect from more individuals than I can now hope to remember. Sujit
Sivasundaram and Robert Travers were abiding sources of inspiration
and models of generosity. Peter Marshall, as ever, was an attentive reader
of my work and an indispensable cicerone to the world of the Company.
Nick Abbott, Ben Gilding, Nick Groom, Jessica Patterson, and Callie
Wilkinson offered astute comments on the manuscript. Nick Abbott,
Daniel Morgan, and Chander Shekhar lent expert advice on, and assis-
tance with, Persian texts. (Any errors in translation are my own.) Many
friends and colleagues kindly invited me to present my research virtually
or in person; I would like to thank in particular Thomas Ahnert, Divya
Cherian, Barry Crosbie, Beth Harper, Parimala Rao, Paris Spies-Gans, and
Hiroki Ueno. Special thanks go to Rosane Rocher, who provided wisdom
and reassurance at a pivotal juncture. I am profoundly grateful for the
aid I also received, in abundance, from the following individuals: Mario
Cams, Rishad Choudhury, Scott Connors, Richard Delacy, Rajeev Kinra,
Nathan Kwan, Peter Mandler, Mohit Manohar, Dinyar Patel, Bhavani
Raman, Holly Shaffer, Asheesh Siddique, and Ian Stewart.
I am deeply grateful too for the help rendered to me by archivists,
librarians, and research assistants, especially during the COVID-19
pandemic. While confined to Macau, I came to rely upon an interna-
tional network stretching from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Delhi
to the Isle of Bute. I would like to thank above all Lynsey Nairn,
Syed Shahid, Sadie Sunderland, Robbie Wilson, the Resource Sharing
staff at Harvard Library, and the Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections
staff at the British Library. It is no exaggeration to say that with-
out their contributions The East India Company and the Politics of
Knowledge could not have been written.
My greatest debt is to David Armitage, who, more than anyone,
has taught me what it means to be a historian. David’s input over
the past decade has sharpened and enriched this book immeasurably.
Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my parents, Paul
and Vicky, and my partner, Susan. I dedicate this book to them in small
but heartfelt recompense for their steadfast love and encouragement.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Note on the Text

Outside of direct quotations, Persian and other non-English names

and terms have generally been rendered according to modern schol-
arly convention. But certain contemporary renderings have been pre-
served: The decision has been made to sacrifice some consistency
for the sake of ease of reference. In lieu of a glossary, definitions of
non-English words are provided throughout the text.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Abbreviations

AJ Asiatic Journal
BL British Library
DMW Marquess Wellesley, The Despatches, Minutes, and
Correspondence, of the Marquess Wellesley, K. G.,
During His Administration in India, ed. [Robert]
Montgomery Martin, 5 vols. (London, 1836–7)
GCPI General Committee of Public Instruction
GIED Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds., The Great Indian
Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-
Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Richmond, UK, 1999)
HC Deb House of Commons Debate, in Parliamentary Debates
from the Year 1803 (London, 1803–) unless otherwise
stated
HL Deb House of Lords Debate, in Parliamentary Debates from
the Year 1803 (London, 1803–) unless otherwise stated
JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and
Ireland
LWJ Sir William Jones, The Letters of Sir William Jones, ed.
Garland Cannon, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1970)
MAS Modern Asian Studies
MWH G. R. Gleig, Memoirs of the Life of The Right Hon.
Warren Hastings, 3 vols. (London, 1841)
NAI National Archives of India
NLS National Library of Scotland
PCFW Proceedings of the College of Fort William, National
Archives of India, Home Miscellaneous
PP Parliamentary Papers
TNA The National Archives (UK)

xi

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Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Introduction

The weight of the occasion was palpable. Representatives of the state

and, surrounding them, members of the press and public filled the
august chamber. At the front of this great assembly sat the diminutive
company executive, flanked by his lawyers and facing a committee of
legislators. In the hearings that followed, one speaker after another
accused the executive and the company of grave offenses. Under his
leadership, had the company not exceeded its bounds at home and
abroad, amassing power to rival that of an independent state? Had
it not subverted governments, trampled individual rights, caused
violence, all in the name of profit? In and out of doors, the execu-
tive and his advocates put forward various defenses. One stood out
for its boldness. They claimed that the company had been concerned
not merely with profit but, moreover, with gathering and dissemi-
nating the world’s knowledge. Under the executive’s leadership, had
it not fostered research, sponsored scholars, and endowed colleges?
The committee would have none of this. Its members denounced the
company’s involvement in science and the humanities as window
dressing or, worse, another outlet for its greed. Neither side, however,
could hope to settle conclusively what had become a sprawling debate
over the proper relations among companies, states, and knowledge.
Indeed, this debate remains unsettled – over two centuries later.
If this scene seems familiar, this may be because ones like it
have transpired around the world in recent years. Charged by critics
in government and the media with malfeasance or overreach, tech-
nology giants, in particular, have committed themselves to the cause
of knowledge.1 Nor have they been alone. These encounters have

1
Hence Google’s stated mission “to organize the world’s information.” For a skeptical
view, see Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, trans.
Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, 2007).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009367967.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 2 Introduction

played out against the backdrop of a growing “knowledge sector,” into

which corporate idealism and investment have increasingly flowed. By
encroaching on science, education, and other spheres long deemed the
preserves of states, companies seem to have mixed commerce, politics,
and knowledge as never before.2 And yet the scene described above
took place not recently but rather in the eighteenth century. The occa-
sion was the impeachment of Warren Hastings in the British House
of Commons. The company in question was the East India Company.
While the East India Company has been known to posterity
as, among other things, “the world’s most powerful corporation,”
several generations of its advocates echoed Hastings’ claim that it
was also the world’s most enlightened one.3 It is easy to dismiss this
claim. From its setting up in 1600 until its winding down in 1858,
the Company was distinguished for profit seeking on a global scale.
Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, moreover, it sub-
jugated vast swathes of the Indian subcontinent and beyond. The
Company was no benevolent organization. And yet, to assume that
its interest in knowledge was merely incidental, or instrumental, is
to overlook the significance of knowledge in its ideology.4 The great-
est challenge for the Company’s advocates was to justify to audiences
in Britain and India its dual character as a company and a state. When
this union came under intense strain, beginning in the 1770s, they
made the support of knowledge a cornerstone of its legitimacy.

2
See, for example, Richard S. Ruch, Higher Ed, Inc.: The Rise of the For-Profit
University (Baltimore, 2001); Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The
Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton, 2003); Sheldon Krimsky, Science
in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research?
(Oxford, 2003); Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of
Higher Education (New York, 2006); Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing
American Science (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The
Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (New York, 2018).
3
Tirthankar Roy, The East India Company: The World’s Most Powerful Corporation
(New Delhi, 2012).
4
This book understands ideology simply as “a language of politics deployed to legiti-
mate political action.” For this definition, which summarizes comments by James
Tully on the work of Quentin Skinner, see Aletta J. Norval, “The Things We Do with
Words – Contemporary Approaches to the Analysis of Ideology,” British Journal of
Political Science 30 (2000), p. 320.

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 Introduction 3

The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge is

about a moment, like the present one, in which the roles of compa-
nies and states overlapped in the realm of knowledge. It reveals how
the Company, like many companies today, drew upon ideas about
knowledge to legitimize its evolving mix of concerns. The Company
may not have been a lineal ancestor of today’s “knowledge enter-
prises,” but it generated a rich body of thought and debate on many
of the questions they raise.5 Is knowledge a public good or a private
commodity? Are the values of scholarship and business compatible?
Should companies be entrusted to provide education and promote
intellectual discovery? For that matter, should states? Can states
effectively tend transnational fields of knowledge? Are they less, or
are they more, likely than companies to corrupt knowledge? These
are questions for our time, but they did not originate in it. To address
them requires a historical perspective.
Accordingly, the book aims not only to show how “the politics
of knowledge” and “ideologies about knowledge” shaped the politics
and ideology of the Company but also to develop a general approach
to the study of these phenomena in history.6 The history of ideas of
knowledge promises to do for knowledge what other approaches have
begun to do for the company and the state: It promises to recover that
concept’s past meanings and uses and make them available in the
present. As pursued in this book, it offers a reminder that the com-
pany, the state, and knowledge have been fluid concepts relatable to
each other in myriad ways. To restore a sense of the historical ampli-
tude and interrelation of these concepts is to empower stakeholders,
citizens, and scholars to mold them anew.

*****

5
For cautions about drawing structural analogies between the Company and the modern
corporation, see Philip J. Stern, “English East India Company-State and the Modern
Corporation: The Google of Its Time?,” in Thomas Clarke, Justin O’Brien, and Charles
R. T. O’Kelley, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation (Oxford, 2019).
6
The business theorist Peter Drucker coined these terms to describe what he
saw as future phenomena unprecedented in history. Peter F. Drucker, The Age of
Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (New York, 1969), pp. 340–7.

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 4 Introduction

The histories of the company, the state, and knowledge have been
studied often, yet seldom have they been studied together. Indeed,
the history of the East India Company has never been studied in
the context of the relations among these three entities. Even much-
discussed episodes in its annals, like the Hastings trial, have not been
seen to involve the kinds of questions raised above. Why this should
be so, why the Company’s political ideas about knowledge remain to
be investigated, requires explanation.
Most often linked have been the histories of the company and
the state, and the link has been best established for the early mod-
ern period. Historians of the Company, prominently, have challenged
modern distinctions between companies and states by demonstrating
the extent to which trade and politics once blurred into each other.
And yet only rarely and tentatively have they carried this line of
inquiry beyond the middle of the eighteenth century. While these
historians have illuminated the origins of the Company’s hybrid con-
stitution, they have scarcely inquired into its later persistence.
In the South Asian context, these origins can be traced at least
as far back as the sixteenth century. At that time, even powerful
rulers of the subcontinent like the Mughals governed according to
a “shared and layered” understanding of sovereignty.7 The Mughal
administrative center functioned as more of a “coordinating agency”
than a commanding authority.8 It expanded its reach by incorporat-
ing local powerholders, who, more often than not, had one foot in
the world of trade. Sometimes they came from that world, as evi-
denced by the Hindustani proverb, “the father a merchant, the son a
nawab.”9 In any case, they increasingly relied for capital and credit

7
Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
(Cambridge, MA, 2006), p. 25.
8
Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab,
1707–48, 2nd edn (New Delhi, 2013), p. 5.
9
Thomas Roebuck, A Collection of Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases in the Persian
and Hindoostanee Languages, ed. H. H. Wilson (Calcutta, 1824), part 2, p. 27 [trans-
lation amended]. For examples, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
introduction to Alam and Subrahmanyam, eds., The Mughal State, 1526–1750
(Delhi, 1998), pp. 53–5.

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 Introduction 5

on merchant bodies, which they wooed and rewarded with “‘shares’

in sovereignty.”10 This pattern of exchange fueled not only the “com-
mercialization” of Indian politics, but also, in turn, the political rise
of the Company.11 For by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
powerholders were granting extensive rights not only to local mer-
chant bodies but also to European ones.12
Nowhere was this phenomenon more pronounced than in
Bengal, where the Company first acquired extensive territory. From
the turn of the eighteenth century, as the ruling nawabs claimed more
and more independence from Delhi, commercial interests captured
more and more of the newly accessible political sphere.13 One sign
of the growing interpenetration of politics and trade was the appear-
ance among political elites of a solicitude, even a sense of responsi-
bility, toward merchants.14 Another was the rise of a group of Asian
“merchant princes,” who acted as middlemen among bazaar, court,
and factory.15 Both developments facilitated the Company’s gradual
insinuation into the politics of the province. At least as significant in
this respect was the local reformulation of Mughal ideas of govern-
ment and sovereignty. By mid-century, nobles and bureaucrats were
espousing the happiness and welfare of the people as the ultimate

10
Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India,
c. 1572–1730 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 126.
11
The classic account is C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British
Empire (Cambridge, 1987).
12
P. J. Marshall, introduction to Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian
History: Revolution or Evolution? (Delhi, 2003), pp. 21–3. For a detailed study, see
David Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750 (Cambridge,
2020).
13
Philip B. Calkins, “The Formation of a Regionally Oriented Ruling Group in Bengal,
1700–1740,” Journal of Asian Studies 29 (1970). On the extent of commercializa-
tion in Bengal, see John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century
Bengal (Cambridge, 1993), p. 6; and, for a later period, Rajat Datta, Society, Economy,
and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760–1800 (Delhi, 2000).
14
Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics and Society in Early Modern India: Bihar,
1733–1820 (Leiden, 1996); Tilottama Mukherjee, Political Culture and Economy in
Eighteenth-Century Bengal (New Delhi, 2013), ch. 5.
15
Sushil Chaudhury, “Merchants, Companies and Rulers: Bengal in the Eighteenth
Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 31 (1988);
Chatterjee, Merchants, chs. 3–4.

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 6 Introduction

test of a good ruler, displacing, or at least downgrading, once para-

mount considerations of pedigree and faith.16 Might even the rule of
a foreign trading company be rendered legitimate? This was the ques-
tion that loomed on the eve of the Company’s ascendancy.
Meanwhile, the same question was being asked in Britain. For
here as well, commerce and politics mixed, and concepts that would
later be reserved for one or the other sphere straddled the two. In the
early modern archipelago, the state was a diffuse complex of individu-
als and institutions that included ones devoted to trade.17 Companies
were knots within the tangled and indistinct webs of market, state,
and society.18 Corporations ranged from business associations to
municipal and national governments, and even to the Crown.19 And
sovereignty – composite rather than unitary – extended to these and
many other kinds of entities.20 All of this explains why, as works
focused on the seventeenth century have shown, the Company
formed part of the English state and even a state in its own right.21
All of this also explains how the Company managed to gain a foot-
hold in both Britain and India, half a world apart. To quote one study,

16
Kumkum Chatterjee, The Cultures of History in Early Modern India: Persianization
and Mughal Culture in Bengal (New Delhi, 2009), pp. 165–80.
17
Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700
(Cambridge, 2000).
18
Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early
Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), chs. 5–6; Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern
England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (London, 2010), ch. 4.
19
Henry S. Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in
England, 1516–1651 (Chicago, 2016).
20
For “composite,” “fragmented,” “layered,” or “divisible” sovereignty as an enduring
feature of European states and empires, see J. H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite
Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (1992); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and
European States, AD 990–1990 (Malden, MA, 1992); Lauren Benton, A Search for
Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge,
2010); Alison L. LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism
(Cambridge, MA, 2010).
21
Philip J. Stern, “‘A Politie of Civill and Military Power’: Political Thought and the
Late Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the East India Company-State,” Journal of
British Studies 47 (2008); Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty
and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011);
Rupali Mishra, A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East
India Company (Cambridge, MA, 2018).

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 Introduction 7

imarat (government) and tijarat (trade) were “adjunct and at times

overlapping spheres” for Europeans as well as South Asians.22 As
another has it, “blurring the boundaries between politics and trade”
was a game Europeans already knew how to play.23 The public–
private, politico-economic constitution of the Company was unex-
ceptional, whether judged by Indian or by British standards.24 It may
even have been typical across an early modern world that abounded
with “company-states” and other hybrid entities.25 By the late eigh-
teenth century, however, company-states were under pressure; by
the early nineteenth century, they were anomalous.26 What demands
further consideration is how the Company was able to adapt to these
changing circumstances.
For all of the attention to the ideas and arrangements that
shaped the Company’s hybrid constitution in the seventeenth cen-
tury, there has been little to those that sustained it from the middle of
the eighteenth century. Generations of commentators have narrated
the history of the Company following the Battle of Plassey in 1757 as
one of utter transformation: from trade to empire, and from indepen-
dence to integration with the British government. Revisionist claims
that the Company was a state, and was part of other states, long
before that watershed have not sparked a parallel interest in the ways
in which it remained a company long thereafter. To be sure, there
have been hints in this direction. Recent works have pointed out that
the Company’s organizational structure was essentially constant;

22
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Of Imârat and Tijârat: Asian Merchants and State Power
in the Western Indian Ocean, 1400 to 1750,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 37 (1995), p. 750.
23
Jon E. Wilson, “Early Colonial India beyond Empire,” Historical Journal 50 (2007),
p. 958.
24
On the Company as a constitutional entity, see William A. Pettigrew, “Corporate
Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and Local in Seventeenth-
Century English History,” Itinerario 39 (2015).
25
Stern, Company-State, p. 3; Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman, Outsourcing Empire:
How Company-States Made the Modern World (Princeton, 2020), chs. 1–2.
26
Timothy Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England
(London, 1998), p. 7; Phillips and Sharman, Outsourcing Empire, ch. 3.

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 8 Introduction

that its “commercial sovereignty” found defenders well into the

nineteenth century; that regulation by the British government was
sporadic and often resembled collusion; and that, until the very end,
the Company paid a dividend and maintained a role in commercial
affairs.27 Still, these facts have barely registered in broader assess-
ments of how the later Company was conceptualized, justified, and
criticized. Histories of the ideological foundations and false starts of
the Raj have largely neglected the Company qua company.28 Their
common, if variously woven, thread has been a concern with efforts
to legitimize British rule over subjects and territories. What remains
to be studied is how these efforts related to those to legitimize the
Company state. How did the Company’s supporters defend its “com-
mercial sovereignty” when others increasingly saw it as a territorial
ruler? This book reveals one important answer: They turned to ideas
about knowledge.

*****

27
Respectively, H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and
Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 182–9; Anna Gambles, Protection
and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815–1852 (Woodbridge, UK, 1998),
pp. 158–65; Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the
Garrison State in India, 1819–1835 (London, 1995), pp. 21–4; Anthony Webster, The
Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and
Politics 1790–1860 (Woodbridge, UK, 2009), pp. 13, 106, 160–1. The phrase “commer-
cial sovereignty” had been used in reference to the Company as early as the 1770s,
for example, in John Morrison, The Advantages of an Alliance with the Great Mogul
(London, 1774), p. 99.
28
For example, Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1995); Sudipta
Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India
(New York, 2002); P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain,
India, and America c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005); Robert Travers, Ideology and
Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007); James
M. Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India
Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain’s Imperial State (New Haven,
2019); Robert Travers, Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British
India, 1765–1793 (Cambridge, 2022). Popular histories have more often treated the
later Company as a company but have generally ignored its ideology. They have also
risked overstating similarities between the Company and the modern corporation.
For example, Nick Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East
India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, 2nd edn (London, 2012); William
Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the
Pillage of an Empire (London, 2019).

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 Introduction 9

If knowledge is power, as the aphorism goes, then it would seem to

follow that knowledge is political. The venerable history of politi-
cal thought has not dealt much with knowledge, however, nor has
the upstart history of knowledge dealt much with political thought.
This book attempts to remedy this mutual oversight by adapting the
methods of the old field to the concerns of the new one. In doing
so, it also addresses some of the limitations of previous studies of
the Company’s engagements with knowledge. The history of ideas of
knowledge does not obviate existing approaches but does challenge
and supplement them. Knowledge debates in the present would ben-
efit from an understanding of knowledge debates in the past, includ-
ing prominently those of the Company.
The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge is
intended at one level as a contribution to the history of knowledge.
As an outgrowth of social history, cultural history, and the history
of science, however, that field has inherited a cultural-structural
emphasis.29 Leading studies have chronicled the rise and fall of insti-
tutions, forms, or systems – “from Alexandria to the Internet,” for
instance, or “from Gutenberg to Google.”30 They have eschewed the
characteristic focus of contextualist intellectual history on the utter-
ances and aims of historical actors.31 The first classic in the field has
examined “intellectual environments rather than intellectual prob-
lems,” including the culture but not the contents of political dis-
course.32 Other studies have analyzed discourse from a Foucauldian
perspective equally dismissive of authorship and agency.33 A history

29
On these various origins, see Johan Östling et al., introduction to Östling et al., eds.,
Circulation of Knowledge: Explorations in the History of Knowledge (Lund, 2018).
30
Ian F. McNeely with Lisa Wolverton, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to
the Internet (New York, 2008); Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, 2 vols.
(Cambridge, 2000–2012), vol. II, p. 1.
31
The classic statement of this method is Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding
in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969).
32
Burke, Social History of Knowledge, vol. I, p. 4.
33
On this tendency, see Suzanne Marchand, “How Much Knowledge Is Worth Knowing?
An American Intellectual Historian’s Thoughts on the Geschichte des Wissens,”
Berichte zur Wissenschafts-Geschichte 42 (2019), pp. 142–4.

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 10 Introduction

of cultures or structures of knowledge may offer something “more

than intellectual history.”34 It also surely offers something less. To
examine past “knowledge economies,” “knowledge revolutions,”
and the like by analogy with those of today may be valid, but such
phenomena are difficult to delimit without a genealogy, not to say a
definition, of the concept of knowledge. For that matter, if another
aim of the history of knowledge is to inform present knowledge
debates, then the field must be devoted in part to the recovery of past
such debates in the terms in which they were waged.
What is needed, in other words, is a history of ideas of knowl-
edge that might elucidate the concept of knowledge and its discur-
sive uses past and present. This approach promises to enrich not only
the history of knowledge but also the history of ideas, including the
history of political thought. Intellectual historians in the contextual-
ist tradition have yet to respond adequately to the claim at the heart
of Michel Foucault’s famous power/knowledge coupling: that power
and knowledge are so closely and innately related as to be insepa-
rable from each other.35 While these historians have focused often
on power, in a political connection, and sometimes on its relations
with certain branches of knowledge, seldom if ever have they treated
the concept of knowledge at large or its political implications.36 A
recognition that this concept is analytically meaningful forms the
basis – perhaps the only common one – of the new history of knowl-
edge. A recognition that it has been so too for historical actors ought
to form the basis of a distinct yet complementary history of ideas of
knowledge. Studies under this heading might track changing mean-
ings of the word “knowledge” and of its cognates and alternatives – a

34
Daniel Speich Chassé, “The History of Knowledge: Limits and Potentials of a
New Approach,” History of Knowledge (3 Apr. 2017), https://historyofknowledge
.net/2017/04/03/the-history-of-knowledge-limits-and-potentials-of-a-new-approach/.
35
See especially Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan, 2nd edn (New York, 1995), pp. 27–8.
36
J. G. A. Pocock, for instance, has treated “the politics of historiography” but not
the larger politics of knowledge. J. G. A. Pocock, “The Politics of Historiography,”
Historical Research 78 (2005).

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 Introduction 11

method that has been extended to countless other concepts.37 Or

they might examine how ideas of or about knowledge “arose in the
competitive context of political argument” – the method adopted in
this book.38 Both methods can yield an answer to Foucault in the
form of proof that the power–knowledge relationship has been con-
tingent, subject to endless rethinking and remaking. In addition, the
latter method, by recovering past knowledge debates, can be expected
to furnish present ones with new resources.
The East India Company’s engagements with knowledge com-
prise a fitting subject for the kind of history proposed above, not least
because other kinds have been tried extensively and have exempli-
fied the tendencies it seeks to overcome. The first sustained interest
in the subject can be traced to the postwar rise of area and impe-
rial studies in the Euro-American academy, which spurred not only
research on other parts of the world but also research on the history
of such research. Among the fruits of this agenda were works on the
orientalist scholarship of officials in the Company’s employ. Early
efforts suggested that the changing patterns of this scholarship were
linked to changing political ideas and ideologies.39 Before this line
of intellectual history had progressed very far, however, the cultural
turn came early in the form of David Kopf’s British Orientalism and
the Bengal Renaissance (1969).40 Kopf characterized the decades

37
Examples of this method include Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern
State,” Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009); Keith Tribe, The Economy
of the Word: Language, History, and Economics (Oxford, 2015); Michael Sonenscher,
Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton, 2022). Worries lest historians of
knowledge “make a fetish of words” are premature, considering that they have yet
to try this method in earnest. For these worries, see Martin Mulsow and Lorraine
Daston, “History of Knowledge,” in Marek Tamm and Peter Burke, eds., Debating
New Approaches to History (London, 2019), p. 177.
38
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000),
p. 5. For that matter, this method need not be limited to strictly political argument.
39
Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance Orientale (Paris, 1950); George D. Bearce, British
Attitudes towards India, 1784–1858 (Oxford, 1961); S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William
Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge, 1968).
40
David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of
Indian Modernization 1773–1835 (Berkeley, 1969).

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 12 Introduction

around 1800 as a high moment in the British study of India, and

ascribed its passing to the shift from an “Orientalist” (east-facing)
official culture to an “Anglicist” (west-facing) one. It is difficult
to overstate the influence of what might be called the Orientalist-
Anglicist thesis. Until Kopf, the two terms used together denoted
rival parties in a debate on Indian education in the 1830s. But since
Kopf, they have also denoted rival cultural formations, the conflict
between which supposedly raged “for at least six decades.”41 One
sign of the staying power of the Orientalist-Anglicist thesis has been
the appearance over the years of a host of minor variations. The
shift from “Orientalism” to “Anglicism” has been reprised as one
from “Indomania” to “Indophobia,” or from “pluralism” to “phi-
listinism.”42 Meanwhile, although Kopf’s wholesale admiration for
British orientalism has gone out of fashion, his cultural-structural
approach to the subject has only become more entrenched.
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) embraced such an approach
even as it recast Western scholarship on the East as a tool of politi-
cal domination. Rather than treat knowledge as a concern of politi-
cal thought and thinkers, Said followed Foucault in subsuming it and
politics alike into an agentless “discourse.”43 Hence, the many stud-
ies of “colonial knowledge” in India that have come in the wake of
Said – and in that of the likeminded anthropologist Bernard Cohn –
have emphasized the generalities of power and culture over partic-
ular political utterances and aims.44 Hence, too, these studies have

41
William A. Green and John P. Deasy, Jr., “Unifying Themes in the History of British
India, 1757–1857: An Historiographical Analysis,” Albion 17 (1985), p. 27; Lynn
Zastoupil and Martin Moir, introduction to GIED.
42
Respectively, Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, 1997);
Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist,
1746–1794 (Oxford, 2011).
43
Said paid more attention than Foucault to individuals, but likewise saw them as largely
passive vessels of culture. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), pp. 11, 202.
44
See Shruti Kapila, preface to Kapila, ed., An Intellectual History for India, special issue
of Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007), pp. 3–4. For an overview of studies of “colo-
nial knowledge,” see Tony Ballantyne, “Colonial Knowledge,” in Sarah Stockwell,
ed., The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Malden, MA, 2008).

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 Introduction 13

tended to dismiss debates surrounding the Company’s engagements

with knowledge as mere epiphenomena of an essentially continuous
“cultural project of control.”45 Such studies have been productive in
two respects. They have focused attention on power, a theme largely
absent from earlier works on orientalism. And they have shown
that the Company’s scholarly interests went beyond orientalism to
include, in fact, nearly every conceivable domain. There has long
been a tension between these two tendencies: between the increasing
ramification of “colonial knowledge” and the continued ascription
of it, in all of its forms, to an “impulse to dominate and control.”46
If it is simplistic to treat knowledge as neutral or innocent, then it is
equally simplistic to reduce the spectrum of human motivation to a
primal will to power. Accepting a key role for the workings of power
ought to mark the beginning, not the end, of essays in the politics
of knowledge. Further questions must be asked. What ideas did his-
torical actors form of the relations between knowledge and power?
To what political uses did they put them? By failing to address these
questions, studies of “colonial knowledge” have elided the complex
agency not only of the “colonizer” but also of the “colonized.”
This last point has been urged in support of alternative approaches,
notably that of C. A. Bayly’s Empire and Information (1996). By fix-
ating on “colonial knowledge,” Bayly argued, Said’s followers risked
ignoring “Indians and their knowledge as thoroughly as the most hide-
bound colonial administrative history.”47 This argument was typical
of the “Cambridge school” of Indian history, which held that the Raj
was built upon and sustained by “Indian agency.”48 Yet the Cambridge

45
For the quote, see Nicholas B. Dirks, foreword to Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and
Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), p. ix.
46
For the quote, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British
Rule in India (New York, 1989), p. 3.
47
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communica-
tion in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 314 [emphasis added]. For a thorough
analysis of the disagreement, see William R. Pinch, “Same Difference in India and
Europe,” History and Theory 38 (1999).
48
This is not to be confused with the Cambridge school of intellectual history.

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 14 Introduction

school itself gave little scope to agency, Indian or other, at the level
of ideas.49 In Empire and Information, Bayly was concerned far less
with the minds of Company officials or “native informants” than with
the structures into which they fit.50 None of the structures he identi-
fied – “the information order,” “knowledge communities,” “the Indian
ecumene” – would have meant anything to these individuals. Nor, for
that matter, would his definition of “knowledge.” Whereas contempo-
raries were apt to distinguish the “knowledge” of a scholar from the
“information” of a news writer or the “intelligence” of a spy, Bayly
used such terms interchangeably. “Knowledge,” in the words of one
distinguished follower, was simply “what it took to govern.”51 This
functionalist stance has proved useful in identifying certain forms and
practices, like writing and print, that served as “technologies of rule.”52
Again, however, it has tended to obscure the ideas about knowledge that
historical actors themselves developed and deployed. Among Bayly’s
keenest insights in Empire and Information was one that belied his
methodological commitments. For the Company, he submitted, schol-
arship “was not a homogenous mode of gaining power” but “rather an
arena of debate.”53 Taking this proposition seriously requires adopting
an altogether different approach: It requires attending to the ideational
terms in which such debate was undertaken.

49
Only in a later phase and in a somewhat different context did Bayly address this omis-
sion. See C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism
and Empire (Cambridge, 2011).
50
This approach was inspired by the sociologist Manuel Castells, for whom, as Bayly
put it, “Knowledge itself is a social formation.” Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 4.
51
Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean
Colony (Chicago, 2013), p. 20.
52
See, for example, Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the
English East India Company (Chicago, 2007); Bhavani Raman, Document Raj:
Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago, 2012).
53
Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 360. “Debate” seems preferable to related notions
of “dialogue,” “conversation,” and “co-production,” as it invites particular attention
to the political sphere. Cf., respectively, Eugene F. Irschick, Dialogue and History:
Constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley, 1994); Thomas R. Trautmann,
Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (Berkeley,
2006); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of
Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke, 2007).

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 Introduction 15

The potential for such an approach has occasionally come into

view. Cultural-structural biases have been, if not corrected, then
at least identified. One historian has countered Kopf’s Orientalist-
Anglicist thesis by pointing up the flexibility of contemporary British
and Indian political rhetoric.54 Another has rebutted the “sweeping …
discourse” of Said and his followers by stressing the “intricate dia-
lectics” between intellectual and political pursuits.55 A number of
studies have heeded the call for nuance and specificity. Most have
done so by focusing on particular scholarly fields or individuals.
Thus, disciplinary histories have suggested that the Company’s
interest in certain kinds of knowledge reflected not a simple drive
to dominate but rather complex and shifting concerns.56 And bio-
graphical treatments have revealed that scholar-officials in the
Company’s employ, though instruments of power, could be subtle
and idiosyncratic thinkers.57 Increasingly, historians have explored
the intellectual worlds not only of the Company’s British personnel
but also of its non-British interlocutors and intermediaries. Studies
of Asian, Eurasian, and continental European knowledge patrons,
go-betweens, and entrepreneurs have done much to overturn facile
conflations of knowledge and power.58 At the same time, the view

54
Travers, Ideology and Empire, pp. 15–16.
55
Rosane Rocher, “British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics
of Knowledge and Government,” in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer,
eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia
(Philadelphia, 1993), p. 215.
56
For example, Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical
Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge,
1995), chs. 7–8; Jessica Patterson, Religion, Enlightenment and Empire: British
Interpretations of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2021).
57
For example, Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher, The Making of Western Indology:
Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company (Abingdon, UK, 2012);
Tobias Wolffhardt, Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the
Early Colonial State and the Comprehensive Survey of India, trans. Jane Rafferty
(New York, 2018).
58
For example, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Very Ingenious Man, Claude Martin in Early
Colonial India (Delhi, 1992); Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, introduction to Alam
and Alavi, trans., A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The Iʻjāz-i Arsalānı¯
(Persian Letters, 1773–1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (New Delhi, 2001); Phillip
B. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,”

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 16 Introduction

they have afforded of layered, cross-cutting intellectual and politi-

cal currents has presented a challenge to historical synthesis. Recent
erudite attempts to remap the terrain of Kopf, Cohn, and Bayly have
eschewed broad conclusions at the risk of lapsing into a diffident
microhistory.59 These attempts have succeeded in complicating or
deconstructing old narratives. This book builds upon them to offer a
distinctly new narrative.

*****
To introduce the main argument of the chapters that follow, a good
point of departure can be found in the preface to Ramkamal Sen’s A
Dictionary in English and Bengalee (1834). There the Calcutta entre-
preneur and litterateur related the following anecdote. Many years
ago, an East India Company ship sailed for the first time from the
Bay of Bengal up the Hooghly River and anchored near the villages
that would one day grow to become the city of Calcutta. The cap-
tain of the vessel sent ashore to the local magnates and requested
the services of a “dubash.” This word, on the coast and elsewhere
in India, referred to a middleman of some learning and standing who
facilitated trade. In riverine Bengal, however, the utterance more
readily called to mind a dhoba, or washerman. Accordingly, the mag-
nates selected one such man and deputed him to tender his services
to the Company. The dhoba boarded the East Indiaman bearing the
customary gifts – only to be received in a most uncustomary man-
ner. The captain and officers saluted the dhoba, honored him with

Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003); Kapil Raj, “Mapping

Knowledge Go-Betweens in Calcutta, 1770–1820,” in Simon Schaffer et al., eds., The
Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach,
MA, 2009); Simon Schaffer, “The Asiatic Enlightenments of British Astronomy,” in
ibid.; Savithri Preetha Nair, Raja Serfoji II: Science, Medicine and Enlightenment in
Tanjore (New Delhi, 2012); Robert Travers, “The Connected Worlds of Haji Mustapha
(c. 1730–91): A Eurasian Cosmopolitan in Eighteenth-Century Bengal,” Indian
Economic and Social History Review 52 (2015).
59
For example, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires,
1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2017); James Watt, British Orientalisms, 1759–1835
(Cambridge, 2019).

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 Introduction 17

ceremonies, and discharged him with bags not of laundry but “of
gold and other precious articles.” The dhoba-dubash soon took to his
new employment. He learned the English language and became “one
of the principal native servants of the Company.” In Ramkamal’s
words, “He may be considered the first English scholar among the
natives of Calcutta.”60
The tale of the dhoba-dubash, though evidently in common
circulation, had a special significance for Ramkamal.61 As he related
elsewhere in the preface to his dictionary, he too had risen from hum-
ble village origins to become a leading “English scholar” and “native
servant” of the Company. The story contrasted sharply and purposely,
however, with the account Ramkamal proceeded to give of his own
literary fortunes, the thrust of which was that he had suffered years
of setbacks and losses owing to a lack of patronage. A dictionary was
the very “key of knowledge,” Ramkamal observed, and in the past,
the Company had favored such works with “encouragement and
assistance.” The scanty patronage it now offered, however, “will not
exempt me from loss in printing, nor … in employing writers, pundits,
&c.” What accounted for the change? The way that Ramkamal now
advertised his dictionary offered some clues. Rather than dwell upon
the scholarly merits of his work, like earlier lexicographers, he framed
it as a practical aid to “native education.” He maintained this stance
in a dedication on behalf of the “Native public” to the Company’s
governor-general, to whom he must have thought it would appeal.62
Thus, in the course of his preface, Ramkamal provided readers with
a striking series of contrasts. First, while harking back to a past in
which the Company had patronized scholars, he alluded to a present
in which it espoused the cause of education. Second, while recalling

60
[Ramkamal Sen] Ram Comul Sen, A Dictionary in English and Bengalee, 2 vols.
(Serampore, 1834), vol. I, pp. 16–17.
61
For another version of the tale, see C. R. Wilson, “Introductory Account of the Early
History of the English in Bengal,” in Wilson, ed., The Early Annals of the English in
Bengal, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1895–1917), vol. I, p. 59.
62
[Ramkamal Sen], Dictionary, vol. I, pp. 3–8.

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 18 Introduction

that it had once wooed learned men, he implied that it now sought
favor with a broader “native public.” Finally, while portraying the
Company of old as a body of traders, he addressed the Company
of his day as a powerful sovereign. With this set of juxtapositions,
Ramkamal anticipated the argument of this book.
From almost its founding in 1600, the Company sponsored
learning in connection with its activities. In the 1770s, when it
began to directly govern large territories, this sponsorship assumed
an ideological aspect. Warren Hastings, the first governor-general
of Bengal, advanced what he called a “system of conciliation.” He
argued that the beleaguered Company would gain allies at home and
abroad by patronizing European scholar-officials and Indian learned
elites. The idea of conciliation befitted both merchant and sover-
eign and was rooted in both British and Indian political thought. It
remained a mainstay of Company ideology throughout much of the
next six decades. Not only did this idea survive the impeachment
of Hastings, it flourished and spread, including to the Company’s
Court of Directors. Lord Wellesley’s governor-generalship posed a
greater challenge: He used knowledge not to defend but to attack
the Company state. After Wellesley’s departure, scholar-officials and
learned elites struggled to find favor with wary Company leaders.
At the same time, the Company’s trade dwindled, while its territory
expanded dramatically. By the 1820s, it was “paramount” in India;
its ideas about knowledge began to change accordingly. Rather than
conciliate a few elites, officials increasingly sought to convince wider
publics of the Company’s good government. Now, more and more,
the idea of conciliation competed with one of mass education. By the
late 1830s, the latter had supplanted the former at the heart of the
Company’s ideology.
This is a new account in many respects, owing to its focus on
ideas about knowledge. It reveals that these ideas were integral to the
Company state and reconstructs the debates they animated. It shows
that, far from a cultural-structural phenomenon comprehensible only
to modern scholars, the politics of knowledge is a subject on which

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 Introduction 19

historical actors themselves have been highly articulate. The histo-

ries of the Company, Britain, and India look different when contem-
porary ideas about knowledge are foregrounded. To trace the career
of these ideas is to cast an illuminating light on the decades around
1800. Familiar narratives – the rise and fall of an Orientalist cultural
formation, the consolidation of colonial knowledge, the reshaping of
the information order – find few echoes in the knowledge debates
of the period. On the contrary, these debates, inasmuch as they per-
tained to the Company, revolved around its hybrid constitution and
that constitution’s legitimacy.
A word should be said about the scope and terminology of the
book. It treats the “Company state”: the East India Company in its
dual character. It understands the Company not as a unitary body
but, rather, as a far-flung constellation of individuals and institu-
tions.63 It centers on the Company’s capitals, London and Calcutta,
but ranges across a “Greater India” from the Red Sea to the Pearl
River Delta. It examines the “high thought” of leaders of or involved
with the Company but also the “medium thought” of its rank-and-
file agents and interlocutors.64 European scholar-officials and Indian
scholar-collaborators figure prominently – among the latter, “learned
elites” in particular.65 More will be said about this category. For now,
suffice it to say that it reflects the Company’s view, and not a neutral
view, of Indian society. A similar caveat applies to the category of
“knowledge,” which the book treats not as an objective category but
rather as a contested one. The East India Company and the Politics of
Knowledge is concerned with what contemporaries called knowledge

63
On the Company’s decentralized structure, see Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly
and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757 (Princeton, 2014).
64
For the distinction, see Emma Rothschild, “Language and Empire, c.1800,” Historical
Research 78 (2005), p. 210.
65
“Scholar-officials” seems preferable to “scholar-administrators” because the category
might include not only civil servants but also army officers and surgeons. For an
important reminder about the scholarly activities of the Company’s military person-
nel, see Douglas M. Peers, “Colonial Knowledge and the Military in India, 1780–1860,”
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 33 (2005). “Scholar-collaborators,”
meanwhile, seems preferable to the more passive “native informants.”

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 20 Introduction

and does not assign greater or lesser relevance to any of its branches
or forms. It should be stipulated, however, that the book is about
“knowledge” not in the very broadest sense but rather in connection
with learning and scholarship. It was knowledge in this sense that
became a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to
be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.

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 1 Warren Hastings and the
Idea of Conciliation

“It is new,” wrote Samuel Johnson to Warren Hastings in 1781,

“for a Governour of Bengal to patronise learning.”1 In this opinion,
Johnson was hardly alone among contemporary intellectuals. Sir
William Jones praised Hastings as “the first liberal promoter of use-
ful knowledge in Bengal”; John Gilchrist held that an “era of Oriental
literature dawned” with his administration.2 What accounted for
such statements? The East India Company, like other European trad-
ing companies, had long patronized learning to facilitate its opera-
tions and to burnish its image.3 Since the seventeenth century, the
Company’s leaders in Bengal and elsewhere had encouraged pursuits
including the collection of natural objects and the study of Asian
languages. Undeniably, however, Hastings as governor (1772–4) and
governor-general (1774–85) patronized learning on a larger scale than
any of his predecessors. He founded a madrasa (Islamic college),
ordered the compilation and translation of Hindu and Islamic laws,
commissioned expeditions to Bhutan and Tibet, and backed dozens
of other humanistic and scientific ventures. Hitherto no Company
official had done any of these things. It has often been asked why
Hastings did.

1
Johnson to Hastings, 29 Jan. 1781, in The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce
Redford, 5 vols. (Princeton, 1992–4), vol. III, p. 324.
2
[William Jones], “The Introduction,” Asiatick Researches 1 (Calcutta, 1788), p. vii;
John Gilchrist, Dictionary, English and Hindoostanee, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1787–98),
vol. I, p. i.
3
Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World
(Basingstoke, 2016). For points of comparison, see Steven J. Harris, “Long-Distance
Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge,” Configurations 6
(1998); Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in
the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, 2007); Ted Binnema, “Enlightened Zeal”: The
Hudson’s Bay Company and Scientific Networks, 1670–1870 (Toronto, 2014).

21

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 22 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

Historians have offered several explanations. One is that

Hastings was stirred by intellectual curiosity. He had excelled at
Westminster School and remained a dabbler in subjects ranging from
agriculture to classical poetry. Another explanation is that he felt a
sense of duty to encourage such curiosity in others; this he wrote
to Johnson.4 Meanwhile, most of the projects he sponsored had, or
could be seen to have, practical benefits for the Company’s trade or
administration. And yet few readers of Hastings have been satisfied
with these explanations alone.5 Several have detected in his writ-
ings evidence of an enlightened cosmopolitan program to “reconcile”
Britons and Indians. They have suggested on this basis that he was
a committed Indophile or cultural relativist.6 But while “reconcilia-
tion” – or, more accurately, “conciliation” – was indeed a key idea
for Hastings, these readers have misconstrued it and hence missed
its political implications. First, any appearance in Hastings of rela-
tivism must be weighed against his stated conviction that Europe’s
learning had surpassed that of “the rest of the world.”7 Second, he
was a canny and changeable politician whose commitment to any
cultural stance should not be overstated. Finally, he did not have the
luxury to indulge in fantasies: To find a place on his agenda, scholarly
patronage would have had to serve vital interests. And indeed, it did.
The main ideological challenge Hastings faced was to square the
Company’s growing political footprint with its hybrid constitution.

4
Hastings to Johnson, 7 Aug. 1775, in MWH, vol. II, p. 18.
5
For the above explanations and their insufficiency, see P. J. Marshall, “Warren
Hastings as Scholar and Patron,” in Anne Whiteman, J. S. Bromley, and P. G. M.
Dickson, eds., Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century
History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland (Oxford, 1973), pp. 243–6, 252–6.
6
Ibid., pp. 256–62; J. L. Brockington, “Warren Hastings and Orientalism,” in Geoffrey
Carnall and Colin Nicholson, eds., The Impeachment of Warren Hastings: Papers from
a Bicentenary Commemoration (Edinburgh, 1989), p. 91; Lynn Zastoupil and Martin
Moir, introduction to GIED, pp. 2–4; Michael J. Franklin, “‘The Hastings Circle’:
Writers and Writing in Calcutta in the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century,” in
Emma J. Clery, Caroline Franklin, and Peter D. Garside, eds., Authorship, Commerce
and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 186.
7
[Warren Hastings], A Proposal for Establishing a Professorship of the Persian Language
in the University of Oxford [c. 1766], p. 9.

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 Hastings and the Company State 23

This was no abstract concern. The British government and Indian

powerholders alike threatened the Company’s very existence. Its
conquest of the province of Bengal from mid-century had stirred up
arguments that a body of merchants could not or should not rule
vast and populous territories. Hastings sympathized with such argu-
ments, but he was bound by duty and circumstances to oppose them.
“Conciliation” offered him a means to do so. This idea, derived from
both European and Mughal sources, denoted a commercial style of
politics based on accommodation and negotiation. In the context of
scholarly patronage, it tapped into widespread positive associations
between commerce and knowledge. Hastings maintained that patron-
izing European scholar-officials and Indian learned elites would con-
ciliate opinion toward the Company state. If this hybrid entity was to
last, he suggested, it must traffic not only in material goods but also
in intellectual ones.

Hastings and the Company State

What were the origins of Hastings’ idea of conciliation? Why did
he nearly always invoke it in connection with scholarly patronage?
Answering these questions requires revisiting the foundations of the
Company’s regime in Bengal, in the construction of which Hastings
played a central role. Hastings has long been seen to embody the
Company’s apparently abrupt transition from merchant to ruler in
the second half of the eighteenth century. He himself did much to
cultivate this reputation by espousing an ideal of strong, uncom-
mercial sovereignty. In reality, however, he was forced to uphold the
Company’s hybrid constitution, even in the face of mounting criti-
cism in Britain and India. It was the search for a mode of politics that
made the best of this reality, and that might assuage the Company’s
critics, that led Hastings to conciliation via scholarly patronage.
From his early days in India, Hastings often voiced disapproval
of the Company’s conflation of politics and trade. He began his career
with the Company in the 1750s handling textiles, and for some time
insisted that such alone was its proper domain. Accordingly, after

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 24 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

joining the ruling council in Calcutta in 1761, he urged it to submit

to the “lawful authority” of the nawab of Bengal. “Instead of erect-
ing themselves into lords and oppressors of the country,” he urged,
Company officials should “confine themselves to an honest and fair
trade.”8 But if this argument was tenuous given the Company’s creep-
ing domination of the province, then it became untenable upon its
assumption of the diwani (the right to collect the land revenue). With
this development in 1765, Hastings acknowledged, the Company
had “undergone a total change. From a merely Commercial Body,
they are grown up into a Military & Territorial Power, to w[hi]ch
their Commerce is but a Secondary concern.”9 Hastings continued
to express this opinion after the Court of Directors appointed him
governor of Bengal in 1772. The Company’s constitution, he wrote
the directors in one dispatch, consisted of “charters … framed for the
jurisdiction of your trading settlements, the sales of your exports,
and the provision of your annual investment. I need not observe how
incompetent these must prove for the government of a great king-
dom.”10 Hastings did not reserve these sentiments for the directors
alone. To the prime minister, he likewise argued that the Company’s
“mercantile concerns” must be subordinated to its political ones. As
he now put it, “the details of commerce are not fit objects of atten-
tion to the supreme administration of a state.”11
These objections bespoke an ideal of a robust sovereignty
unbounded by the Company’s commercial lineage. This ideal took
several forms. At times, Hastings suggested that a body of merchants
was unfit to rule and that the Company’s political authority should be
transferred to the Crown.12 At others, he portrayed himself as a loyal

8
Hastings, Minute (1 Mar. 1763), in Original Papers Relative to the Disturbances in
Bengal: Containing Every Material Transaction from 1759 to 1764, 2 vols. (London,
1765), vol. II, p. 53.
9
Hastings to [Earl of Shelburne], 16 July 1771, BL, Add. MS 29126, f. 74v.
10
Hastings to Directors, 11 Nov. 1773, in MWH, vol. I, p. 368.
11
Hastings to Lord North, 2 Apr. 1775, in MWH, vol. I, pp. 534, 539.
12
Neil Sen, “Warren Hastings and British Sovereign Authority in Bengal, 1774–80,”
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (1997).

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 Hastings and the Company State 25

servant of the Company who merely sought to bring its constitution

in line with its altered situation.13 Finally, whether under the Crown’s
or the Company’s auspices, he spoke of establishing an “oriental des-
potism” ostensibly on the model of the Mughal emperors.14 Hastings
never settled on a coherent political program, much less philosophy.
He was constantly adapting his message to different audiences and cir-
cumstances. Yet, for all of the ambiguities and contradictions in his
thinking, he expressed a consistent desire – at least while in office – to
render the Company less of a company and more of a state.
There is a distinction to be observed, however, between
Hastings’ grand projections and the practicalities of the system in
which he operated. His calls for an uncommercial politics after 1765
were no more realistic than his calls for an unpolitical commerce for-
merly. Declaring “the details of commerce” below the dignity of his
government meant little when most officials – sometimes including
Hastings – were engaged in trade. These officials intended to make a
private fortune and used their public positions to do so.15 Something
similar was true of the Company at large. The assumption of the
diwani had shifted the main source of its profits without diminish-
ing their primacy.16 In this broad sense, “commerce” had hardly
become, as Hastings would have it, “a secondary concern.” To quote
one report, the Company remained fixated on keeping “in motion the
great machine of [its] commerce,” notwithstanding its “accession …

13
In 1771, for instance, Hastings railed against a Crown commission whose “purpose
was apparently to invade the Rights of the Co[mpany].” He claimed that “though I
have read the History of England more t[ha]n once I do not remember such an Invasion
of … a great Commercial body.” Hastings to Randolph Marriott, 26 Mar. 1771, BL,
Add. MS 29126, f. 62r; Hastings to [Shelburne], 16 July 1771, f. 76v. For Hastings’
alternate appeals to the Company and to the ministry, see Ben Joseph Gilding, “British
Politics, Imperial Ideology, and East India Company Reform, 1773–1784” (PhD disser-
tation, University of Cambridge, 2019), ch. 5.
14
Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in
Bengal (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 106–7, 139–40.
15
P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century
(Oxford, 1976).
16
P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India 1740–1828 (Cambridge,
1987), p. 133.

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 26 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

to the Government of the Country.”17 The Company as merchant

bought goods using the revenue the Company as ruler collected and
drove down their cost using its political leverage.18 Even to put things
in this way may be to draw too neat a distinction between two sides
of the Company that remained bound together in its constitution.
Hastings understood this reality only too well as an official
whose commission was to exercise sovereignty for profit. Hitherto,
governors of Bengal, first appointed in 1758, had played a minor role
in actually governing the province. Upon the Company’s assumption
of the diwani, Robert Clive had delegated most of its new functions to
the naib nazim (nawab’s deputy), Muhammad Reza Khan. As Hastings
put it, the governor had “contrived to enjoy all the Emoluments of it
[power] with[ou]t Responsibility.”19 But by the early 1770s, Clive’s
system of “double government” had broken down completely.
Commentators blamed it for low revenue from the diwani lands and,
in part, for a famine that threw markets and trade into disarray. It
must now be admitted that, to quote the surveyor James Rennell,
“In a Countrey void of civil Polity these Accidents are not easily
remedied.”20 Thus it was that the directors appointed Hastings to
“stand forth as Duan [diwan]” and to rescue the Company’s troubled
finances.21 They expected him to largely fund the Company’s debts,
its trading settlements, and its “investment” (the goods it bought
in India to sell in London).22 Many of Hastings’ reforms, later seen
as laying the foundations of the Raj, were ad hoc, desperate fund-
raising measures. So too were his aggressive attempts to extract

17
Report (6 Aug. 1789), cited in Rajat Datta, “The Commercial Economy of Eastern
India under Early British Rule,” in H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid,
eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850
(Oxford, 2012), p. 343.
18
Marshall, Bengal, p. 115; Om Prakash, “The English East India Company and India,”
in H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby, eds., The Worlds of the East
India Company (Woodbridge, UK, 2002).
19
Hastings to [Shelburne], 16 July 1771, f. 74v.
20
Rennell to Gilbert Burrington, 1 Sept. 1770, BL, IOR H/765, p. 208.
21
Fort William – India House Correspondence, 21 vols. (Delhi, 1949–85), vol. VI, p. 123.
22
See Travers, Ideology and Empire, pp. 101–2.

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 Hastings and the Company State 27

“casual and extraordinary resources” from zamindars (landholders)

and neighboring rulers.23 Hastings, in other words, largely complied
with the directors’ expectations. Between occasional calls to abolish
the Company state, he was toiling on its behalf.
Hastings resented the Company’s hybrid constitution but was
ultimately compelled to uphold it. He aspired to wield a strong sov-
ereignty, uncompromised by commercial imperatives, but was forced
to work within the existing system.24 In his early months in office,
Hastings was preoccupied with averting a fiscal crisis and impart-
ing a semblance of order to his administration. No sooner had he
begun to entertain grander ambitions than he became mired in a
series of conflicts. While the long-awaited Regulating Act of 1773
made him “governor-general” and granted him authority over all of
the Company’s Indian territories, it also established local counter-
weights to his authority in the form of a “Supreme Council” and
a “Supreme Court.” Bitter wrangling ensued in Calcutta. Having
“formed great designs,” Hastings now found himself “curbed, and
prevented from carrying” them “into execution.”25 Nor did he obtain
much support from the Court of Directors or the ministry in Britain,
both of which were also paralyzed by disagreement.26 Finally, to
effect any great change required negotiating with Indian powerhold-
ers, who could seldom be corralled. For all of these reasons, Hastings
was forced to compromise his leviathanic vision. Whatever the dic-
tates of his conscience, judgment, or ego, he had no choice but to
prioritize the Company’s finances. It was thus in vain, according to
Hastings’ councilor and rival Philip Francis, that he should pretend

23
Fort William – India House Correspondence, vol. VIII, p. 421. See P. J. Marshall, The
Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965), p. 108; Michael H. Fisher, A Clash
of Cultures: Awadh, the British, and the Mughals (New Delhi, 1987), pp. 81–5.
24
See P. J. Marshall, “The Shaping of the New Colonial Regime in Bengal,” in
Mahmudul Huque, ed., Bangladesh: History, Politics, Economy, Society and Culture
(Dhaka, 2016).
25
Hastings to [Robert] Palk, undated, in MWH, vol. I, p. 477; Hastings, cited in Keith
Feiling, Warren Hastings (London, 1954), p. 100.
26
See Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics,
corr. edn (Oxford, 1962), pp. 291–317; Gilding, “British Politics,” ch. 5.

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 28 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

“to reconcile … justice” in his “administration, with injustice in

its fundamental principle – I mean that of uniting the character of
Sovereign and merchant, and exercising the power of the first for the
benefit of the second.”27 Hastings scarcely disagreed. He himself per-
ceived a “radical and incurable” contradiction between the “primary
exigencies” of the Company and “those which in all States ought to
take [the] place of every other concern, the interests of the people.”
His conclusion was revealing: “All that the wisest institutions can
effect in such a system can only be to improve the advantages of a
temporary possession, and to protract that decay, which sooner or
later must end it.”28 In his own sober estimation, then, Hastings was
not the builder of a sturdy edifice but the carpenter of one ultimately
beyond repair. The Company’s constitution contained “the seeds of
death in it.” But as long as it remained, he must do what he could to
preserve it.29
In fact, there was much that Hastings could do, thanks to the
limitations of contemporary criticism. In Britain, the Company
state was controversial but not yet anomalous: Concepts of pub-
lic and private, political and economic were only just beginning to
diverge. Hence, while the jurist William Blackstone espoused an
influential unitary view of sovereignty, a composite view amenable
to corporate sovereignty remained the norm.30 And while the phi-
losopher Adam Smith helped to shape political economy into a dis-
tinct discipline, he identified neither an “economy” independent of
the polity nor an “economics” independent of politics.31 Smith did
demonstrate a growing tendency among British critics to trace the
Company’s ills to its hybrid constitution. In holding in The Wealth

27
Philip Francis, Letter from Mr. Francis to Lord North, Late Earl of Guildford [17 Sept.
1777] (London [1793]), p. 13.
28
Hastings to Alexander Elliot, 10 Feb. 1777, in MWH, vol. II, pp. 149–50.
29
Hastings to Laurence Sulivan, 18 Apr. 1779, in MWH, vol. II, p. 275.
30
Alison L. LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Cambridge, MA,
2010), pp. 15–20.
31
Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the
Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

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 Hastings and the Company State 29

of Nations (1776) that “a company of merchants are … incapable of

considering themselves as sovereigns,” he invoked an increasingly
popular premise.32 For every commentator who insisted that “the
greatest evil arises when traders become princes,” however, there
was another ready to point out:

Is not our own legislature composed principally of merchants

and of mercantile men? And are not the mercantile concerns of
this, and of most countries now-a-days, so intimately connected
with their prosperity and well-being, that the great concern of
governments is to put them on a right and respectable footing?33

Some of the most outspoken detractors of the Company state advo-

cated reforming it rather than abolishing it outright. This indeed was
what the British government sought to do in the Regulating Act of
1773 and again in Pitt’s India Act of 1784. The coalition ministry
of 1783 advocated a more radical intervention, which would have
involved appointing separate commissions to oversee the Company’s
government and trade. Yet even this plan, which was thwarted by
the king, would have kept much of the Company’s existing structure
intact. Indeed, according to its prime mover, Edmund Burke, one of
its key objects was to “restore the Company.” There was nothing
inherently wrong, Burke assured the Commons, with placing “exten-
sive political powers in the hands of a company of merchants…. I
have known merchants with the sentiments and the abilities of great
statesmen; and I have seen persons in the rank of statesmen, with the
conceptions and character of pedlars.”34

32
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2
vols. (London, 1776), vol. I, p. 251. For the work most responsible for popularizing this
premise, see William Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs, 2 vols. (London, 1772–5),
vol. I, pp. vi, 222.
33
Archibald Keir, Thoughts on the Affairs of Bengal (London, 1772), p. 5; Thomas
Pownall, The Right, Interest, and Duty, of the State, as Concerned in the Affairs of
the East Indies (London, 1773), pp. 43–4.
34
Edmund Burke, “Speech on Fox’s India Bill” (1 Dec. 1783), in Burke, The Writings and
Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols. (Oxford, 1981–2015), vol. V, pp.
386–7, 433.

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 30 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

So much for British opinion, but what of its Indian counter-

part? Could Indian subjects and rulers tolerate the sovereignty of the
Company? Some Britons assumed not. “Brought up under regal gov-
ernment,” wrote one London newspaper contributor, “the Indians
place a confidence in the promises of princes, which they never
bestow upon commercial bodies.”35 Indian “princes” too, accord-
ing to another commentator, were “humiliated and galled with the
thought of being under the sway of a company of merchants.”36 Such
arguments projected British ideas onto Indian minds. But there is
reason to think that some of these ideas reached India and found a
receptive audience. A vast network of news-writers translated and
circulated foreign publications for the consumption of the literate
and “literacy aware.”37 The free merchant Joseph Price, who had
lived in Bombay and Calcutta, went so far as to argue that “news-
papers are as much read in Asia as in London.” Indians, he advised
the statesman Charles James Fox, were familiar with his views and
those of other Company critics, and quoted his “speeches against
the Company, in as many modes and ways, as you could and have
done yourself.”38 If Price is to be credited, then politically active
Indians took an early interest in metropolitan debates surrounding
the Company.39 Whatever they learned of these debates from news-
papers and other sources likely served to reinforce locally inspired

35
Creon [pseud.], “The State of Asiatic Affairs, as Represented by a Writer Well
Acquainted with the Concerns of Government,” Gentleman’s Magazine 39 (Aug.
1769), p. 375.
36
Thoughts on Improving the Government of the British Territorial Possessions in the
East Indies (London, 1780), p. 15.
37
On these news-writers and their audiences, see Michael H. Fisher, “The Office of
Akhbār Nawı¯ s: The Transition from Mughal to British Forms,” Modern Asian Studies
27 (1993); C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social
Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 36–44, 69–73, 199–207.
38
Joseph Price, A Short Commercial and Political Letter from Mr. Joseph Price to the
Right Honourable Charles James Fox (London, 1783), pp. 15–16.
39
Others corroborated his account. One Calcutta observer in 1782 remarked at “the
translating into persian, & circulating throughout India, the disputes in council at
Calcutta, & angry paragraphs in general letters from home.” Alexander Macaulay to
Charles Francis Greville, 5 Dec. 1782, BL, Mss Eur E309/1/4.

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 Hastings and the Company State 31

critiques. Among the Mughal elite in eastern India, in particular, it

had long been a common charge that the Company behaved like an
irresponsible merchant.40 According to the courtier Karam Ali, for
instance, though the Company had become “supreme in economic
and political affairs,” it was still “caught in the snare of greed.”41
Yet, this was not to say that the Company was constitutionally
incapable of good government. The commercialization of politics, in
parts of India at least, made it possible to countenance the rule of a
mercantile body. Hence, most panegyrists of the ancien régime in
Bengal sought not to delegitimize their new rulers, however short
they fell of the ideal, but to counsel them and to assert the indispens-
ability of such counsel. This was certainly the intention of the noble-
man Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i in his great Tarikh (history)
Siyar al-Muta‘akhkhirin (c. 1781–5).42 Writing a quarter-century after
Plassey, Ghulam Husain saw “nothing strange in those Merchants
having found the means of becoming masters of this country.” In his
understanding, merchants in general and the Company, in particular,
had already acquired in Britain a power to rival that of parliament or
the king. While the Company now behaved in arrogant and exclusive
ways, it seemed to have come from a system, like the Mughal one, in
which sovereignty was parcellated and negotiated. Ghulam Husain
suggested that to become a virtuous sovereign, or even a competent
one, the Company must renew the reciprocal relations on which
such a system was based. European notions of commercial sociabil-
ity found an analog in his call for open “gates of communication and
intercourse” between rulers and ruled.43 It was fitting, therefore, that

40
See Rajat Kanta Ray, “Colonial Penetration and the Initial Resistance: The Mughal
Ruling Class, the English East India Company and the Struggle for Bengal 1756–1800,”
Indian Historical Review 12 (1988), pp. 98–102; Kumkum Chatterjee, The Cultures of
History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal (New
Delhi, 2009), pp. 175–8.
41
Karam Ali, Muzaffarnama [c. 1772–3] (Patna, 1992), p. 483.
42
See Robert Travers, Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British
India, 1765–1793 (Cambridge, 2022), ch. 5.
43
[Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i] Seid-Gholam-Hossein-Khan, A Translation of the
Seir Mutaqharin; or, View of Modern Times, trans. Nota Manus [Haji Mustafa], 4 vols.

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 32 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

in the English translation of Siyar al-Muta‘akhkhirin (1789–90), vari-

ous Indo-British interactions (mulaqat, musahabat) were rendered
simply as “commerce.”44
Faced with audiences in Britain and India that were critical of the
Company state but perhaps not inveterately so, Hastings needed means
to legitimize it. Within months of taking office in 1772, he located one
in the idea of conciliation. Hastings announced that a major task of his
administration would be to “conciliate the affection and confidence of
the people.”45 Soon, he was defending his conduct on the ground of
“the effect which it has produced … in conciliating the minds of the
natives.”46 He also wrote of “conciliating” Britons. So, what did con-
ciliation mean? It is evident that it was, to quote Hastings, a “mode” of
politics, and that he had embraced it because, to quote his biographer,
“his powers were limited.”47 But there is more to be said on the sub-
ject. As Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) indicated, “conciliation”
carried a double meaning: It could refer either to “the act of gaining”
or to the act of “reconciling.”48 The term might thus describe the sov-
ereign art of condescension or the merchant art of concession; it might
connote dominance or deference. Furthermore, by combining these
things in speech, it could lend itself to combining them in policy. In a
celebrated parliamentary address of 1775, Burke urged “conciliation”
with the restive American colonies. “All government,” he reasoned, “is
founded on compromise and barter,” especially governments of large

(Calcutta, 1789–90), vol. II, pp. 544–5, vol. III, pp. 331–2. Coeval Indian observers
seem to have broadly shared Ghulam Husain’s impression of the Company’s standing
vis-à-vis parliament and the king. See Gulfishan Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of
the West during the Eighteenth Century (Karachi, 1998), p. 54.
44
[Ghulam Husain], Seir, vol. II, p. 598; Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i, Siyar
al-Mutaʼakhkhirin, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1833), vol. I, p. 417.
45
Warren Hastings, “Regulations Proposed for the Government of Bengal” [c. 1772], in
M. E. Monckton Jones, ed., Warren Hastings in Bengal, 1772–4 (Oxford, 1918), p. 160.
46
Fort William – India House Correspondence, vol. VII, p. 527.
47
An Authentic Copy of the Correspondence in India between the Country Powers and
the Honourable the East India Company’s Servants, 6 vols. (London, 1787), vol. IV,
p. 273; MWH, vol. I, p. 407.
48
“Conciliate,” in Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755).
See similarly George Crabb, English Synonyms Explained: in Alphabetical Order, with
Copious Illustrations and Examples Drawn from the Best Writers (London, 1816), p. 257.

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 Hastings and the Company State 33

empires, where “despotism itself is forced to truck and huckster.”49

Burke’s argument adapted the language and logic of commerce to the
management of a transmarine political community that was under-
stood as composite rather than unitary.50 Conciliation was not egalitar-
ian: The aim was to retain the colonies “in a profitable and subordinate
connexion with us.”51 But Burke’s usage conveyed the notion that even
such a connection could and should involve reciprocity.
Conciliation in this sense had echoes in Indian political
thought, especially in the idea of sulh-i kull. The term has been vari-
ously translated, and had multiple meanings even for the Mughal
emperor Akbar, with whom it has been closely associated.52 In gen-
eral, however, it referred to mediation among different groups within
a polity or across polities.53 This idea still enjoyed a wide circulation
in Hastings’ day, owing in part to the fame of the courtier Abu al-
Fazl’s Ain-i Akbari (c. 1595–8). Hastings made attempts to get this
work translated, eventually with success, and praised it as a guide to
Akbar’s “magnificent machine.”54 In addition, he could have encoun-
tered the idea in any one of a number of later texts.55 It is probable,
therefore, that Hastings’ idea of conciliation drew on this Indian

49
Edmund Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with America” (22 Mar. 1775), in Burke,
Writings and Speeches, vol. III, pp. 125, 157.
50
Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton,
2015), pp. 476–87. See also J. G. A. Pocock, “Empire, State and Confederation: The
War of American Independence as a Crisis of Multiple Monarchy,” in John Robertson,
ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995).
51
Burke, “Speech on Conciliation,” p. 118.
52
On the various origins of sulh-i kull, and for other points of comparison, see A. Azfar
Moin, ed., “Sulh-i Kull as an Oath of Peace: Mughal Political Theology in History,
Theory, and Comparison,” special issue of MAS 56 (2022).
53
Rajeev Kinra, “Revisiting the History and Historiography of Mughal Pluralism,”
ReOrient 5 (2020).
54
Hastings to Earl of Moira, 12 Nov. 1812, Mount Stuart, HA/10. On these attempts, see
[Abu al-Fazl], Ayeen Akbery: Or, The Institutes of the Emperor Akber, trans. Francis
Gladwin, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1783–6), vol. I, pp. iii, ix–x; Mouluvee Khyr ood Deen
[Maulvi Khair ud-Din Ilahabadi] to William Sleeman [c. Mar. 1820], PCFW, vol. 566,
pp. 90–1.
55
On the post-Akbar career of sulh-i kull, see Rajeev Kinra, “Handling Diversity with
Absolute Civility: The Global Historical Legacy of Mughal Ṣulḥ -i Kull,” Medieval
History Journal 16 (2013); Kinra, “Revisiting,” pp. 160–71.

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 34 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

example as well as on British and European ones. Not for nothing

did contemporary writers translate sulh-i kull as “conciliation” and
portray Hastings as a latter-day Akbar.56 To be sure, such analogies
were superficial. Nowhere does Hastings seem to have grappled seri-
ously with the ethical or spiritual dimensions of Akbar’s philosophy.
Nor was there much textual basis for tying sulh-i kull to commerce
in the manner of Burke’s “conciliation” or the language of Ghulam
Husain. Still, in at least one respect, Hastings’ idea bore an unmistak-
able resemblance to that of Akbar and Abu al-Fazl. Just as these men
had figured scholarly patronage as central to sulh-i kull, so Hastings
figured it as central to what he called his “system” of conciliation.57
The workings of this system can be gleaned from several of the
governor-general’s writings. In a minute of 1778, he held that in its
“present state and constitution,” the Company should consider it a
duty “to encourage the efforts of genius.”58 He expanded on this argu-
ment in two texts of 1784: a letter to his London agent and an accom-
panying address to the chairman of the directors. The address solicited
the directors’ patronage of Charles Wilkins’ translation of the Bhagavad
Gita (1785), and would serve as an introduction to the printed work.
Hastings described it to his agent as “part of a system, which I long
since laid down & supported, for reconciling the People of England to
the Natives of Hindostan, & the Company to their Serv[an]ts.”59 The
address explained this system in greater detail:

56
Philip Francis, Minute (22 Jan. 1776), in Minutes of Evidence Taken at the Trial of
Warren Hastings, 11 vols. (London, 1788–95), vol. X, p. 1728; William Robertson, An
Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India
(London, 1791), p. 273; Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among
the Asiatic Subjects of Great-Britain (London, 1797), pp. 76–7. See also Justin Biel,
“Edge of Enlightenment: The Akbar Tradition and ‘Universal Toleration’ in British
Bengal,” MAS 53 (2019), pp. 11–25.
57
On the connection between sulh-i kull and scholarly patronage, see Rajeev Kinra,
Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the
Indo-Persian State Secretary (Berkeley, 2015), ch. 5.
58
Warren Hastings, Minute (20 Feb. 1778), in R. B. Ramsbotham, ed., “Pages from the
Past: Extracts from the Records of the Government of India,” Bengal Past and Present
29 (1925), p. 213.
59
Hastings to John Scott, 2 to 9 Dec. 1784, BL, Add. MS 29129, f. 275r.

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 Conciliating Britain 35

Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is

obtained by social communication with people over whom we
exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful
to the state: it is the gain of humanity: in the specific instance
which I have stated, it attracts and conciliates distant affections;
it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in
subjection; and it imprints on the hearts of our own countrymen
the sense and obligation of benevolence.60

This passage has become famous, in the wake of Michel Foucault

and Edward Said, as an acknowledgment of the relationship between
power and knowledge. Little, if any, attention has been paid, how-
ever, to the commercial language in which Hastings figured that rela-
tionship. Unnoticed has been the way in which each phrase in the
passage refers to the idea of conciliation at its heart: “Knowledge … is
useful to the state” and “is the gain of humanity” because “it attracts
and conciliates distant affections.” Hastings thus signaled that his
idea of conciliation was to be realized through a system involving
scholarly patronage. He also signaled that there were two branches to
this system, corresponding to its two audiences, British and Indian.

Conciliating Britain
Contemporary British political opinion tended toward criticism of
the Company and anyone connected with it. Company officials, in
particular, were widely regarded as grasping, uncultivated “nabobs.”
Still, the negative views of commerce that underpinned such criti-
cism coexisted with positive ones. Hastings sought to mobilize the
latter through a policy of scholarly patronage. In a lofty vein, he
played to Enlightenment associations between knowledge and com-
merce. In a prosaic one, he asserted that importing knowledge was
part of the Company’s business. This dual approach was on display in
his two most ambitious scholarly projects: to compile and translate

60
Hastings to Nathaniel Smith, 4 Oct. 1784, in Charles Wilkins, trans., The Bhǎgvǎt
Gēētā (London, 1785), p. 13.

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 36 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

Hindu and Islamic laws, and to survey Bhutan and Tibet. Yet while
these projects yielded opportunities for conciliating Britain, they also
pointed up the distinct challenge of conciliating India.
Hastings had good reason to devote one branch of his “system”
to the metropole. There, he observed, Company officials had been vil-
ified and Indians likened to savages.61 Both sets of prejudices could be
traced to the Company’s rise to power in Bengal and to some extent
in the Carnatic, and to the “nabob controversy” that had erupted in
Britain as a result.62 As officials returned home, some swollen with
ill-gotten wealth, the “nabob” (from nawab) became a stock charac-
ter in plays, pamphlets, and parliamentary speeches. Modeled largely
on Robert Clive, the nabob of popular repute was a man of mercan-
tile origins and attitudes who threatened the socio-political order. He
embodied old anxieties about foreign commerce and new ones about
foreign conquest. And if his avarice and corruption made him rep-
rehensible, then so too did his ignorance and philistinism.63 As the
Company critic William Bolts put it, there was no reason to expect
advancements in knowledge from “one whose great object, [in] going
to India, is the acquisition of wealth.”64 The nabob was, in the words
of another writer, “equally hostile to literature and freedom.”65
Meanwhile, any knowledge the nabob had picked up was liable to be
tainted by Asiatic despotism and superstition. Such was the rhetoric
that continually circulated in Britain and obtruded upon Hastings
in India. No wonder that he concluded that “the English World”

61
Hastings to Scott, 2 to 9 Dec. 1784, f. 270r; Hastings to Smith, 4 Oct. 1784, p. 13.
62
The following discussion draws upon Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, “‘Our Execrable
Banditti’: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain,” Albion 16
(1984); James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to
Commerce in England, 1750–1800 (Oxford, 1992); Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs:
Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2010); James Watt,
British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (Cambridge, 2019), ch. 2.
63
The latter point has gone largely unrecognized in studies of the nabob controversy.
But for a discussion of how the cultural tastes of nabobs came under suspicion, see
Nechtman, Nabobs.
64
Bolts, Considerations, vol. I, p. 5.
65
Thomas Maurice, Indian Antiquities, 7 vols. (London [1793]–1800), vol. I (1794
edn), p. 57.

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 Conciliating Britain 37

distrusted everything to do with “the Indian World.”66 Conciliating

Britain, for Hastings, would entail rehabilitating the Company – its
servants, subjects, leaders, and of course himself.
Luckily for Hastings, the Enlightened commercial imagination
furnished equipment for such an undertaking. In seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Europe, criticism of merchants had often been
mitigated by the notion that trade and learning flourished together.
Francis Bacon had seen a link between “the opennesse and through-
passage of the world, and the encrease of knowledge.”67 Montesquieu
had submitted that “commerce has spread knowledge of the mores
of all nations everywhere.”68 Hastings would have been exposed to
such ideas at school, in books, and during a sojourn in England in
the late 1760s.69 It was at this time that he wrote “of the advan-
tages which might be derived to every branch of knowledge, from
an acquaintance with … the most remote nations.”70 He was calling
here for the creation of a Persian professorship at the University of
Oxford. But the same thinking could inspire more grandiose pro-
posals. Jacques-Pierre Brissot, for instance, conceived of a global
network of learned societies that would exchange knowledge by
means of the Company’s ships.71 Less grand philosophe than Grub
Street hack, Brissot was echoing ideas coming from both sides of the
English Channel.72 In 1774, Samuel Johnson sent Hastings a copy of
William Jones’ A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), which
foresaw that, thanks to “the flourishing state of our commerce …

66
Hastings to John Scott, 15 Apr. 1782, BL, Add. MS 29129, f. 41r.
67
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford,
2000), p. 71.
68
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C.
Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge, 1989), p. 338.
69
Hastings also implied in at least one letter that he was familiar with Montesquieu’s
writings. See Hastings to John Purling, 22 Feb. 1772, BL, Add. MS 29126, f. 128r.
70
[Hastings], Proposal, p. 5.
71
Jacques-Pierre Brissot, London Literary Lyceum; or, an Assembly and Correspondence
Established at London (London, 1783), p. 9.
72
See Robert Darnton, “The Grub Street Style of Revolution: J.-P. Brissot, Police Spy,”
Journal of Modern History 40 (1968).

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 38 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

the eastern nations will be perfectly known.”73 Johnson put the

matter directly to Hastings in an accompanying letter: With his
“attention and patronage,” those regions that supplied Europe with
luxuries might also inform it on “many subjects” on which it was
ignorant.74 There was more than a passing resemblance between
Johnson’s appeal and Hastings’ own claim that works like the Gita
translation “may open a new and most extensive Range for the
human mind.”75 What made this claim political was the identity of
the translation’s patron. Hastings made his argument explicit in the
preface: Because the Company was the greatest “commercial body”
in history, it offered Britain unequalled access to the “field of fruitful
knowledge.”76
Johnson and Jones were two sources for this argument, but
Hastings would also have encountered it in India. After all, other
Company officials were similarly exercised by metropolitan attacks
on nabobery. As one noted, the “pernicious” character of a govern-
ment composed of men fixated on “private Emolument … is now the
only theme instilld in us.”77 If a recent attribution is correct, then this
official was none other than Richard Johnson.78 After being recalled
from Lucknow in 1782 for amassing a fortune by dubious means,
Johnson insisted to Hastings that he was actually “very indifferent”
when it came to wealth. He requested to stay in northern India for
intellectual reasons: “My mind is bent upon compleating some liter-
ary objects in the Sa[n]skrit and Persian, and these can only be effected
at Luc[k]now or Delhi or Benares.”79 Perhaps Johnson was not being
entirely disingenuous. In his private notes, he outlined a plan to give

73
William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London, 1771), pp. xi–xiii.
74
Johnson to Hastings, 30 Mar. 1774, in Johnson, Letters, vol. II, p. 136.
75
Hastings, Minute, 9 Dec. 1783, BL, IOR H/207, p. 172.
76
Hastings to Smith, 4 Oct. 1784, pp. 5, 13.
77
[Richard Johnson], Journal (undated), Ames Library, Mss B 114, no. 6.
78
For the attribution, see Anna Clark and Aaron Windel, “The Early Roots of Liberal
Imperialism: ‘The Science of a Legislator’ in Eighteenth-Century India,” Journal of
Colonialism and Colonial History 14 (2013).
79
Johnson to Hastings, 15 Jul. 1782, BL, Add. MS 29155, f. 102r.

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 Conciliating Britain 39

“up all my advantages and Prospects in pursuit of my Studies.”80 This

plan never materialized. And yet, thanks in part to his reputation for
learning, Johnson eventually obtained a prestigious, if only modestly
paid, appointment as the Company’s resident at Hyderabad.81
Johnson was not the only scholar-official who reaped the ben-
efit of Enlightened associations between commerce and knowledge.
Another was the Bengal administrator and favorite of Hastings, David
Anderson. In 1772, Anderson wrote to his old Edinburgh schoolmas-
ter, enclosing an astrolabe and an account of the arts and sciences
of Asia.82 This scholarly turn, the schoolmaster replied, “surprises
and pleases me not a Little,” since Europeans in Asia were typically
obsessed with lucre. The schoolmaster expected that Anderson’s
“greater Thirst after knowledge and Wisdom than after the Golden
Calf so generally worshiped” would spare him from “the Reproachfull
Epithet of Nabob” upon his return. He also hoped that Anderson,
by following the trail of an earlier India merchant, might supply his
home country with a much sought-after article of knowledge:

Lord Monboddo relates and believes that a swede named

Koeping[,] Lieutennant aboard of a dutch East India Ship of force,
saw on the Island Nicobar in the Gulf of Bengal a race of men
with Taills like those of Catts which they moved in the same
manner …. [T]hey were Canniballs, for says the swede they
devoured five of the Crew …. Now as a tradition of these human
Cats … may yet Remain in the memory of some old inhabitant
on the Coast of that Gulf, it would not be pains or Labour Lost to
Enquire into the truth of … an ugly Tail with which his Lordship
is disgracefully painted in this Island.83

80
[Richard Johnson], Notes (undated), John Rylands Library, GB 133 Eng MS 194, no. 14.
81
See P. J. Marshall, “Johnson, Richard, (1753–1807),” Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/63514.
82
Anderson to Alexander Mackenzie, 11 Sept. 1772, BL, Add. MS 45438, ff. 70r–73v.
83
Alexander Mackenzie to Anderson, 5 Jun. 1773, BL, Add. MS 45430, ff. 282v–284v.
An assistant surgeon in the Company’s service later did investigate the subject, while
on a visit to the Nicobar Islands, and concluded that “this supposed tail, may have

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 40 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

Whether or not Anderson ever looked into Monboddo’s “ugly Tail,”

or shared with Hastings the contents of the schoolmaster’s letter,
this exchange showed how the governor-general might exploit asso-
ciations between commerce and knowledge to rescue the nabob and
the Company.
But if Hastings entertained lofty views, then he also emphasized
prosaic ones. He presented the Company as an importer of knowl-
edge that would be useful as well as curious to his British audience.
He remitted plant and animal specimens with an eye to introduc-
ing new commodities to the metropole.84 Even the Gita preface and
translation he told his London agent to defend as “Business” and not
“Levities.”85 Hastings clearly anticipated the charge that his schol-
arly projects were fanciful indulgences. Accordingly, he entrusted
them to scholar-officials who combined “capacity for business” with
“liberal knowledge”; men like Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, “who with
a Genius adapted equally to the first Compositions of Judgment and
Imagination, could … unravel the Intricacies of a Salt Account, or
… study the Reports of a Com[mitt]ee of the H[ous]e of Commons.”
There was a further reason that Hastings appreciated such men of
“universal talents”: Critics of the Company like Bolts often staked
their own credibility on their varied expertise.86 In A Grammar of
the Bengal Language (1778), a work proposed and patronized by
Hastings, Halhed dismissed Bolts’ linguistic and typographic abili-
ties. Whereas, according to Halhed, Bolts had a questionable grasp
of Bengali and had “egregiously failed” to produce a set of types in
the language, Hastings’ protégé Wilkins had succeeded in this task
beyond “every expectation.”87 Thus, the practical held political

been the stripe of cloth hanging down from their [the human inhabitants’] posteri-
ors.” Nicolas Fontana, “On the Nicobar Isles and the Fruit of the Mellori,” Asiatick
Researches 3 (Calcutta, 1792), pp. 151–2 n. †.
84
Marshall, “Warren Hastings,” pp. 251–3.
85
Hastings to Scott, 2 to 9 Dec. 1784, ff. 270v, 275r.
86
Hastings to Halhed, 2 Nov. 1783, BL, Add. MS 29129, f. 194v; Hastings to Smith, 4
Oct. 1784, p. 12; Hastings, Minute (14 Oct. 1776), NLS, MS.1072, f. 92r.
87
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, A Grammar of the Bengal Language (Hoog[h]ly, 1778), p. xxiii.

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 Conciliating Britain 41

significance for Hastings and coexisted with the profound in many

of his scholarly ventures. Certainly, it did so in his two greatest ones.
Two projects dominated the British branch of Hastings’ system
of conciliation. One was the compilation and translation of Hindu and
Islamic laws. With this project, Hastings sought to facilitate the busi-
ness of the courts set up by his administration and by the Regulating
Act, but also to improve British opinion of the “Indian World.” Hence,
in one letter on the subject, he wrote of freeing Indians “from the
reproach of ignorance and barbarism”; in another, he avowed a zealous
regard for the “credit and interest” of the directors; on many occasions,
he praised the scholar-officials involved in the work; and finally, he
admitted the further aim of obtaining “public credit” for himself.88 The
project yielded several publications, which were fulsome in their praise
of Hastings, in particular, and which he ensured would reach promi-
nent jurists, scholars, and politicians at the metropole.89 One reader
who responded in what must have been the desired manner was the
historian Robert Orme. In 1775, Orme wrote to Hastings after perusing
the manuscript of Halhed’s A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776):

The educated world have received with the greatest satisfaction

the portion you have sent of the laws of Bengal, and earnestly wish
the continuation and accomplishment of a work, which does you
so much honour. I always thought that such a work must be the
basis of any reasonable government exercised by us; but always
despaired of its execution, knowing to what other views and objects
the abilities of Europeans have hitherto been directed in Indostan.
The silent step of philosophy is gaining ground every day; and your
name will not be forgot amongst the foremost of her disciples, for
the valuable present you are making to learning and reason.90

88
Hastings to Johnson, 7 Aug. 1775, p. 18; Hastings to Lord Mansfield, 20 Jan. 1776, in
MWH, vol. II, p. 22; Hastings to Directors, 21 Feb. 1784, in MWH, vol. III, p. 160.
89
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, trans., A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the
Pundits (London, 1776), pp. vi–vii; Charles Hamilton, trans., The Hedaya, or Guide;
A Commentary on the Mussulman Laws, 4 vols. (London, 1791), vol. I, pp. i–ii.
90
Orme to Hastings, 14 Jan. 1775, in Robert Orme, Historical Fragments of the Mogul
Empire (London, 1805), p. xxxvi.

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 42 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

What Orme expressed privately others did so before a wide audience.

Several leading magazines carried favorable notices and extracts of
Halhed’s Code. Hastings’ larger system even received visual endorse-
ment, in James Rennell’s map Hindoostan (1782), to which he had
also leant his support. The cartouche of the map, between marginal
illustrations of war and commerce, depicted a group of pandits (Hindu
learned elites) entrusting to Britannia their shastras (laws).91 It thus
bid the observer to regard the Company state as devoted – centrally
no less – to the cause of knowledge.
Hastings’ other major project to conciliate Britain comprised
two expeditions to Bhutan and Tibet. In 1774 and again in 1783,
he dispatched envoys to these secluded countries northeast of
Bengal. One purpose was political: to establish diplomatic relations.
Another was commercial: to evaluate the prospects of trade and of a
land route to China. But the “intercourse with distant nations” that
Hastings hoped to stimulate had an intellectual component as well.92
Hastings instructed his first envoy, George Bogle, to correspond reg-
ularly on the trade, government, history, religion, and topography
of the places he visited.93 Bogle must also keep a diary, inserting
information on “the people, the country, the climate, or the road,
their manners, customs, buildings, cookery &c.” Finally, he must
obtain specimens of “useful” or “remarkably curious” animals; of
“curious or valuable seeds or plants”; and of “natural productions,
manufactures, paintings, or what else may be acceptable to persons
of taste in England.”94 Hastings expected that he and Bogle “should
both acquire reputation” from the mission’s success, but even a fail-
ure might be compensated by additions to European knowledge. “Do
not return,” he instructed him, “without something to show where
you have been, though it be but a contraband walnut, a pilfered slip

91
James Rennell, Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan (London, 1783), frontispiece.
92
Hastings to Bogle, 10 Aug. 1774, in Alastair Lamb, ed., Bhutan and Tibet: The Travels of
George Bogle and Alexander Hamilton, 1774–1777 (Hertingfordbury, UK, 2002), p. 120.
93
Hastings to Bogle, 13 May 1774, in ibid., pp. 46–7; Hastings, Memorandum (1774), in
ibid., pp. 52–5.
94
Hastings to Bogle, 16 May 1774, in ibid., pp. 47–8.

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 Conciliating Britain 43

of sweet briar, or the seeds of a Bhutanese turnip.”95 The commerce

that Hastings envisioned with Bhutan and Tibet was, in large part, a
commerce of knowledge.
After all, in Hastings’ view, it was the intellectual component
of the expedition that would serve to conciliate Britain. As he wrote
to Bogle,

I feel myself more interested in the success of your mission than

in reason perhaps I ought to be; but there are thousands of men
in England whose good-will is worth seeking, and who will listen
to the story of such enterprises in search of knowledge with ten
times more avidity than they would read accounts that brought
crores [tens of millions] to the national credit, or descriptions of
victories that slaughtered thousands of the national enemies.96

For this reason, upon Bogle’s return to Calcutta in 1775, Hastings

sought to have his bulging journal edited and published with the aid
of Samuel Johnson.97 Unfortunately, according to the testimony of
Bogle’s brother, “the Doctor died before it came home.”98 In 1777,
however, Hastings had his agent John Stewart draw up an account
of the young envoy’s discoveries to read before the Royal Society.
Stewart’s account likewise served a conciliatory purpose: It praised
Hastings for seizing “every opportunity which could … tend to the
advancement of natural knowledge.”99 Meanwhile, after plans for a
second embassy were suspended, Hastings continued to ask Bogle

95
Hastings to Bogle, 10 Aug. 1774, in ibid. pp. 118–19.
96
Hastings to Bogle, 8 Sept. 1774, in ibid. p. 122.
97
Hastings to Johnson, 7 Aug. 1775, pp. 19–20.
98
Robert Bogle to Henry Dundas, 23 Aug. 1799, Cleveland Public Library, 091.92 B634L.
This is surprising, for Johnson did not die until 1784, but perhaps the journal was
misplaced or delayed in transit.
99
John Stewart, “An Account of the Kingdom of Thibet. In a Letter from John Stewart,
Esquire, F. R. S. to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S.,” Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society of London 47 (1777), p. 469. The same purpose would seem to have been
served by a painting of Bogle’s first meeting with the Panchen Lama that was com-
missioned by Hastings and presented to George III. Kate Teltscher, The High Road
to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama and the First British Expedition to Tibet
(London, 2006), p. 176.

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 44 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

to procure botanical specimens through intermediaries. Placing an

order for some Bhutanese cinnamon in 1780, he foreshadowed his
later remark on the “business” achieved by the Gita translation
and preface: “You w[oul]d wonder that I could write to you on such
Trifles, if you knew what weighty concerns pressed upon my Mind.
But I do not think this altogether a Trifle.”100 By the time a second
embassy materialized three years later, Bogle had died. Hastings
renewed his instructions to his replacement, Samuel Turner: “extend
your enquiries to every subject which a scene so new may afford …
for at least it will be no Discredit to you to have added to the store of
Knowledge.”101
Yet while Hastings fancied that his vision of an intellectual
commerce would be embraced at the courts of Bhutan and Tibet,
his envoys continually found themselves suspected of harboring sin-
ister motives. On one occasion, Bogle learned that the shah (king)
of neighboring Nepal sought to bar the Company from bringing to
Tibet scientific objects like telescopes and clocks. Might he sus-
pect the Company of importing arms, Bogle wondered, or of trying
to outshine his own emissaries in Lhasa? On another occasion, the
Panchen Lama proffered Bogle “a map of Tibet from Ladakh to the
frontier of China,” which included tantalizing details missing from
European maps. Tempted as Bogle was by this “splendid” present,
which “would reflect much lustre on my commission,” he was
forced to turn it down, lest he increase “that jealousy, which had …
thwarted me in all my negotiations.” It seemed that such incidents,
and such “jealousy,” were imputable to the growing notoriety of the
Company. Bogle learned that the vakil (ambassador) of Raja Chait
Singh of Benares had “described the English as a people designing and
ambitious; who, insinuating themselves into a country on pretence

100
Hastings to Bogle, 1 Mar. 1780, Glasgow City Archives, TD1681/74.
101
NAI, Bengal Public Consultations (13 Mar. 1783), no. 10. Hastings told another cor-
respondent that “Turner’s Embassy … will at least satisfy curiosity.” Hastings to John
Macpherson [Apr. to May 1783], in Warren Hastings’ Letters to Sir John Macpherson,
ed. Henry Dodwell (London, 1927), p. 189.

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 Conciliating India 45

of trade, became acquainted with its situation and inhabitants, and

afterwards endeavoured to becomes masters of it.” The vakil denied
the charge and implicated the agent of another grandee instead. But
the source of these remarks was almost beside the point: As the
Panchen Lama told Bogle, “many people” had warned him against
dealing with the Company.102 The suspicion that commerce, includ-
ing the commerce of knowledge, was but an accessory to conquest
threatened to undermine Hastings’ policy.
Hastings worried that, were his embassies to fail, his larger
scheme to conciliate Britain would suffer.103 Even were they to suc-
ceed, it boded ill that grievances against the Company had reached
this remote aerie. In the long term, suspicion of British designs on
Tibet would profoundly shape Chinese policy toward the Company.104
More immediately, in 1781, the rebellion of Chait Singh spread
across northern India and nearly cost Hastings his life. Had the rebel-
lion succeeded, Hastings and others believed, the Company might
have been driven out of India for good. To conciliate Britain was one
matter; to conciliate India another.

Conciliating India
Indian opinion was as much a concern for Hastings as its British coun-
terpart. He perceived that the grip of the Company in Bengal was tenu-
ous and that powerholders in the region must be conciliated. One way
to do this, it appeared to him, was to patronize “respectable” Indian
scholars. According to his sources, such scholars had long been key par-
ticipants in the “commerce” between Indian rulers and political classes.
Some were themselves aristocrats, zamindars, or other individuals of
status and authority. Others, especially maulvis (Muslim learned elites)
and pandits, were believed to exercise influence with such individu-
als. Hastings’ attempt to conciliate India, therefore, was essentially an

102
Bogle, Journal, in Lamb, ed., Bhutan and Tibet, pp. 212, 216–17, 239–40, 243.
103
See Hastings to Bogle, 10 Aug. 1774, p. 118.
104
Mathew Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and
the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford, 2013).

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 46 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

attempt to cultivate Indian elites. But if the exigencies of the Company

state presented opportunities for this strategy, then they also presented
obstacles. At the same time, some of Hastings’ most ambitious ventures
raised the prospect of an altogether different form of conciliation.
When Hastings wrote in the Gita preface of conciliating “dis-
tant affections,” he referred to those of the Indian world as well as the
British world. And when he called for lightening “the chain by which
the natives are held in subjection,” he invoked a political imperative
as well as a moral one. Writing shortly after Hastings’ departure, Haji
Mustafa, the translator of Ghulam Husain’s Siyar al-Muta‘akhkhirin,
censured the Company for seeing Indians as “a dead stock, that may
be worked upon without much consideration.” He enjoined it to
treat them with “a more watchful eye” but especially with “a more
winning deportment, and a more caressing hand.” Finally, he warned
that there persisted across the Company’s territories “a subterrane-
ous vein of national resentment,” which, until Chait Singh’s rebel-
lion, had been known to only “eight or ten” Company officials. One
of these men would have been Mustafa’s longtime friend and patron,
Hastings.105 Indeed, Hastings was well aware of the precariousness of
the Company in India. He acknowledged that “this government sub-
sists more by the influence of public opinion than by its real power or
resources.”106 Like other officials, he denied that the Company was
accountable to an Indian “public,” yet he grasped that it could not
maintain its position through domination alone.107 The Company
needed Indian allies; men who would not be “dead stock” but instead
participants in an active “commerce.” Ghulam Husain and other
authorities recommended one sort of ally in particular.
According to these sources, Indian rulers had long endeared
themselves to their subjects by patronizing learned individuals.

105
Nota Manus [Haji Mustafa], preface [2 Nov. 1786] to [Ghulam Husain], Seir, vol. I,
pp. 21, 22, 27, 31.
106
Hastings to the Earl of Shelburne, 12 Dec. 1782, in MWH, vol. III, p. 23.
107
See P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and
America c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 256–70.

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 Conciliating India 47

Ghulam Husain praised earlier nawabs of Bengal for gathering

scholars at court, conversing with them, and showering them with
rewards.108 Mustafa held that “learning is the sure road to hon-
our” in India: “Men of eminent learning are treated as equals by
the Princes of the country.”109 Salim Allah made much the same
point in his Tarikh-i Bangala (c. 1760–4), as did Alexander Dow in
his History of Hindostan (1768–72).110 “No princes in the world,”
Dow averred, “patronised men of letters with more generosity and
respect, than the Mahommedan Emperors of Hindostan.” Scholars
stood in such high credit, he claimed, that “literary genius was …
an infallible road for rising to the first offices of the state.”111 The
message of Dow, Ghulam Husain, Salim Allah, Mustafa, and other
interpreters of the Mughal inheritance was that this policy must
be emulated by the new rulers if they were to replicate the success
of the old ones.
This expectation helps to explain the crisis that Hastings trig-
gered, in 1772, when he arrested the naib nazim Muhammad Reza
Khan. The nawab’s deputy in name, Reza Khan, as Hastings recog-
nized, was “in real authority more than the Nâzim.”112 The charges
against the Khan were dubious, but Hastings dutifully pressed them at
the behest of the directors.113 Four months later, he complained that
“Reza Cawn’s influence still prevailed generally throughout the coun-
try.”114 Hastings (and the directors) had misjudged not only the extent

108
[Ghulam Husain], Seir, vol. I, pp. 20–21, 685–716, vol. II, pp. 197–9, 462–3, 536.
109
[Mustafa], in ibid., vol. I, p. 264 n. 211. See also ibid., vol. II, p. 305 n. 141.
110
Salim Allah, Tarikh-i Bangala (c. 1760–4), trans. Francis Gladwin, as A Narrative of
the Transactions in Bengal (Calcutta, 1788), pp. 24, 115–18.
111
Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, 2 vols. (London, 1768–72), vol. I, p. x.
112
Hastings to Secret Committee, 1 Sept. 1772, in MWH, vol. 1, p. 247. Edmund Burke
would later describe Reza Khan as uniting “the character of First Lord of the Treasury,
the character of chief Justice, the character of Lord High Chancellor and the character
of Archbishop of Canterbury.” Edmund Burke, “Speech on Sixth Article: Presents”
(21 Apr. 1789), in Burke, Writings and Speeches, vol. VII, p. 45.
113
Abdul Majed Khan, The Transition in Bengal, 1756–1775: A Study of Saiyid
Muhammad Reza Khan (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 294–349.
114
Hastings to Secret Committee, 1 Sept. 1772, p. 250.

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 48 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

but also the basis of the Khan’s support. He was a canny operator, true,
but he also embodied the Mughal ideal of the learned bureaucrat:

He has a very good Understanding, improved first by Education,

and afterwards by long Practice in publick Affairs. His Learning …
is … greater than can often be found in Bengal, even among
professed Scholars. He seems to have an extensive Acquaintance
not only with Persian but Arabian Authours, has obtained, from
Arabick Translations of Greek Books, some Knowledge of the
Philosophy and even of the Politicks of ancient Greece, and has
been thereby … enabled to understand so well as he does … our
Constitution and Government.115

So wrote one supporter of the Khan, the Calcutta Supreme Court

judge Robert Chambers. Even Ghulam Husain, a rival as well as a
discerning critic, could not deny the Khan’s intellect.116 For friends
and enemies alike, the ruination of this “fountain of knowledge”
over “a few lakh [hundred thousand] rupees” reinforced existing
criticisms of the Company.117 So too did Hastings’ reduction of the
nawab Mubarak ud-Daula’s stipend within weeks of the arrest.118
Apart from the nawab and his dependents, the stipend supported
“a number of deserving persons,” among them scholars, “to whom
attention had always been paid.”119 As Hastings himself acknowl-
edged, it represented the only provision for hundreds “of the ancient
nobility of the Country, excluded under our government from almost
all employments.”120 But if Hastings anticipated a backlash, then

115
Chambers to Charles Jenkinson, 25 Mar. 1778, BL, Add. MS 38401, ff. 94r–v. On
this ideal, see Rajeev Kinra, “The Learned Ideal of the Mughal Wazı̄r: The Life and
Intellectual World of Prime Minister Afzal Khan Shirazi (d. 1639),” in Paul M. Dover,
ed., Secretaries and Statecraft in the Early Modern World (Edinburgh, 2016).
116
[Ghulam Husain], Seir, vol. II, p. 539.
117
Karam Ali, Muzaffarnama, pp. 383, 482.
118
Khan, Transition, pp. 327–9.
119
[Ghulam Husain], Seir, vol. II, p. 426.
120
Secret Letter from Bengal, 10 Nov. 1772, in Monckton Jones, Warren Hastings, p. 191.
See also John Stewart, “A Letter from John Stewart, Secretary and Judge Advocate of
Bengal, 1773,” ed. L. S. Sutherland, Indian Archives 10 (1956), p. 6.

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 Conciliating India 49

he may not have appreciated its scale until Reza Khan was exoner-
ated in 1774. Not only was the Khan now at liberty to oppose the
Company but he warned that other Indians “of consequence” would
do so too.121
Hastings’ plans to conciliate India thus took shape around an
urgent need to patronize Indian learned elites. The business of the
Company threw up opportunities in this regard but also obstacles.
One channel of patronage was the legal system created by Hastings
and by the Regulating Act in the early 1770s. Hastings sought out the
“most respectable” pandits and maulvis from “every part of Bengal”
to staff the new courts and to compile and translate Hindu and
Islamic laws. When his protégé Nathaniel Brassey Halhed claimed
that such efforts would “conciliate … the Natives,” he was allud-
ing mainly to these learned elites and their powerful connections.122
Several maulvis and pandits declined or resigned employment with
the Company, apparently because of its political connotations.123
Those who accepted and remained understood that they were lend-
ing their names in support of it. Hence, Maulvi Majd ud-Din, who
had been a courtier of the nawab of Awadh, could demand treat-
ment befitting his value.124 Hence, too, the eleven pandits and four
maulvis who helped to compile and translate the laws accepted it as
part of their duty to write in praise of their employer.125 As the news
and fruits of Hastings’ patronage circulated among India’s political

121
Charles Goring to Philip Francis, Dec. 1774, cited in Khan, Transition, p. 346.
122
Halhed, trans., Code, pp. ix–x. By “Gentoos” Halhed seems to have meant elite
Brahmans. See Sushil Srivastava, “Constructing the Hindu Identity: European Moral
and Intellectual Adventurism in 18th Century India,” Economic and Political Weekly
33 (1998), p. 1185.
123
See Calendar of Persian Correspondence, 11 vols. (Calcutta and Delhi, 1911–69), vol.
V, pp. 194–5; Rosane Rocher, “The Career of Rādhākānta Tarkavāgı¯ śa, an Eighteenth-
Century Pandit in British Employ,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 109
(1989), pp. 628, 633.
124
See John Hyde, Notes (12 Jul. 1782), Victoria Memorial Hall, Hyde Notebooks;
William Jones, Notebook, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn c400, p. [3].
125
Halhed, trans., Code, pp. 3–5; Hamilton, trans., Hedaya, vol. I, pp. ix–xii. See also
Charles Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols.
(London, 1879), vol. I, pp. 63–4; Rocher, “Career of Rādhākānta,” p. 628.

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 50 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

classes, so too would his good reputation and that of the Company.
Or, at least, so he imagined.
In March 1777, Hastings was vexed to discover on two
mahzarnamas (memorials) “intended to vilify my character” the sig-
nature of one of his favorite maulvis:

Of the little weight that Gratitude bears in the Scale of Indian

Policy, both Lists afford a remarkable Instance in Golam Yahyah
Cawn whose name appears in both. He was without Employment
and little known, but as a Man of Learning I employed him to
translate the Mahomedan Laws from the Arabic into the Persian
Language with other Molavies to assist him, with monthly
salaries … during three years to an Amount which I am ashamed
to mention. He was afterwards appointed by me to the Cauzy ul
Cazaut or head Cauzee [judge] of the Province, which Office he
since holds under Mahomed Reza Cawn. He has been taxed with
having been privy to this Affair and has solemnly denied it.126

The two mahzarnamas raised numerous questions for Hastings.

Had one been composed by Afaz ud-Din Husaini, a maulvi under
Reza Khan’s control? Was the Khan himself involved, notwith-
standing his denials? Who else had seen the documents? Were the
signatures even genuine? Whatever the answers, Hastings expressed
confidence that the mahzarnamas would do him little harm either
in India or in Britain. His perturbation stemmed instead from the
fact that so many “Nobles and Worthies” – not least his client
Ghulam Yahya Khan – had ostensibly affixed their names.127 One
possible lesson from this affair was that loyalty could not always
be bought, that Reza Khan still commanded a greater share than

126
Hastings to John Graham and Lauchlin Macleane, 5 Mar. 1777, BL, Add. MS 29128, ff.
45v–46r. On mahzarnamas, see Nandini Chatterjee, “Mahzar-namas in the Mughal
and British Empires: The Uses of an Indo-Islamic Legal Form,” Contemporary Studies
in Society and History 58 (2016).
127
Hastings to Graham and Macleane, 5 Mar. 1777, ff. 44r–46v; Hastings to George
Vansittart, 5 to 28 Mar. 1777, BL, Add. MS 48370, ff. 41r–43v, 47r–54v.

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 Conciliating India 51

Hastings of elite affection. Another was that, for many elites, sid-
ing with the Khan still appeared to be a better bet. In 1775, the
council majority restored Reza Khan to the office of naib nazim,
from which Hastings would be able to oust him again only tempo-
rarily. Ghulam Yahya’s response to this second ouster suggested
that he may well have had flexible or divided loyalties. Mere
months after eulogizing Hastings in the translator’s preface to the
law tract Hidaya-i Farsi, Ghulam Yahya resigned his position as
qazi ul-quzat, reportedly in solidarity with the dismissed Khan.128
When he died in 1784, having reassumed this position, Hastings
made sure that a more dependable ally – Ahmad, the brother of
Majd ud-Din – succeeded him.129
Hastings fared better with another jurist, the Mughal aristo-
crat Ali Ibrahim Khan. Distinguished also as a poet and historian,
and well-connected, Ali Ibrahim was the kind of learned elite that
Hastings sought to cultivate. His opportunity came when a dispute
with Reza Khan resulted in Ali Ibrahim’s dismissal from the court
of the nawab. Hastings invited the nobleman, who had been reduced
to living “at his own house in obscurity and retirement,” to accom-
pany him on a tour upcountry. Not only did Hastings’ overture earn
the approval of Ghulam Husain, who dubbed him “a connoisseur of
the first rate,” but it proved decisive in forging an alliance with Ali
Ibrahim.130 For it was during the visit of Hastings’ suite to Benares
in August 1781 that tensions with Chait Singh came to a head and
northern India erupted in rebellion. Presenting himself as a victim of
the Company’s aggression, Chait Singh mounted a campaign to draw
rulers and grandees across the region to his standard. Yet Ali Ibrahim,
steeped in the establishmentarian politics of the Mughal court, saw
the “raja” as merely a zamindar who had forgotten his place. The tri-
umph of this view among the regional aristocracy was, in large part,

128
Calendar of Persian Correspondence, vol. V, pp. 120, 194–5, 197.
129
Ibid., vol. VI, pp. 368, 372, 393.
130
[Ghulam Husain], Seir, vol. II, pp. 469–73, vol. III, p. 330.

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 52 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

what prevented the rebellion from getting out of hand.131 And here,
Ali Ibrahim may have contributed decisively. While Hastings framed
a justification of his actions toward Chait Singh in English, Ali
Ibrahim drew up a complementary narrative in Persian.132 Declaring
himself a “well-wisher” and “intermediary” of the Company, Ali
Ibrahim dwelt upon Hastings’ reasonableness and fidelity as com-
pared with Chait Singh’s “evil ways.”133 That autumn, with the
uprising quelled and Benares annexed to the Company, Hastings
repaid Ali Ibrahim’s loyalty by appointing him chief magistrate. “It is
chiefly from the reliance which I have in him personally,” Hastings
wrote, “that I have ventured to delegate a degree of authority to him,
which it would perhaps be unsafe to vest in a person of a less estab-
lished character.”134 This judgment would prove well founded: Ali
Ibrahim maintained the esteem of the city’s leading figures and of the
Company until his death in 1793.
Hastings also had notable success enlisting Indian learned
elites as vakils (ambassadors). His greatest prize in this category was
the remarkable Tafazzul Husain Khan. Born to a prominent fam-
ily of Mughal administrators, Tafazzul studied rational sciences in
the Greco-Arabic tradition before serving as a tutor to the second
son of the nawab of Awadh. Finding himself on the wrong side of a
dynastic struggle in 1776, Tafazzul was forced to flee the court and,
during a period of exile, was drawn into the orbit of the Company.

131
G. F. Grand, The Narrative of the Life of a Gentleman Long Resident in India (1814),
ed. Walter K. Firminger (Calcutta, 1910), p. 110.
132
Ali Ibrahim Khan, Tarikh-i Chait Singh, BL, Or. 1865, ff. 36r–40v; Warren Hastings, A
Narrative of the Insurrection Which Happened in the Zemeedary of Banaris (Calcutta,
1782). See Shayesta Khan, A Biography of Ali Ibrahim Khan (circa 1740–1793): A
Mughal Noble in the Administrative Service of the British East India Company
(Patna, 1992), pp. 155–9; Nandini Chatterjee, “Hindu City and Just Empire: Banaras
and India in Ali Ibrahim Khan’s Legal Imagination,” Journal of Colonialism and
Colonial History 15 (2014). Hastings also commissioned another Indian poet to com-
pose an epic work on the occasion. James White, “On the Road: The Life and Verse
of Mir Zeyn al-Din ‘Eshq, a Forgotten Eighteenth-Century Poet,” Iranian Studies 53
(2020), pp. 797–803.
133
Ali Ibrahim, Tarikh-i Chait Singh, ff. 36r, 36v, 38r.
134
Hastings to Supreme Council, 1 Nov. 1781, in Hastings, Narrative, Appendix, p. 22.

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 Conciliating India 53

After befriending the officials William Palmer and David Anderson,

he was sent by Hastings to help the one to negotiate with the rana
of Gohad and the other to conclude a treaty with the maharaja of
Gwalior. By this time, Hastings was on personal terms with Tafazzul
and appreciated the political value of his reputation “throughout the
country for … integrity and knowledge.”135 Upon sending Palmer
to Gohad in 1781, he assured him that “Tofuzzal Hussein Cawn is
already fully informed …. I have much reliance on his abilities.”136
Meanwhile, having arrived before Palmer, Tafazzul apprised the
governor-general that “I am diligently employed in enquiring into
every particular of the State of this Quarter.” Within days, Tafazzul
had succeeded not only in making the rana “truly & Sincerely
attached to him [Hastings]” but also in forging friendly relations with
“learned Men,” other “Men of Distinction[,] & Rajahs.”137 Palmer
would soon confirm Tafazzul’s achievements, writing to Hastings,
“He is the most able & faithful adherent which you could have
given me & his services have been inestimable.”138 In Anderson’s
later recollection, Tafazzul was no less a boon to the negotiations
in Gwalior the following year. “As he wrote the Persian language
with uncommon elegance,” it was Tafazzul who penned Anderson’s
letters of introduction to the maharaja and other Maratha leaders.
As he was a skillful and erudite speaker, he far outclassed his oppo-
nent in the ensuing negotiations. “In all my intercourse with the
natives of India,” Anderson summarized, “I never knew any man
who combined, in so eminent a degree, great talents for public
business, profound learning, and the liberal ideas and manners of
a gentleman.”139 At the time of Hastings’ departure, Tafazzul had
not yet begun the project for which he would be most remembered:

135
Hastings to Supreme Council, 25 Nov. 1781, in Hastings, Narrative, p. 57.
136
Hastings to Palmer [1781], John Rylands Library, GB 1313 Eng MS 173, no. 24.
137
Tafazzul to brother [Rahmatullah Khan], 13 to 23 Feb. [1781], BL, Add. MS 29123, ff.
103r, 106r, 108r.
138
Palmer to Hastings, 21 Mar. 1781, BL, Add. MS 29148, f. 151r.
139
Anderson, cited in “An Account of the Life and Character of Tofuzzel Hussein Khan,”
Asiatic Annual Register [5] (1804), “Characters,” pp. 2–4.

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 54 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

a translation of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687). But Hastings

commissioned him to procure, and apparently to produce, scientific
manuscripts and leant early support to his collaborator, the math-
ematician Reuben Burrow.140 Tafazzul likely figured in a project
of Burrow’s to establish an observatory, which Hastings approved
shortly before leaving India.141 This was one of several projects that
suggested that Hastings’ plans for conciliating India went beyond
individual patronage.
Two other such projects were a Hindu college that Hastings
pledged to build in Benares, also shortly before his departure, and a
madrasa that he did in fact build in Calcutta. Like the observatory,
these institutions were rooted in patronage and yet pointed toward
greater conciliatory possibilities. The Hindu college seems to have
been inspired at least in part by the example of Raja Krishnachandra,
the influential zamindar or little king of Nadia. Krishnachandra owed
his preeminent status among Hindus in Bengal to his reputation as
a scholar and patron of scholars. He stocked his court with lead-
ing poets, astronomers, philosophers, and physicians.142 He devel-
oped Nadia’s colleges into “the most frequented as well as the most
learned university in the east.”143 No wonder that Hastings con-
tacted Krishnachandra on learned matters and inquired into how the
Company could support his “university.”144 Yet an alliance was not
to be. Krishnachandra was in debt to the Company, whose officials

140
Hastings to Charles Wilkins, 7 Apr. 1809, cited in Peter Gordon, The Oriental
Repository at the India House [London, 1835], p. 3; Calendar of Persian
Correspondence, vol. VI, pp. 296, 397. On the activities of Tafazzul and Burrow, see
Simon Schaffer, “The Asiatic Enlightenments of British Astronomy,” in Schaffer
et al., eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820
(Sagamore Beach, MA, 2009).
141
R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India (Dehra Dun, 1945), vol. I,
pp. 162–3.
142
Bharatchandra Ray, In Praise of Annada (1752), trans. France Bhattacharya, 2 vols.
(Cambridge, MA, 2017–20), vol. I, pp. 41–51.
143
“Particular Account of the Nuddeah University,” Calcutta Monthly Register and
India Repository (Jan. 1791), p. 137.
144
Joshua Ehrlich, “New Lights on Raja Krishnachandra and Early Hindu-European
Intellectual Exchange,” JRAS 3rd ser. 31 (2021).

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 Conciliating India 55

considered him untrustworthy.145 Hastings must also have seen more

advantage in making his own reputation for learning than in elevat-
ing that of the raja. He lured several pandits from Krishnachandra’s
court to work on the Code of Gentoo Laws.146 Rather than restore a
former grant to the colleges of Nadia, he formed plans to establish
a college of his own in Benares.147 The new institution would be a
font of patronage for pandits, especially Kasinath Sarma, who report-
edly conceived of it in the first place and sought Hastings’ support.148
The pandits could be expected to sway other elites in favor of the
Company. But Hastings seems to have been pursuing a still wider
constituency. Since Benares was a holy city for Hindus, he wrote,
attentions to it served to “conciliat[e] a great People to a Dominion
which they see with envy and bear with reluctance.”149
A similar dual logic, patronizing learned elites while grasping
toward a broader mode of politics, informed Hastings’ founding of
the Calcutta Madrasa. The institution also appears to have originated
under similar circumstances. In 1774, Hastings restored a former
grant to the maulvi Amsa ud-Din for the maintenance of his madrasa
in the Burdwan district. One zamindar after another refused to honor
the agreement and Hastings allowed it to lapse.150 Again, however,
he proved willing to exert himself when given the chance to estab-
lish a college in the Company’s name. Such an opportunity arose

145
David L. Curley, “Maharaja Krisnacandra, Hinduism, and Kingship in the Contact
Zone of Bengal,” in Richard B. Barnett, ed., Rethinking Early Modern India (New
Delhi, 2002), p. 223; Ratan Dasgupta, “Maharaja Krishnachandra: Religion, Caste
and Polity in Eighteenth Century Bengal,” Indian Historical Review 38 (2011), pp.
227–30.
146
Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770–1870
(Basingstoke, 2007), p. 49.
147
Ehrlich, “New Lights,” p. 162.
148
Kasinath, Petition (1801), trans. in Surendranath Sen and Umesha Mishra, introduc-
tion to Sen and Mishra, eds., Sanskrit Documents: Being Sanskrit Letters and Other
Documents Preserved in the Oriental Collection at the National Archives of India
(Allahabad, 1951), p. 58. After the college was established in 1791, Kasinath served as
its first principal.
149
Hastings, cited in Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 236.
150
Chambers to Jenkinson, 25 Mar. 1778, f. 96r; Calendar of Persian Correspondence,
vol. VIII, pp. 70–72.

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 56 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

six years later, when “Mussulmen of Credit and Learning” petitioned

him to build a madrasa for the maulvi Majd ud-Din. According to
Hastings, the petition reflected “the Belief which generally pre-
vailed that Men so accomplished usually met with a distinguished
Reception from myself.” And he implied that this was a belief that
he intended to perpetuate. At one level, therefore, in founding the
madrasa Hastings was bidding for the allegiance of Majd ud-Din and
his supporters. At another, however, he was bidding for the alle-
giance of the institution’s future students and scholars, and even
of a class of Indian society. Since the Company’s assumption of
the diwani, Hastings observed, most of the Muslim revenue offi-
cials favored by the old regime had been replaced by Hindus and
Europeans. At the same time, the decline of the Mughal Empire had
led to “the Decline of Learning” in towns and cities across India.
Hence, the madrasa was meant to qualify “the once respectable,
but now decayed and impoverished Mahometan families” for work
in the Company’s courts and police. It was also meant to promote
“the Growth and Extension of liberal Knowledge” even beyond the
Company’s borders. Hastings boasted that in its early months, still
operating on a limited basis, the institution was already drawing
students from Kashmir, Gujarat, and the Carnatic.151 In 1784, he
apprised the directors that “it has contributed to extend the credit
of the Company’s name, and to soften the prejudices excited by the
rapid growth of the British dominions.”152
While Hastings’ plans for the colleges in Benares and Calcutta
coupled elite patronage with larger ambitions, another of his state-
ments on conciliation eschewed such “commerce” altogether in
favor of a bolder political vision. This statement, engraved on a
marble monument that was erected in Bhagalpur in 1784, read as
follows:

151
Warren Hastings, Minute (17 Apr. 1781), in GIED, pp. 73–4; Warren Hastings, Minute
[1784], in S. C. Sanial, “History of the Calcutta Madrassa,” Bengal Past and Present 8
(1914), pp. 109–10.
152
Hastings to Directors, 21 Feb. 1784, p. 159.

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 Conciliating India 57

To the memory of Augustus Cleveland, Esq.

Late collector of the districts of Bhaugulpore and Rájamahall,
Who, without bloodshed or the terrors of authority,
Employing only the means of conciliation, confidence, and benevolence,
Attempted and accomplished
The entire subjection of the lawless and savage inhabitants of the
jungleterry of Rájamahall,
Who had long infested the neighbouring lands by their predatory incursions,
Inspired them with a taste for the arts of civilized life,
And attached them to the British Government by a conquest over their minds;
The most permanent, as the most rational, mode of dominion.153

Cleveland’s alleged feat, before he died at sea, was to convince

several hill tribes to give up a life of raiding for one of agriculture
and trade. He had offered material incentives, recruited a local
militia, established bazaars, introduced husbandry and manufac-
tures, and even laid the foundations of a school. These measures
comprised a very different program, adapted to a very different
situation, than those of Hastings in lower Bengal or in India at
large. Nonetheless, as Hastings wrote elsewhere, he found much
to admire in Cleveland’s “system of conciliation” and had favored
it with “public support and private encouragement.”154 There was
nothing of the enlightened cosmopolitan or cultural relativist in
the lines he composed for Cleveland’s epitaph, nor, for that mat-
ter, of the Company man resigned to a commercial mode of poli-
tics. These lines approached far nearer to conciliation as “the act
of gaining,” to use Johnson’s terms, than to conciliation as the
“act of reconciling.” And yet, like the blustery paeans to conquest
that appeared on other Anglo-Indian monuments, they bore little

153
Cited in Thomas Shaw, “On the Inhabitants of the Hills Near Rájamahall,” Asiatick
Researches 4 (Calcutta, 1795), p. 106 [emphasis removed]. See also the derivative epi-
taph composed for another monument to Cleveland in Calcutta. [John Hawkesworth],
Asiaticus: In Two Parts (Calcutta, 1803), Part Two, p. 19.
154
Warren Hastings, Memoirs Relative to the State of India (1786), in Hastings,
Selections from the State Papers of the Governors-General of India: Warren Hastings,
ed. G. W. Forrest, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1910), vol. II, p. 79.

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 58 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

resemblance to reality.155 As his own system of conciliation dem-

onstrated, Hastings seldom made policy in the heroic mood. He
seldom got the chance.

Conclusion
In early 1785, Hastings resigned from the governor-generalship and
sailed for England. He had been threatening to do so for the past
two years, in response to renewed opposition from the ministry,
the directors, and his council. Only the hope that parliament would
finally grant him the increased powers he had sought induced him
to stay as long as he did.156 But he was to be disappointed. Of the
bill drawn up by Prime Minister William Pitt and passed in 1784
he complained, “An Act more injurious to … my Character and
Authority … could not have been devised.”157 On the return voyage,
Hastings set about penning a memoir of his years in office. It was
in this period that the Company, whose “first existence was com-
mercial,” had come to possess a “political character.” It was now
“impossible to retrace the perilous and wonderful paths by which
they have attained their present elevation, and to redescend to the
humble and undreaded character of trading adventurers.” Still,
Hastings lamented revealingly, “we have not been able … to change
our ideas with our situation.”158
Hastings had been prevented from realizing his ideal of a
robust, uncommercial sovereignty. Enjoying only “intervals of acci-
dental authority,” he had been forced to accept the Company’s pri-
orities and to adopt a commercial style of politics.159 Accordingly,

155
Rebecca M. Brown, “Inscribing Colonial Monumentality: A Case Study of the 1763
Patna Massacre Memorial,” Journal of Asian Studies 65 (2006); Robert Travers,
“Death and the Nabob: Imperialism and Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century
India,” Past and Present 196 (2007).
156
C. C. Davies, “Warren Hastings and the Younger Pitt,” English Historical Review 70
(1955).
157
Hastings to Marian Hastings, 29 Dec. 1784, in Hastings, The Letters of Warren
Hastings to His Wife, ed. Sydney C. Grier (London, 1905), p. 413.
158
Hastings, Memoirs, pp. 60–61, 85.
159
Hastings to David Anderson, 13 Sept. 1786, in MWH, vol. III, p. 303.

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 Conclusion 59

he had devised strategies to “conciliate” British and Indian politi-

cal classes. These strategies differed in some respects. Whereas
the British one entailed rehabilitating the nabob and the “Indian
World” this figure had come to represent, the Indian one entailed
forging alliances with scholars from or close to powerful groups in
Indian society. The two strategies also posed different challenges.
Whereas the former demanded that Hastings frame the Company’s
commerce of knowledge in both exalted and mundane terms, the
latter demanded that he identify “respectable” Indian scholars and
engage them in such commerce. Nonetheless, the two strategies
overlapped. Both centered on the use of scholarly patronage to pac-
ify the Company state’s discontents, paper over its contradictions,
and protract its tenuous existence. What was more, projects under-
taken as part of one strategy often implicated the other. The com-
pilation and translation of Hindu and Islamic laws, for instance,
was meant largely to win over opinion in Britain but also presented
opportunities to cultivate Indian scholars. And the reverse seems
to have been true of the founding of the Calcutta Madrasa, which
Hastings announced in a dispatch tailored for general metropolitan
consumption.
If Hastings’ designs spanned oceans, however, then so too did
those of his adversaries. The irksome mahzarnamas were apparently
intended to reach authorities in Britain and convince them that he
had alienated respectable Indians. A similar motive seems to have
inspired several letters from the Calcutta judge Robert Chambers
to the statesman Charles Jenkinson. In one, Chambers ascribed the
decline of “Mahommedan Learning throughout Bengal” to Hastings’
disdain for knowledge:

It is said that … in this Country, the Study of Law and of every

other Kind of Learning is neglected because it is no longer
honourable. The Observation is true and the Cause is evident:
Much of the Dignity of Knowledge depends on the Power it is
supposed to have of introducing its Possessour to the Society of

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 60 Warren Hastings and the Idea of Conciliation

his Superiours; and the Knowledge of a conquered People must

lose its Rank and Importance if it neither excites the Curiosity
nor ministers to the Passions of the Conqueror.160

For Chambers, Hastings was a nabob; a representative of “the Old

Indian System” whose only “object is to enrich the company’s ser-
vants.”161 The persecutor of Reza Khan, he implied, could hardly
be credited with success in cultivating learned men. Chambers
expressed these views in the late 1770s. Perhaps they informed
Hastings’ decision to found the Calcutta Madrasa. But while doing
so may have propitiated the scholarly judge, it provided fodder for
another, more steadfast enemy.162 In 1786, Philip Francis printed
Hastings’ dispatch on the madrasa as part of a campaign to have
him impeached in parliament. Francis ridiculed Hastings for claim-
ing to be “the promoter of learning and patron of men of letters,”
considering his wars and “all the havock he has made.” And yet,
Francis continued, “absurdity is not incompatible with cunning.”
He asserted that the founding of the madrasa had been a piece of
financial chicanery.163 Francis made the case – a disturbing one for
Hastings and his supporters – that Hastings’ system of conciliation
was a system of corruption instead.
Other developments augured better for this system. Sir William
Jones had lately arrived in Bengal and was now presiding over the
Asiatic Society. Hastings’ acting successor, John Macpherson, was a
son of the Scottish Enlightenment who pledged to follow his exam-
ple in everything.164 And while Hastings’ system could not be said
to be similarly entrenched at the other presidencies, the Madras

160
Chambers to Jenkinson, 25 Mar. 1778, ff. 96r–v.
161
Chambers to Jenkinson, 29 Dec. 1779, BL, Add. MS 38403, f. 315v.
162
Chambers’ biographer has noted that his opposition to Hastings softened in the early
1780s and that the two bonded over intellectual pursuits. Thomas M. Curley, Sir
Robert Chambers: Law, Literature, and Empire in the Age of Johnson (Madison,
1998), pp. 414–15, 422.
163
[Philip Francis], A Letter from Warren Hastings, Esq., Dated 21st of February, 1784,
with Remarks and Authentic Documents (London, 1786), pp. 26, 29.
164
Hastings to Marian Hastings, 10 Jan. 1785, in MWH, vol. III, p. 218.

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 Conclusion 61

government had appointed a naturalist and was soon to build an

observatory. Even the Court of Directors, which had figured doubly
in this system as a body that must be both defended and persuaded,
now seemed positively well disposed toward it. True, the directors
were sometimes unresponsive to requests for scholarly patronage,
leading one London critic to write that “the genius of a Hastings does
not shine in … Leadenhall-street.”165 But they had agreed to most
such requests from Hastings, encouraged their servants in learned
pursuits, and appointed a hydrographer and a historiographer.166
Doubts about the directors’ interest in knowledge lingered. In 1778,
James Rennell, for whom Hastings had sought a pension, wrote from
London that “any sum you had fixed would be beat down here by
men accustomed to drive Bargains.”167 After initially reducing the
award, however, the directors soon restored it.168 Accordingly, the
geographer performed a volte-face. “Whatever charges may be imput-
able to the Managers for the Company,” Rennell declared in 1785,
“the neglect of useful Science … is not among the number.” This
was proof for him that “a body of subjects may accomplish, what
the State itself despairs even to attempt.”169 In other words, the
Company’s attention to knowledge was due not to its emergence as
a state but rather to its endurance as a mercantile company. Hastings
would have been loath to draw such a conclusion. Still, he had done
much to support it.

165
Review of Halhed, Grammar, in English Review (Jan. 1783), p. 13; Miles Ogborn,
Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company
(Chicago, 2007), p. 225.
166
H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain,
1756–1833 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 174–6.
167
Hastings to Richard Becher, 25 Mar. 1777, BL, Add. MS 29128, ff. 50r–51r; Rennell to
Hastings, 1 May 1778, BL, Add. MS 29140, f. 343r.
168
Clements R. Markham, Major James Rennell and the Rise of Modern English
Geography (London, 1895), p. 61.
169
James Rennell, Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan; or the Mogul Empire, 2nd edn
(London, 1785), pp. iv–v n.

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 2 Conciliation after Hastings

One tomb rises above the others in Kolkata’s South Park Street
Cemetery. At the time it was built, in 1794, it would have domi-
nated the marshy landscape for miles around. This was fitting. For
the tomb’s occupant, Sir William Jones, had enjoyed a similar promi-
nence in Calcutta’s intellectual topography. As the leading light of
the Supreme Court and the Asiatic Society, Jones put the Company
and its capital firmly on the Enlightenment map. And yet his tomb
nearly had a rival. Had Lord Cornwallis died in Calcutta, an imposing
monument like that built for him in Ghazipur instead would have
graced a plot nearby.1 Cornwallis served as governor-general for most
of Jones’ decade in India. He overhauled the Company’s administra-
tion in Bengal and expanded its territory around Madras. Most impor-
tantly, he helped the Company to recover from its greatest scandal,
the impeachment of Warren Hastings, by conveying to its British
audience the appearance of probity. Just as Jones embodied the intel-
lectual ferment of the era, so Cornwallis embodied its reformist poli-
tics. How the two figures, and the two phenomena, related to each
other is the issue at the heart of this chapter.
Historians have tended to see in the age of Jones an expansion of
Hastings’ program, and in the age of Cornwallis a turn away from it.2
1
The Earl Cornwallis, as he was styled when he took up the governor-generalship, was
created the Marquess Cornwallis in 1792.
2
On Jones, see Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones,
the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge, 1990); Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist
Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (Oxford, 2011). On
Cornwallis, see Franklin Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial
Years (Chapel Hill, 1980); Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century
India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 6; Jon E. Wilson, The Domination
of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke, 2008),
ch. 3; Robert Travers, Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British
India, 1765–1793 (Cambridge, 2022), ch. 6.

62

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 Conciliation after Hastings 63

This Janus-faced perspective on the decade, paradoxical though it

is, is not without basis. Shortly after arriving in Calcutta in late
1783, Jones hailed Hastings as a kindred spirit, a fellow voyager on
“the sea of knowledge.”3 He befriended many of the same Indian
learned elites and European scholar-officials, involved them in the
Asiatic Society, and asked Hastings to be its first president. He also
took up Hastings’ plan to compile and translate Hindu and Islamic
laws and shared his aim to save the “Indian World” from metro-
politan disdain. Meanwhile, and in as many ways, Cornwallis dis-
tanced himself from the former governor-general. Upon arriving in
1786, he set about discarding Hastings’ connections and policies in
the name of purifying the Company state. No wonder that Jones
and Cornwallis have often appeared as opposites, or as masters
of separate domains. But were their views really so antithetical,
their spheres of activity – knowledge and politics – so discrete?
Not according to Jones, who figured Cornwallis as the Justinian
to his Tribonian; nor according to Cornwallis, who praised Jones
for bringing “the greatest Honour upon our Administration.”4 For
all of their differences, the two men were bound together. They
were useful to each other. What made them so was the evolving
relevance of the idea of conciliation.
In these years, Hastings’ idea of conciliation, of patronizing
scholars to attract support for the Company state, encountered new
and formidable opposition. Hastings relied on the idea in his defense
against impeachment charges, but his principal accuser, Edmund
Burke, identified it with corruption. Conciliation also acquired a bad
name in India, where Hastings’ acting replacement, John Macpherson,
made it the watchword of his scandalous administration. Hence, it
fell to Cornwallis to rid the idea of its unsavoriness, as part of his

3
Jones to Hastings [early Feb. 1784], in LWJ, vol. II, p. 629.
4
See Governor-General in Council to Jones, 19 Mar. 1788, in LWJ, vol. II, p. 801 n. 3;
Bernard S. Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State,” in Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms
of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), p. 70. Justinian was the emperor
who sponsored, and Tribonian the jurist who oversaw, the codification of Roman law
in the sixth century.

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 64 Conciliation after Hastings

attempt to restore metropolitan faith in the Company state. His alli-

ance with Jones helped in this regard. And in the 1790s, pressure
on the Company state and on the idea of conciliation abated. Yet
this was to be a temporary reprieve. Soon, both would be challenged
afresh by the governor-generalship of Lord Wellesley.

Knowledge on Trial
Looming over the era of Jones and Cornwallis was the impeachment
of Warren Hastings. Few individuals, institutions, or ideas linked to
the Company were unaffected by this development. The relevant
contemporary publications take up one-eighth of a definitive bibli-
ography comprehending the entire history of the Company.5 For its
part, modern coverage has ranged from minute investigations of the
charges against Hastings to broad homilies on the sins of imperial-
ism.6 Recent works have added a salient reminder that it was the
Company state that was on trial as much as the former governor-
general.7 Still, the role of knowledge in the proceedings has gone
unstudied, despite its evident importance to his administration.
Hastings had patronized learned elites and scholar-officials in service
of what he called his system of conciliation. He now enlisted their
aid to vindicate this system before parliament and the British public.
Emphasizing his connections with such individuals, however, proved
to be a risky strategy. It allowed his main prosecutor Edmund Burke
to identify conciliation with corruption.
In February 1787, months after his return to England, Hastings
appealed to his friend John Shore and his agent George Thompson in
Calcutta. The charges Burke had brought against him in the Commons
the previous year now seemed certain to result in a trial in the Lords

5
Catherine Pickett, Bibliography of the East India Company, 2 vols. (London, 2011–
15), vol. II, p. vii.
6
P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965); Nicholas B.
Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge,
MA, 2006).
7
For example, Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund
Burke (Princeton, 2015), pp. 635–7, 647–56, 827.

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 Knowledge on Trial 65

in which his “lasting reputation” would be at stake. Since he was

accused of “having sacrificed every duty to the views of interest,”
he solicited “testimonials of the most respectable” Indians as to his
“more positive merit.” Among the several questions he hoped they
would address was, “Whether I have shown a disregard to science; or
whether I have not, on the contrary … given effectual encouragement
to it.”8 Nor would he be disappointed. Of the fifty testimonials, or
razinamas, Hastings later received and submitted into evidence most
emphasized his scholarly patronage. Of the thousands of signatories,
many were “learned men” and most of the rest were the kinds of
“Persons of Family and Rank” whom he had sought to conciliate by
patronizing them. According to one document signed by hundreds of
“Pundits and Bramins” from the district of Nadia, “the whole body of
the learned” sang in Hastings’ praise. According to another graced by
the seals of the nawab of Bengal and his household, “Thousands, reap-
ing the Benefit” of the Calcutta Madrasa, prayed “for the Success of
the Company.” Similar statements, likewise echoing Hastings’ concil-
iatory logic, issued from prominent constituencies across India. They
chimed with another submission: a parting address from Calcutta’s
British residents, which held that by patronizing “Arts” Hastings had
fostered “Communication” with “the Natives.”9
Hastings mobilized scholars not only as passive witnesses but
also as active campaigners on his behalf. In the letter of February
1787, he instructed Shore and Thompson to employ several Indian
learned elites in the collection of the razinamas. These included the
maulvi Majd ud-Din, the mufti (Islamic legal scholar) Ahmad, the
magistrate Ali Ibrahim Khan, and the mathematician Tafazzul Husain
Khan.10 Hastings later acknowledged that he was “much indebted”

8
Hastings to John Shore, 19 Feb. 1787, in MWH, vol. III, pp. 321–3.
9
Minutes of Evidence Taken at the Trial of Warren Hastings, 11 vols. (London,
1788–95), vol. V, pp. 2333–432, vol. VI, pp. 2433–74. Hastings’ agent John Scott also
printed the Indian and British testimonials in [John Scott, ed.], Copies of the Several
Testimonials Transmitted from Bengal by the Governor and Council, Relating to
Warren Hastings, Esq. Late Governor General of Bengal (London, 1789).
10
Hastings to Shore, 19 Feb. 1787, p. 323.

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 66 Conciliation after Hastings

to the last two for their efforts; “You will not meet with Characters
of more Faith or worth,” he wrote to a friend.11 European scholar-
officials likewise lent their names and talents to Hastings’ cause.
Charles Wilkins and Jonathan Scott translated some of the razina-
mas; David Anderson and Nathaniel Brassey Halhed helped to
prepare Hastings’ defense, testified on his behalf, and battled his
accusers in the pamphlet press.12 Haji Mustafa tried to afford Hastings
“some timely assistance” by publishing his translation of Siyar al-
Muta‘akhkhirin. He dedicated the work to Hastings and praised him
in the preface, in addition to rendering in English the plaudits of the
author, Ghulam Husain Khan.13
While Hastings’ connections with scholars would seem to have
been an asset, however, they threatened to become a liability. By adver-
tising his successes in cultivating such individuals, Hastings risked
drawing attention to his failures. Notably absent from the Burdwan
razinama were any signatures of scholars, or, for that matter, any ref-
erence to Hastings’ scholarly patronage. For critics of Hastings, there
would have been a ready explanation: Rather than tend the district’s
once-famed madrasas, he had built a new one in Calcutta.14 More
awkward still was the absence from the Murshidabad razinama of
the signature of Muhammad Reza Khan, with whom Hastings had
frequently sparred. Thompson reported that he had felt obliged to
mention the address to the Khan’s agent but that, when the Khan
equivocated about signing it, he had declined to respond. “In truth,”
Thompson explained,

11
Hastings to David Anderson, 15 Jul. 1788 and 1 Oct. 1790, BL, Add. MS 45418, ff. 21r, 39r.
12
Hastings to David Anderson, 5 Aug. 1788, ibid., f. 24r; [Scott, ed.], Copies, p. 177;
Rosane Rocher, Orientalism, Poetry, and the Millennium: The Checkered Life
of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, 1751–1830 (Delhi, 1983), pp. 131–55; T. H. Bowyer,
“Anderson, David (1751–1825),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004),
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/63498.
13
[Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i] Seid-Gholam-Hossein-Khan], A Translation of the
Seir Mutaqharin, trans. Nota Manus [Haji Mustafa], 4 vols. (Calcutta, 1789–90), vol. I,
dedication, pp. 3–4, 13.
14
See Robert Chambers to Charles Jenkinson, 25 Mar. 1778, BL, Add. MS 38401, f. 96r;
[Philip Francis], A Letter from Warren Hastings, Esq., Dated 21st of February, 1784,
with Remarks and Authentic Documents (London, 1786), pp. 28–9.

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 Knowledge on Trial 67

I knew how far he had committed himself in conjunction with

[Hastings’ enemy Philip] Francis, and was not sorry that he did
not seek to sign the address for he is certainly a double dealer,
and would probably … have written to Francis that he did it
either from fear or favour and have thus furnished that viper
with an increase of poison.15

Some scholar-officials who had once been close to Hastings now

distanced themselves from him; they too endangered his cause.
Jonathan Duncan, the Company’s resident at Benares, refused to
involve himself with the razinamas on the ground that they had
“no Connection with the Business of the Company.”16 This reaction
must have surprised Hastings: He had not only advanced Duncan’s
career and encouraged his intellectual pursuits but also counted him
as a friend.17 It was proximity to Hastings that compelled officials
like Duncan to refuse him aid. If they remained loyal, scholars or not,
they too risked being branded as nabobs.
In the trial before the Lords, which began in 1788, Burke made
an issue of Hastings’ various enmities and intimacies with scholars.
There was irony in this. For Burke was a friend to letters and com-
merce, and most likely a source for Hastings’ idea of conciliation. He
had once been well disposed toward the Company. He never advo-
cated its liquidation or even the uncoupling of its dual functions.18
But by the 1780s, he was arguing that officials, especially Hastings,
had corrupted its virtuous “mercantile constitution.”19 For Burke,
the problem was not that Hastings had behaved like a merchant but

15
Thompson to Hastings, 12 Feb. 1788, in “The Nesbitt-Thompson Papers,” Bengal
Past and Present 8–23 (1914–21), vol. XVIII, p. 183.
16
Duncan to Ali Ibrahim Khan, trans. in Minutes of Evidence, vol. V, p. 2334.
17
See Thompson to Hastings, 12 Feb. 1788, p. 182; Hastings to Anderson, 15 Jul. 1788,
f. 21r; V. A. Narain, Jonathan Duncan and Varanasi (Calcutta, 1959), pp. 16–17.
18
Gregory M. Collins, “The Limits of Mercantile Administration: Adam Smith and
Edmund Burke on Britain’s East India Company,” Journal of the History of Economic
Thought 41 (2019).
19
Edmund Burke, “Speech on Opening of Impeachment” (15 to 19 Feb. 1788), in Burke,
The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols. (Oxford,
1981–2015), vol. VI, p. 295.

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 68 Conciliation after Hastings

rather that he had behaved like an unprincipled one. As a corollary,

any scholar or scholarly undertaking Hastings had patronized was
inherently suspect. Thus,

We find and trace him through the whole of his conduct,

following a great variety of mercantile employments, and when
he comes to you, you would imagine that he had been bred in
the sublime sciences, who never knew any act any further than
as it made a part in the business of the sublime matters he was
engaged in, that he had been engaged in writing a poem, an Iliad,
or sometime to revive fallen literature. And yet you find this man
dealing in accounts contriving to make up a good account for
himself.20

In Burke’s telling, Hastings was a “swindling M[aec]enas,” who,

despite affecting “the honour and glory of a Patron,” had duped schol-
ars or made them his accomplices.21 To the extent that his patron-
age had conciliated – more often it had injured – it was under false
pretenses.
Burke offered three examples. First, there was the patronage of
Ali Ibrahim. Burke claimed that Hastings had taken bribes from the
Khan, employed him in dark dealings, and used his supposed rank and
learning to distract from his own crimes. As Burke put it, “Mr. Hastings
has covered all his injustice and all his violences … by proving what
good he had done at Benares by taking Ali Ibrahim Khan with him.”22
Then, there was the codification of Hindu and Islamic laws. Burke
saw merit in the project but accused Hastings, with Halhed’s conniv-
ance, of cheating the financier Raja Nabakrishna to pay for it. In his
words, Hastings had “obtained a false credit with the Public for an Act
of liberality which he did not perform, for the production of Laws for

20
Edmund Burke, “Speech in Reply” (28 May to 16 Jun. 1794), in ibid., vol. VII,
pp. 620–21.
21
Ibid., p. 285. Gaius Maecenas was the patron of Horace and Virgil (and not known to
be a swindler).
22
Ibid., pp. 454–6. See also Edmund Burke, “Articles of Impeachment” (14 to 28 May
1787), in Burke, Writings and Speeches, vol. VI, p. 244.

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 Knowledge on Trial 69

which he forced other people contrary to all Laws to pay.”23 Finally,

there was the founding of the Calcutta Madrasa. Burke alleged that
Hastings had defrauded not only Nabakrishna but also the Company,
and that he had appointed a disreputable principal in Majd ud-Din.
Contrasting Hastings’ praises for the maulvi with recent complaints
against him, Burke maintained that the two men had conspired in
“fraud, injury and peculation,” and even in the training of “Robbers
and House breakers.” According to Burke, the fact that several of the
razinamas lauded Hastings on account of the madrasa merely proved
that the documents were spurious.24 It was one of his assumptions
that all of Hastings’ “learned” and “respectable” Indian allies had
been bribed or coerced.
Burke’s message was that Hastings’ system of conciliation was
a system of corruption instead. This was also a warning. His objective
in prosecuting Hastings was to make a public example of him. Burke’s
sharpest comments on scholarly patronage came late in the trial, but
they would have been long anticipated, and not only because his ally
Francis had foreshadowed them.25 Since his earliest writings, Burke
had maintained that knowledge was only good insofar as it served to
promote social order and virtue.26 His Reflections on the Revolution
in France (1790) warned of what could happen when men of letters
colluded with men of commerce in political intrigues.27 Burke’s case
against Hastings may have been tenuous, his rhetoric overblown; but
his basic insistence on oversight appealed to his British audience.
Pending the outcome of the trial, the Company’s scholarly patronage
would be under intense scrutiny. If Hastings’ system of conciliation
was to endure, then it must be carefully delimited.

23
Burke, “Speech in Reply,” pp. 262, 265, 268, 273, 285. For the transaction to which
Burke was referring, see P. J. Marshall, “Nobkissen versus Hastings,” in Marshall, Trade
and Conquest: Studies on the Rise of British Dominance in India (Aldershot, 1993).
24
Burke, “Speech in Reply,” pp. 650–2, 665–9.
25
See [Francis], Letter from Warren Hastings, pp. 26–34.
26
Bourke, Empire and Revolution, p. 80.
27
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), in Burke,
Writings and Speeches, vol. VIII, pp. 160–2; Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the
1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 42–53.

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 70 Conciliation after Hastings

Macpherson and Conciliation

Burke’s attack on Hastings’ system of conciliation drew additional
force from the record of the latter’s acting replacement. Though it has
been neglected by historians, the nineteen-month administration of
John Macpherson did much to shape those that followed. Macpherson
was a son of the Scottish Enlightenment who advocated a lofty com-
mercial politics. Rather than turn to conciliation out of necessity, he
keenly took up and developed the idea. He described conciliation as
a natural impulse underlying all of the principles that guided his con-
duct. Like Hastings, he understood conciliation in close connection
with scholarly patronage. Macpherson succeeded in forging alliances
with scholar-officials like Jones and with learned elites like Majd ud-
Din. He even nurtured the Company’s reputation as a global broker
of knowledge. And yet his elevated visions coincided with an evident
streak of corruption. This did much to tarnish them in the eyes of
contemporaries, including his successor, Cornwallis.
Macpherson nowhere seems to have set down a “system” of con-
ciliation in the manner of Hastings and yet he evidently envisioned
something of the kind. He used the term “conciliate” often – nearly a
dozen times in one defense of his administration.28 And like Hastings,
he used it to refer to a mode of politics in line with the Company’s
hybrid constitution. Unlike Hastings, he championed this mode and
this constitution: Sound policy dictated preserving the Company’s
“old System,” which entailed “conciliating the Native Population.”29
Nonetheless, Macpherson likewise sought to do this through schol-
arly patronage, which he described as “natural” to his disposition.30

28
The Case of Sir John Macpherson, Baronet, Late Governor-General of India,
Containing a Summary Review of his Administration and Services Prepared by
Friends from Authentic Documents (London, 1808). The work must have been pre-
pared either by Macpherson or with substantial input from him.
29
Macpherson to Charles Grant, 31 Jul. 1807, BL, Mss Eur F291/57, f. 38r. For earlier
praise of the Company’s constitution, see Macpherson to James Macpherson, 27 Jul.
1782 and 1 Nov. 1783, BL, Mss Eur F291/129, ff. 18r-v, 91r.
30
Macpherson to John Gilchrist [1785], in John Gilchrist, Dictionary, English and
Hindoostanee, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1787–98), vol. I, p. vii n.

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 Macpherson and Conciliation 71

In 1781, soon after being appointed to Hastings’ council, Macpherson

signed, and likely authored, a statement praising his attentions to Ali
Ibrahim and the “colleges” of Benares. These measures were impor-
tant “in a political view”; they would earn the respect of “leading”
Indians, and of Europeans, who were starting to investigate Eastern
“antiquities” and “sciences.”31 As governor-general too, Macpherson
made the case for conciliation in terms reminiscent of his predeces-
sor. In a minute meant for the eyes of the directors, he recommended
Joseph Champion’s The Poems of Ferdosi (1785) on the ground that
it was “political in a Government like ours to encourage” such writ-
ings.32 And yet Macpherson’s system of conciliation, such as it was,
was more intuitive and idealistic than that of Hastings. It intersected
with what he called “my two great Principles of action” in India:
building alliances and establishing public credit.33
Macpherson’s principle of building alliances took shape
through a series of commercial, political, and literary entanglements
and conducted him to a system of conciliation rooted in his own
experience. Macpherson was born to a minister on the Isle of Skye.
A polite education prepared him to earn his “bread by embarking in
the world.”34 In the 1760s, he attended the University of Edinburgh,
where he began a lifelong friendship with his tutor, Adam Ferguson,
and mixed with other literati. He considered using these connec-
tions to try to obtain a chair at the university.35 As it was, he long

31
Supreme Council to Governor-General, 3 Dec. 1781, in George W. Forrest, ed.,
Selections from the Letters, Despatches, and Other State Papers Preserved in the
Foreign Department of the Government of India, 1772–1785, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1899),
vol. III, p. 38.
32
NAI, Bengal Public Consultations (19 Dec. 1785), no. 26.
33
Macpherson to unknown, 6 May 1800, Edinburgh University Library, Dc.1.77,
no. 64B.
34
This, at least, was what he later implied in a letter on the curriculum to be adopted
at a proposed Highland academy. Macpherson to Provost Mackintosh, 23 Mar. 1789,
in Charles Fraser-Mackintosh, ed., Letters of Two Centuries, Chiefly Connected with
Inverness and the Highlands, from 1616 to 1815 (Inverness, 1890), p. 314.
35
James Noel Mackenzie Maclean, “The Early Political Careers of James ‘Fingal’
Macpherson (1736–1796) and Sir John Macpherson, Bart. (1744–1821)” (PhD disserta-
tion, University of Edinburgh, 1967), pp. 104–12.

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 72 Conciliation after Hastings

anticipated spending his retirement among this illustrious set.36

“Though we have lost you for a while,” read a typical letter to him
from Hugh Blair, “this will find you acting in a much wider and more
purposeful sphere …. [W]hen we meet, your health is drunk, and
much conversation carried on about all that you are to do in India.”37
Macpherson’s first voyage east, as a ship’s purser in 1767, landed
him at Madras, where he promptly put both his learning and his
charm to use. After obtaining an audience by demonstrating “some
Electrical experiments,” he convinced the nawab of Arcot to appoint
him as his London agent.38 In this lucrative capacity, Macpherson
renewed his acquaintance with James Macpherson, with whom he
shared more than a Highland clan affiliation. Among other things,
both men had already used “literature as a means of raising capital:
James with the poems of Ossian, and John with his father’s work
on customs and antiquities.”39 Together, the Macphersons wrote a
flattering sketch of the nawab, coaxed Alexander Dow to insert it
in his History of Hindostan, and, finally, sent the section to minis-
ters and puffed it in the press.40 No wonder that Macpherson took
to Hastings’ idea of conciliation upon encountering it in the 1780s:
Building alliances through commerce, politics, and letters was some-
thing he had long done already.
Accordingly, rather than merely continue Hastings’ sys-
tem of conciliation, Macpherson made it his own. This could be
observed in his distinctive approach to patronizing learned elites.
Macpherson not only kept up ties with friends of Hastings like Ali
Ibrahim but also traded “philosophical observations” with his enemy

36
Macpherson to James Macpherson, 20 Nov. 1783, BL, Mss Eur F291/129, f. 94v.
37
Blair to Macpherson, 28 Nov. 1781, BL, Mss Eur F291/83, ff. 25r–v.
38
Robert Harland to Earl of Rochford, 10 Sept. 1772, in Maclean, “Early Political
Careers,” p. 114.
39
Maclean, “Early Political Careers,” p. 120.
40
George McElroy, “Ossianic Imagination and the History of India: James and John
Macpherson as Propagandists and Intriguers,” in Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock,
eds., Aberdeen and the Enlightenment: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the
University of Aberdeen (Aberdeen, 1987), p. 365. See Alexander Dow, The History of
Hindostan, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (London, 1770–72), vol. II, pp. 396–8.

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 Macpherson and Conciliation 73

Reza Khan.41 He showed singular tact in resolving a crisis at the

Calcutta Madrasa that had threatened to turn a friend into an enemy.
According to several petitions, Majd ud-Din was withholding the
allowances of the madrasa’s students as well as demanding exces-
sive rent from the tenants of its endowed lands. The maulvi implored
Macpherson not to “give ear to the unjust complaints which are raised
against him.”42 An entry in Macpherson’s notes, however, suggests
his own conclusion: “The Mulovie of the Mudrussa seems to be going
mad with avarice & ignorance & if a remedy is not speedily applied,
this Honourable … Institution will soon go to ruin altogether.”43 The
problem with simply removing Majd ud-Din was that he wielded
influence with leading Muslims in Calcutta and beyond – perhaps as
far away as his home of Awadh. Macpherson’s solution was to tell
the maulvi’s discontents one thing and the maulvi himself another.
Replying to the students, Macpherson declared that he had heard their
complaints and that Majd ud-Din would be brought under his super-
vision.44 Replying to Majd ud-Din, he dismissed these complaints
as interested fabrications and expressed undiminished confidence in
him.45 Macpherson ultimately issued a sanad (edict) appointing the
official William Chambers as amin (monitor) of the institution.46 At
the same time, he took pains to reassure Majd ud-Din, telling him
that Chambers was “a sensible man fit for the business.”47
Macpherson proved no less adept at building alliances with
European scholar-officials. John Gilchrist praised him as a “gentle-
man and scholar” who “did all in his power to forward” his views.48

41
Allan Macpherson, Notes (12 Dec. [1785]), Cambridge South Asian Archive,
Macpherson Family Papers, f. 2869; Ali Ibrahim to Macpherson, received 19 Oct.
1786, trans., BL, Mss Eur F291/6, p. 50.
42
Abstract [of Majd ud-Din to Macpherson], undated, Cambridge South Asian Archive,
Macpherson Family Papers, ff. 2607–8.
43
Note, ibid., ff. 2647–8.
44
Macpherson to [students], undated, trans., ibid., f. 5.
45
Macpherson to [Majd ud-Din], undated, trans., ibid., f. 1282.
46
Macpherson, Sanad, trans., ibid., ff. 2814–15.
47
Macpherson to [Majd ud-Din], undated, trans., ibid., f. 2813.
48
Gilchrist, Dictionary, vol. I, p. vii.

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 74 Conciliation after Hastings

Chambers no doubt was equally grateful for his appointment as

amin at the madrasa. Still, it was a third orientalist whose friendship
most interested Macpherson. Chambers was the interpreter at the
Supreme Court and the brother of one of its judges, as well as a mem-
ber of the Asiatic Society. Hence, he was doubly known to William
Jones, who applauded his selection as amin and may have suggested
it to Macpherson in the first place.49 Macpherson found other ways
to cultivate Jones. He lent him letters from Ferguson, obtained for
him Samuel Turner’s account of Bhutan and Tibet, and made known
to him his shared fondness for the naturalist Johann Koenig.50
Moreover, at Jones’ behest, he met with the poet Zain ud-Din ‘Ishqi
and with the pandit Ramalocana Kanthavarna.51 Jones, in turn, flat-
tered Macpherson that “your mind can grasp the whole field of lit-
erature … as well as that of politics, and … in the manner of ancient
rulers in Asia, particularly Cicero, the governor of Cilicia, you unite
the character of the statesman and the scholar.”52 This endorsement
was valuable in Britain, where Jones had acquired a name already and
was becoming famous anew for his Indian studies. Macpherson and
his supporters would trot out Jones’ lines for decades to come; they
would even appear in his epitaph.53 Still, there seems to have been
more to Macpherson’s adoption of the motto than vanity: It accorded
not only with the principle of building alliances but also with that of
establishing public credit.

49
Jones to Macpherson, 17 and 26 May 1785, in LWJ, vol. II, pp. 673, 675–6; Jones to
Macpherson, 22 May 1785, in Joshua Ehrlich, “Empire and Enlightenment in Three
Letters from Sir William Jones to Governor-General John Macpherson,” Historical
Journal 62 (2019), p. 548; Proceedings of the Asiatic Society, 4 vols. (Calcutta, 1980–
2000), vol. I, p. 54.
50
Jones to Macpherson, 6 May and Nov. 1786, in LWJ, vol. II, pp. 698, 727; Jones to
Patrick Russell, 28 Sept. 1786, in LWJ, vol. II, p. 707.
51
Jones to Macpherson, May 1785, in LWJ, vol. II, pp. 674–5; Jones to Macpherson [1785],
in Ehrlich, “Empire and Enlightenment,” p. 551; Jones to Allan Macpherson, 6 Jan. 1786,
in W. C. Macpherson, ed., Soldiering in India, 1764–1787 (Edinburgh, 1928), p. 345.
52
Jones to Macpherson, 17 May 1785, in LWJ, vol. II, p. 672.
53
Case of Sir John Macpherson, p. 99 n *; William Essington Hughes, ed., Monumental
Inscriptions and Extracts from Registers of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, at St.
Anne’s Church, Soho (London, 1905), p. 17.

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 Macpherson and Conciliation 75

Whereas Macpherson’s first “great principle” of building alli-

ances was early in evidence, his second one of establishing public
credit marked a late apostasy. Before he became governor-general,
Macpherson was apt to concur with his tutor Ferguson that state bor-
rowing was among the evils of modern commercial society.54 But,
as he later put it, “Judge what a Disciple of Ferguson … must have
learned when he sat on the Throne of Timur, without a rupee in
his Treasury, with an immense army a year in arrears, & when Bills
on England could not raise a shilling.”55 Faced with these circum-
stances, Macpherson sought to cut costs, increase the circulation of
specie, and in general set the “credit of the Company on the firmest
basis.”56 His understanding of public credit, however, went beyond
simply a government’s borrowing of money. Macpherson wrote that
the rise of “commerce and modern finance” had made public credit
“the grand heart-spring which … keeps up the … progress of civili-
sation.”57 He perceived the emergence of a global system of inter-
action and called for a politics attuned to it. Macpherson had once
described India, in a Fergusonian key, as a field “too great for the nar-
row and interested Politics of a commercial society.”58 As governor-
general, however, he espoused a politics based on “the reciprocal
advantages of Commercial Intercourse.”59 “A solid foundation for
the Power of the Company,” Macpherson asserted, must rest “on
a Commercial connection” – and not on extended territory.60 His
retrenchments and encouragements to trade marked only the first

54
For Ferguson’s view, see Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment:
The Roman Past and Europe’s Future (Cambridge, MA, 2013), p. 116.
55
Macpherson to Alexander Carlyle, 12 Jan. 1797, Edinburgh University Library,
Dc.4.41, no. 40.
56
[John Macpherson], Documents Explanatory of the Case of Sir John Macpherson,
Baronet, as Governor General of Bengal [London, 1800], p. 28.
57
Macpherson, cited in Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature
for the Year 1797 (London, 1800), p. 176; Macpherson, cited in John Sinclair, Memoirs
of the Life and Works of Sir John Sinclair, Bart., 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1837), vol. II, p. 266.
58
Sallust [John Macpherson] to ed., Public Advertiser (16 Aug. 1769), cited in McElroy,
“Ossianic Imagination,” p. 365.
59
Macpherson to Vicomte de Souillac, 26 Jan. 1786, BL, Add. MS 38409, f. 47v.
60
Macpherson to Directors, 11 Jan. 1786, TNA, PRO 30/8/362, f. 116v.

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 76 Conciliation after Hastings

steps in “the opening of a system” that would ultimately “embrace

the Commerce of the Globe.”61 Macpherson wrote in these terms
to the directors and the prime minister, to rulers across India, and
even to the French Compagnie des Indes.62 His furthest-reaching
statements, however, were reserved for men of letters back in Britain.
In a missive to Ferguson of 1786, the various strands of
Macpherson’s thought on commerce, politics, and knowledge came
together. Here, it became clear how building alliances and establish-
ing public credit figured in a project to conciliate India, Britain, and
the wider world. Macpherson first wrote of the benefits that “may
flow from the practical operation of the commercial and political sys-
tems I have opened.” He expressed a desire to foster “the happy com-
munications of all the inhabitants of the globe … till the east and the
west are united.” He boasted:

I have at this moment at Calcutta ambassadors from Tidore, in

the eastern seas, from Thibet, from all the states of India, and
from Timur Shaw, who is crossing the Attock; and as Manilla is
opening her trade, I hope to hear direct from Lima before I leave
India, and to make the Incas of Peru acquainted with the Brahmin
Rajas on the banks of the Ganges.

After developing the theme of “commerce” in a political as well as

in an economic sense, Macpherson turned to its role in disseminat-
ing knowledge: “Curious are, besides, the treasures in literature and
the oblivious history of nations that are drawing upon us from the
researches of Sir William Jones and others.” As the Company’s com-
merce placed more “useful and elegant information” into the hands
of scholars, so their studies would yield even greater treasures.63 In

61
Macpherson to William Pitt, 12 Jul. 1786, ibid., ff. 136r–136v.
62
For Macpherson’s attempt to broker a trade agreement with the Compagnie, see John
Shovlin, Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a
Peaceful World Order (New Haven, 2021), p. 267.
63
Macpherson to Ferguson, 12 Jan. 1786, in The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed.
Vincenzo Merolle, 2 vols. (London, 1995), vol. II, pp. 315–16.

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 Macpherson and Conciliation 77

the tradition of Montesquieu – and of Hastings, but without his res-

ervations – Macpherson envisioned a global exchange of ideas that
would reconcile differences and stimulate progress.
Whatever the merits of this exalted vision, its fate would soon
be thrown into doubt by the arrival of Cornwallis. In the new
governor-general’s estimation, Macpherson was thoroughly cor-
rupt, and lucky not to have been impeached alongside Hastings.64
Certainly, in his dealings with scholars, Macpherson was liable
to mix considerations of public and private utility. He offered the
management of the prospective Calcutta Botanic Garden to a crony,
who replied that he might accept “if the thing were made worth my
while.”65 Still, Macpherson’s “philosophical politics” and its reso-
nance with contemporaries cannot be entirely dismissed.66 Years
later, removed from office and no longer ambitious to return, he con-
tinued to entertain his old designs. As he told the historian Edward
Gibbon in 1791, “I too have long been forming general ideas upon
the … consequences, which letters … and commerce are likely to
introduce.” He expected that “the fruits of knowledge, which were
originally so poisonous will mellow into useful Ripeness.” He also
hoped to draw Gibbon’s “eye to the Indian Scene” and recommended
William Robertson’s Historical Disquisition (1791) as a model.67
That work lauded Alexander and Akbar for stimulating intellectual
and material exchange, and placed Hastings in the same line of com-
mercial sovereigns.68 “By tracing the progress of the trade of Europe
with India,” Robertson later acknowledged, he had meant to “suggest

64
Cornwallis to Henry Dundas, 1 Nov. 1788, 8 Aug. and 1 Nov. 1789, in Marquis
Cornwallis, Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis of Cornwallis, ed. Charles
Ross, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (London, 1859), vol. I, pp. 383, 430, 454.
65
Archibald Keir to Allan Macpherson, 10 Jul. 1786, Cambridge South Asian Archive,
Macpherson Family Papers, f. 1809.
66
For the description, see James Macpherson to Macpherson, 17 Jun. 1783, BL, F291/125,
f. 14v.
67
Macpherson to Gibbon, 1 Nov. 1791 and 4 Dec. 1792, BL, Add. MS 34886, ff. 227v,
229r–229v, 231v–232r, 319r [emphasis removed].
68
William Robertson, An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the
Ancients Had of India (London, 1791), pp. 12–13, 22–5, 272–5, 336, 347–9.

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 78 Conciliation after Hastings

some hints to an intelligent … Statesman.”69 Indeed, he did more

than just hint: He urged the Company to appoint someone to per-
form the “important” task of “investigating … Indian philosophy.”70
Surely, Macpherson would have leapt at the chance to gratify his
important friend and to advance his own designs. His replacement,
Cornwallis, however, did not.

Cornwallis and Conciliation

Hastings and Macpherson provided cautionary examples for
Cornwallis. The one was on trial in parliament and the other, he
believed, ought to be. And yet, his conclusion was not that the
Company state was fundamentally flawed but rather that it must
be purified and rehabilitated. This conclusion had important conse-
quences for the idea of conciliation and for the attendant policy of
scholarly patronage. Both were to be preserved, indeed protected, but
at the cost of some of their former amplitude. They must be purged
of corruption, brought in line with Cornwallis’ regulatory politics.
Certain learned elites and scholar-officials would fall from grace but
others would adapt and benefit. One of the latter was Jones, who,
despite his former closeness with Hastings and Macpherson, adjusted
to the new dispensation. He and his Asiatic Society served to give the
appearance of a more detached, less corruptible relationship between
knowledge and the Company state.
Cornwallis has often been seen as a transformative governor-
general, but in at least one crucial respect he was a conservative one.
Although – or perhaps because – he was an outsider with no Indian
experience, he was inclined to preserve the Company state. This was
also his directive. His reforms were underpinned by Pitt’s India Act,

69
Robertson to Henry Dundas, 6 Jul. 1791, cited in Stewart J. Brown, “William
Robertson, Early Orientalism and the Historical Disquisition on India of 1791,”
Scottish Historical Review 88 (2009), p. 303. Robertson also had his son, one of two
in the Company’s service, present a copy of the Historical Disquisition to Cornwallis.
Robertson to Cornwallis, 17 Dec. 1791, TNA, PRO 30/11/270, ff. 70r–71r.
70
Robertson, Historical Disquisition, p. 311.

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 Cornwallis and Conciliation 79

which, in the words of the eponymous prime minister, was intended

to remodel the Company’s “old constitution … rather than make a
new one.” The act was drawn up with the directors’ “concurrence”;
it served to “connect” the Company with the government rather than
absorb it into it. For, Pitt held, “commercial companies could … gov-
ern empires” if their servants behaved with “purity and abstinence.”71
This, accordingly, was what the “Cornwallis system,” as it would
come to be known, sought to ensure. It sought to close off avenues
of corruption by stamping out profiteering, regulating diplomacy,
and curbing the power of Indian intermediaries.72 These reforms
came mainly from within the Company: They were worked out by
Cornwallis’ advisers.73 They were also in keeping with its ideology.
In the words of Pitt, “Commerce was our object, and with a view to
its extension, a pacific system should prevail, and a system of defence
and conciliation.”74 Like Hastings, Cornwallis would undermine such
claims by indulging in war and conquest. And like Hastings, he would
rely all the more for that reason on the idea of conciliation.
While Cornwallis adopted this idea for the same general
reason – to legitimize the Company state – he did so under new con-
ditions and in service of a new agenda. Conciliation, now associated
with corruption, must be brought in line with his regulatory poli-
tics. This could be seen in Cornwallis’ treatment of Indian learned
elites, whom he continued to patronize but on more restrictive terms
than his predecessors. Unlike Hastings or Macpherson, Cornwallis
refused to smooth over accusations against Majd ud-Din, the head
maulvi of the Calcutta Madrasa. Following new reports of peculation

71
William Pitt, Speech in HC Deb (6 Jul. 1784), in The Parliamentary History of
England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (London, 1806–20), vol.
XXIV, cols. 1089, 1091, 1099.
72
The Cornwallis moment was an important one, especially in Britain and its empire,
for the emergence of the modern understanding of corruption as the abuse of office.
See Mark Knights, Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and Its Empire,
1600–1850 (Oxford, 2021).
73
Lilian M. Penson, “The Bengal Administrative System, 1786–1818,” in The
Cambridge History of India, 6 vols. (Cambridge 1922–37), vol. V, pp. 434–7.
74
Pitt, Speech (6 Jul. 1784), col. 1095.

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 80 Conciliation after Hastings

and permissiveness – those cited by Burke at Hastings’ trial – the

Supreme Council finally removed the maulvi from his post.75 At
the same time, other learned elites benefited from Cornwallis’ high-
mindedness. The successor to Majd ud-Din, Muhammad Israel, was
chosen as much “for the purity of his moral Character as for his liter-
ary attainments.”76 Cornwallis’ scruples also worked in favor of Ali
Ibrahim Khan, whom the prince of Wales, in 1789, sought to have
removed as chief magistrate of Benares.77 There is little doubt that
Macpherson, at least, would have sacrificed his friendship with the
Khan for the sake of one with the prince. (In fact, he befriended the
latter after returning to Britain.) Cornwallis, however, responded
to the prince firmly in the negative. “The great and truly respect-
able character of” Ali Ibrahim, he wrote, “would have rendered it
a very difficult and unpopular measure” to have replaced him with
the prince’s protégé.78 Nor was this all. As Cornwallis informed his
brother, he was duty-bound to refuse such an “infamous and unjusti-
fiable job.”79 The idea of conciliation thus aligned with Cornwallis’
principles to keep Ali Ibrahim where he was.
Cornwallis patronized a number of other learned elites. To do
so may have been all the more important at a time when Indians were
vanishing from the upper ranks of the Company’s service.80 On dif-
ferent occasions, he proposed to appoint as resident at Hyderabad the
writer Mirza Abu Talib Khan and the mathematician Tafazzul Husain
Khan.81 Neither man ultimately filled the post, perhaps because, as

75
West Bengal State Archives, Bengal Revenue Proceedings (23 Jan. 1788), no. 1; ibid.
(18 Mar. 1791), no. 9.
76
Ibid. (18 Mar. 1791), no. 9.
77
Prince of Wales to Cornwallis, 30 May 1789, in Cornwallis, Correspondence, vol. II,
p. 29.
78
Cornwallis to Prince of Wales, 14 Aug. 1790, in ibid., vol. II, p. 35.
79
Cornwallis to Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, 16 Nov. 1790, in ibid., vol. II, p. 52.
80
On the displacement of Indians by Britons as a gradual process that Cornwallis con-
cluded rather than began, see P. J. Marshall, “Indian Officials under the East India
Company in Eighteenth-Century Bengal,” in Marshall, Trade and Conquest.
81
Tafazzul to David Anderson, undated, trans. and cited in “An Account of the Life and
Character of Tofuzzel Hussein Khan,” Asiatic Annual Register [5] (1804), “Characters,”
p. 5; Richard Johnson to [Henry Dundas], 8 Feb. 1800, BL, IOR H/435, p. 189.

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 Cornwallis and Conciliation 81

one official put it, “the spirit of the times made it necessary to find
an English Gentleman.”82 Still, Abu Talib credited Cornwallis with
helping him on other occasions; and Tafazzul wrote that he “treats
me with favour” and has “encouraged me to hold my connection with
public affairs.”83 The “integrity” and “honor” of these men now did
much to recommend them, but, as in the past, so did their “erudi-
tion.”84 If Cornwallis demonstrated a new concern with the morals of
learned elites patronized by the Company, then he did not lose sight
of the reason for patronizing them. Thus, in 1788, he readily agreed to
enlist the support of the pandit Jagannatha Tarkapanchanan for a proj-
ect to compile and translate Hindu laws. Since “his Opinion, Learning
and Abilities are held in the highest Veneration,” Cornwallis wrote,
“the Work will Derive infinite Credit … from the Annexation of his
Name.”85 This was the kind of statement Hastings himself might
have made were he still governor-general. It showed that his idea of
conciliation continued to resonate.
Nowhere was this continuity clearer than at the Benares Sanskrit
College, plans for which had begun under Hastings. After Hastings’
departure, the pandit Kasinath Sarma reportedly brought these plans
to the resident Jonathan Duncan, who, in turn, took them up with
Cornwallis.86 That Cornwallis would establish the institution was by
no means a foregone conclusion. Given the history of the Calcutta
Madrasa, he might have foreseen the troubles that would plague
its Hindu counterpart. But Duncan had earned his confidence as

82
Johnson to [Dundas], 8 Feb. 1800, p. 189. See also “Mirza Abu Taleb Khan,” Asiatic
Annual Register [3] (1802), “Miscellaneous Tracts,” pp. 100–1.
83
Tafazzul to David Anderson, undated, p. 6; Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, The Travels of
Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, trans. Charles Stewart, 2 vols. (London, 1810), vol. I, pp.
15–16, 112.
84
Lord Teignmouth to ed., undated, cited in “An Account of the Life and Character of
Tofuzzel Hussein Khan,” p. 8.
85
Cornwallis, Minute (22 Aug. 1788), cited in LWJ, vol. II, p. 803 n. 1.
86
Kasinath, Petition (1801), trans. in Surendranath Sen and Umesha Mishra, introduc-
tion to Sen and Mishra, eds., Sanskrit Documents: Being Sanskrit Letters and Other
Documents Preserved in the Oriental Collection at the National Archives of India
(Allahabad, 1951), p. 58.

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 82 Conciliation after Hastings

“the first Resident who has done any thing but plunder the Country.”87
Moreover, he made a compelling argument that the college would
endear “our Government to the native Hindus.”88 Cornwallis reprised
this argument in a letter to the directors, explicitly invoking the idea
of conciliation. “An Institution founded expressly to promote the
study of Laws and Religion,” he wrote, “must be extremely flattering
to their [Hindus’] prejudices, and tend greatly to conciliate” them.89 It
was clear that the Hindus whom Duncan and Cornwallis had most in
mind were Brahmans and other elites who reputedly venerated them.
Preferences for Brahmans and Brahmanical learning were built into the
college’s rules and curriculum, and its professorships all initially went
to Brahman pandits.90 It was also clear, however, that the founders of
the college, like Hastings before them, entertained notions of popular
engagement. Duncan’s inaugural visit in 1791 included a procession
through the streets, and proclamations in the square outside.91 Finally,
the college may have figured in Cornwallis’ designs to strengthen the
zamindar class, on which he believed the social order in India rested.92
Just as Hastings had founded the madrasa partly to provide tutors for
declining Muslim families, so perhaps Cornwallis sought to do the
same for their Hindu analogs.
Like Hastings too, if not to an even greater extent, Cornwallis
sought to conciliate metropolitan opinion by patronizing scholar-
officials. Like Majd ud-Din, however, some of these officials fell afoul

87
Cornwallis to John Shore, 6 Nov. 1789, TNA, PRO 30/11/165, f. 72r.
88
Duncan to Cornwallis, 1791, cited in George Nicholls, Sketch of the Rise and Progress
of the Benares Patshalla or Sanskrit College (Allahabad, 1907), p. 1.
89
Governor-General in Council to Directors, 10 Mar. 1792, cited in Narain, Jonathan
Duncan, p. 173.
90
Nicholls, Sketch, pp. 2–4; Sen and Mishra, introduction, pp. 53–4; Michael S. Dodson,
Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770–1870 (Basingstoke, 2007),
pp. 51–2.
91
“Extract of a Letter from Benares, dated 17th November 1791,” in Selections from the
Calcutta Gazettes, 5 vols. (Calcutta, 1864–8), vol. II, pp. 310–11.
92
Elsewhere, Cornwallis advocated enabling zamindars “to give a liberal education to
their children.” Cornwallis to Directors, 2 Aug. 1788, in Cornwallis, Correspondence,
vol. I, p. 554. See Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea
of Permanent Settlement, 3rd edn (Ranikhet, 2016), pp. 223–5.

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 Cornwallis and Conciliation 83

of the new governor-general’s stricter standards of behavior. In 1786,

Cornwallis approved the officer Robert Kyd’s proposal to establish
the Calcutta Botanic Garden. Not only were the reasons of science,
commerce, and sustenance worthy in themselves but in combination,
they served to justify the Company state.93 Cornwallis and Kyd thus
would seem to have had a mutual interest in the success of the gar-
den. But tensions grew over the former’s refusal to let the latter gather
specimens in China or salt on the Maratha frontier. Kyd grumbled
to Hastings about Cornwallis’ “Ignorance (I further apprehend a con-
tempt) of every thing relating to the Institution.”94 Given Cornwallis’
claim that the garden “has proved of much General Utility,” it seems
likelier that he, as Kyd sensed, suspected him of pursuing his “per-
sonal interest.”95 Kyd was not the only discontent. Another was the
Persianist and factotum Francis Gladwin, who similarly wrote to
Hastings to complain: “Under your patronage, oriental Learning was
cultivated with success, but his Lordship, despising every branch of
Science, there is not the smallest encouragement for publication so
that my literary labours have … ceased to be of any value.”96 This
charge does not hold up either. Cornwallis agreed to subscribe to
Gladwin’s proposed history of the emperor Aurangzeb and asked an
adviser how many copies “would be right.”97 What seems to have
irked Gladwin was that he would not intercede personally – as indeed
Hastings might have done – to help with his mounting debts.98

93
See Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the
“Improvement” of the World (New Haven, 2000), pp. 117–19; Adrian P. Thomas,
“The Establishment of the Calcutta Botanic Garden: Plant Transfer, Science and the
East India Company, 1786–1806,” JRAS 3rd ser. 16 (2006).
94
Kyd to Hastings, 20 Jul. 1789, BL, Add. MS 29171, f. 332r.
95
Kyd to unknown, 6 Mar. 1788, BL, IOR H/799, ff. 95v–96r; Governor-General to
Governor of Madras, 5 Jul. 1793, cited in Tim Robinson, William Roxburgh: The
Founding Father of Indian Botany (Chichester, 2008), p. 42.
96
Gladwin to Hastings, 15 Feb. 1790, BL, Add. MS 29172, f. 47v.
97
Cornwallis to Shore, 29 Aug. 1787, TNA, PRO 30/11/28, f. 18v.
98
See Gladwin to Cornwallis, 9 Aug. 1787, TNA, PRO 30/11/18, ff. 82r–v; Gladwin to
Cornwallis [Sept. 1787], TNA, PRO 30/11/19, ff. 98r–99v; Gladwin to Cornwallis, 19
May 1789, TNA, PRO 30/11/30, ff. 96r–v; Reginald Craufuird Sterndale, An Historical
Account of “The Calcutta Collectorate,” 2nd edn (Alipore, 1958), p. 23.

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 84 Conciliation after Hastings

The picture of Cornwallis that emerges from his interactions

with Kyd and Gladwin is of an opponent not of knowledge but of cli-
entelism. He would have been especially wary of officials like these
who had formed close relations with his predecessors. Hastings’ agent
Thompson informed him that Cornwallis “stands aloof from the
men who were most honored by your patronage and confidence.”99
His longtime secretary William Palmer went further, claiming that
Cornwallis’ style was “too circumscribed & distant to conciliate gen-
eral attachment.”100 Yet Cornwallis did aim to conciliate, and by the
same means of scholarly patronage. He simply maintained that, if
this policy was to succeed, then it must be separated from personal
interests. This was among the ends that he sought by raising officials’
salaries while barring them from engaging in private trade. A greater
number of Company servants now would enjoy the means and leisure
to undertake their studies independently.101 Cornwallis’ ideal scholar-
official pursued letters as a recreation. He combined learning and integ-
rity. Most importantly, he impressed the political classes in Britain on
both accounts. All of this could be said of Alexander Hamilton, who
learned Sanskrit while serving as Cornwallis’ private secretary.102 The
standard-bearer of the new ethos, however, was William Jones.
Jones helped to give the impression of a new relationship
between knowledge and the Company that was more distant and
hence less corruptible. Despite having been a friend and associate
of Hastings and Macpherson, Jones quickly fell in with the new
order. As early as 1787, he could speculate that Cornwallis and his
chief adviser John Shore were “the most virtuous governors in the
world.”103 He could claim, moreover, that “I live in perfect friendship

99
Thompson to Hastings, 14 Nov. 1786, in “Nesbitt-Thompson Papers,” vol. XVII, p. 92.
100
Palmer to Hastings, 18 Feb. 1787, BL, Add. MS 29170, f. 381r.
101
Holden Furber, John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in
the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1948), p. 340.
102
Rosane Rocher, Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824): A Chapter in the Early History of
Sanskrit Philology (New Haven, 1968), pp. 7–9. For further evidence of this employ-
ment, see “Proceedings of Societies,” AJ new ser. 23 (1837), p. 74.
103
Jones to John Eardley-Wilmot, 3 Oct. 1787, in LWJ, vol. II, p. 781.

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 Cornwallis and Conciliation 85

with both, but in as perfect independence of them; never asking

patronage even for those whom I wish to serve.”104 Jones’ image of
“perfect independence” was plausible thanks to his reputation, his
appointment, and his salary. It also carried over to his leadership of
the Asiatic Society. Upon forming the society in 1784, Jones had
offered its presidency to Hastings, only to accept it himself after
Hastings demurred. The governor-general cited as his reasons lack
of time and ability but likely sought to shield the society from the
mounting campaign against him in Britain. Perhaps this was the sig-
nificance of his remark that he feared becoming an “incumbrance”
on Jones and the other members.105 In any case, with Jones as its
president and the governor-general as its patron – a ceremonial role
– the society could redound to the Company’s credit while appear-
ing to be free of its control. This arrangement evidently suited
Cornwallis, who attended meetings of the society but withheld
material support.106 It also suited Jones, who, in the preface to the
society’s transactions, claimed that though its members were offi-
cials they pursued their studies in a personal capacity.107
There was one matter that tested the Jones-Cornwallis alliance
but ultimately contributed to its success. This was Jones’ project to
compile a “Digest of Hindu and Mohammedan laws.” The project
followed from earlier efforts commissioned by Hastings, but whereas
Hastings had framed such efforts as a means to patronize and concili-
ate learned elites, Jones framed them in addition as a means to keep
these allies honest. With the aid of the digest, he claimed, judges
would no longer “be led astray by the Pandits or Maulavi’s [sic], who
would hardly venture to impose on us, when their impositions might
so easily be detected.” This was but one of a number of ways in which

104
Jones to the Second Earl Spencer, 1 Sept. 1787, in LWJ, vol. II, p. 764.
105
Hastings to Jones et al., 30 Jan. 1784, in [William Jones], “The Introduction,” Asiatick
Researches 1 (Calcutta, 1788), p. vii.
106
S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes
to India (Cambridge, 1968), p. 80; O. P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and
the Discovery of India’s Past (Delhi, 1988), p. 58.
107
[Jones], “The Introduction,” p. iii.

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 86 Conciliation after Hastings

Jones signaled to Cornwallis that he shared his upright principles.

Jones disclaimed any “personal interest” in the project, pledged to
work on it only when he found time away from his duties, declined
additional pay, and proposed that the governor-general select his
assistants. He suggested that only “the most learned” maulvis and
pandits be employed in this capacity, that they be paid a modest
salary, and that it cease after three years lest they “protract their
work.”108 In other words, Jones thoroughly guarded against the kind
of accusations being leveled against Hastings in connection with
scholarly patronage. Accordingly, Cornwallis fully approved the
proposal within the day; he even let Jones select his own assistants.
Cornwallis’ statement on the occasion, that the project “would
reflect the greatest Honour upon our Administration,” fell somewhat
short of the grandest pronouncements of Hastings or Macpherson.109
All the same, it was not out of keeping with their spirit.

Conciliation after Cornwallis

In the 1790s, metropolitan censure of the Company state abated and,
with it, wariness about the idea of conciliation. In Bengal, Hastings’
system was restored by the new governor-general, Sir John Shore,
while in Britain, it was praised and taken up by a wider range of
actors. Not only Hastings but also the directors, and the president of
the Board of Control, now sought to demonstrate their e­ nlightened
support of knowledge. Britain’s political classes appeared more
­receptive to such demonstrations than ever before.
The Company was one of the great beneficiaries of a sea change
in British opinion at the end of the eighteenth century. For various
reasons, not least the popularity of Cornwallis, widespread qualms
about empire were giving way to widespread support.110 Company

108
Jones to Cornwallis, 19 Mar. 1788, in LWJ, vol II, pp. 794–800.
109
Governor-General in Council to Jones, 19 Mar. 1788, pp. 801–2 n. 3.
110
P. J. Marshall, “‘A Free Though Conquering People’: Britain and Asia in the Eighteenth
Century,” in Marshall, “A Free Though Conquering People”: Eighteenth-Century
Britain and Its Empire (Aldershot, 2003).

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 Conciliation after Cornwallis 87

servants now were less likely to be depicted as predatory nabobs

than as virtuous professionals.111 Cornwallis’ campaign against Tipu
Sultan of Mysore, unlike previous wars of conquest, was greeted with
acclaim by parliament and the public.112 When the Company’s charter
came up for discussion in 1792–3, it was renewed with few changes
and “a quietness unexampled in the annals of Parliament.”113 And
Burke and his fellow prosecutors of Hastings, who had enjoyed suc-
cess at first, now faced enmity in the press and almost certain defeat
in the Lords.114 All of this served to vindicate the restrictive regime
of Cornwallis but, at the same time, to lessen the need for it. Hence,
by the time Cornwallis left India in 1793, the idea of conciliation
could be safely restored to its former amplitude.
Something like a return to the status quo ante was evident in the
approach to scholarly patronage of Cornwallis’ successor, Shore. For
him, “the grand Object of our Government … should be to conciliate …
the Natives,” and Hastings had been “wise” to do so by “encourag-
ing the pursuits of literature.”115 By all accounts, Shore imitated the
guarded stance of Cornwallis while serving as his lieutenant. But a
sojourn in England in 1790–92 seems to have convinced him that
this was no longer necessary. Whereas Cornwallis had maintained a
distance from Jones and the Asiatic Society, Shore voiced his “affec-
tion” – nay “reverence” – for the one and took an active part in the
other.116 He even broke with precedent and accepted the presidency
of the society upon Jones’ death in 1794. Meanwhile, Shore involved
himself personally in the affairs of learned elites. He provided relief

111
Ibid., pp. 16–19.
112
P. J. Marshall, “‘Cornwallis Triumphant’: War in India and the British Public in the
Late Eighteenth Century,” in Marshall, Trade and Conquest.
113
William Pitt, Speech in HC Deb (24 May 1793), in Parliamentary History, vol. XXX,
col. 944.
114
P. J. Marshall, introduction to vol. 7 of Burke, Writings and Speeches, pp. 3–6.
115
Shore, Minute (18 May 1785), in Minutes of Evidence, vol. III, p. 1277; Lord
Teignmouth, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence, of Sir William
Jones (London, 1804), pp. 237–9, 260 n. Shore was created Baron Teignmouth in 1798.
116
John Shore, The Literary History of the Late Sir William Jones, in a Discourse
(London, 1795), pp. 3–4; Kejariwal, Asiatic Society, p. 93.

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 88 Conciliation after Hastings

to the ailing Benares pandit Kanhardas and advanced the career of his
onetime private pandit Radhakanta Tarkavagisa.117 It is hard to imag-
ine Cornwallis bestowing such kindnesses. It is also hard to imagine
him imposing on Tafazzul Husain Khan as Shore did in 1797. Keen
to leverage Tafazzul’s reputation, and heedless of propriety, Shore
pressed him into accepting an appointment as deputy of the nawab of
Awadh.118 Though ostensibly an honor, the post was perilous given
the level of infighting and suspicion at the nawab’s court – not to
mention the unpopularity of the encroaching Company. Relating the
matter to Hastings, William Palmer confided that “I tremble for the
peace & Reputation of my Friend.”119 His premonitions proved cor-
rect. Tafazzul would last but a few harrowing months in Lucknow
before fleeing to Calcutta, where he died in 1800.
If the 1790s saw a return to Hastings’ system of conciliation
in Bengal, then they also saw a fuller and wider adoption of it in
Britain. Hastings himself played a role in this development, expound-
ing his system not only at trial but also upon his acquittal in 1795.
He prepared and circulated a volume containing the razinamas
along with new addresses that praised him for, among other things,
“establishing colleges” and “promoting science.”120 Meanwhile,
the Court of Directors too was beginning to see advantage in por-
traying the Company as an enlightened broker of knowledge. In a
report to a Crown committee of 1792, the directors claimed to
have used “every Endeavour to extend … Trade” and “to cultivate
Knowledge and Science.” They boasted of having put the historian

117
Kanhardas, Petitions, trans. in Sen and Mishra, eds., Sanskrit Documents, pp. 81–8;
Rosane Rocher, “The Career of Rādhākānta Tarkavāgı¯ śa, an Eighteenth-Century
Pandit in British Employ,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 109 (1989), p. 632.
118
Arif Abid, “A Poisoned Chalice,” 3 Quarks Daily (2006), https://3quarksdaily
.com/3quarksdaily/2006/03/nawab_tafazzul_.html. The author of this paper kindly
provided a version with citations.
119
Palmer to Hastings, 15 Apr. 1797, BL, Add. MS 29175, f. 88r.
120
[Warren Hastings, ed.], Debates of the House of Lords, on the Evidence Delivered in
the Trial of Warren Hastings in Consequence of His Acquittal (London, 1797), p. 820.
See Hastings to David Anderson, 23 Nov. 1796 to 22 Jan. 1799, BL, Add. MS 45418,
74r-95v.

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 Conciliation after Cornwallis 89

Robert Orme, the geographer James Rennell, and the hydrographer

Alexander Dalrymple on their payroll. They also played up their role
in “the Establishment of Botanical Gardens in Calcutta, Madras,
and St. Helena” for scientific and commercial purposes. They even
took credit for the founding of the Asiatic Society, which, they
noted, embraced not only “Literature and Science” but also “Arts,
Manufactures, and Commerce.”121 The message was clear: The
Company’s combined politico-economic power enabled it to contrib-
ute to British knowledge, and any attempt to curtail the one would
have a corresponding effect on the other.
The directors buttressed their case in 1798 by announcing the
founding of an “Oriental Repository” at their London headquar-
ters. This institution, which would come to be known as the India
Museum and Oriental Library, followed in a long line of collections
meant to advertise the fruits of the Company’s trade.122 If in the past
these fruits had been material, then the directors now insisted that
they were intellectual as well. The announcement stressed their “dis-
position for the encouragement of Indian literature” and their desire
to assist in the “exportation” of its “Stores.”123 For that matter, in a
plan drawn up for the institution, Charles Wilkins envisioned that
its “objects of commerce” would contribute to “the cause of sci-
ence.”124 And in letters supporting Wilkins’ bid to serve as its cura-
tor, Hastings beheld “a new system for ingrafting the knowledge of
India on the commercial p[u]rsuits of the Company.”125 Of course, all

121
First, Second, and Third Reports of the Select Committee, Appointed by the Court of
Directors of the East India Company, to Take into Consideration the Export Trade
from Great Britain to the East Indies (London, 1793), pp. 37–8.
122
Memorandum [c. 1838–58], BL, Mss Eur F303/54; Arthur MacGregor, Company
Curiosities: Nature, Culture and the East India Company, 1600–1874 (London, 2018),
pp. 168–9.
123
Public Despatch to Bengal (25 May 1798), cited in A. J. Arberry, The Library of the
India Office: A Historical Sketch (London, 1938), p. 10.
124
Charles Wilkins, “Sketch of a Plan for an Oriental Museum Proposed to be Established
at the India House” (Jan. 1799), in ibid., pp. 16–18.
125
Hastings to Charles Wilkins [1799], in ibid., pp. 19–20; Hastings to Chairman of the
Court of Directors, 15 Nov. 1799, in ibid., p. 23.

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 90 Conciliation after Hastings

of this sounded rather like the system of conciliation that Hastings

had developed as governor-general. It was only fitting, therefore, that
the directors prominently displayed a portrait of him in the museum
upon its completion in 1801.126
In the meantime, there were signs that the efforts of Hastings
and the directors were finding an audience among Britain’s politi-
cal classes. This audience included Henry Dundas, the head of the
Board of Control, a government body formed by Pitt’s India Act to
supervise the Company. A patron of letters himself, Dundas seems
to have admired the scholarship of Jones and other Company offi-
cials. Certainly, notwithstanding his biographers’ claims to the con-
trary, he appreciated its political value.127 Early in discussions on
the renewal of the Company’s charter, he engaged John Bruce, an
Edinburgh professor, to research and write a history of the Company
state.128 As Bruce put it, in telling language, the work was “a means of
conciliating the opinions of the parties interested in the subsequent
renewal.”129 It would do this not only by defending the Company’s
hybrid constitution but also by serving as an example of its leaders’
promotion of knowledge. For his labors, Bruce was appointed by the
directors as the Company’s assistant historiographer. He also contin-
ued to do Dundas’ bidding. It was under this dual aegis that he under-
took his next project, “a general History of Indian Affairs.”130 Like his
earlier work, the history was intended first and foremost to legitimize

126
“Some Account of a Hindu Temple, and a Bust, of which Elegant Engravings are
Placed in the Oriental Library of the Hon. East India Company, Leadenhall Street,”
European Magazine 42 (Dec. 1802), pp. 448–9.
127
For these claims, see Holden Furber, Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville, 1742–
1811: Political Manager of Scotland, Statesman, Administrator of British India
(Oxford, 1931), p. 296; Michael Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 184.
128
[John Bruce], Historical View of Plans, for the Government of British India, and
Regulation of Trade to the East Indies (London, 1793).
129
Bruce to Directors, draft [1818], BL, IOR H/456e, p. 233G.
130
Bruce to Alexander Adamson, 16 May 1793, ibid., p. 2. The work Bruce eventually
published was narrower in scope: John Bruce, Annals of the Honorable East-India
Company, from Their Establishment by the Charter of Queen Elizabeth, 1600,
to the Union of the London and English East-India Companies, 1707–8, 3 vols.
(London, 1810).

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 Conciliation after Cornwallis 91

the Company state. It would “be divided into the Political, and
Commercial Branches” but show that these were “interwoven.”131
It would also incorporate, and draw attention to, the research of
scholar-officials across the Company’s territories. Bruce solicited
contributions from Jones and other members of the Asiatic Society as
well as from authorities in Benares, Bombay, Madras, and elsewhere.
His project thus marked an attempt to credit Dundas and the direc-
tors in London for scholarship carried out in India.
Dundas’ engagement of Bruce was but one among many signs of
Hastings’ and the directors’ public success. The earlier Indian “flood-
tide of panegyric” on Hastings’ scholarly patronage was now being
matched in Britain.132 Following his acquittal, Hastings appeared in
print as “the distinguished patron of … literature”; “the enlightened
politician, the comprehensive genius, and polite scholar.”133 One
pamphleteer credited him with inspiring Lord Macartney’s mission
to China, which, like those he had sent to Tibet, combined “atten-
tion to … commerce” with “service to … science.”134 At the same
time, the directors were increasingly coming in for praise on the
same account. The writer and antiquarian Thomas Maurice adduced
their patronage as proof that these “enlightened … merchants” were
free from “the meanness of avarice.” He described their blending of
“Trade and Science” as conducive to a world in which the two “trav-
elled, side by side.”135 Such accolades demonstrated both what the
directors wanted to hear and the willingness of their clients to oblige.

131
Bruce to Alexander Adamson, 1794, BL, IOR H/456e, p. 75. See also Olivera Jokic,
“Commanding Correspondence: Letters and the ‘Evidence of Experience’ in the
Letterbook of John Bruce, the East India Company Historiographer,” Eighteenth
Century 52 (2011), p. 113.
132
For the phrase, see Burke, Speech (21 Apr. 1789), in E. A. Bond, ed., Speeches of
the Managers and Counsel in the Trial of Warren Hastings, 3 vols. (London, 1860),
vol. II, p. 5.
133
Eliza Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 2 vols. (London, 1796),
vol. I, dedication; [Hastings, ed.], Debates, p. 504.
134
The Merits of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Hastings, as Ministers in War and in Peace, Impartially
Stated (London, 1794), pp. 49–52.
135
Thomas Maurice, Indian Antiquities, 7 vols. (London [1793]–1800), vol. I, pp. xv, lxvi n.

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 92 Conciliation after Hastings

There were many further examples. John Gilchrist, writing from

Bengal, rejoiced at the cherishing of letters “by a sovereign Company
of British Merchants.”136 Patrick Russell proclaimed that this was “a
splendid era” for the Company, owing to its happy union of “com-
mercial concerns” and “Science.”137 Joseph Hager pronounced that
Britain was indebted to the directors as much for their devotion to
scholars as for their “Commercial enterprise.”138 David Macpherson
held that their “encouragement of literature and science have raised
the mercantile character to the highest degree of exaltation.”139 And
yet, this last encomium was different. There was something defensive
about it, coming as it did in 1805. By this time, the Company state
was threatened from within by a governor-general with altogether
different ideas about knowledge.

Conclusion
In the last decade and a half of the eighteenth century, Hastings’ idea
of conciliation – of legitimizing the Company state through schol-
arly patronage – was promulgated, tarnished, expanded, contracted,
and ultimately widely embraced. Ironies and paradoxes abounded.
A critic of the Company state, Hastings was thrust into the role of
its defender. A likely source for Hastings’ idea of conciliation, Burke
emerged as its greatest skeptic. An intimate of Macpherson, Jones
partnered with his enemy Cornwallis. And the more the Company
changed, the more its ideas about knowledge stayed the same.
The idea of conciliation withstood the reforms of Pitt, Dundas,
and Cornwallis largely because these fundamentally preserved the
Company state. In the 1780s, Dundas had considered ending the
Company’s political role, but Cornwallis, and later experience,

136
Gilchrist, Dictionary, vol. I, p. i.
137
Patrick Russell, An Account of Indian Serpents, Collected on the Coast of Coromandel
(London, 1796), p. viii.
138
Joseph Hager, A Dissertation on the Newly Discovered Babylonian Inscriptions
(London, 1801), p. xi.
139
David Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries, and Navigation,
4 vols. (London, 1805), vol. I, dedication.

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 Conclusion 93

convinced him against this.140 As he told the Commons in 1793, no

political economist “has as yet supposed that an extensive empire
can be administered by a commercial association”; yet he found the
Company “to be an organ of government, and of trade, which has
experimentally proved itself.”141 The resulting Charter Act renewed
the Company’s privileges for twenty years and thus ensured that the
raison d’être for conciliation remained. It also provided evidence that
Hastings’ system of conciliation had been effective. Certainly, signs
to the contrary could be found. Some scholar-officials complained
that the directors had done “nothing” for them.142 Tafazzul’s failure
in Awadh revealed the limits of the strategy of employing learned
elites as political agents. Still, on the cusp of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the Company’s constitution appeared secure and conciliation
entrenched in its ideology. As Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington
sailed for India in late 1797, perhaps only he foresaw the challenges
to both that his governor-generalship would bring.

140
Furber, Henry Dundas, pp. 130–31; C. H. Philips, The East India Company, 1784–
1834, 2nd edn (Manchester, 1961), pp. 71–2.
141
Henry Dundas, Speech in House of Commons Debate (23 Apr. 1793), in Parliamentary
History, vol. XXX, cols. 651–3.
142
Jonathan Scott, preface to [Inayat-Allah Kamboh] Einaiut Oolah, Bahar-Danush; or,
Garden of Knowledge. An Oriental Romance, trans. Scott, 3 vols. (Shrewsbury, 1799),
vol. I, pp. xiv–xv. For another complaint, about a lack of support from the Bombay
administration, see Charles Reynolds to Alexander Adamson, 18 Mar. 1795, BL, IOR
H/456e, p. 187.

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 3 The Politics of the College of
Fort William

“The College must stand or the Empire must fall.”1 So declared Lord
Wellesley in reference to the College of Fort William.2 The year was
1802, his pet project was threatened with abolition, and the threat
came from the Company’s Court of Directors. Since being appointed
governor-general of Bengal four years earlier, Wellesley had quarreled
with his nominal masters. The topics of controversy ranged from his
fiscal and administrative policies to his personal conduct to his wars
and diplomacy. Yet it was that Calcutta seminary for Company ser-
vants to which Wellesley vowed to devote the rest of his political
life, over which he threatened to resign the governor-generalship, and
upon which he later would look back as his proudest achievement.3
Why was the college so important to Wellesley? Why did it so antago-
nize the directors? How did it respond to, and affect, the Company’s
thinking about knowledge, which had come to revolve around the
idea of conciliation?
Modern studies offer limited help in answering these questions.
The ideas that shaped Wellesley, his college, and the directors’ enmity
toward it have been little understood. To start with, the ambitions
of the man have been underestimated. Wellesley, the elder brother of
the Duke of Wellington, has been seen by historians as “viceregal,”

1
Marquess Wellesley to David Scott, 12 Aug. 1802, in Robert Rouiere Pearce, Memoirs
and Correspondence of the Most Noble Richard Marquess Wellesley, 3 vols. (London,
1846–7), vol. II, p. 212.
2
The Earl of Mornington, as he was styled when he took up the governor-generalship,
was created Marquess Wellesley in 1799.
3
Wellesley to Earl of Dartmouth, 5 Aug. 1802, in ibid., vol. II, pp. 214, 217; Wellesley
to Charles Metcalfe, Aug. 1839, in The Wellesley Papers [ed. L. S. Benjamin], 2 vols.
(London, 1914), vol. II, p. 350; Wellesley to W. B. Bayley, 21 Mar. 1841, in John William
Kaye, Lives of Indian Officers, 2 vols. (London, 1867), vol. I, p. 488.

94

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 The Politics of the College of Fort William 95

an avatar of Lord Curzon a century later.4 But this is putting things

mildly. As one contemporary recalled, Wellesley was “regal” in
everything he did and “unbounded in the authority of a name which
filled all India.”5 According to no less than Curzon, Wellesley exer-
cised “a single and self-centred rule” – an “autocracy” – that would
have been “impossible” in his own day.6 To brand Wellesley a pro-
consul, an instrument of the British state, or an architect of the Raj
is to ignore his intention to rule as a king. Jeremy Bentham was
right, albeit late, in characterizing the regime forged by Wellesley
as a “sort of local Monarchy.”7 The forging of this regime, in turn,
explains the college controversy. For all of the personal, financial,
and – it has been alleged – cultural issues that divided Wellesley and
the directors, what mattered by far the most was his hostility to the
Company state.8 Wellesley argued that the Company’s constitution
jumbled together “the conflicting characters of merchant and sover-
eign,” and that the directors were incapable of putting their sovereign
duties before their “mercantile interests, prejudices, and profits.”9

4
Iris Butler, The Eldest Brother: The Marquess Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington’s
Eldest Brother (London, 1973), pp. 23–4; C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British
Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), pp. 111, 209.
5
[Charles Marsh], “Society in India,” New Monthly Magazine 22 (1828), p. 234.
Wellesley thus argued against any “interference of the Crown” in the government
of British India, which ought to be left to the governor-general. Wellesley to Henry
Dundas, 27 Jan. 1800, in Dundas and Wellesley, Two Views of British India: The
Private Correspondence of Mr. Dundas and Lord Wellesley, 1798–1801, ed. Edward
Ingram (Bath, 1969), p. 223.
6
George Nathaniel Curzon, British Government in India: The Story of the Viceroys
and Government Houses, 2 vols. (London, 1925), vol. II, pp. 9, 108, 115.
7
Jeremy Bentham, Plan of Parliamentary Reform (London, 1817), p. xciv. For more
contemporary allusions to Wellesley’s kingly style of rule, see Sir James Mackintosh
to Richard Sharp, 14 Aug. 1804, in Mackintosh, Memoirs of the Life of the Right
Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. Robert James Mackintosh, 2nd edn, 2 vols.
(London, 1836), vol. I, p. 212; Viscount Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India,
Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt, 3 vols. (London, 1809), vol. I, pp. 235–6.
8
For discussions of these issues, see C. H. Philips, The East India Company, 1784–1834,
2nd edn (Manchester, 1961), pp. 125–30; Ainslie Thomas Embree, Charles Grant and
British Rule in India (London, 1962), pp. 187–94; David Kopf, British Orientalism
and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835
(Berkeley, 1969), pp. 133–5.
9
Wellesley to Viscount Castlereagh, 25 Jul. 1803, in DMW, vol. III, p. 202.

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 96 The Politics of the College of Fort William

The directors, for their part, understood that Wellesley sought “to
establish a new species of Government,” to subvert their authority,
and to assume “all the political powers of British India.”10 Both par-
ties saw the college as central to this attempt.
A close examination of the college controversy shows that it
turned on the danger the institution posed to the Company state.
The college served to aggrandize Wellesley at the directors’ expense
and to establish his legitimacy with multiple audiences. It would do
this not through conciliation but through the projection of an image
of grandeur consonant with a kingly territorial sovereignty. In a sign
of the reach and impact of Wellesley’s ideas, the directors continued
to fear them for years after his departure.

The College Controversy

Wellesley made it clear that his founding of the college was part of
an assault on the foundations of the Company state. And yet the
directors at first did not appreciate the danger they faced. Only upon
further examination – and provocation – did the directors attempt to
abolish the institution. They were blocked, however, by the Board of
Control, whose constitutional role now entered into the controversy.
Unable to close the college, the directors decided to establish one of
their own in Hertfordshire. Haileybury College would absorb some
of the functions and, they hoped, the prestige of the College of Fort
William. Nonetheless, it evinced no new ideas about knowledge. The
directors remained wedded, at least for the time being, to the idea of
conciliation.
Wellesley opened the controversy on 10 July 1800, with a dis-
patch entitled “The Governor-General’s Notes with Respect to the
Foundation of a College at Fort William.” The political nature of the
institution was implied in the first sentence: “The British possessions

10
Copy of a Proposed Dispatch to the Bengal Government, Approved by Twenty-Three
of the Twenty-Four Directors of the Hon. East-India Company, Dated April 3, 1805
(London, 1806), p. 17; Directors to Board of Control, 6 Nov. 1805, in P. J. Marshall,
Problems of Empire: Britain and India 1757–1813 (London, 1968), p. 143.

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 The College Controversy 97

in India now constitute one of the most extensive and populous

empires in the world.” To the officials who administered this empire,
Wellesley continued, “commercial or mercantile knowledge” was
entirely inapplicable. The “commercial education” they typically
received in Britain was not merely unnecessary; it was positively
inimical. In the following pages, Wellesley broached several issues
connected with the institution he had already founded in conse-
quence, such as the age at which “writers” should enroll, where they
should reside, and which subjects they should study. Undergirding
all of his plans, however, was a claim that the Company’s territory
had outgrown its mode of government, and that ultimate power must
be vested in the office of the governor-general. His most concrete
proposal in this regard was to wrest away from the directors’ con-
trol of civil service appointments. With the founding of the college,
he held, the governor-general was best placed to determine writers’
starting ranks and destinations. In symbolic ways too, the college
was intended to strengthen Wellesley’s authority. Not only would he
serve as its visitor, a role often played by the Crown at Oxford and
Cambridge colleges, but he dated its founding to the first anniversary
of the conquest of Mysore. The choice was revealing. Wellesley had
invaded Mysore against the directors’ wishes, and in furtherance of
a large-scale territorial vision of British India. He now said in public
what he had long said in private: Such an empire must be ruled not by
“a commercial concern” but by “a powerful sovereign.”11
The directors were slow to grasp this challenge to their
authority, or, at least, its full magnitude. Upon the arrival of
Wellesley’s dispatch in spring 1801, they reacted with ambivalence.12
The influential Charles Grant pronounced the college “highly com-
mendable,” and noted only three partial objections from his fellow
directors:

11
Marquess Wellesley, “The Governor-General’s Notes with Respect to the Foundation
of a College at Fort William” (10 Jul. 1800), in DMW, vol. II, pp. 325–9, 351, 355, 358.
12
See John Bowen, “The East India Company’s Education of Its Own Servants,” JRAS
(1955), p. 108; Philips, East India Company, pp. 125–6.

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 98 The Politics of the College of Fort William

(1) That it is far too expensive for the Company’s finances;

(2) That it ought not to comprehend the young men of other
Presidencies; (3) That it should be confined chiefly to learning
properly Oriental, and not to include a revising course of
European Literature, which would be better and more cheaply
provided at home.

Grant thought “these objections have weight, particularly the

last.”13 But he agreed on the need for a better educated civil service.
Furthermore, he cheered the appointments of his fellow Evangelicals
David Brown and Claudius Buchanan as provost and vice-provost.
Neither Grant nor the other directors initially saw the institution
as especially dangerous. Perhaps they were inclined to dismiss
Wellesley’s rhetoric as harmless bluster. Some may have been pla-
cated by a revision drawn up by Grant at the urging of Wellesley’s
ally among the directors, David Scott.14 Others may not have read
the dispatch’s eighty-nine paragraphs very closely. In any case, Scott
expressed a cautious optimism that “we must all approve such an
institution,” and that “time for reflection and reasoning” would con-
vince enough of the skeptics.15 On the contrary, by the end of the
year, the directors as a body were set against the college, for they had
grown to understand the intentions of its founder.
The first alarm was sounded by none other than the former
governor-general Warren Hastings. Scott had sent him Wellesley’s
dispatch in June 1801 in the hope of enlisting his support.16 In letters
of July and October, Hastings commended the institution in gen-
eral. But he criticized certain features that he argued undermined
the directors’ authority. He objected, in particular, to Wellesley’s

13
Grant to David Brown, 19 Jun. 1801, in Henry Morris, The Life of Charles Grant:
Sometime Member of Parliament for Inverness-Shire and Director of the East India
Company (London, 1904), pp. 241–2.
14
See Embree, Charles Grant, pp. 192–3.
15
Scott to Wellesley, 9 Jan. 1801, in Scott, The Correspondence of David Scott, ed. C. H.
Philips, 2 vols. (London, 1951), vol. II, p. 297; Scott to Lord Teignmouth, 9 May 1801,
in ibid., vol. II, p. 306.
16
Scott to Hastings, 11 Jun. 1801, in ibid., vol. II, pp. 309–10.

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 The College Controversy 99

proposal to assume the “extraordinary privilege” of deciding the

destinations of writers.17 This would have a result “to be avoided
in every delegation of a remote authority, that of transferring the
sense of … fidelity, from the Company to the person of the Governor
General.” Hastings also apparently suspected that Wellesley would
try in other ways to make the college a vehicle for his own aggran-
dizement. He enjoined the directors to frame new rules for the col-
lege that would set “clearly defined bounds” to the “discretion” of
the visitor. If Hastings saw the irony of giving this advice when he
had once sought greater independence from the directors, then he
did not show it. He did display an awareness that the college was
likely to be “unpopular” with that body.18
Two further developments underscored the subversive poten-
tial of the college and hardened the directors against it. Reports
reached London, first, of Wellesley’s extravagant spending and, sec-
ond, of his renewed encouragement of private trade.19 In both cases,
Wellesley had disregarded the directors’ instructions as well as the
Company’s commercial interests. The unsanctioned and expensive
college thus came to seem part of a pattern of defiant assault on the
foundations of the Company state. As the directors wrote in January
1802, its establishment without their permission was

a departure from our established system; the tendency of all such

deviations is to weaken the authority which is constitutionally
placed in this country; for, when measures are once adopted, which
either pledge the faith of government, or incur great expense, the
exercise of control, in such cases, is in effect frustrated.20

By now, additional issues had crept into discussions of the college in

metropolitan political circles. Some commentators feared it would

17
Warren Hastings, “A Letter of Warren Hastings on the Civil Service of the East India
Company” (19 Jul. 1801), ed. W. H. Hutton, English Historical Review 44 (1929), p. 638.
18
Hastings to Directors, 18 to 19 Oct. 1801, BL, IOR H/487, pp. 224, 226, 228.
19
Philips, East India Company, p. 126.
20
Public Despatch to Bengal (27 Jan. 1802), in Letters of the Marquis Wellesley
Respecting the College of Fort William (London, 1812), p. 59.

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 100 The Politics of the College of Fort William

become a sink of Jacobinism or lead to disruptive “colonization”

(British settlement) in India. By contrast, some Evangelicals envi-
sioned the college as an instrument for spreading the word of God.
But the directors, after faulting Wellesley for disobedience, ordered
its abolition on the simple ground of expense.
It was at this point that the Board of Control entered the con-
troversy and raised it to a new pitch. Lord Dartmouth, the president
of the board, favored Wellesley and the college and edited the direc-
tors’ order to make it seem merely provisional.21 Under better finan-
cial conditions, in the new wording of the dispatch, the college would
merit “the most serious consideration.”22 Accordingly, Wellesley
waited for conditions to improve and then, in August 1802, wrote
the directors that he had stayed the college’s abolition.23 When the
letter reached London, Dartmouth’s successor, Lord Castlereagh,
pushed the directors to endorse a dispatch he had penned in sup-
port of Wellesley’s decision.24 But the directors now stated that their
financial justification had been a pretext and that larger questions
were at issue.25 In a draft dispatch of July 1803, they objected not
only that the college had been “formed without our sanction” but
also that its “plan and scope” endangered the Company’s constitu-
tion. This constitution, they held, was “of a mixed nature, being
partly Commercial and partly Political,” and Wellesley threatened
to degrade “the Commercial part.” This was the tendency, allegedly,
of his aspersions on mercantile knowledge and of his “high assump-
tions of title” and “splendour.” For that matter, his grab for control
of writers’ appointments seemed to have more to do with his own

21
Dartmouth to Wellesley, 2 Feb. 1802, Staffordshire County Record Office, D(W)1778/I/
ii/1589.
22
Public Despatch to Bengal [showing alterations by Board of Control] (27 Jan. 1802), BL,
IOR E/4/652, p. 86.
23
For this strategy, see Merrick Shawe to Henry Wellesley, 20 Jun. 1802, BL, Mss Eur
E176, pp. 547–8.
24
Prakash Chandra, “The Establishment of the Fort William College,” Calcutta Review
51 (1934), p. 166; Philips, East India Company, pp. 127–8.
25
Directors to Board of Control, 1 and 19 Jul. 1803, BL, IOR H/487, pp. 399, 445.

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 The College Controversy 101

“power” than, as he claimed, “the good of the service.”26 No won-

der then that Castlereagh’s intervention “produced a hurricane at the
India House.”27 In the directors’ estimation the survival of the col-
lege might mean the demise of the Company state.
The controversy had grown to involve, in Castlereagh’s words,
“the general System of India Government.”28 At issue now was the
constitutional relationship of the directors not only to the governor-
general but also to the Board of Control. When Henry Dundas and
William Pitt had drawn up plans for the board two decades earlier,
they had left the extent of its powers somewhat uncertain. After
all, it must be able to exert control when necessary without appear-
ing to infringe the chartered rights of the Company. Along with the
draft dispatch of July 1803, however, the directors sent a letter stat-
ing that “they consider the Authority of the Board to be confined to
an absolute or partial negative.”29 According to them, the board had
overstepped its bounds in changing the meaning of one dispatch and
in seeking to originate another. Of course, things looked otherwise
to Castlereagh. In his view, the directors themselves were “aiming
at the extension of their authority” far beyond what Dundas and
Pitt had envisioned. If allowed to stand, their construction would
not only exclude “the Board of Controul (that is, the State) from all
effectual direction” but would lead to further “attempts at undue
authority.”30 After Castlereagh rejected the directors’ draft, along
with their argument, both sides took legal counsel. The directors
seemed to have the stronger case, but the board was prepared to bring
its case before parliament.31 Finally, in order to prevent an open

26
Draft Public Despatch to Bengal (19 Jul. 1803), ibid., pp. 456, 459, 461, 469, 471–2,
506–9.
27
Castlereagh to Viscount Melville, 1 Aug. 1803, Public Record Office of Northern
Ireland, D3030/L/8.
28
Ibid.
29
Directors to Board of Control, 19 Jul. 1803, p. 451.
30
Castlereagh to Viscount Melville, 4 Aug. 1803, Public Record Office of Northern
Ireland, D3030/L/9.
31
P. E. Roberts, India Under Wellesley (London, 1929), pp. 160–62; Chandra,
“Establishment,” pp. 168–70.

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 102 The Politics of the College of Fort William

confrontation, the two parties agreed on a compromise. The ambi-

guity of their respective powers would be allowed to continue – as
would Wellesley’s college.
Already, the directors had been developing a response to the
college that went beyond simple abolition. As early as the start of
the controversy, they had recognized a political as well as a practical
need to offer something in its stead. Their draft dispatch of January
1802 put forward a dual remedy. First, a seminary giving basic lin-
guistic instruction might replace the College of Fort William. Second,
“regulations” might be adopted for the prior and fuller education of
writers in England. Dartmouth undercut both proposals. He made
the one seem largely a means to save costs and expunged the other
entirely.32 Far from rebutting Wellesley’s charges, therefore, his mod-
ified dispatch reinforced them.33 No wonder that amid the climactic
volley of correspondence with the board, the directors felt the need
to disclaim being led “by the narrow views of commercial habits.”
They protested that this was “a stale and unjust imputation.” Had
they not encouraged “the literary talents of Individuals” and “the
literary spirit in general”?34 In the negotiations with the board, the
directors won a concession: limiting admission to the college to writ-
ers assigned to Bengal. In addition, they ordered Wellesley to spec-
ify which expenses were “requisite for … the study of the Native
Languages” and which, by implication, could be cut.35 So began in
earnest a scheme not to abolish the college but, instead, to diminish
it. Further reductions would play a part in this scheme. So too would
the establishment of Haileybury College.
Having failed to destroy Wellesley’s college, the directors set
about building a college of their own to overshadow it. The East
India College, or Haileybury, took shape in a report of 1804 and was
formally established in Hertfordshire the following year. Grant, the

32
Public Despatch to Bengal [showing alterations] (27 Jan. 1802), pp. 67–71.
33
See Charles Grant, Speech in East India House Debate (5 Mar. 1817), AJ 4 (1817), p. 273.
34
Directors to Board of Control, 1 Jul. 1803, pp. 405–6.
35
Public Despatch to Bengal (2 Sept. 1803), BL, IOR E/4/654, pp. 653–4.

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 The College Controversy 103

prime mover of the enterprise, insisted that it was no reaction to

Wellesley, for its origins dated back to 1796.36 But while the directors
had discussed a “plan” or “regulations” for educating writers – “most
probably” at Oxford or Cambridge – the idea of a new institution
seems to have arisen only once it became clear that Wellesley’s col-
lege would persist.37 Indeed, the primary purpose of Haileybury was
to counter the menace of Wellesley. Its course of instruction would
precede and largely replace that of his college and would uphold the
hybrid constitution of the Company. On the one hand, according to
the 1804 report, it should include “Mercantile Accounts” and prepare
writers for “Commercial Operations.” On the other hand, it should
also comprehend every other subject connected with the “Affairs of
our Empire.”38 As a later plan concurred, writers must be trained to
serve not only as “Factors and Merchants” but also as “Magistrates,
Ambassadors, and Provincial Governors.” The Company’s “exten-
sion of dominion” increased its responsibilities; Haileybury’s cur-
riculum ensured that it could meet them.39 And yet, for all of the
directors’ seriousness of purpose, encapsulated by the forbidding edi-
fice they commissioned, Haileybury smacked of reaction instead of
initiative. It bespoke no new ideas about knowledge. According to a
notice in the press, the college would stand as “a lasting memorial”
of the Company’s patronage “of literature and science.”40 This state-
ment, authored by the directors or on their behalf, did no more than
invoke the idea of conciliation.

36
“Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Plan for Forming an
Establishment at Home for the Education of Young Men Intended for the Company’s
Civil Service in India, 26 October 1804,” in Anthony Farrington, ed., The Records
of the East India College Haileybury and Other Institutions (London, 1976), p. 14;
Grant to Sir James Mackintosh, 17 Sept. 1805, in Morris, Life, p. 245.
37
Grant to Sir James Mackintosh [c. 1801–2], in Morris, Life, p. 244; Public Despatch to
Bengal [showing alterations] (27 Jan. 1802), p. 67; “Report of the Committee,” p. 14.
38
“Report of the Committee,” pp. 16–17.
39
A Preliminary View of the Establishment of the Honourable East-India Company in
Hertfordshire for the Education of Young Persons Appointed to the Civil Service in
India ([Hertfordshire,] 1806), pp. 3–4.
40
“Varieties, Literary and Philosophical,” Monthly Magazine 29 (London, Mar. 1810),
p. 164.

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 104 The Politics of the College of Fort William

Might and Splendor

Wellesley had other ideas. Apart from subverting the directors,
the College of Fort William was meant to secure his legitimacy.
Wellesley sought to do this, not through conciliation, but through
the projection of might and splendor instead. The collection,
display, and transmission of knowledge at the institution were
designed to uphold his kingly territorial sovereignty. They served,
at an ideological level, to ennoble him and to enlarge the sphere
of his authority. Wellesley marshalled the resources of the col-
lege, notably at its annual disputations, to cultivate audiences
in Britain, British India, Europe, and Asia. What was studied and
taught at the college mattered less, ultimately, than the grand
impression it made.
It was telling of Wellesley’s ambitions that he eschewed the
idea of conciliation, which had figured in the Company’s ideology
for the past three decades. Since this idea blurred the distinction
between sovereign and merchant – both could conciliate – it must
be repudiated. The flexibility that sullied the idea for Wellesley
did allow others to attach it to his College of Fort William. Warren
Hastings, for one, expressed hope that the “political uses” of the col-
lege would include “ingratiating our countrymen with the … people
of India.”41 Others deployed the idea explicitly. One student, in a
printed essay, held that by patronizing “natives of learning,” the col-
lege would help “greatly to conciliate … India.”42 At least one pro-
fessor likewise invoked the idea by name in a request for patronage
addressed to the college council.43 Wellesley, by contrast, seldom
wrote of “conciliation” as governor-general and never, it seems, in
connection with scholarly patronage. Later, as lord lieutenant of

41
Hastings, “Letter,” p. 635.
42
W. P. Elliott, “Of the Advantages to Be Derived from an Academical Institution in
India; Considered in a Moral, Literary, and Political Point of View,” in Primitiae
Orientalis, 3 vols. [vol. 1 titled Essays by the Students of the College of Fort William]
(Calcutta, 1802–4), vol. I, p. 32.
43
Gilchrist to College Council, 19 Aug. 1803, PCFW, vol. 559, p. 272.

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 Might and Splendor 105

Ireland, he would advocate “conciliating” Catholics.44 But here he

sought neither to unmake the rule of a company nor to make himself
into a king. In the Indian context, conciliation was linked to three
things Wellesley hated: councils, compromise, and commercial sov-
ereignty. Instead of a system of conciliation, he devised a campaign
to raise his standing in the eyes of multiple constituencies.
One political frontier of the college lay in Britain, where the
enmity of the directors compelled Wellesley to find other sources of
support. He sent his dispatches on the college to notables like the king
and prime minister, and enlarged on them in letters to allies like David
Scott.45 His campaign seems to have widened after the directors ordered
the institution abolished in 1801. A composition saved in his brother
Henry’s papers and apparently intended for publication stressed the
“Political Magnitude” of the college and asked how “any men” could
judge it “on considerations purely Mercantile.”46 Wellesley’s efforts
went further. He also sought to staff the college with men of influ-
ence residing at the metropole. In an early letter to Henry Dundas, he
proposed to appoint as professors James Mackintosh, James Rennell,
Thomas Maurice, and Charles Grant (the director’s son).47 Mackintosh
was a famous lawyer, writer, and philosopher; Rennell and Maurice
were likewise well regarded and connected scholars; and although
Grant was merely a student, his father would play a large role in
­determining the fate of the college. Ultimately, reductions imposed by
the directors would force Wellesley to recruit from a less distinguished
expatriate pool. Still, the Company’s territories in India were home to
at least a few scholars of metropolitan renown. One such was James
Dinwiddie, who had served as the astronomer on Lord Macartney’s

44
In this context too, “conciliation” had a flexible meaning. As one pamphlet put it,
this “comely word” took on “a thousand different shapes.” [John Swift Emerson], One
Year of the Administration of His Excellency the Marquess of Wellesley in Ireland
(London, 1823), pp. 22–3.
45
Pearce, Memoirs and Correspondence, vol. II, pp. 200–201, 217.
46
“Copy of a Letter from a Gentleman in Calcutta to His Friend in England, Dated July
14th 1802,” BL, Mss Eur E176, p. 196.
47
Wellesley to Dundas, 18 Aug. 1800, in Dundas and Wellesley, Two Views, p. 283.

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 106 The Politics of the College of Fort William

mission to China and who now maintained a wide scientific corre-

spondence from Calcutta.48 No doubt Dinwiddie’s reputation and con-
nections informed the decision of Wellesley, as early as August 1800,
to find a place for him at the college.49
Among metropolitan Britons, Evangelicals became the most fer-
vent champions of the College of Fort William. This was a constitu-
ency that Wellesley assiduously cultivated. At first, he sought Grant’s
support in particular – hence the appointments of Grant’s friends
David Brown and Claudius Buchanan, and the plan to appoint his son.
But as Grant emerged as the leading voice of opposition to the college –
or at least as the principal author of the directors’ letters on the sub-
ject – Wellesley increasingly appealed to other Evangelicals instead.
He was helped in this task by Brown and Buchanan, as well as by the
Baptist missionaries who resided at the nearby Danish settlement of
Serampore. Wellesley attached the missionaries to the college by hiring
their press to do its printing and by hiring their chief, William Carey,
as professor of Bengali. These employments kept the mission solvent
and gave it respectability at a time when the Company still prohibited
proselytization in its territories.50 What most endeared Wellesley to
Evangelicals, however, was his creation of a department dedicated to
translating scripture into Asian languages. As one Serampore pamphlet
put it, “Our hope of success in this great undertaking depends chiefly
on the patronage of the College of Fort William.”51 Such endorse-
ments, along with the lobbying of Brown and Buchanan, garnered the
support of religious leaders for Wellesley and his institution.52 As late
as the debates over the renewal of the Company’s charter in 1813, the

48
William Jardine Proudfoot, Biographical Memoir of James Dinwiddie, LL.D.
(Liverpool, 1868), pp. 26, 102.
49
James Dinwiddie, Journal (25 Aug. 1800), Dalhousie University Archives, Dinwiddie
Fonds B60.
50
William Carey to William Cuninghame, 7 Aug. 1805, NLS, Acc.4505, pp. 31–2; Kopf,
British Orientalism, pp. 75–7.
51
W. Carey et al., Proposals for a Subscription for Translating the Holy Scriptures
(Serampore, 1806), p. 7.
52
Wilberforce to Archdeacon Wrangham, 23 Nov. 1807, in Robert Isaac Wilberforce and
Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols. (London, 1838), vol. III,

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 Might and Splendor 107

fortunes of the college and of Christianity in the East could be seen

as intertwined. On this occasion, Wellesley himself proposed “com-
bining religion with learning” by connecting the college to the local
ecclesiastical establishment.53 By his own admission, Wellesley’s con-
tribution to the Evangelical cause had been cautious and limited.54 It
was enough to put pressure on Grant, however, and may have helped
to save the college from total destruction.
Another political frontier of the college lay in British India,
where the institution was meant to elevate Wellesley in the eyes of
his “subjects.”55 Soon after his arrival, Wellesley complained that the
unassuming style of Sir John Shore had lowered “the person, dignity
and authority of the Governor-General.”56 Not only had the subordi-
nate presidencies of Bombay and Madras become insubordinate but
even his council now refused to pay the “respect due” to him. This
lent the government he had inherited the character less “of a monar-
chy” than of a “republic” – or, he might have written, of a trading com-
pany.57 Defiance had also trickled down the ranks. Soon, Wellesley
augured, “the Europeans settled at Calcutta will control the govern-
ment, if they do not overturn it.” What was needed was “a thorough
reform in private manners,” and the College of Fort William would
be the vehicle for effecting it.58 Wellesley emphasized protocol and
discipline, formed a loyal coterie of students, and promoted them to
the top ranks of the civil service. And yet none of this forestalled the
emergence of disorders at the institution itself, which in turn came to
preoccupy him. After eight students were expelled for misbehavior,
Wellesley was observed passing by the college buildings in his carriage,

pp. 352–3; Watson to Duke of Grafton, 10 Dec. 1807, in Richard Watson, Anecdotes
of the Life of Richard Watson (London, 1817), p. 373.
53
Wellesley, Speech in HL Deb (9 Apr. 1813), vol. XXV, col. 697.
54
Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–1858 (Woodbridge,
UK, 2012), pp. 133–4.
55
On Wellesley’s telling use of this term, see Curzon, British Government, vol. II, p. 174.
56
Wellesley to Lord Grenville, 18 Nov. 1798, in Report on the Manuscripts of J. B.
Fortescue, Esq., Preserved at Dropmore, 9 vols. (London, 1892–1915), vol. IV, p. 383.
57
Wellesley to Dundas, 25 Jan. 1800, in Dundas and Wellesley, Two Views, p. 216.
58
Wellesley to Grenville, 18 Nov. 1798, p. 384.

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 108 The Politics of the College of Fort William

looking “hard in at the Windows.”59 He must have been even more dis-
turbed by reports that older civil servants were slandering the college
with the encouragement of the directors.60 One student described an
atmosphere of growing paranoia: Opinions were closely guarded; infor-
mants had an ear out for expressions of disaffection.61 For Wellesley,
the problems of establishing authority in Britain and British India were
connected: These were two fronts in the same campaign.
This campaign was not aimed at Europeans alone: Wellesley also
sought to earn “the obedience and respect of the [Indian] people.”62 And
he likewise sought to do this in ways that depended upon the College of
Fort William. His “Notes” on the college echoed the rationale Hastings
had given twenty years earlier for establishing the Calcutta Madrasa.
With the decline of the Mughals, Wellesley wrote, “all the public institu-
tions calculated to promote education and good morals were neglected.”
He suggested that by employing Indian teachers and scholars the college
would help them reclaim their honor and livelihood. He also proposed
to make the Madrasa, along with its Hindu counterpart in Benares, “the
means of aiding the study of the laws and languages in the College.” He
concluded, “These arrangements respecting the native Colleges, while
they contribute to the happiness of our native subjects, will qualify
them to form a more just estimate of the mild and benevolent spirit of
the British Government.”63 For all of its intended embodiment of mild-
ness and benevolence, however, the college was also meant to inspire
awe and obedience. Before the directors’ cuts forced him to use exist-
ing buildings for the college, Wellesley had planned to build a walled
compound with a great hall, a chapel, and an observatory.64 It was dif-
ficult to find a large enough site in the desired vicinity of Garden Reach,

59
Richard Blechynden, Diary (5 May 1801), BL, Add. MS 45617, f. 79v.
60
David Brown to Charles Grant, 15 Jan. 1805, in Kaye, Lives, vol. I, p. 481.
61
William Fraser to father, 21 Aug. 1804, Reelig House, bundle 76.
62
Wellesley to Dundas, 25 Jan. 1800, p. 216.
63
Wellesley, “Governor-General’s Notes,” pp. 351–2.
64
Claudius Buchanan to Charles Grant, 23 Aug. 1800, in Hugh Pearson, Memoirs of the
Life and Writings of the Rev. Claudius Buchanan, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1817), vol. I, p. 205;
James Dinwiddie, Journal (23 and 29 Sept. 1800), Dalhousie University Archives,
Dinwiddie Fonds B61; S. Davis, Minute (8 Aug. 1814), BL, IOR H/488, p. 610.

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 Might and Splendor 109

so several plots were acquired and joined together.65 Displaced Indian

residents of the area were compensated but not always satisfactorily.66
Several residents threw themselves before Wellesley’s carriage, where-
upon “he ordered them … sent to the police who … confined them to
hard labour for one month.” Dinwiddie, who recorded this incident,
thought the punishment harsh: Lord Cornwallis had once been halted
thusly and had taken no such action.67 For Wellesley, however, the dig-
nity of the institution was paramount. He was even said to have ordered
a nearby brickworks dismantled, lest it spoil the view.68
Another blot on the horizon was not so easily expunged: the
Egyptian expedition of Napoleon. News of this venture “to answer
at once the purposes of science and conquest” greeted Wellesley
upon his arrival in Calcutta in 1798.69 Soon, he was using the fears
it stoked of a French invasion of India to justify expansionist designs
to authorities in Britain.70 Yet Egypt and India were linked not only
in military strategy but also in the classical imaginary. In recent
years, Sir William Jones had spawned a raft of philological and myth-
ological links between the two ancient civilizations. If Jones’ Asiatic
Society had drawn European attention to British discoveries in India,
then Napoleon’s Commission des Sciences et des Arts threatened
to refocus it on French ones in Egypt. The exploits of this corps of
some one hundred and fifty savants, ranging from the antiquarian
to the zoological, would have been familiar to Wellesley. The com-
mission was famous enough in Britain to inspire no fewer than three

65
Wellesley, “Notes,” p. 350; Dinwiddie, Journal (29 Sept. 1800); William Hickey,
Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Alfred Spencer, 5th edn, 4 vols. (London, 1950), vol.
IV, pp. 237–8.
66
Some petitioned the government for additional relief. West Bengal State Archives,
Bengal Revenue Proceedings (1 Dec. 1801), nos. 13–14.
67
James Dinwiddie, Journal (5 Feb. 1801), Dalhousie University Archives, Dinwiddie
Fonds B63.
68
James Dinwiddie, Journal (19 Nov. 1800), ibid., Dinwiddie Fonds B62.
69
Selections from the Calcutta Gazettes, 5 vols. (Calcutta, 1864–8), vol. III, p. 202.
70
G. S. Misra, “Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition and Its Repercussions on Wellesley’s
Policy,” Journal of the Uttar Pradesh Historical Society new ser. 3 (1955); Edward
Ingram, “The Geopolitics of the First British Expedition to Egypt – III: The Red Sea
Campaign, 1800–1801,” Middle Eastern Studies 31 (1995).

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 110 The Politics of the College of Fort William

James Gillray cartoons.71 Apart from the scale of its operations – the
first edition of the resulting Description de l’Égypte (1809–18) filled
twenty-three volumes – what was novel about the commission was
its close identification with the French state. To quote one histo-
rian, “The British had done nothing of the sort in India.”72 Napoleon
had thus thrown down a gauntlet, and with the College of Fort
William Wellesley took it up. An early memorandum on the college
expected that it would impress “the learned world in Europe.”73 In
the coming years, its continental reputation would inspire a strain
of gasconade.74 The Egyptian expedition may have marked a high
point in the Anglo-French national rivalry over art and science, but
the college marked Wellesley’s entry into this arena as a sovereign
in his own right.75
The college was also intended to boost Wellesley’s standing
among the sovereigns of Asia, most directly by training a diplomatic
corps. It offered some subjects, like Marathi, with an eye to their util-
ity in negotiations.76 But for Wellesley, the practical was often sub-
ordinate to the ornamental. As he advised the leader of an embassy
to the Arabian states, “the greatest attention is requisite to points of
ceremony and appearance. Any concessions in points of that nature
on the part of an Ambassador to an Eastern court, tend to degrade
his consequence and to impede the progress of his negotiation.”77
In diplomatic settings, Wellesley suggested, knowledge itself was an

71
Andrew Bednarski, Holding Egypt: Tracing the Reception of the Description de
l’Égypte in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 2005), pp. 16–20.
72
Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Years (Princeton, 2004), p. 599.
73
“On the Comparative Advantages of a College in Calcutta & in Its Vicinity” [c. 1801],
BL, Add. MS 13862, f. 45r.
74
Abraham Lockett to College Council, 29 Sept. 1810, PCFW, vol. 561, p. 335; Thomas
Roebuck, Annals of the College of Fort William (Calcutta, 1819), p. vii.
75
On this rivalry, see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in
the East, 1750–1850 (New York, 2005); Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination:
Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London, 2010).
76
See J. Webbe to N. B. Edmonstone, 19 Jun. 1802, in DMW, vol. V, pp. 193–4.
77
Wellesley to Home Popham, 16 Oct. 1801, in DMW, vol. V, p. 155.

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 Might and Splendor 111

ornament that imparted prestige to the wearer. Among senior diplo-

mats, he favored Neil Benjamin Edmonstone, not only for his Eastern
learning but also for his gentlemanly display of it.78 Wellesley’s
ambitions for kingship and extended territory demanded an increased
supply of residents, agents, and other “political” personnel. He told
Edmonstone in early 1800 that too few Company servants possessed
the knowledge and “dignity” needed to represent him.79 But a solu-
tion was near at hand. In March, Wellesley informed Dundas that he
planned to establish an institution where writers might acquire both
qualifications.80 Within a few months, Edmonstone was busy finding
and training able diplomats in his new role as professor of Persian at
the College of Fort William.
Not only the college’s diplomatic training but also its literary
apparatus was calculated to enhance Wellesley’s regional standing.
The development of its library into one of the finest in India was
as much a political as a scholarly enterprise. The library’s greatest
treasures were plundered from the palace of Tipu Sultan after the
conquest of Mysore in 1799. Wellesley wanted Tipu’s fate to dis-
suade other would-be challengers.81 But he wanted the fate of his
library to convey an additional message. The collection had been a
regal appurtenance, after all, and still carried associations with sov-
ereignty.82 By preserving it and penetrating its secrets, Wellesley
offered the “native princes” a demonstration of his fitness to be king.
He continued to bolster this claim. His survey of Mysore in 1800
yielded various “ancient inscriptions and valuable manuscripts.”83

78
See [Robert] Montgomery Martin, preface to DMW, vol. III, p. xii n; Marla Karen
Chancey, “In the Company’s Secret Service: Neil Benjamin Edmonstone and the First
Indian Imperialists, 1780–1820” (PhD dissertation, Florida State University, 2003),
chs. 7–10 passim.
79
Edmonstone to Archibald Edmonstone, 6 Mar. 1800, Cambridge University Library,
Add. 7616/2/21.
80
Wellesley to Robert Dundas, 5 Mar. 1800, in DMW, vol. II, p. 232.
81
Wellesley to Directors, 11 May 1799, in DMW, vol. I, p. 578.
82
Joshua Ehrlich, “Plunder and Prestige: Tipu Sultan’s Library and the Making of British
India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 43 (2020).
83
Asiatic Annual Register 8 (London, 1809), “Chronicle,” p. 29.

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 112 The Politics of the College of Fort William

His embassies to Persia and Arabia in the following years spared

“neither trouble nor expense to procure whatever was rare or valu-
able” for the repository.84 From 1804, the college council sponsored
manuscript expeditions to Mysore, Travancore, Ceylon, and else-
where.85 And within a decade-and-a-half, the library could boast over
eight thousand print holdings in addition to some three thousand
manuscript ones.86
Besides preserving works, the college was publishing them, on
the order of one hundred original volumes in its first four years.87 The
vice-provost Buchanan, presumably at Wellesley’s urging, sought “to
swell the annual Catalogue” and was “very little solicitous about the
expence.”88 The publications included grammars, dictionaries, let-
ters, dialogues, fables, prayer-books, and ethical treatises in Persian,
Arabic, Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindustani, and Marathi.89 Many copies
would have been destined for the libraries of rulers and elites across
India. Wellesley suggested this when he announced that “the opera-
tion of these useful labours, will not be confined to the limits … of
this Empire.”90 The college munshi (teacher) Mir Sher Ali Afsus could
boast of one of his productions that “five hundred copies were struck
off, and reached distant places.”91 Wellesley no doubt shared the
belief of Professor John Gilchrist that “the Nations of India” would
praise him as the “Reviver and Patron of Oriental Literature.”92

84
Charles Stewart, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental Library of the Late Tippoo
Sultan of Mysore (Cambridge, 1809), p. 190.
85
Claudius Buchanan, Christian Researches in Asia: With Notices of the Translation
of the Scriptures into the Oriental Languages (Cambridge, 1811), p. 91; Kopf, British
Orientalism, pp. 67, 188.
86
Sisir Kumar Das, Sahibs and Munshis: An Account of the College of Fort William,
repr. edn (Calcutta, 2001), pp. 103–5.
87
[Claudius Buchanan, ed.], The College of Fort William in Bengal (London, 1805),
p. 156.
88
Matthew Lumsden to College Council, 2 May 1810, PCFW, vol. 561, p. 239.
89
See Roebuck, Annals, appendix, pp. 21–45.
90
Wellesley, Speech (30 Mar. 1803), in Roebuck, Annals, p. 41.
91
[Mir Sher Ali Afsus], The Araish-i-Mahfil; or, Ornament of the Assembly [1805],
trans. Major Henry Court (Allahabad, 1871), p. 3.
92
John Gilchrist, dedication and introduction to [Mir Sher Ali Afsus] Meer Sher Ulee
Ufsos, trans., The Rose Garden of Hindoostan (Calcutta, 1802), pp. [iii], vii.

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 Might and Splendor 113

Gilchrist also alluded to the fact that scholars had come from
far and wide to teach the students, manage the library, and compose
and translate texts.93 These scholars soon numbered over one hun-
dred and hailed, in Buchanan’s words, “from every quarter of India,
and from the parts beyond, from Persia and Arabia.”94 In 1805, the
“learned Malay” Tuanko Attil was recruited from Natal, on the coast
of Sumatra.95 In that year too, Buchanan sought to hire a Sinophone
Armenian from Macao, though this plan was scotched by the direc-
tors.96 Many of the scholars were recruited through Company or kin-
ship networks; others had seen an advertisement issued by Wellesley
for “men of learning and knowledge.”97 It was one measure of the
sundry origins of the college pandits that “there are few (not being
of the same district) who will give the same account of their faith,
or refer to the same sacred books.”98 Such a group, according to
Buchanan, could only have been assembled “by the influence of the
supreme government, as exerted by the Marquis Wellesley.”99
This was a circumstance that Wellesley emphasized in his
1802 letter staying the directors’ order to abolish the college. “Many
learned natives,” he warned, “are now attached to the institution
who have been invited … by my especial authority, from distant
parts of Asia.” To suddenly rescind their employment – “to violate
our faith” – surely would “be an act of the most flagrant impolicy.”

93
Ibid., pp. vii–viii.
94
Claudius Buchanan, Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for
British India (London, 1805), p. 81.
95
NAI, Bengal Public Consultations (21 Aug. 1806), no. 21; Buchanan, Christian
Researches, p. 80.
96
Elmer H. Cutts, “Early Nineteenth Century Chinese Studies in Bengal,” Indian
Historical Quarterly 20 (1944), pp. 117–18.
97
For the first group, see Maulavi Ikram ’Ali, Ikhwanu-S-Safa; or, Brothers of
Purity [1810], trans. John Platts (London, 1869), pp. ix–x; Ruth Gabriel, “Learned
Communities and British Educational Experiments in North India: 1780–1830”
(PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1979), pp. 177–81. For the second group,
see Pearson, Memoirs, vol. I, p. 212; Mir Amman, Bāgh o Bahār; or Tales of the Four
Darweshes [1804], trans. Duncan Forbes (London, 1857), p. [1].
98
Buchanan, Memoir, p. 26.
99
Buchanan, Christian Researches, p. 3.

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 114 The Politics of the College of Fort William

Ought these “learned natives” to “be driven forth to the extremities

of Asia, to report … that the British Government was unable to sup-
port … learning”?100 Wellesley was arguing that these informants
and advisers of far-flung sovereigns were arbiters of his and his gov-
ernment’s reputation. Their recruitment enlarged the sphere of his
influence and thus served as a complement to more forceful strate-
gies of expansion.101 As if to endorse this notion, the college pandits
credited Wellesley with securing power not only through arms but
also through “science, and the … regard of the learned.”102 They
obviously knew how to flatter their patron: Wellesley would keep
this address and later make it available to the editor of his papers.
The various audiences and messages of the College of Fort
William mingled in the grandiose spectacle of its “Public Disputations
in the Oriental Languages.” This annual event at Government House
was designed to attract “all Calcutta” – Europeans and “natives of
rank and learning” – and indeed it did.103 According to one attendee,
“all the college and private moonshis were present, with all the
native and foreign eastern merchants who pretend to any learning,
and crowds of Europeans.”104 In 1804, an envoy from the pasha of
Baghdad joined in the pageantry, as part of a mission to shore up the
alliance recently forged against Napoleon. For that matter, the audi-
ence was not limited to physical spectators. Reports were printed in
octavo volumes, in the official gazette, and in local and metropolitan
journals. As the missionary professor Carey put it, “thousands of the
learned in distant nations will exult in this triumph of Literature.”105
At the center of the proceedings sat the governor-general himself.

100
Wellesley to Directors, 5 Aug. 1802, in DMW, vol. II, p. 663.
101
For Wellesley’s fostering of ties with intermediaries as a strategy of expansion, see
Paul K. Macdonald, Networks of Domination: The Social Foundations of Peripheral
Conquest in International Politics (Oxford, 2014), ch. 3.
102
“Address from the Pundits of the College” (31 Jul. 1805), in DMW, vol. IV, p. 628.
103
Buchanan to W. P. Elliott, 17 Nov. 1800, in Pearson, Memoirs, vol. I, p. 209. The first
disputations of 1802 were held in the Writers’ Buildings, as Government House had
not yet been completed.
104
Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in India (Edinburgh, 1812), p. 138.
105
William Carey, Speech (20 Sept. 1804), in Primitiae Orientalis, vol. III, p. 115.

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 Might and Splendor 115

The following account dates from 1819, but most of what it describes
originated with Wellesley:

In a state chair, covered with crimson velvet and richly gilt,

with a group of aid-de-camps and secretaries standing behind
him, sat the Marquis of Hastings [the governor-general]. Two
servants with state punka[h]s of crimson silk were fanning him,
and behind them again were several native servants bearing
silver staffs. Next him, on either side, were seated the examiners,
and below them again, the most distinguished ladies of the
presidency. Next, in an open space, were two small rostrums for
the disputants, and chairs for the professors; the room behind
these, and fronting the marquis, was quite filled with company,
and in the rear of all, the body guard was drawn up in full
uniforms of scarlet with naked sabres.106

After presiding over the disputations, Wellesley presented the top

students with gold medals engraved with the motto, Redit a nobis
Aurora diemque reducit.107 He then delivered a speech extolling the
college’s ideals and achievements – or, as one student put it, “a piece
of bombast … intended to exalt himself.”108 A grand dinner was held
in the evening.
Whether judged by Indian or British, Asian or European stan-
dards, there was an unmistakable kingliness to all of this. One Malay
scribe, visiting Bengal in 1810, construed the disputations as part of
the ritual life of a raja’s palace. Unable to comprehend the languages

106
[Moyle Sherer], Sketches of India: Written by an Officer for Fire-Side Travellers at-
Home (London, 1821), pp. 119–20. For comparison, see “A Colored Plan of a Hall
for Public Exercises for the College of Fort William,” BL, Add. MS 13901C; William
Fraser to father, 30 Mar. 1803, Reelig House, bundle 75, f. 24v; Notes, Mount Stuart,
HA/21/19.
107
“The Dawn returns down there/Bringing them back the light of our previous day.”
Virgil, The Georgics of Virgil: A Translation, trans. David Ferry (New York, 2005),
p. 20. For the medals, see Robert P. Puddester, Medals of British India with Rarity and
Valuations: Volume One: Commemorative and Historical Medals from 1750 to 1947
(London, 2002), pp. 16–18.
108
William Fraser to father, 1 Aug. 1803, Reelig House, vol. 28, p. 195.

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 116 The Politics of the College of Fort William

being spoken, the scribe, Ibrahim, relied on his eyes to interpret “the
manners and customs of the great Rajah of the English.” He remarked
on the plenitude of the “palace,” “the splendour of the throne,” the
hierarchy of the “court,” and the beauty of the raja’s “wives” (ladies
in attendance).109 No doubt the envoy from Baghdad better grasped
the proceedings, yet he too hailed the governor-general as a sover-
eign: “Kings approach his threshold with offerings of respect.”110
Meanwhile, the trappings of sovereignty at the disputations were
equally intelligible according to European models. Buchanan anal-
ogized the governor-general’s speech at the college to “the King’s
speech in Parliament.”111 A student participant described Wellesley
as a “King … seated in all his Glory.”112 Clearly, rather than impart
a single image of authority, the disputations were designed to accom-
modate multiple interpretations and attachments.
What was meant to bind spectators’ impressions into a coher-
ent language of rule was a collective sense of awe at the majesty of
the ruler. Ibrahim described his arrival on the scene as an ascent into
“heaven”: “I was no longer in the world I had left,” and it was “for-
tunate … that I lived to see the wonders that were within.”113 Others
responded in a similar fashion. For one British visitor, the sight of
Government House was too dazzling to “be conveyed by words”:
The hall where the disputations were held was a “magic ground”
that “brought to my mind some of the enchanted castles described
in the Arabian tales.”114 The directors, for their part, were said to
be astonished at reports of the disputations.115 Most, no doubt, con-
cluded with one official that they were “a very vain miserable piece

109
Ibrahim, “An Account of Bengal, and of a Visit to the Government House, by Ibrahim,
the Son of Candu the Merchant,” trans. John Leyden, in Graham, Journal, pp. 201–7.
110
Suleiman Aga, Address (20 Oct. 1804), Cambridge University Library, Oriental MSS
Add. 286.
111
Buchanan to Wellesley, 6 Mar. 1806, BL, Add. MS 37284, f. 35v.
112
William Fraser to father, 30 Mar. 1803, f. 25r.
113
Ibrahim, “Account of Bengal,” p. 202.
114
J. Johnson, The Oriental Voyager; or, Descriptive Sketches and Cursory Remarks, on
a Voyage to India and China (London, 1807), p. 100.
115
Buchanan to Wellesley, 6 Mar. 1806, f. 38v.

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 Reverberations 117

of Business.”116 It was Wellesley’s ally David Scott who best appreci-

ated his counterargument. By confirming his ascendance “in the eyes
of other men,” Scott conceived, the college might sustain “the charm
by which that immense eastern empire could alone be held.”117
“Charm” was an apt word, for there was something talismanic about
Wellesley’s scaffolding of sovereignty, as if the constituent ele-
ments mattered less than the magnificence of their arrangement.118
Knowledge held pride of place among these elements; to debate
whether Wellesley was an Anglicist or an Orientalist is to miss the
fact that its provenance was beside the point.

Reverberations
In the summer of 1805, Wellesley vacated his gilt chair and departed
for England. His warring with the Marathas had finally upset his pact
with the Board of Control and led to his effective recall. But this
would not be the end of his impact. For one thing, the College of Fort
William still rankled with the directors. Even after they scaled back
the college, its association with its founder meant that it continued
to loom as a threat. Residual aggravations included a natural history
establishment, which Wellesley had envisioned as an outgrowth of
the college, and the library of Tipu Sultan, which he had claimed
for the college’s repository. So sweeping were the directors’ appre-
hensions that they extended to scholar-officials formerly employed
at the institution. Wellesley had left the scene, but his ideas about
knowledge lingered.
By the time of Wellesley’s departure, the directors had cast
aside any reservations they had had about openly disavowing him or
his college. In a draft dispatch, they beheld such

116
Edward Strachey, Minute (Jul. 1814), BL, IOR H/488, p. 600.
117
Scott to Wellesley, 8 Sept. 1803, in Scott, Correspondence, vol II, p. 431.
118
For the “scaffolding” of sovereignty as the “aesthetic, artistic, theatrical, and sym-
bolic structures” that establish and maintain it, see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos
Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr, introduction to Benite, Geroulanos, and Jerr, eds., The
Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a
Concept (New York, 2017), p. 3.

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 118 The Politics of the College of Fort William

assumptions of new authority by the Governor General himself,

that the character of our Indian Government has in his hands
undergone an essential change. It has in fact been turned into a
pure and simple despotism; the powers of the Supreme Council
have been completely absorbed; the Subordinate Governments
have been reduced nearly to the condition of Provinces of the
Bengal Presidency; the authority of the Court of Directors has, in
many instances, been disregarded .…119

Wellesley, as the directors repeated to the board, had “invaded” the

Company’s constitution and infringed its “rights and privileges.”120
Their reappointment of the trusty, if elderly, Lord Cornwallis
as governor-general was an effort to repair some of the damage.
Cornwallis died less than three months into his second stint in office.
He spent much of that time trying to undo Wellesley’s legacy, includ-
ing by cutting down the college.121 His acting replacement George
Barlow, though better disposed toward both Wellesley and the college,
took the same course out of deference to the directors. He meekly
followed orders to retrench, which the directors took the occasion
of Lord Castlereagh’s resignation from the board to transmit.122 In a
matter of months, the college’s staff and prizes were reduced, and its
curriculum restricted to the study of a few languages.
And yet, even these measures failed to propitiate the directors.
One lingering irritant was the Institution for Promoting the Natural
History of India. Having founded the institution in 1800 as an annex
to the college, Wellesley separated it in 1804 in an attempt to evade
the coming retrenchments. At the same time, he appointed Francis
Buchanan to head the institution and to enlarge it from a menagerie

119
Draft Public Despatch to Bengal (26 Mar. 1805), BL, IOR H/486, pp. 7–8.
120
Directors to Board of Control, 6 Nov. 1805, p. 143.
121
“Narrative of Marquis Cornwallis’s Proceedings in India” (Sept. 1805), TNA, PRO
30/11/210, ff. 15v–16v.
122
Barlow to Charles Grant, 22 Mar. and 30 Nov. 1806, BL, Mss Eur F176/29, pp. 55–7,
100–4; Public Despatch to Bengal (21 May 1806), BL, IOR E/4/659, pp. 1019–30; Public
Despatch to Bengal (23 Jul. 1806), BL, IOR E/4/660, pp. 151–5.

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 Reverberations 119

into a research center. Whereas it was soon receiving specimens

from across the region, the directors’ India Museum was languish-
ing for want of contributions.123 The directors’ displeasure must
have been compounded by Wellesley’s suggestion that the exten-
sion of “the boundaries of … science” went hand in hand with the
extension of territory.124 From 1804, he seems to have conceived of
the ­institution as a means to sustain a greater vision of the college
despite the ­directors’ reductions. Accordingly, he also proposed to
build an experimental farm, which, along with the institution, would
form a scientific cluster around his country seat.125 He left before
this design could be implemented. The institution itself lasted some
months more before succumbing to cuts imposed by the directors.126
If the directors were annoyed at the college’s extension in the
form of the natural history institution, then they were incensed at
its retention of the library of Tipu Sultan. Upon founding the col-
lege, Wellesley had canceled an order of the army’s prize committee
allotting most of the collection to the directors’ Oriental Library.127
“It is obvious,” he declared, “that these manuscripts may be ren-
dered highly useful to the purposes of the new institution, and that
much more public advantage can be derived from them” there than
in London.128 Unappeased by Wellesley’s offer to transmit those
works “merely valuable as curiosities,” the directors grumbled at
their library being “superceded by the interception of contributions

123
Mildred Archer, “India and Natural History: The Rôle of the East India Company,
1785–1858,” History Today 9 (1959), p. 738; Ray Desmond, The India Museum, 1801–
1879 (London, 1982), p. 19.
124
Marquess Wellesley, “Minute of the Governor-General on the Natural History of
India” (26 Jul. 1804), in DMW, vol. IV, p. 675.
125
Marquess Wellesley, “Minute of the Governor-General on the Improvement of Indian
Agriculture” (1 Jun. 1805), in DMW, vol. IV, p. 676.
126
Extract Public Despatch to Bengal (28 Feb. 1806), BL, IOR F/4/199/4471, pp. 17–20;
Extract Bengal Public Consultations (30 Apr. 1807), ibid., pp. 59–62. For the site’s
survival as a public garden, see Eugenia W. Herbert, Flora’s Empire: British Gardens
in India (Philadelphia, 2011), pp. 83–96.
127
For the order, see “Extract from the Proceedings of the Committee of Prize” (May to
Jun. 1799), BL, Eur Mss E196, f. 51r.
128
Wellesley, “Governor-General’s Notes,” p. 353.

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 120 The Politics of the College of Fort William

intended for it.”129 After Wellesley’s departure in 1805, they recurred

to the subject of Tipu’s collection, “which we have always intended
should be preserved in the Company’s Library.”130 Of the twelve
trunks of books and manuscripts sent by the college in response,
however, only one was designated for that repository. The rest were
addressed to a relation of the vice-provost Buchanan “for the purpose
of being presented, in the name of the College” to universities and
collections in Britain. At this the directors exploded, declaring

our decided disapprobation of this act of our College, & our

displeasure at the unprecedented & disrespectful form & manner
in which it has been executed.
Hitherto no Department subordinate to our authority had ever
presumed to dispose of the Company’s Property without our con-
sent, much less make Presents … in its own name, as if it were an
Establishment independent of our Control.131

Two members of the college council offered to resign, although the

fault apparently lay with Buchanan.132 The new governor-general, Lord
Minto, ordered the council to send the directors everything originally
allotted to them.133 This resolved the immediate issue but could not
remove its underlying causes. The directors’ aversion to Wellesley cast
a long shadow over their relations with the College of Fort William.
The suspicions of the directors even extended to scholar-
officials whom Wellesley had patronized in India. These included
onetime personnel of the College of Fort William upon their return
to Britain. Charles Stewart found a position at Haileybury; no doubt
it helped that he brought a catalogue of Tipu’s books with him. Other

129
Ibid.; Draft Public Despatch to Bengal (19 Jul. 1803), p. 526.
130
Public Despatch to Bengal (15 Jun. 1805), BL, IOR E/4/658, p. 32.
131
Public Despatch to Bengal (28 Feb. 1806), BL, IOR E/4/659, pp. 569–71.
132
G. S. A. Ranking, “History of the College of Fort William from Its First Foundation,”
Bengal Past and Present 21 (1920), pp. 182–3; Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher,
The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India
Company (Abingdon, UK, 2012), pp. 66–7.
133
Governor-General to College Council, 27 Nov. 1806, BL, Mss Eur E196, ff. 82v–83r.

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 Conclusion 121

candidates for such employment were decidedly less fortunate. John

Gilchrist found that his association with Wellesley was positively
“productive of harm”: The directors, believing him a partisan of
the College of Fort William, were reluctant to hire him or to grant
him a pension.134 Similar treatment awaited Francis Buchanan, who
had headed the natural history establishment. Buchanan’s ties to
Wellesley and his voyage home with him “prejudiced them [the direc-
tors] so much against me that there is no saying the lengths they may
go.”135 Wellesley’s college and the ideas it embodied still troubled the
directors. At one time, they had seen scholar-officials as assets; now,
they were as likely to see them as liabilities.

Conclusion
In only a few years, Wellesley had upended the politics of the Company.
Central to his rebellion was the College of Fort William. When he
declared that “the College must stand or the Empire must fall,” the
empire he meant was very different from the one he had been sent
to administer. It was not just that Wellesley conquered and annexed
on a larger scale than his predecessors, and adopted greater pomp and
ceremony. He was the first governor-general who sought to undo the
Company state and the ideas about knowledge that legitimized it.
The future prospects for Wellesley’s own ideas were mixed. On
the one hand, his kingly pretensions were unlikely to be imitated.
Wellesley could make such pretensions only because the directors
feared provoking the ministry, and he paid for them back at home
when they sponsored an inquiry against him.136 On the other hand,
Wellesley’s embrace of large-scale territorial sovereignty would be
difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. The Company now ruled

134
J[ohn] B[orthwick] G[ilchrist], Dr. Gilchrist’s Statement of His Case and Conduct,
bound with Jonathan Scott and John Borthwick Gilchrist, Introductory Address to
the Honorable Court of Proprietors of the East India Company [Hertford, 1806], UCL
Library Special Collections, Hume Tracts, vol. 119, pp. 30, 53.
135
Buchanan to John Hamilton, 17 Jul. 1806, National Records of Scotland, GD161/18/8.
136
Philips, East India Company, pp. 144–50.

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 122 The Politics of the College of Fort William

vast tracts in the south, north, west, and east of India, which its
representatives would feel obligated to preserve. Wellesley’s ideas
about knowledge were another matter. Would the college remain a
magic “charm,” to quote David Scott, in the absence of its founder?
Even setting aside the impact of the directors’ cuts, it was doubt-
ful whether Wellesley’s successors would share his devotion to the
institution. The former governor-general Lord Teignmouth (Sir John
Shore) had doubts on this score, as did the director Charles Grant,
long before the outcome of the controversy was assured.137 For their
part, presumably, the directors would stop any governor-general from
restoring the college, lest he try to realize its subversive potential.
At the same time, the depth of the directors’ own commitment
to knowledge had become newly uncertain. Would they continue to
dedicate resources to Haileybury? Was there something incongruous
in modeling their college on one they had sought to abolish? For that
matter, was there something incongruous in filling their museum
with the spoils of conquests of which they had disapproved? Finally,
and most importantly, did the idea of conciliation still have currency
in the wake of Wellesley’s rebellion? It had become more difficult
to make the case not only for commercial sovereignty but also for
scholarly patronage as its complement. The College of Fort William
had sponsored more publications in five years than the Company
had in its entire previous history. Perhaps it was this awkward fact
that led the directors, in 1806, to claim that the college had rendered
no “advantages … to Literature.” They dismissed its publications as
“a few elementary School Books” that might have appeared under
their patronage “though the College had never existed.”138 These
statements demonstrated new concerns about the loyalty of the
Company’s scholar-officials. Wellesley’s “reign” had ended, but its
reverberations were only just beginning to be felt.

137
Lord Teignmouth to Grant, 30 Mar. 1801, cited in Lord Teignmouth, Memoir of the
Life and Correspondence of John Lord Teignmouth, 2 vols. (London, 1843), vol. II, pp.
31–2; Grant to Brown, 19 Jun. 1801, p. 242.
138
Public Despatch to Bengal (28 Feb. 1806), pp. 574–7.

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 4 Scholar-Officials and the
Later Company State

Upon landing at Madras in 1803, the young surgeon John Leyden

took stock of his surroundings. Fellow servants of the Company, he
quickly perceived,

fell naturally into two divisions. The mercantile party, consisting

chiefly of men of old standing, versed in trade, and inspired with a
spirit in no respect superior to that of the most pitiful pettifogging
pedlar, nor in their views a whit more enlarged; in short, men
whose sole consideration is to make money …. [T]his is the party
that stands highest in credit with the East India Company. There
is another party for whom I am more at a loss to find an epithet ….
[T]hey have discovered that we are not merely merchants in India,
but legislators and governors; and they assert that our conduct
there ought to be calculated for stability and security ….

Leyden considered his options. On the one hand, he might adopt the
outlook of the “mercantile party,” and “by strict economy, endeav-
our to amass a few thousand pounds in the course of twenty years.”
On the other hand, he might adopt the outlook of that second division
of his colleagues. He might acquire a “knowledge of India, its laws,
relations, politics and languages,” and fill a “more respectable” role
helping to consolidate an empire. Leyden settled on the latter option.
By 1805, he was well on his way to realizing his decided ambition:
“to become a furious Orientalist.”1
The twinning of intellectual ambition and a sense of the
imperatives of sovereignty defined Leyden’s generation of Company

1
Leyden to [James] Ballantyne, 24 Oct. 1805, in Leyden, The Poetical Works of Dr. John
Leyden (London, 1875), pp. lxxviii–lxxix.

123

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 124 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

scholar-officials. More than the movements of Romanticism, Evan-

gelicalism, or Utilitarianism, it was the Company’s recent evolution
that impressed itself on their minds.2 The Mysore war of 1798–9 and
the Maratha war of 1803–5 dramatically enlarged the Company’s
dominions. These conflicts also destroyed and weakened, respec-
tively, its two major rivals, lending its conquests for the first time
the appearance of permanence.3 For that matter, the Battle of Delhi
during the latter conflict rendered the once mighty Mughal Empire
a vassal state of the Company. “What a revolution,” as one student
at the College of Fort William put it: “The Emperor of Hindoostan
glad … to receive the protection of a mercantile association.”4 But
could a mercantile association secure “a greater empire than any
Emperor of Delhi reigned over,” to quote one professor at the col-
lege?5 Along with a belief that the Company’s situation had changed
came a regret, on the part of critics, that its constitution had not
changed accordingly. The opposition to the Company state stirred up
by Lord Wellesley and his college would not simply disappear in the
years following his departure. On the contrary, attempts to alter the
balance between the Company’s mercantile and sovereign characters
would only intensify.
Ideas about knowledge would continue to feature in these
attempts. The Charter Act of 1813 tied the Company’s patronage of
scholars to its collection of land revenue. European scholar-officials
and their Indian collaborators, meanwhile, increasingly tailored
their intellectual projects to the aim of territorial expansion. Overall,
such expansion was encouraging engagement with Indian society

2
On these influences, see respectively Michael J. Franklin, ed., Romantic
Representations of British India (London, 2006); Penelope Carson, The East India
Company and Religion, 1698–1858 (Woodbridge, UK, 2012); Eric Stokes, The English
Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959).
3
See Governor-General in Council to Secret Committee of Directors, 13 Jul. 1804, in
DMW, vol. IV, pp. 144, 176. Cf. Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence:
British Imperialism in India (Princeton, 1967), p. 5.
4
William Fraser to Edward Fraser, 3 Apr. 1804, Reelig House, bundle 76, f. 4r.
5
Henry Thomas Colebrooke to George Colebrooke, 9 Aug. 1802, in Sir T. E. Colebrooke,
The Life of H. T. Colebrooke (London, 1873), p. 211.

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 From Patronage Clause to Education Clause 125

and raising the prospect of greater involvement in Indian education.

The Court of Directors was slow to embrace this prospect. But by
the 1820s, the need for new ideas about knowledge could not be
ignored any longer.

From Patronage Clause to Education Clause

Few laws pertaining to the Company have been as much discussed,
by contemporaries and by historians, as section forty-three of the
Charter Act of 1813:

[I]t shall be lawful for the Governor-General in Council to

direct, that, out of any surplus which may remain of the rents,
revenues, and profits arising from … territorial acquisitions … a
sum of not less than one lack of rupees in each year, shall be set
apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature
and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for
the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences
among the inhabitants of the British territories in India.6

Since Victorian times, histories of Indian education have often begun

with the enactment by parliament of this “education clause.” Despite
its later appellation, however, the section was meant less to insti-
tute a new system for spreading learning than to invigorate an old
one for supporting the learned. What was initially significant about
the clause was that it linked the Company’s patronage of scholars to
its collection of land revenue. Its meaning shifted to center on Indian
education only in the course of a years-long debate on the character
and responsibilities of the Company.
To trace the original meaning of section forty-three requires
briefly reconstructing the life and mind of its author. The life is
more easily reconstructed, for the author was the prominent yet
reticent Robert Percy “Bobus” Smith. Smith distinguished himself
as a Latinist at Eton and Cambridge and, before entering parliament,

6
53 Geo. III, c. 155, s. 43.

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 126 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

served as the Company’s advocate-general of Bengal. In that role, he

would have interacted with maulvis and pandits. He is also known
to have befriended several fellow British scholar-officials. John
Leyden came out on the same ship in 1803 and would recall enjoy-
ing “the society of the excellent R. Smith, whose profound compre-
hensive & versatile mind with equal ease fathomed the Abysses,
unravelled the subtilties & amused itself with the playthings of lit-
erature & science.”7 Sir James Mackintosh, after taking up a legal
appointment in Bombay, told a common friend that “I have heard
a great deal of Bobus. His fame is greater than that of any pundit
since the time of M[a]nu.”8 Smith was a consummate literary social-
ite. He wrote for the Microcosm at Eton, founded the King of Clubs
in London, and frequented the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. After
returning to Europe in 1811, he consorted with Madame de Staël,
who remarked that “due to his personality he comes in contact with
everyone.”9 In limited circles, Smith was celebrated as “a well of
old poetry and ingenious philosophy.”10 A young Thomas Babington
Macaulay, meeting Smith in 1833, pronounced him “a great author-
ity on Indian matters.”11 And yet Smith seems to have confined
his written scholarship to legal reports. He left little correspon-
dence. Nor, despite early political ambitions, did he cut much of a
figure in parliament.12 His surviving letters reveal an enthusiasm
for Wellesley’s imperial vision, tempered slightly by a classicist’s

7
Leyden to William Erskine, 15 Sept. 1804, NLS, MS 3383, 147r.
8
Mackintosh to Richard Sharp, 29 Jun. 1804, cited in Mackintosh, Memoirs of the Life
of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. Robert James Mackintosh, 2 vols.
(London, 1835), vol. I, p. 208.
9
Germaine de Staël to Lord and Lady Lansdowne, 24 Jan. 1816, in de Staël,
Correspondance Générale, 9 vols. (Paris, 1960–2017), vol. IX, p. 390.
10
Baron Holland to Thomas Grenville, 6 Sept. 1832, Centre for Buckinghamshire
Studies, D 56/7/25.
11
Macaulay to Hannah Macaulay, 21 Dec. 1833, in Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas
Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas Pinney, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1974–81), vol. II, p. 365.
12
Thomas de Quincey, “Dr. Parr and His Contemporaries” (1831), in de Quincey, The
Works of Thomas de Quincey, ed. Frederick Burnwick, 21 vols. (London, 2000), vol. VIII,
pp. 7–9; M. H. Port and R. G. Thorne, “Smith, Robert Percy (1770–1845),” in Thorne, ed.,
The House of Commons 1790–1820, 5 vols. (London, 1986), vol. V, pp. 201–3.

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 From Patronage Clause to Education Clause 127

wariness of luxury and overextension.13 He praised Lord Minto, who

arrived in 1807, as “a good quiet sensible Governor G[enera]l.”14 The
two were evidently friends.15
Smith’s friendship with Minto underpins one plausible theory
of the origins and meaning of section forty-three. In a minute of 1811,
Minto proposed to form a few Hindu and Islamic seminaries, and
to reform the Benares Sanskrit College and the Calcutta Madrasa.
What was most striking about the minute was its claim that, since
a widespread “want of … education” hindered efforts toward “better
government,” the Company should promote “the more general dif-
fusion of knowledge among the great body of the people.”16 These
lines held out the prospect of a new policy of mass education, as
distinct from scholarly patronage. And yet, the rest of the minute
did not match up to this radical prospect. As a later educationalist
would complain, “nothing whatsoever … is proposed, or even alluded
to, as regards ‘the great body of the people’ …. [N]o classes what-
ever of the community are provided for, but the learned and more
respectable classes.”17 A colleague would agree: Minto intended to
encourage those “natives of India … who are already learned.”18 Both
readers viewed the minute through the prism of later debates, yet it is
hard to disagree with their conclusion. There was nothing very new
about the measures Minto advocated: Previous governors-general
had formed and reformed colleges. They too had mused about influ-
encing Indian society at large but had focused on conciliating elites.

13
Smith to James Mackintosh, 2 Aug. 1804, BL, Add. MS 78764, ff. 1v–2r; Smith to
Baron Holland, 18 Aug. 1805 and 22 Sept. 1807, BL, Add. MS 51801, ff. 50r–v, 55r. For
this wariness, see also Robert Percy Smith, Early Writings of Robert Percy Smith, ed.
R. V. S. (Chiswick, 1850), pp. 48–52.
14
Smith to James Mackintosh, 14 Feb. 1808, BL, Add. MS 78764, f. 8v.
15
Earl of Minto to family, Apr. 1808, in Minto, Lord Minto in India: Life and Letters of
Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, from 1807 to 1814, ed. Countess of Minto (London,
1880), p. 88.
16
Governor-General in Council, Minute (6 Mar. 1811), in PP (1831–2), vol. 735-I, p. 484.
17
[Alexander Duff], “The Early or Exclusively Oriental Period of Government Education
in Bengal,” Calcutta Review 3 (1845), p. 260 [emphasis removed].
18
William Adam, Adam’s Reports on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Behar,
Submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838, ed. J. Long (Calcutta, 1868), p. 310.

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 128 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

If indeed Minto’s minute provided the basis for section forty-three,

then that basis consisted of little more than a reframing of the
Company’s existing policy.
Section forty-three may have had other origins. According to
the chairman of the directors, Robert Thornton, parliament, pre-
sumably including Smith, was unaware of Minto’s minute.19 The
timing makes it possible that Thornton was mistaken.20 Another
possibility, however, is that section forty-three resembles Minto’s
minute because both derived from a memorandum of 1806. Penned
by the scholar-official Henry Thomas Colebrooke and addressed to
the previous governor-general, Sir George Barlow, this memoran-
dum at some point ended up in Minto’s papers. Its call for “pub-
lick instruction” was akin to Minto’s call for the “general diffusion
of knowledge.” And it envisioned the formation or reformation of
institutions in the same places. Still, these institutions – at Barelli,
Jaunpur, Nadia, and Tirhut – would not be colleges but merely librar-
ies, and would be meant for the use of the same discrete constituen-
cies. Colebrooke’s plan of 1806, therefore, had even less to do with
popular education than Minto’s plan of 1811. It is hard to determine
the exact relationship among the three documents. Colebrooke was
appointed to Minto’s council and signed the minute, so it is likely
that he had a hand in its composition. He was on friendly terms
with Smith, so it is also likely that he exchanged ideas with him
throughout the period when both were in Calcutta. In at least one
way, however, the memorandum seems directly connected to sec-
tion forty-three: Colebrooke cited as the cost of his plan the identical
sum of one lakh of rupees. For that matter, he presented the support
of knowledge as a duty imposed by the “domination” of territory.21

19
Robert Thornton to Marquess of Hastings, 5 Sept. 1813, Mount Stuart, HA/9/28.
20
See Michael Hancher, “Reading and Writing the Law: Macaulay in India,” in Michael
Freeman and Fiona Smith, eds., Law and Language: Current Legal Issues (Oxford,
2013), pp. 195–6.
21
[Henry Thomas Colebrooke], “Remarks Delivered to Sir G. Barlow in 1806,” NLS, MS
11726, ff. 1r–7v. Colebrooke’s authorship of the memorandum can be gleaned from a
reference to “the encouragement lately given by myself to a Sanscrit Printing Press.”

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 From Patronage Clause to Education Clause 129

This was something that Wellesley – but not Minto – had done, and
that Smith would do in his remarks proposing section forty-three.
Smith’s remarks before parliament yoked the Company’s
old idea of conciliation to its increasingly conspicuous territorial
sovereignty. Still, their ambiguity, which endured in the language
of the Charter Act, allowed for multiple readings. Several reports
of the session of the Commons on 2 July 1813 noticed the speech.
One summarized it thus: “Mr. R. Smith read certain clauses, the
effect of which was to apply part of any surplus to the establish-
ment of colleges, schools, and lectures, in India, to promote the sci-
ences, and revival of oriental literature, and also to afford marks of
honour and distinction on the natives.”22 A second report differed
slightly. In this version, Smith proposed “to lay aside a modicum
for founding schools for the literature of the natives, wherein they
should be themselves the teachers; and for communicating the sci-
ences to them through the medium of Europeans.”23 A third report
included further details, one of which was especially significant:
The outlay “would be but just,” it quoted Smith as saying, “as we
extracted from this people 17 millions yearly.”24 None of the reports
suggested that Smith had meant to advance a new policy of educa-
tion. Absent was any reference even to “public instruction” or the
“diffusion of knowledge.” They suggested instead that he sought
to patronize Indian learned elites and European scholar-officials.
These, after all, were the likeliest beneficiaries of the “modicum” to
be spent and of the “marks of honour” to be conferred. The reports
revealed something else: that Smith had emphasized that the sum
should be drawn from the Company’s land revenue and that he saw
the measure as fulfilling a duty imposed by its extraction of such

Colebrooke helped set up such a press in Calcutta in 1806. Ibid., f. 3v. For details on
the press, see Colebrooke to father, 9 Jun. 1806, in Colebrooke, Life, p. 227; David
Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian
Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley, 1969), p. 118.
22
Smith, Speech in HC Deb (2 Jul. 1813), Morning Post (3 Jul. 1813), p. [3].
23
Smith, Speech in HC Deb (2 Jul. 1813), vol. XXVI, cols. 1098–9 [emphasis removed].
24
Smith, Speech in HC Deb (2 Jul. 1813), Morning Chronicle (3 Jul. 1813), p. [2].

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 130 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

revenue in the first place. His clarity on this point contrasted with
the ambiguity of many of his comments and of the resulting statu-
tory language. The Charter Act was passed on 21 July. Thorny deci-
sions remained about how to spend the annual lakh of rupees.
For help with these decisions, the Board of Control turned to the
librarian and resident orientalist of East India House, Charles Wilkins.
Wilkins returned a detailed memorandum many of whose suggestions
were novel but whose spirit was in keeping with the idea of concilia-
tion. His main suggestion was to conduct a survey of all of the “Pandits,
or learned men … who, of course, are mostly Brahmans,” and to note
which of them “appear to be the most distinguished, and to have the
greatest influence over the rest.” By discovering which individuals
were “of the highest Cast and literary rank,” the Company would
discover too which “ought, in good policy, to be the chief objects of
encouragement.” Wilkins’ remarks were premised on the notion that
“the Hindu Hierarchy” safeguarded India’s political stability. Thus,
he warned that “the clause in question [section forty-three] cannot
be acted upon with too much circumspection.” In seeking to effect
the “improvement” and “introduction” of knowledge, the Company
must take care to conciliate, and not to demean, the leading pandits.
Rather than subject them to the “subordination and discipline” of col-
leges, the Company should place them in charge of existing seats of
learning. It should also bring them into its scientific establishments
and encourage scholar-officials to cooperate with them. There was no
necessary contradiction between the “ancient” knowledge of Indians
and the “modern” knowledge of Europeans. “A reciprocal communi-
cation of knowledge” was possible and productive of political benefits.
For Wilkins, however, it could be so only if the Company upheld the
Indian social order. To “interfere with the education of the natives”
and risk disturbing that order was “politically” dangerous.25
So afraid was Wilkins of this prospect that in the first draft of
his memorandum he had expressed a wish that “‘the clause in the act

25
Wilkins to [John Sullivan], 25 Aug. 1813, BL, Add. MS 29234, ff. 204r–211v, 243r–v.

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 From Patronage Clause to Education Clause 131

had not been moved.’”26 As it happened, this was exactly the view of
his old friend and patron Warren Hastings. That the board next con-
sulted the former governor-general reflected both his scholarly repu-
tation and his political rehabilitation. It also reflected the impression
he had made recently in parliament and the press with his testimony
during the charter negotiations. For one old schoolmate, it was as if
“the world has just found out that Mr. Hastings, now 84, is a great
man.”27 His testimony had led backward in time, opposing the expan-
sionism of Wellesley along with the inroads of Evangelicals and free
merchants.28 Once a critic of the Company state, Hastings, in retire-
ment, had become one of its defenders (and pensioners). On questions
of knowledge, therefore, he enjoined the board and directors to follow
the example of his administration. He reminded them that in the city
of Benares, whose pandits were especially renowned, they possessed a
“powerful instrument of conciliation.” Yet ultimately, Hastings’ con-
cern not to disrupt India’s social order ran even deeper than that of his
friend. Regarding section forty-three he was forced to conclude that
“no specific plan can be devised for its operation.” He continued, “If
the Braminical establishment has any wants, let the professors of it
represent them. Let them be even invited to represent them.”29 This
argument did not preclude engaging with pandits; it did insist that
such engagement occur on their terms. Hastings made it clear that he
opposed any unsolicited interference in Indian education.
The directors’ dispatch on the subject of section forty-three,
after being lightly revised by the board, was communicated in
June 1814.30 It did little more than weave together the judgments of

26
John Sullivan to Warren Hastings, 10 Oct. 1813, BL, Add. MS 29188, f. 276v.
27
William Vincent to William Francklin, 10 Jul. 1813, National Library of India,
R 19/14.
28
See Hastings, Speech in HC Deb (30 Mar. 1813), vol. XXV, cols. 415–29; Hastings,
Speech in HL Deb (5 Apr. 1813), vol. XXV, cols. 553–63.
29
Warren Hastings, “My Observations on Mr. Wilkins’ Plan” (7 Oct. 1813), BL, Add. MS
29234, ff. 212r–215v.
30
For the original draft and modifications, see Draft Paragraphs to Bengal (1 Jun. 1814),
BL, IOR F/3/31, pp. 25–43.

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 132 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

Wilkins and Hastings. Some of its advice was positive. It repeated

their call to award “natives of caste and of reputation” with ­honors
and “pecuniary assistance.” It pointed out that attentions to
the pandits of Benares might prove a “powerful instrument of …­
conciliation.” It endorsed the forging of “links of communica-
tion” between Indian learned elites and European scholar-officials.
Nevertheless, its overall tendency was negative. It concurred that
the objects of section forty-three could not “be attained through
the medium of public colleges.” And it echoed Hastings’ refusal “to
devise any specific plan” for the clause’s implementation. Finally, in
a sign of the directors’ wariness toward scholar-officials (discussed
later in this chapter), it ordered the new governor-general, Lord
Moira, not to “adopt any arrangement” without authorization. With
its limp proposal to give “effect in the course of time to the liberal
intentions of the Legislature,” the directors’ dispatch fell dead from
the East Indiaman that carried it.31 Smith had linked the idea of con-
ciliation to large-scale territorial sovereignty. But the directors, like
their two informants, resisted this new affiliation.
The dispatch came closest to reckoning with the Company’s
altered situation in a few paragraphs on the subject of “village teach-
ers.” Paraphrasing Wilkins and Hastings, it described these teachers
as “public servants” the support of whom had long been a “distin-
guished feature of internal polity.” It instructed Moira to investigate
their present state and wants and to guarantee “their just rights and
immunities.”32 Doing so was in keeping with the policy of con-
ciliating elites, but it also presented a chance to reach beyond this
constituency. In the understanding of the directors, informed by
Wilkins and Hastings, village teachers were elites who mixed with
commoners and commanded their respect. Integrating them into the
Company’s machinery might extend its grasp downwards from the
upper classes and inwards from the coastal presidencies. And this

31
Extract Public Despatch to Bengal (3 Jun. 1814), in GIED, pp. 94–6.
32
Ibid, pp. 95–6.

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 From Patronage Clause to Education Clause 133

might be just the beginning. Hastings wrote that his comments on

village teachers “may be repeated of the village Bramins officiating
in … religious worship.”33 Wilkins offered that “Though I would
not interfere with the religion of the natives, I see no objection why
Government should not … exercise a controul over its ministers.”
What both men imagined was an alliance between the Company
and India’s “national clergy” analogous to that which had shaped
the development of European states.34 This line of thought was preg-
nant with radical implications, including not just curbing the spread
of Christianity but also enshrining Hinduism as the official faith.
Neither Hastings nor Wilkins pursued these implications. Despite
pushing at the boundaries of conciliation, they advanced no new idea
to replace it. Meanwhile, the directors seem not to have recurred to
the subject of village teachers; Moira proposed merely to offer them
little moral manuals.35
Moira’s response to section forty-three was shaped by a number
of sources in addition to the directors’ dispatch. He received advice
on the subject from at least a half-dozen Europeans based in Calcutta
alone. Some of these individuals, mainly officials, reprised the plans
of Colebrooke and Minto to establish a few elite institutions; others,
mainly missionaries and their supporters, called for a larger number of
popular schools.36 Noncommittal as to these various schemes, Moira
had greater reason to listen to the powerful director Charles Grant.
In correspondence, Grant urged him to establish schools and to dis-
tribute tracts that would improve “the moral & intellectual condi-
tion of our Indian Subjects.”37 Grant’s rationale was partly religious.

33
Hastings, “My Observations,” f. 212v.
34
Wilkins to [Sullivan], 25 Aug. 1813, f. 243r.
35
Lord Moira, Minute (2 Oct. 1815), in H. Sharp, ed., Selections from Educational
Records, Part I: 1781–1839 (Calcutta, 1920), pp. 24–5.
36
J. Sargent, The Life of the Rev. T. T. Thomason (London, 1833), pp. 222–5; Kopf,
British Orientalism, pp. 148–51; M. A. Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal
1793–1837 (Oxford, 1972), pp. 68–9.
37
Grant to Marquess of Hastings, 11 Sept. 1819, Mount Stuart, HA/9/47. Moira was
created Marquess of Hastings in 1816 but will be referred to as Moira throughout this
discussion to avoid confusion with Warren Hastings (no relation).

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 134 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

He had added similar language to the Charter Act as part of a clause

allowing proselytization in the Company’s territories.38 His recently
reprinted Observations on the State of Society (1792) depicted educa-
tion as the surest route to Christianization in India.39 Nonetheless,
Grant was a complex figure. Religious considerations mingled
with other kinds in the thought of the Company man. And while
he ­disapproved of further conquests, he insisted that those that had
already been made imparted certain responsibilities.40 In one ­letter
to Moira, he described the Company’s “acquisition of territorial
­dominion” as a watershed that created imperatives “of preservation &
of ­progressive refinement.” It was in keeping with these imperatives
that he urged Moira to establish schools and distribute moral trea-
tises, for “as the Minds of that people [Indians] are enlarg’d by greater
knowledge in things compatible with their superstition, they may be
expected to become more readily susceptible of encreas’d influence
from our superior lights & principles.”41 This was an Evangelical and
­providential outlook, but it was also a political one. The “preserva-
tion” to which Grant alluded was that of the Company state.
Preservation was likewise a recurrent theme in the letters
addressed to Moira by Hastings. Even the ostensibly subtle inno-
vations proposed by Grant, however, alarmed the former governor-
general. Upon Moira’s appointment in 1812, he contacted Hastings,
and promptly received congratulations and a dinner invitation.42
At the start of the ensuing correspondence, Hastings expressed an
uneasiness about the changes that had occurred since his own admin-
istration: “in the system of government … in its foreign policy and
relations, its vast extension of territory, its regulations of law, finance,
and even rights of property …. I fear I shall have to add commercial

38
Carson, The East India Company and Religion, pp. 37, 147.
39
Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of
Great-Britain [“written chiefly in the year 1792”] (London, 1797).
40
Ainslie Thomas Embree, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (London, 1962).
41
Grant to Marquess of Hastings, Apr. 1817, Mount Stuart, HA/9/35.
42
Moira to Hastings, 11 Nov. 1812, BL, Add. MS 39871, ff. 118r–122r; Hastings to
Charles Hastings, 13 Nov. 1812, Huntington Library, HA 6194.

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 From Patronage Clause to Education Clause 135

competitions.”43 As his contemporary poems attest, Hastings saw

the age as one of imperial decline rather than triumph.44 He enjoined
Moira to revert to the time-honored usages, policies, and institutions
of the Company state. He counseled him to seek the good opinion
of the directors and of the British public. He urged him to commu-
nicate with Indians and to observe “their relative ranks in society.”
Finally, mirroring his and Wilkins’ remarks to the board, he exhorted
Moira not to disturb the social order by propagating Christianity.45
Cultivating British and Indian political classes and negotiating with
them – these were the hallmarks of Hastings’ system of conciliation.
Having once devised this system out of necessity, he now embraced
it. As ever, it centered on scholarly patronage.
Hastings recommended to Moira several scholarly ventures.
One was an intellectual commerce with Bhutan and Tibet. Though
the Qing had barred Europeans from these places, Hastings believed
that high-caste, well-connected Gosains might retrace the steps of
his envoys. Any diplomatic gains would be modest. Yet, Hastings
reasoned, “It opens a new, and almost untried field of knowledge …
and who can set bounds to its discoveries?”46 Citing similar rea-
sons, he encouraged Moira to commission a history of the neigh-
boring kingdom of Nepal. Such a work, Hastings claimed, would
appeal to the British “public: a powerful body … and no inefficient
dispensers of fame.” It ought to focus on commerce, which accord-
ing to him was “the most useful of all subjects” and yet one lately
neglected by scholar-officials.47 If Hastings thus adhered to his idea
of conciliation, then he nonetheless made several concessions to the
times. In the belief that Muslim elites “have now scarcely any exis-
tence,” he focused on Hindu ones and stressed the need to insulate

43
Hastings to Moira, 12 Nov. 1812, Mount Stuart, HA/10.
44
Stuart Gillespie, “Warren Hastings as a Translator of Latin Poetry,” Translation and
Literature 26 (2017), pp. 200–202.
45
Hastings to Moira, 2 Dec. 1812, Mount Stuart, HA/12/19.
46
Hastings to Moira, 24 Dec. 1812, ibid.
47
Hastings to Marquess of Hastings, 3 Jan. 1817, Mount Stuart, HA/9/35.

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 136 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

and accommodate them.48 He reiterated his verdict on Wilkins’ plan:

The Company should “abstain from all interference … but such as
they [pandits] themselves shall solicit.”49 His concern was that the
Company had strayed too far from its old constitution. Restoring his
system of conciliation would help to bring it back within bounds.
Hastings and Grant espoused two different ideas about knowl-
edge, between which Moira at first vacillated. The choice was
between conciliating political classes through scholarly patronage
and shaping Indian society through education. In an early response
to Hastings, Moira wrote that many of the Company’s problems
stemmed “from the discarding that tone of conciliation … with
which you tempered … your measures.”50 He delayed responding to
the directors’ dispatch until after an extensive tour of northern India
in 1814–15. Among the stops on Moira’s itinerary was Benares, the
focus of so much interest among the various commentators on sec-
tion forty-three. Expectations duly heightened, he was “particularly
curious to assure myself of the state of learning” at the Company’s
Sanskrit college.51 In the event he was disappointed. He came away
convinced by what he had seen and heard that “the instruction com-
municated at this college was wretchedly superficial.” Still, in a
line that would have pleased Hastings, Moira hoped that with the
“co-operation of some of the principal natives,” he could render the
college “effective for its professed ends.”52
This thinking would change dramatically. In a dispatch of the
following year, Moira described “the existing native colleges” as lack-
ing “any embers capable of being fanned into life.” Thus, he argued,
the funds authorized by parliament should be spent instead on found-
ing and maintaining experimental schools. Underpinning this turn
from patronizing scholars to providing education was a sense that the

48
Hastings, Speech in HL Deb (5 Apr. 1813), col. 560.
49
Hastings to Moira, 14 Sept. 1814, Mount Stuart, HA/9/28.
50
Moira to Hastings, 3 Feb. 1814, BL, Add. MS 29189, f. 127v.
51
Moira, Minute (2 Oct. 1815), p. 27.
52
Marquess of Hastings, The Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings, ed.
Marchioness of Hastings, 2 vols. (London, 1858), vol. I, p. 128.

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 From Patronage Clause to Education Clause 137

Company had reached a climacteric. Its “extensions of territory” and

success in “securing the new possessions” now warranted a bolder
mission: to “cultivate” the “intellect” of an “immense population.”
There were limits to Moira’s proposed “revolution.” He reasoned that
it was “most likely to succeed” with the cooperation of “natives of
birth and education.” And he left as a matter for future deliberation
“the nature as well as the extent” of the Company’s “interference”
in Indian society. Nonetheless, he proposed that the Company might
diffuse knowledge “to places and persons now out of its reach.”53
Endorsing conciliation and education, but with the latter ultimately
in view, Moira supplied a coda to the first career of section forty-
three and a preview of the second.
Moira did little in the following years to effect his “revolu-
tion,” leaving the founding of schools to individuals and associations.
Not only was he distracted by wars with the Gurkhas, Pindaris, and
Marathas, but he was delayed by the failure of the requisite revenue
surplus to materialize.54 One association that sprang up in the mean-
time was the Calcutta School Book Society (CSBS), which counted
officials, missionaries, and Indian scholars as its members. The CSBS
engaged Moira as its sponsor and, in its first proceedings, asked him
and other leaders to forgo the “patronage of learning” for “the general
march of Mind.”55 Moira accepted this proposition. Already, he had
announced that any funds granted under section forty-three must be
spent not on “literary” works but on Indian education.56 Besides the
CSBS, he contributed to a school founded by his wife in Barrackpore
and to similar ventures in Bengal and Rajputana. These actions,
though small and unofficial, drew forth from the governor-general
grand musings on the basis of Company rule in India. “How is it,”

53
Moira, Minute (2 Oct. 1815), pp. 25–9.
54
On the indebtedness of the Company’s territorial account to its commercial one
throughout this period, see C. H. Philips, The East India Company, 1784–1834, 2nd
edn (Manchester, 1961), p. 303.
55
“Proceedings Prior to the Final Establishment of the Society, &c.” (1817), in The Second
Report of the Calcutta School Book Society’s Proceedings (Calcutta, 1819), p. 68.
56
Extract Bombay Public Consultations, 8 May 1816, BL, IOR F/4/523/12491, p. 19.

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 138 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

Moira queried, “that we maintain sovereignty over this immense

mass?” His answer was “equity.” But equity first required educa-
tion. Through education, he averred, the lower classes would learn to
appreciate their rights, and the upper classes would give up some of
their privileges.57 These changes might be in the ultimate interests
of Christianity; they were certainly in the immediate interests of the
government. In 1817, Moira described the “expansion of intellect” as
good for the state and urged young officials to promote “the educa-
tion of a rising generation.”58 Moira himself, however, was to play
even less of a role in this project in the following years. The second
half of his decade in office was marred by illness, debts, and quarrels
with the home authorities.59 Moira was the first British statesman to
call for “public education” in India.60 But he conceded that his efforts
had been “nothing” next to those of others.61

Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions

in India
The story of the changing meaning of section forty-three captures
something of the Company’s changing ideas about knowledge in
the early nineteenth century. And yet education was not the only
politico-intellectual avenue opened by the growth of the Company’s
dominions. In another ramification, scholar-officials in India now
turned their efforts to extending and securing the control of the
state. This trend was visible across a growing range of scholarly
institutions, and in projects to digest reams of information on the
Company’s territories. The designs of scholar-officials, however, had
little impact on the higher reaches of discourse or policy. Unwilling to

57
Marquess of Hastings, Private Journal, vol. II, pp. 149–50, 156–9, 346–7.
58
Marquess of Hastings, Speech (30 Jun. 1817), in Thomas Roebuck, Annals of the
College of Fort William (Calcutta, 1819), pp. 542–3.
59
Richard John Bingle, “The Decline of the Marquess of Hastings,” in Donovan
Williams and E. Daniel Potts, eds., Essays in Indian History in Honour of Cuthbert
Collin Davies (New York, 1973).
60
Moira, Minute (2 Oct. 1815), p. 24.
61
Marquess of Hastings, Summary of the Administration of the Indian Government,
from October 1813, to January 1823 (London, 1824), p. 33.

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 Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions in India 139

embrace these officials’ expansionist views, the directors withheld

their patronage and approbation.
The foremost site in India for the fusion of intellectual and ter-
ritorial ambitions remained the College of Fort William. Its reduc-
tion notwithstanding, the college, and, in particular, its disputations,
continued to evoke something of the vision of its founder, Wellesley.
For that matter, it still employed European professors in addition to
scores of Indian munshis and pandits. It maintained a sizeable library
with books in many languages and a printing press with founts of
English and various “Oriental” types. Most importantly, the college
continued to dispense considerable literary patronage. In an artful bit
of bookkeeping meant to evade the directors’ cuts, Wellesley had set
up a separate fund for this purpose in 1805.62 In the next decade and a
half, the college council subsidized more than one hundred publica-
tions.63 It thus helped to sustain the Serampore Mission Press and the
Asiatic Society. From 1812, the College of Fort St. George performed
a similar range of functions in Madras. Apart from training civil ser-
vants, it too employed European and Indian scholars, published and
patronized works, and sponsored private initiatives.64 The effect of
both colleges was centripetal as well as centrifugal: attracting schol-
ars and deploying them to conduct research. One official spoke for
many in describing the college as bound up with the “interests … of
the government of this extensive and populous territory.”65
Other institutions fostered the same perspective. The Calcutta
Botanic Garden, according to its manager, Nathaniel Wallich, had
a “sphere of … operations” to match that of the Company’s gov-
ernment. Its specimens, he wrote in 1819, “have derived from
every variety of soil and climate … within our Indian possessions,”
and had been cultivated and disseminated to “a corresponding

62
Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher, The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas
Colebrooke and the East India Company (Abingdon, UK, 2012), pp. 65–6.
63
Roebuck, Annals, appendix, pp. 21–45.
64
Thomas R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial
Madras (Berkeley, 2006), ch. 4.
65
George Hewett, Speech (7 Aug. 1811), in Roebuck, Annals, p. 275.

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 140 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

degree.”66 As microcosms of the territorial state, the Company’s

botanic gardens – in Bangalore and Saharanpur as well as Calcutta –
brought its concerns within the scope of individual intellectual
exertion. The same was true of the museum founded in 1802 by the
governor of Madras, Lord Clive, and entrusted to the superintendence
of the botanist and naturalist Benjamin Heyne. Clive, a disciple of
Wellesley, not only approved Heyne’s plan to exhibit “the natural
Productions and Curiosities of this Country.” He also ordered him
to investigate thirty-six subjects, ranging from its climate to the
customs of its inhabitants.67 Heyne’s commission, evidently, was to
help to secure the Company’s control of the vast tracts captured from
the late Tipu Sultan. Versions of this rationale attached to additional
scientific institutions. The astronomical observatories of Bombay
and Madras came to be justified as emblems of territorial power.68
After all, apart from defining local time and place and aiding naviga-
tion, they now facilitated ambitious terrestrial surveys.
For many scholar-officials, an appointment to one of the new
surveys offered the best chance to further the twin causes of science
and the state. The Mysore survey begun in 1799, in particular, was
a wide-ranging enterprise, intellectually as well as geographically.
The survey’s initial sponsor, Wellesley, decreed that it “should not
be confined to mere military or Geographical information.” Instead,
it should comprehend every kind of knowledge useful for “establish-
ing and conducting our government.”69 The breadth of this enter-
prise explains why Heyne, John Leyden, and Colin Mackenzie – men
of differing talents – all saw in it tantalizing possibilities. In 1815,
Mackenzie was appointed the first “Surveyor-General of India.” By
this time, the Company’s surveys had crisscrossed the peninsula and

66
NAI, Bengal Public Proceedings (7 Jan. 1820), no. 55.
67
Extract Madras Public Consultations (2 Apr. and 18 Jun. 1802), BL, IOR F/4/152/2601,
pp. 3–9, 11–22.
68
See Simon Schaffer, “The Bombay Case: Astronomers, Instrument Makers and the
East India Company,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 43 (2012), p. 158.
69
Marquess Wellesley, Minute (4 Sept. 1799), cited in R. H. Phillimore, Historical
Records of the Survey of India, 5 vols. (Dehra Dun, 1945–68), vol. II, p. 91.

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 Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions in India 141

reached as far north as the Himalayas and the Sutlej. In 1818, the
same year that the Company became “paramount” in India, Moira
acknowledged that they had gone hand in hand with “the consolida-
tion of our Empire.”70 For that matter, dedicated surveys did not offer
the only opportunities for surveying. The Company’s military and
diplomatic missions did so as well. The embassies of John Malcolm
to Persia and of Mountstuart Elphinstone to Peshawar furnished, in
equal measure, arguments for the integration of British India and
materials for the exploration of neighboring lands.71
Scholar-officials used not only institutions but also grand
projects to forward their politico-intellectual agenda. Most ambi-
tiously, they sought to digest a vast array of information on
the Company’s lands and subjects. In 1805, James Mackintosh
informed Wellesley of plans for a work entitled “The History and
Present State of the British Dominions in India.” Not only would
this work justify “our national policy in the East,” but it would
yield “new conclusions of political science” and “rules for the con-
duct of statesmen.” It was to be based on information gleaned from
Company officials and their networks throughout India. Thus,
Mackintosh asked Wellesley to order “all the civil and military
servants, to transmit answers … to such … queries as I should
send.” “By this means,” he explained, “I might hope to accu-
mulate valuable materials of various sorts, especially statistical,
which … would furnish the means of applying principles of politi-
cal economy to the condition of this country.”72 Mackintosh’s let-
ter from Bombay reached Wellesley only after he had resigned, but
he recommended the scheme to his successor, Lord Cornwallis, and

70
Marquess of Hastings, Minute (6 Jan. 1818), cited in ibid., vol. III, p. 302.
71
Ibid., vol. II, pp. 65–7, 173–6; Jack Harrington, Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of
British India (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 83–94; Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, ed., Mountstuart
Elphinstone in South Asia: Pioneer of British Colonial Rule (London, 2019), chs. 1–5
passim.
72
Mackintosh to Wellesley, 16 Jul. 1805, in Robert Rouiere Pearce, Memoirs and
Correspondence of the Most Noble Richard Marquess Wellesley, 3 vols. (London,
1846–7), vol. II, pp. 380–83.

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 142 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

promised to take it up with the directors.73 The latter approach bore

fruit in a dispatch of 1806 instructing officials to cooperate fully
with Mackintosh’s requests.74 In the meantime, “desirous to make
a trial” of his method, Mackintosh had drawn up a narrower Plan of
a Comparative Vocabulary of Indian Languages (1806).75
It was at this point that Mackintosh’s exertions began to
attract the interest of other scholar-officials. After Minto referred
the narrower plan to the council of the College of Fort William,
one member, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, offered to enlarge it into
“a very grand undertaking.”76 Whereas Mackintosh had proposed
to collect specimens of Indian languages, Colebrooke proposed to
compile entire vocabularies.77 Meanwhile, Leyden had proposed
something even grander: a comparative analysis of a plethora of
Eastern languages.78 Although the council chose Colebrooke’s
plan over Mackintosh’s, this put an end neither to Leyden’s plan
nor to others that emerged in the following years. Not all of the
scholar-officials who framed these projects were directly inspired
by Mackintosh, but all shared similar political and intellec-
tual aims. In Serampore and Calcutta, William Carey was start-
ing work on “A Universal Dictionary of the Oriental Languages
Derived from Sanskrit.”79 In the same environs, Francis Irvine
was drawing up “a physical survey and philosophical statement
of the characters of the tribes of this vast country.”80 In Bombay
and Madras, respectively, William Erskine and Francis Whyte Ellis

73
Wellesley to Mackintosh, 20 Nov. 1805, BL, Add. MS 78765, ff. 52r–53v.
74
Extract Public Despatch to Bengal (9 Apr. 1806), NLS, MS 11726, ff. 30r-v.
75
Mackintosh to Lord Minto, 31 Jul. 1807, ibid., f. 11v.
76
Colebrooke to father, 14 Sept. 1807, in Colebrooke, Life, pp. 228–9.
77
Colebrooke, Minute (15 Aug. 1807), NLS, MS 11726, ff. 32v–34v.
78
Leyden to Barlow, 2 Jan. 1807, BL, Add. MS 26566, ff. 3r–4v.
79
George Smith, The Life of William Carey, D.D., 2nd edn (London, 1887), p. 221; M.
Siddiq Khan, “William Carey and the Serampore Books (1800–1834),” Libri 11 (1961),
pp. 235–6. Carey was more interested in religion than empire but saw the spread of the
latter as conducive to that of the former.
80
Mackintosh to John Whishaw, 13 Aug. 1811, in Whishaw, The “Pope” of Holland
House: Selections from the Correspondence of John Whishaw and His Friends, 1813–
1840, ed. Lady Seymour (London, 1906), p. 287.

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 Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions in India 143

were embarking on great studies of Indian languages and history.81

And, following his Mysore survey, Mackenzie was arranging sun-
dry collections for his intended magnum opus: “a Statistical &
Historical View” of the “Geography of India.”82 These scholar-
officials all hitched their fortunes to “the acquisition of British
India,” as Leyden described it, and to “the necessity of regulating
accurately its interior and exterior relations.”83 Their argument
was the one gaining ground at the Company’s scholarly institu-
tions: Assimilating new territories politically required assimilat-
ing them intellectually.
As sound as this argument may have been, it did not appeal to
the directors, who sought to curtail the new or new-modeled insti-
tutions and projects. This policy was in evidence at the College of
Fort William, whose functions and budget they continued to trim.
By 1820, a professoriate once numbering over one dozen had been
whittled down to just three.84 Some professors were dismissed; oth-
ers left in frustration, including in short succession two lecturers of
natural philosophy.85 Even those who stayed, meanwhile, frequently
had reason to feel unappreciated. In 1811, the directors again con-
demned the college’s publications as expensive, ill-executed, and
unworthy of patronage.86 Matthew Lumsden, the author of one of
the offending works, protested at these remarks: “The utility of
the College has never yet been fully acknowledged by the author-
ities at home …. [I]t can flourish only by means of their decided

81
P. Hardy, introduction to William Erskine, A History of India under the Two First
Sovereigns of the House of Taimur, Baber and Humayun (1854), repr. edn, 2 vols.
(Karachi, 1974); Jane Rendall, “Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James
Mill,” Historical Journal 25 (1982), p. 62; Trautmann, Languages and Nations,
pp. 83–4, 108–15.
82
Mackenzie to C. M. Ricketts, 15 Jun. 1815, Mount Stuart, HA/9/32.
83
John Leyden, “Plan for Investigating the Languages, Literature, Antiquities, & History
of the Dekkan,” BL, Add. MS 26600, f. 109v.
84
Public Despatch to Bengal (28 Jun. 1820), BL, IOR E/4/699, pp. 814–16.
85
David Hare to James Dinwiddie, 16 Jan. 1810, Dalhousie University Archives,
Dinwiddie Fonds A51; William Jardine Proudfoot, Biographical Memoir of James
Dinwiddie, LL.D. (Liverpool, 1868), pp. 119–21.
86
Extract Public Despatch to Bengal (10 Jul. 1811), BL, IOR F/4/503/12029, pp. 1–2.

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 144 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

approbation and support.”87 A resulting letter from the college coun-

cil to the directors, seeking their “assurance” on this point, proved
unavailing.88 In 1815, they ordered that the college’s literary fund
be reduced and its patronage confined to “works of real utility.”89
“Without exception,” according to a later memorandum, the publi-
cations of the college had put their authors in debt.90 Finances at the
College of Fort St. George were even more constrained.91
The directors were no better disposed toward the Company’s
scientific establishments. The Calcutta Botanic Garden they merely
tolerated. They repeatedly sought to limit its activities to ones with
commercial value; its manager Wallich endured because he “knew
how to appeal to the Company’s material interests.”92 In 1808, the
governor of Madras, Sir George Barlow, abolished Heyne’s office as
botanist and naturalist. In response to Heyne’s plea that the political
“usefulness of natural History is generally admitted,” Barlow replied
that he was “not at Liberty … to continue the Appointment.”93 Not
only was the presidency’s natural history museum closed but its botan-
ical gardens were permitted to languish. By the 1810s, those built up
over many years by Heyne and the physician-general James Anderson
now lay “totally neglected and barren,” “in a sad state of ruin.”94
Astronomy, meanwhile, suffered from lackluster support at all three

87
Lumsden to College Council, 11 Nov. 1812, PCFW, vol. 562, pp. 268–9.
88
College Council to Directors, 29 Dec. 1812, ibid., p. 299.
89
Extract Public Despatch to Bengal (6 Mar. and 19 May 1815), BL, IOR F/4/587/14202,
pp. 3–4, 5–6. For figures, see Kopf, British Orientalism, p. 220.
90
College Council to Governor-General in Council, 22 Dec. 1823, PCFW, vol. 567, p. 354.
91
Here the directors’ retrenchments culminated in an 1823 order confining literary
patronage to “essential” works. Peter L. Schmitthenner, Telugu Resurgence: C. P.
Brown and Cultural Consolidation in Nineteenth-Century South India (New Delhi,
2001), p. 107.
92
David Arnold, “Plant Capitalism and Company Science: The Indian Career of
Nathaniel Wallich,” MAS 42 (2008), p. 911; Mark Harrison, “The Calcutta Botanic
Garden and the Wider World, 1817–46,” in Uma Das Gupta, ed., Science and Modern
India: An Institutional History, c.1784–1947 (Delhi, 2011), p. 237.
93
Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras Public Consultations (3 Jun. 1808), pp. 3837, 3856.
94
Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in India (Edinburgh, 1812), p. 125; Benjamin
Heyne, Tracts, Historical and Statistical, on India (London, 1814), p. 411.

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 Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions in India 145

presidencies. Plans for new observatories were put off or rejected; the
one at Madras was cut back and threatened with closure.95 In the last
instance, scholar-officials remonstrated with Governor Barlow and
Governor-General Minto alike.96 But there was little that either man
could do given the determination of the directors.
And so it went with the Company’s surveys. In the absence of
steady sponsorship, these assumed “a chaotic, if not anarchic, char-
acter.”97 At one point, William Lambton complained that “neither
the extent nor principle of my plan have been in the least under-
stood by the Court of Directors.”98 While Lambton’s trigonometrical
survey fared better than Mackenzie’s Mysore one, this was largely
because it posed less of a threat to that body. Lambton presented
himself as a disinterested man of science and distinguished the work
of surveying from that of building a territorial empire. Thus, as one
of his allies put it,

when the fame of Conquest & extensive Dominion has passed

away, a page may remain on the records of science, to shew
that under the fostering & liberal protection of the East India
Company, a survey has been carried on … not inferior … to the
brilliant labors of the English & French astronomers.99

Mackenzie, meanwhile, struggled to make such a case for his sur-

vey. Appeals to the interests of commerce and the idea of concilia-
tion could not disguise its Wellesleyan mandate.100 Nor, in private

95
Joydeep Sen, Astronomy in India, 1784–1876 (London, 2014), ch. 2.
96
William Petrie, Memorandum (4 Sept. 1808), NLS, MS 11726, ff. 36r–42r; Andrew
Scott to Petrie, 9 Sept. 1808, ibid., ff. 44r–47r.
97
Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British
India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1997), p. 162.
98
Lambton to Samuel Peach, 28 Jun. 1802, Cleveland Public Library, 091.92 L179L.
99
Petrie, Memorandum (4 Sept. 1808), f. 41v.
100
For such appeals, see Peter Robb, “Completing ‘Our Stock of Geography’, or an Object
‘Still More Sublime’: Colin Mackenzie’s Survey of Mysore, 1799–1810,” JRAS 3rd ser.
8 (1998), p. 201. For Mackenzie’s belief that the Company must become a “Paramount
Power” in order to ensure “the tranquillity of all India,” see Mackenzie to [Thomas
Middleton], 11 Feb 1819, BL, Add. MS 9871, f. 56v.

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 146 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

correspondence, did he even attempt to disguise his antipathy toward

the directors. He told Leyden, “I feel very little obliged by them, &
if they & their System go to pot, I am not bound to bewail either
their Justice or their Indulgence.”101 Mackenzie’s sense of griev-
ance endured long after the termination of the Mysore survey. His
appointment as surveyor-general of India was less a reward than a
cost-cutting measure. Now burdened with administrative duties,
Mackenzie was forced to give up his plans for a great “Statistical &
Historical” work. Though he still hoped to organize and catalogue
his materials, in the end, he would fail to accomplish even this.102
Mackenzie was hardly alone in being disappointed: Few of his
contemporaries realized their great projects either. The main rea-
son for this, dwarfing even the decline of scholarly institutions,
was the drying up of scholarly patronage.103 Leading officials some-
times commanded the resources to undertake ambitious works
independently. As the resident at Mysore, Mark Wilks could draw
on staff, state papers, and local learned men to write a history of
the province.104 Matters were different for their subordinates, who
now found opportunities for scholarship limited. This, in 1815,
was the complaint of the army officer and political assistant John
Briggs. From bases in the Deccan, Briggs had long been work-
ing on a comprehensive “History of the Mohamedan Conquests”
and had collected some eleven volumes of notes and translations.

101
Mackenzie to Leyden, 13 Nov. 1809, NLS, MS 3380, f. 117r.
102
Mackenzie to Alexander Johnston, 1 Feb. 1817, in Johnston, “Biographical Sketch
of the Literary Career of the Late Colonel Colin Mackenzie,” JRAS 1 (1834), p. 343;
Mackenzie to [Thomas Middleton], 4 Jun. 1818, BL, Add. MS 9871, ff. 26r–27r.
103
There were other reasons too: Mackintosh and Colebrooke found few contributors;
Erskine was charged with defalcation and sent off in disgrace; Carey’s work was
destroyed in a fire; and further accidents befell Ellis and his papers. Khan, “William
Carey,” p. 236; Jane Rendall, “The Political Ideas and Activities of Sir James
Mackintosh (1765–1832): A Study in Whiggism Between 1789 and 1832” (PhD disser-
tation, University of London, 1972), pp. 203–5; Trautmann, Languages and Nations,
pp. 84–6, 107, 113; Rocher and Rocher, Making of Western Indology, p. 72.
104
Mark Wilks, Historical Sketches of the South of India, in an Attempt to Trace the History
of Mysoor, 3 vols. (London, 1810–17), vol. I, p. x; Su Fang Ng, “Indian Interpreters in the
Making of Colonial Historiography: New Light on Mark Wilks’ Historical Sketches of
the South of India (1810–1817),” English Historical Review 84 (2019).

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 Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions in India 147

With the departure of his patrons Wilks and Malcolm, however,

Briggs “was deprived of almost all the literary patronage I could have
once secured in India.” For one thing, a remote posting prevented
his “acquiring either interest or acquaintance among the people in
power in Madras.” For another, he had already written to the College
of Fort William two years earlier and never received so much as a
response.105 In 1817, Briggs finally abandoned the project after the
contents of his library were variously destroyed or scattered.106 The
mishap resulted from the Maratha peshwa’s [prime minister’s] sack-
ing of the Poona residency, yet the larger issue remained a lack of
patronage. Some of Briggs’ “valuable Oriental MSS” might have been
replaced, and assistants hired to track down or reconstruct his other
papers. Despite pleas on his behalf, however, “no adequate compen-
sation” was granted by the Company.107
Governors and governors-general of the era were not uniformly
inattentive to scholar-officials. Minto was sometimes willing to
assist fellow Scots in particular. The surveyor Francis Buchanan,
who had feared that he would never be able to return to India, was
brought out again by Minto in 1806.108 Soon, a colleague and rival
could remark that “his views have met the aid and encouragement
of Government” and that his research was benefitting from this
“powerful assistance.”109 Another of Minto’s protégés was Leyden,
who hailed from near his ancestral seat and had been recommended
by no less a literary light than Walter Scott. Minto favored the ori-
entalist with appointments to Calcutta’s Court of Requests, college,

105
Briggs to Colin Mackenzie, 17 Sept. 1815, BL, Mss Eur F303/442.
106
John Briggs, preface to Firishta, Tarikh-i Firishta, trans. Briggs, as History of the Rise
of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612, 4 vols. (London, 1829), vol.
I, p. viii.
107
John Briggs, cited in Evans Bell, Memoir of General John Briggs (London, 1885), p. 101.
108
Buchanan to John Hamilton, 17 Jul. 1806, National Records of Scotland, GD161/18/8.
For details, see Mark F. Watson and Henry J. Noltie, “Career, Collections, Reports
and Publications of Dr Francis Buchanan (Later Hamilton), 1762–1829: Natural
History Studies in Nepal, Burma (Myanmar), Bangladesh and India (Part 2),” Annals
of Science (in press).
109
Thomas Hardwicke to James Edward Smith, 4 Nov. 1807, Linnean Society of London,
GB-110/JES/COR/22/82.

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 148 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

and mint, and, upon his expedition to Java in 1811, to the post of
chief translator. Leyden’s ties to the governor-general put him in
demand as an intermediary and must also have made him an object
of envy.110 One apparent rival was Irvine, who complained to his
father in 1810 that “Lord Minto’s distribution of patronage is …
self-willed & unfair.”111 Two years later, however, Minto granted
Irvine a monthly salary to complete a work of “Political, Moral, and
Statistical economy.”112 Irvine, along with Buchanan and Leyden,
now belonged to the small set of scholar-officials who enjoyed the
governor-general’s patronage.
And yet none of these three enjoyed a happy fate in the Company’s
service. Despairing of his future in India, Buchanan returned to Scotland
in 1815.113 Leyden complained of being tasked with the work of four or
even ten officials; overextension contributed to the illness that killed
him in 1811.114 Unlike Buchanan and Leyden, Irvine could pursue
his scholarship uninterrupted by other responsibilities. Nonetheless,
he claimed that having to constantly justify his salary resulted in
delays.115 In 1813, he was told that, having paid him through a use “of
the publick funds not … strictly warranted,” Minto was “anxious to
take with him to England some report of the progress of that work.”116
Apart from the fact that Irvine had little to show for his efforts thus
far, his unsanctioned salary clearly put Minto in an awkward position
with the directors.117 When Irvine’s contract ended the following year,
he was informed that “Government cannot on any account grant you

110
See I. M. Brown, “John Leyden (1775–1811): His Life and Works” (PhD dissertation,
University of Edinburgh, 1955), pp. 468, 483, 510–11, 518–20.
111
Irvine to father, 5 Aug. 1810, NLS, Acc.13147.
112
Governor-General in Council to Irvine, 25 Sept. 1812, BL, F/4/427/10436, p. 170.
113
Marika Vicziany, “Imperialism, Botany and Statistics in Early Nineteenth-Century
India: The Surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762–1829),” MAS 20 (1986), p. 654.
114
Leyden to Oliva Raffles, 10 May 1808, NLS, MS 971, f. 53v; Brown, “John Leyden,” p.
555; John Bastin, Sir Stamford Raffles and Some of His Friends and Contemporaries:
A Memoir of the Founder of Singapore (Singapore, 2019), pp. 66, 71.
115
Irvine to Minto, 28 Jan. 1812, NLS, MS 11727, f. 2v.
116
N. B. Edmonstone to Irvine, 18 Nov. 1813, ibid., f. 90r.
117
See Irvine to Minto, 6 Dec. 1813 and 7 May 1814, ibid., ff. 94r–96r.

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 Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions in Britain 149

any further pecuniary assistance.”118 In 1815, the directors denounced

not only his salary but also his apparent attempt to force upon them
new “duties in the administration of India.”119 For some time, Irvine
still hoped to complete his great work but was impeded by debts, “bad
health & worse spirits.”120 Finally, in 1820, he relocated with his wife
and children to Australia and thence, in 1824, back to Scotland.121 Like
Buchanan’s disillusionment and Leyden’s death, Irvine’s failure to com-
plete his treatise undoubtedly owed to multiple causes. The common
factor, however, was the directors’ reluctance to support their endeav-
ors on account of their political implications.

Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions

in Britain
The directors’ break with scholar-officials was clearest in Britain at
the institutions they superintended directly. Haileybury College and
the India Museum, which they had founded as centers of learning,
now languished as a result of their distrust and disesteem. At the
same time, these institutions became sites of conflict over the char-
acter of the Company. The directors were forced, if not to develop
new ideas about knowledge, then at least to confront the diminish-
ing relevance of conciliation. Company scholarship was becoming so
bound up with territorial expansion that eventually the directors lost
interest in it. By the 1820s, they had reached the conclusion that they
had little to gain politically from scholarly patronage.
Scarcely had the imposing edifice of Haileybury College gone up
than it began to seem inapposite. Once envisioned as a counterweight to
the College of Fort William, Haileybury now lacked an ideological pur-
pose. Even if the directors still felt that their college must overshadow
its Calcutta counterpart, it was less economical to feed the one than to

118
Governor-General in Council to Irvine, 7 Apr. 1814, ibid., f. 97r.
119
Extract Public Despatch to Bengal (6 Mar. 1815), BL, IOR F/4/489/11870, pp. 1–2.
120
Irvine to father, 4 Oct. 1815, 8 Feb. 1816, and 16 Mar. 1820, NLS, Acc.13147.
121
Dennis Wright, “Descendants of Capt Francis Irvine, 1786–1855” (self-published
booklet, 2014), pp. 4–6.

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 150 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

starve the other. Their aversion to scholar-officials, meanwhile, mani-

fested itself in a reluctance to employ that cadre or to train students
to enter it. As Jonathan Scott apprised the directors, they had access
to scores of returned officials like himself who had already added
much to the “stock of Oriental information.”122 But they mostly kept
these men at a distance from the college, dealing brusquely with Scott
and spurning overtures from John Gilchrist and Thomas Roebuck.123
Equally telling were conditions at the college library. “The neglect of
the Directors is scandalous,” wrote one student in 1806, upon finding its
shelves empty.124 A year later, Charles Stewart marveled that “many of
the writers attached to this College … have never yet seen an Arabic or
Persian Manuscript.”125 Part of the problem was that some books could
only be obtained from India, but even these seem not to have been well
treated or, when necessary, replaced. As late as 1828, a professor could
grumble at “the miserable state of our supply of Hindustani books.”126
Such issues notwithstanding, many staff and students seem to have
found Haileybury unobjectionable. The political economist Thomas
Robert Malthus spent a long career at the institution and defended it
in print.127 In light of the “merely rudimental learning” offered there,
however, it was the instilment of esprit de corps that advocates cited in
its favor.128 This was a markedly humbler mission for a university than
that announced by Wellesley or, at one time, by the directors.

122
Jonathan Scott, Observations on the Oriental Department of the Hon. Company’s
East India College, at Hertford (Hertford [1806]), BL, IOR H/488, pp. 678–9, 719–21.
123
Scott to Charles Grant, Jun. 1805, BL, Add. MS 29190, f. 29v; Scott to Directors, 3 Dec.
1805, ibid., ff. 30r–v; Directors to Roebuck, 8 Oct. 1807, in [John Gilchrist], The British
Indian Monitor, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1806–8), vol. II, p. xv; John Borthwick Gilchrist to
College Committee, 1 and 2 Jun. 1818, BL, IOR, J/1/33/221–2. The directors’ aversion to
Gilchrist seems to have long outlasted their suspicion that he was an agent of Wellesley.
124
Alexander Fraser to father, 6 Aug. 1806, Reelig House, vol. 32, p. 224.
125
Stewart to Charles Wilkins, 30 Sept. 1807, BL, IOR J/1/23/410.
126
James Michael to College Committee, 12 Dec. 1828, BL, IOR J/2/7/276.
127
See Timothy L. Alborn, “Boys to Men: Moral Restraint at Haileybury College,” in
Brian Dolan, ed., Malthus, Medicine, and Morality: “Malthusianism” after 1798
(Amsterdam, 2000).
128
Scott, Observations, p. 687; Bernard S. Cohn, “Recruitment and Training of British
Civil Servants in India, 1600–1800,” in Cohn, An Anthropologist among the
Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1987), pp. 537–45.

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 Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions in Britain 151

Controversies over Haileybury did, at least, force the directors

to revisit the Company’s relations with knowledge. In debates at
East India House, proprietors (shareholders) defined these relations in
ways that clashed with the idea of conciliation.129 According to one
view, the Company should interest itself only in knowledge that was
practically relevant to its trade. Thus, for Randle Jackson, the found-
ing of Haileybury was a sign that Wellesley’s “mania had reached the
directors in England”:

It was too much to expect, that young gentlemen would

descend from the rostrum, – where they had been displaying
their acquirements in … high branches of human knowledge –
to count bales and to measure muslins…. Surely, if they [the
directors] wished to form a good and active merchant, they
would not commence by making him a Doctor of Laws or
an expounder of philosophy…. Instead of sending out writers
qualified for the purposes of commerce, they prepared to pervade
India with an army of young Grotiuses and Puffendorfs – whose
qualifications were too high for the situations they were
intended to fill – whose minds could not descend to the drudgery
of the counting-house ….

Jackson’s comments reportedly drew a mixture of laughter and

cheers from the audience of directors and proprietors.130 Charles
Grant, in a later speech, and Malthus, in a pamphlet, noted that fewer
than one-sixth of the Company’s civil servants were now involved
in trade.131 Nonetheless, these comments highlighted a tendency,
prevalent among the directors, to think of the Company as still fun-
damentally a trading outfit. It was left to other proprietors, like the

129
On these debates, which comprehended much else besides, see Callie Wilkinson,
“The East India College Debate and the Fashioning of Imperial Officials, 1806–1858,”
Historical Journal 60 (2017).
130
Randle Jackson, Speech in East India House Debate (18 Dec. 1816), AJ 3 (1817), p. 156
[emphasis removed].
131
Charles Grant, Speech in East India House Debate (6 Feb. 1817), AJ 3 (1817), p. 373;
T. R. Malthus, Statements Respecting the East-India College (London, 1817), p. 92.

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 152 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

member of parliament Douglas Kinnaird, to articulate the opposing

view. According to Kinnaird,

It were to be wished, indeed, that in transferring the name and

some of the forms of lord Wellesley’s college at Calcutta, some
attention had been paid to the objects which the noble lord had
in view …. His objects were not confined merely to the education
of the Company’s civil servants, as was the case here … but
his aim was to found at the same time a seat of learning, the
civilizing effects and advantages of which were to be diffused
throughout the whole empire …. He wisely thought that the
most effectual mode of governing sixty millions of people, was
to scatter the seeds of learning and of science amongst them ….
Lord Wellesley’s object was to establish a source from whence
the fountain of science might diffuse its waters over the whole
territory of India.

Kinnaird envisioned “securing” the Company’s territories through

“an enlightened system of government.”132 The directors, in 1817,
were unable to unite around such an idea. If, to quote Malthus, “In
the establishment of the East-India college, the feelings of the sover-
eign conspicuously predominated,” then, in its subsequent manage-
ment, these feelings evidently took a backseat.133
The India Museum and Oriental Library was the focus of a par-
allel set of conflicts, which likewise arose from its failure to meet
expectations. These expectations had been set as early as 1799, when
Charles Wilkins, applying to serve as the museum’s curator, had
pledged to advance the cause of “Eastern learning” and of “science
in general.” To this end, he had drawn up a prospectus for a coun-
terpart to the Asiatic Society. “Under the patronage of the Court of
Directors,” this body was to hold meetings, conduct research, and
publish a journal on the premises. He anticipated little difficulty in

132
Douglas Kinnaird, Speech in East India House Debate (20 Feb. 1817), AJ 4 (1817),
pp. 47–8.
133
Malthus, Statements, p. 487.

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 Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions in Britain 153

finding suitable members: Many scholar-officials had retired in the

vicinity of London.134 Wilkins’ plan may explain why some current
or former officials, like Warren Hastings, offered up their collections
despite the directors’ paying little if anything for them.135 But the
directors never adopted the plan. Nor, after the first few years, did
they take more than a sporadic interest in the repository’s holdings.
They did make some effort, apparently, to acquire items that had
monetary value or commercial applications. But “a place to store and
deploy capital,” as one historian has called the museum and library,
was a far cry from Wilkins’ vision.136
Conditions at the place, meanwhile, were notorious. As late as
the 1830s, the library had no catalogue and the museum’s comprised
“some tattered loose leaves, in manuscript.” According to one critic,
the reading room was poorly staffed and organized, not to mention
frequently disturbed by casual visitors. More than one critic accused
the directors of allowing the library’s valuable manuscripts to dete-
riorate through wanton neglect. Some collections, reportedly, were
succumbing to dirt, damp, or termites.137 Others, years after arrival,
lay “packed in the cases in which they had been sent.”138 Thus, one
commentator reasoned that the Company must “not wish for visi-
tors” to its museum and library; another that “the public benefited
as little by them almost as if they had no existence.”139
The directors were not only negligent of their repository but
also antagonistic toward the scholar-officials who contributed to it.

134
Charles Wilkins, “Sketch of a Plan for an Oriental Museum Proposed to be Established
at the India House” (Jan. 1799), in A. J. Arberry, The Library of the India Office: A
Historical Sketch (London, 1938), p. 18.
135
See [Peter Gordon], “The Oriental Repository at the India House,” Alexander’s East
India and Colonial Magazine 10–11 (1835–6), vol. X, pp. 131–4.
136
Jessica Ratcliff, “Hand-in-Hand with the Survey: Surveying and the Accumulation of
Knowledge Capital at India House during the Napoleonic Wars,” Notes and Records:
The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 73 (2019), p. 160.
137
[Gordon], “Oriental Repository,” vol. X, pp. 140, 427, vol. XI, pp. 126–7.
138
William Gowan, Speech in East India House Debate (19 Mar. 1834), AJ 13 (1834),
p. 295.
139
Ibid.; “Her Majesty’s East India House,” East India Magazine (Mar. 1841), p. 221.

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 154 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

One such official was Colin Mackenzie, who was willing to offer
the directors his collection, notwithstanding his grievances against
them.140 “I sincerely hope you will be able to dispose of your valu-
able collection to advantage, to the East India Company,” warned
William Francklin in 1818; “I am sorry to say that they have dis-
carded me & mine long since, & never sent me even thanks for
the offer.”141 Four years later, the Bengal government bought
Mackenzie’s trove from his widow for a sum the directors decried as
exorbitant.142 This was an outcome of which other scholar-officials,
like Francklin, or indeed Francis Buchanan, could only have
dreamed. When Buchanan donated his manuscripts and specimens
to the directors’ museum in 1815, they gave him a “very cold” recep-
tion.143 They accepted “my collection with such contempt and arro-
gance,” he fumed, “that I would neither ask nor receive any favour
from so scoundrely a body.”144 Buchanan saw the directors’ lack of
“approval of my conduct or of thankfulness for my present” as a
result of their still-commercial priorities.145 His surveys of India –
its “appearance,” “productions,” “antiquities,” “inhabitants,” and
“history” – could “in no manner interest” them, except insofar as
they might “obtain credit.”146 According to Buchanan, the directors
valued his work not as an asset to their government but instead only
as an accessory to their trade. Ascribing to these “Cheese monger
Emperors” an unstatesmanlike “jealousy,” Buchanan echoed his old
patron Wellesley.147

140
Mackenzie to Ricketts, 15 Jun. 1815.
141
Francklin to Mackenzie, 22 Oct. 1818, BL, Mss Eur F303/442.
142
David M. Blake, “Colin Mackenzie: Collector Extraordinary,” British Library Journal
17 (1991), p. 141.
143
A. Allan to [Benjamin Sydenham], 14 Feb. 1816, National Records of Scotland,
GD161/19/2/21.
144
Buchanan to Nathaniel Wallich, 4 Feb. 1817, Natural History Museum, MSS BUC,
p. 149. For details, see Watson and Noltie, “Career.”
145
Buchanan to Nathaniel Wallich, 17 Jul. 1816, Natural History Museum, MSS BUC,
pp. 147–8.
146
Buchanan to Benjamin Sydenham, 4 Mar. 1816, National Records of Scotland,
GD161/19/2/17–18.
147
Ibid.; Buchanan to Wallich, 4 Feb. 1817, p. 149.

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 Scholar-Officials and Scholarly Institutions in Britain 155

The India Museum, like Haileybury, emerged as a site of conflict

over the Company’s relations with knowledge. Having been founded
to advertise the fruits of the Company’s trade, it was filling up instead
with the spoils of the Company’s conquests. The books and other
belongings of Tipu Sultan, in particular, sat incongruously at East
India House.148 In adorning their headquarters with the trappings of
a territorial empire, the directors risked undercutting their commer-
cial sovereignty.149 A delicate balancing act thus could be observed in
the receptions they hosted for visiting dignitaries. The Mamluk chief
Muhammad Bey al-Alfi and the Persian ambassador Mirza Abu’l Hasan
were conducted on tours that illustrated the Company’s hybrid char-
acter. Both were shown the museum and library. Abu’l Hasan admired
the “high-ceilinged room” with shelves of “neatly ranged books
in Arabic and Persian.”150 Al-Alfi, at least according to the Times,
assumed “a solemnity of demeanor suited to the idea he must enter-
tain of the first Corporate Body in the world.”151 Exhibiting curiosities,
however, was not quite the same thing as encouraging scholarship. If
the directors saw political value in the one, then it was far from clear
that they still saw it in the other. The writer Peter Gordon, who criti-
cized the Company in the 1830s, was being hyperbolic when he held
that it “excels every other Government in its hatred of knowledge.”152
That he could point to the state of its museum as evidence, however,
did provide a measure of the directors’ waning interest in scholarship.
So too did the abolition, in 1817, of the office of historiogra-
pher, which had existed for half of a century. After pensioning off the

148
For remarks by contemporaries to the effect that East India House was fit for mer-
chants but not sovereigns, see John McAleer, “Exhibiting the ‘Strangest of All
Empires’: The East India Company, East India House, and Britain’s Asian Empire,”
in Stephanie Barczewski and Martin Farr, eds., The Mackenzie Moment and Imperial
History: Essays in Honour of John M. Mackenzie (Basingstoke, 2019), pp. 30–32.
149
Joshua Ehrlich, “Plunder and Prestige: Tipu Sultan’s Library and the Making of British
India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 43 (2020), pp. 488–90.
150
Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, A Persian at the Court of King George 1809–10: The Journal of
Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, ed. and trans. Margaret Morris Cloake (London, 1988), p. 74.
151
“Elfi Bey,” Times (9 Dec. 1803).
152
[Gordon], “Oriental Repository,” vol. X, p. 547.

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 156 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

longtime occupant, John Bruce, the directors entrusted the writing

of the Company’s annals to a “literary hack.” According to Bruce,
the directors’ only concern in the matter was “to save my Salary.”153
In addition, however, they seem to have lost faith in the concilia-
tory value of his labors. If they had hired him in 1793 because he
had helped to renew the Company’s charter on favorable terms, then
they must have been disappointed when he failed to replicate the feat
in 1813.154 Besides, the directors now seemed to be making a habit
of squandering literary talent. Having long employed Charles Lamb
as an accountant, in 1819 they hired James Mill and Thomas Love
Peacock as preparers of correspondence. Mill’s History of British
India (1818), which was dismissive of Company scholarship, neither
attracted nor repelled them on political grounds.155 In their new way
of thinking, it simply established his qualifications as a clerk.156
It was no wonder that the Company’s scholarly institutions
were beginning to be eclipsed by other ones at the metropole. One
sign of this trend was that scholar-officials were donating their col-
lections to universities, museums, and especially the Royal Asiatic
Society. With the society’s founding in 1823, Wilkins’ plan was
finally realized – albeit under the aegis of the Crown instead of the
Company. The society kept a museum and library, held meetings,
published a journal, and patronized scholars – everything Wilkins had
sought in vain from the directors. Its prospectus may have alluded to
this fact with its expression of “surprise” that such a body had not

153
Bruce to Hugh Inglis, 30 Jun. 1817, BL, IOR H/456e, pp. 362–3.
154
For Bruce’s efforts on the later occasion, see John Bruce, Annals of the Honorable
East-India Company, from Their Establishment by the Charter of Queen Elizabeth,
1600, to the Union of the London and English East-India Companies, 1707–8, 3
vols. (London, 1810), vol. I, p. vii; John Bruce, Report on the Negociation, Between
the Honorable East-India Company and the Public, Respecting the Renewal of
the Company’s Exclusive Privileges of Trade, for Twenty Years from March, 1794
(London, 1811), p. iii; William Foster, John Company (London, 1926), pp. 241–2.
155
On this dismissiveness, see Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The
History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford, 1992).
156
See William Foster, The East India House: Its History and Associations (London,
1924), pp. 195–7.

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 Indian Collaborators and the Turn to Education 157

been established sooner. The document slighted the directors in

other ways, omitting to mention them and announcing as founding
members several of their adversaries.157 Henry Thomas Colebrooke,
the society’s driving force, did ask for the directors’ “countenance
and support,” but only as an afterthought; and it took four years and
a pointed reminder to obtain from them a modest annual grant.158
Thus, despite being comprised largely of retired Company officials,
like Colebrooke, the society charted an independent course. It was to
focus on the parts of Asia “under British dominion” and serve as “the
main link” that secured them “in the bonds of literature, science,
and art.”159 The directors and their commercial ideas, such language
implied, were no longer integral to British orientalism. Nor, by this
time, did the directors bother to contest the point.

Indian Collaborators and the Turn to Education

The Royal Asiatic Society’s prospectus did suggest a domain of
knowledge in which the directors and the Company might yet play
a leading role: The society, it held, would not “interfere with the
views and proceedings of … associations for promoting Education
in the East.”160 In India, such associations were being led not only
by missionaries and their allies but also by a new range of Indian
scholar-collaborators. Indeed, the territorial expansion that so pro-
foundly influenced scholar-officials encouraged, too, a broadening
and deepening of their Indian connections. The flourishing of educa-
tion associations was but one result of this. Another was the framing
of great projects by Indians hopeful of the Company’s patronage. And
yet, while the same Indian scholar-collaborators were often involved

157
“Asiatic Society of London: Prospectus” (16 Jan. 1823), AJ 15 (1823), pp. 264–5.
158
Minute of Council (15 Mar. 1823), cited in C. F. Beckingham, “A History of the Royal
Asiatic Society, 1823–1973,” in Stuart Simmonds and Simon Digby, eds., The Royal
Asiatic Society: Its History and Treasures (Leiden, 1979), p. 27; Rocher and Rocher,
Making of Western Indology, p. 166.
159
“Asiatic Society of London: Prospectus,” p. 265; “Twelfth Annual Report of the
Council,” JRAS 2 (1835), p. xxvi.
160
“Asiatic Society of London: Prospectus,” p. 264.

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 158 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

in both kinds of endeavor, they found much greater support for the
first kind than for the second.
Expansion altered the pattern of collaboration between European
scholar-officials and Indians in several ways. First, it opened to the
former wider horizons, the exploration of which required greater man-
power and expertise. If scholar-officials once had tended to employ a
single maulvi or pandit – the forming of groups to compile and trans-
late laws being an exception – then the institutions and projects to
which they now turned called for teams of Indian scholars as a matter
of necessity.161 Francis Buchanan surveyed Bengal with a complement
of several dozen, including clerks, collectors, and draughtsmen – not to
mention a military escort.162 Colin Mackenzie employed an even larger
“native establishment,” at times numbering over one hundred, on his
survey of Mysore.163 Horace Hayman Wilson assembled his mammoth
Sanskrit dictionary from texts prepared by numerous “native assis-
tants.”164 And even some less well-placed officials, like Francis Irvine,
built extensive Indian networks to gather and process material for
their vast schemes.165 In some respects, therefore, such projects were
at least as much Indian as European.166 The political ideas that set and
kept them in motion, however, were those of the scholar-officials who
sought to extend and consolidate the Company’s dominions.

161
See Ruth Gabriel, “Learned Communities and British Educational Experiments in
North India: 1780–1830” (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1979), ch. 5;
Thomas R. Trautmann, introduction to Trautmann, ed., The Madras School of
Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India (New Delhi, 2009), p. 11.
162
Ray Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992), p. 78.
163
Tobias Wolffhardt, Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the
Early Colonial State and the Comprehensive Survey of India, trans. Jane Rafferty
(New York, 2018), p. 121.
164
Horace Hayman Wilson, A Dictionary, Sanscrit and English: Translated, Amended
and Enlarged, from an Original Compilation Prepared by Learned Natives for the
College of Fort William (Calcutta, 1819), p. iii.
165
Extract Bengal Public Consultations (7 Apr. 1814), BL, IOR F/4/489/11870, pp. 7–10.
166
See Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of
Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke, 2007); Rama Sundari
Mantena, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and
Philology, 1780–1880 (Basingstoke, 2012).

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 Indian Collaborators and the Turn to Education 159

A second effect of expansion was thus to deter many Indian

rulers and learned elites from collaborating with scholar-officials.
The rise in this period of complaints of Brahman obfuscation can be
explained only partly by Evangelical and anti-Maratha prejudices.167
The duping of Francis Wilford by his chief pandit in Benares may
not have been a political act: Likely the pandit was trying to please
his patron.168 Different, however, was the case of pandits obstructing
scholar-officials in Poona, the seat of the Maratha peshwa. In 1806,
the residency officer and aspiring orientalist E. S. Frissell described
the situation to James Mackintosh:

I have not been inattentive to your wishes respecting a Catalogue

Raison[n]é of the Peshwa[’]s Shanscrit MSS, but I am very sorry
to tell you that I have reason to fear the accomplishment of them
will be impracticable. When one asks a native of rank for any
information respecting any thing belonging to him, his family, his
occupations, his connections, his possessions of whatever kind
they may be, he invariably thinks that there is something sinister
in your motive, and takes alarm. No persons are allowed to look at
the Peshwa[’]s books, but two or three of his favorite Pundits.169

Suspicions of this kind may explain why Claudius Buchanan had

to overcome opposition from court Brahmans to obtain a catalogue
of manuscripts in Travancore, or why the College of Fort William
struggled to procure manuscripts through the Company’s residents
in Basra, Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad.170 Benjamin Heyne, for

167
On these, see Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth
Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 88–93, 110–11.
168
C. A. Bayly, “Orientalists, Informants and Critics in Benares, 1790–1860,” in Jamal
Malik, ed., Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History, 1760–
1860 (Leiden, 2000), pp. 103–11; Nigel Leask, “Francis Wilford and the Colonial
Construction of Hindu Geography, 1799–1822,” in Amanda Gilroy, ed., Romantic
Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–1844 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 214–19.
169
Frissell to Mackintosh, 13 Jun. 1806, BL, Add. MS 78765, f. 73r. On Frissell, see
“Deaths Abroad,” Monthly Magazine 25 (May 1808), p. 378.
170
Matthew Lumsden to College Council, 18 Sept. 1810, PCFW, vol. 561, p. 325;
Claudius Buchanan, Christian Researches in Asia: With Notices of the Translation of
the Scriptures into the Oriental Languages (Cambridge, 1811), p. 93.

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 160 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

that matter, ascribed his difficulties in investigating the miner-

als of the Carnatic to the nawab’s distrust of Europeans.171 These
places all fell without the sphere of the Company’s formal control
but, it might be surmised, within that of its ambition. By contrast,
learned elites in longer-established dominions like Bengal may have
been becoming more, not less, willing to collaborate. And rulers of
dependent states like Mysore, Tanjore, and Baroda readily furnished
the Company with valuable manuscripts.172 It was the unstable
periphery of the Company’s territory, however, that most interested
scholar-officials. And they turned to new partners to bring it under
intellectual control.
A final effect of expansion was to throw up a wider range of
Indian scholar-collaborators. This was especially true in the south,
where the Company’s inroads deprived pandits of their royal patrons
yet created openings for other men of letters.173 In Madras, scholar-
officials had long found that access to pandits and their texts was
mediated by the city’s powerful dubashes. When Mark Wilks
attempted to learn Sanskrit, they allegedly “threatened loss of cast
and absolute destruction to any Bramin” who would teach him.174
As the Madras Presidency expanded, however, new collaborators
came into the Company’s orbit. Mackenzie staffed his survey with
Niyogis, a class of Brahmans widely regarded as sullied by their
embrace of salaried employment.175 Other scholar-officials turned
to Deshasthas, a small community of Maratha Brahmans in some

171
Heyne, Tracts, p. 112.
172
Anand Rao Gaekwad to East India Company [Jan. 1809], BL, IO Islamic 4253; Fateh
Singh Rao Gaekwad to East India Company [Jan. 1809], BL, IO Islamic 4254; Alexander
Walker to Jonathan Duncan, 11 Jan. 1809, NLS, MS 13922, ff. 1r–2v; Buchanan,
Christian Researches, p. 53; Wilks, Historical Sketches, vol. I, p. x.
173
See Velcheru Narayana Rao, “Print and Prose: Pundits, Karanams, and the East
India Company in the Making of Modern Telugu,” in Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha
Dalmia, eds., India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (New Delhi,
2004), pp. 150–52.
174
John Leyden to William Erskine, 27 Nov. 1804, BL, Add. MS 26561, f. 56v.
175
Phillip B. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial
Knowledge,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003), pp. 795–6.

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 Indian Collaborators and the Turn to Education 161

ways as removed from Hindu society as Europeans.176 One of this

number was Vennelakanti Subbarao, who, through literary services,
rose from modest origins to become a translator at the high court.177
For that matter, Non-Brahman men of letters too now found their
talents in higher demand. Of the Tamil “pandits” at the College of
Fort St. George at least two were Christians and the rest, apparently,
Pandarams and Vellalars.178 Mamadi Venkayya, a Komati, compiled
Telugu and Sanskrit dictionaries for the Company despite attempts
by Brahmans to stop him.179 Thiruverkadu Muttiah, a Mudaliar,
served scholar-officials in Madras before being appointed a “literary
translator” in Ceylon.180 Thus, while the Company’s ascent in the
south may have displaced many learned elites, it created opportuni-
ties for some of their social subordinates.
This trend was not limited to the eastern side of the peninsula.
A striking instance comes from Malabar, where, as late as the 1800s,
the Company was still jostling for power with local rulers. Amid the
turmoil, the officer Alexander Walker investigated numerous subjects
with the aid of a set of Indian Christians based in Calicut. Even after
being transferred elsewhere, Walker relied on these contacts for intel-
ligence, and for assistance with his eclectic researches: on one occa-
sion, a delivery of pepper and cardamom plants; on another, advice
from a shastri (Sanskrit scholar) on Hindu religious practices. In
return, Walker helped the men to find work in the Company’s offices,
where, one reported, the “Bramins take every opportunity of shewing
themselves as factotum.” Letters from the group to Walker recurred

176
Robert Eric Frykenberg, Guntur District 1788–1848: A History of Local Influence and
Central Authority in South India (Oxford, 1965), p. 8.
177
[Vennelakanti Subbarao] Vennelacunty Soob Row, The Life of Vennelacunty Soob
Row, ed. Vennelacunty Venkata Gopal Row (Madras, 1873), pp. 14, 16.
178
A. R. Venkatachalapathy, “‘Grammar, the Frame of Language’: Tamil Pandits at the
College of Fort St. George,” in Trautmann, ed., Madras School, pp. 120–24.
179
Trautmann, Languages and Nations, pp. 146–50.
180
For Mootiah’s activities in Madras and Ceylon, respectively, see [Thiruverkadu
Muttiah] Teroovercadoo Mootiah, “An Historical and Chronological Journal, of the
Life of Teroovercadoo Mootiah,” Oriental Repository 2 (1797), pp. 569–70; General
Despatch from Ceylon, 26 Feb. 1799, in S. G. Perera, ed., The Douglas Papers
(Colombo, 1933), pp. 160–61.

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 162 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

to a central topic: a Malayalam history which he had hired one of their

number, Joseph Passanha, to translate.181 Noting the existence of dif-
ferent versions of the text tailored to the interests of different castes
and families, Walker compared his translation with another commis-
sioned by the Governor of Bombay.182 He may also have sought to
control for discrepancies by hiring Passanha instead of a pandit, who
might have been more likely to be an interested party. Walker’s rela-
tions with the humble translator were sometimes strained. He later
claimed to have consorted only with Indians “of rank, of Education,
or of Property.”183 And he bemoaned the astonishing “power and
ascendancy” obtained by “Native favourites” – “men of low origin …
without much education” though “of great shrewdness.”184 Scholar-
officials were beginning to ask how such upward mobility, if widely
stimulated, might impact Indian society and its relations with the
Company. Walker seems to have had ambivalent feelings on the sub-
ject, but this was not the case with many of his contemporaries.
For scholar-officials, it was often a short leap from inves-
tigating Indian society to calling for its alteration. The army and
political officer James Tod studied Rajputs and their history with a
view to raising their present standing.185 Mackenzie displayed more
popular inclinations, researching and working with many groups,
and advancing broad notions of state-led “improvement.”186 Irvine

181
“Native Letters: Malabar” (1801–8), NLS, MS 13718, ff. 1r–42v.
182
Alexander Walker, “An Account of the Kerool-ood-Patty,” NLS, MS 13797, pp. 2–4.
See Jonathan Duncan, “Historical Remarks on the Coast of Malabar, with some
Description of the Manners of Its Inhabitants,” Asiatick Researches 5 (Calcutta,
1798), p. 1. Walker thus anticipated the modern view of the text as “a charter of vali-
dation for status groups in society.” Kesavan Veluthat, “The Kēraḷō lpatti as History,”
in The Early Medieval in South India (New Delhi, 2009), p. 142.
183
Alexander Walker [1826], cited in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words,
People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2017), p. 271.
184
Alexander Walker [c. 1820], cited in Neil Rabitoy, “System v. Expediency: The Reality
of Land Revenue Administration in the Bombay Presidency, 1812–1820,” MAS 9
(1975), p. 543.
185
Jason Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of
Rajasthan (Leiden, 2009), pp. 108–14.
186
Robb, “Completing ‘Our Stock of Geography,’” pp. 198–201; Wolffhardt, Unearthing
the Past, pp. 197–202.

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 Indian Collaborators and the Turn to Education 163

sought “to give a new turn to the occupations of the people” and,
accordingly, to the “structure of Society.”187 John Leyden, for his
part, disapproved of caste distinctions and called for demystifying
Brahmanical authority.188 Among scholar-officials, however, it was
Francis Buchanan who most forcefully inveighed against India’s
social order. In an early essay, he contrasted this order, which he
took to be dominated by Brahmans, with Buddhist egalitarian-
ism.189 His A Journey from Madras (1807), as William Erskine had
it, avoided the errors orientalists had committed by “confining their
enquiries to men of learning, & of the upper classes.”190 In this and
other works, Buchanan devoted his attention to non-Brahmanical
institutions and ideologies.191 His program went still further. In
Genealogies of the Hindus (1819), he claimed that caste was a late
invention, and that “Brahman” had once meant “merely a civilized
or intelligent person.”192 Implicit in his remarks, and in those of
some of his fellow scholar-officials, was an argument for education
as a vehicle of social change.193 Yet generally quicker to articulate
this argument were Indian scholar-collaborators, especially ones
from groups not previously favored.
They did so in conjunction with the education associa-
tions springing up in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. These bodies
were founded by Europeans, but, in the words of Irvine, “Not the
least remarkable circumstance is the support which the Natives
have given” them.194 Indian members were often social climbers.
Subbarao, for instance, played a principal role in the Madras School

187
Extract Bengal Public Consultations (7 Apr. 1814), p. 24.
188
Leyden to [Robert] Knox [1804], BL, Add. MS 26561, ff. 53r–54r.
189
Vicziany, “Imperialism,” p. 632.
190
William Erskine, Diary (24 Feb. 1811), BL, Add. MS 39945, f. 4r.
191
William R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 150–4.
192
[Francis Buchanan] Francis Hamilton, Genealogies of the Hindus, Extracted from
Their Sacred Writings (Edinburgh, 1819), p. 57.
193
For further suggestive remarks by Buchanan on the existing state of education in
India, see [Francis Buchanan], The History, Antiquities, Topography, and Statistics of
Eastern India, ed. [Robert] Montgomery Martin, 3 vols. (London, 1838).
194
[Vennelakanti Subbarao], Life, pp. 64–76.

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 164 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

Book Society (1820).195 His fellow members included Ram Raz, head
English master of the College of Fort St. George, who had ascended
from similarly modest origins.196 The Calcutta School Book Society
(1817) and Calcutta School Society (1818) attracted maulvis and pan-
dits but also Bhadralok (gentlemen), who had risen with the com-
ing of Company rule.197 The Bombay Native Education Society
(1822) included Hindus, Muslims, and Parsis of various castes and
classes.198 All of these associations harbored multiple and sometimes
conflicting agendas. For the new scholar-collaborators, however,
mass education evidently took precedence. As Ram Raz put it, “In
this country education is confined to a very small portion of … the
higher class,” while “the greater part of the population, are lamenta-
bly sunk in ignorance.”199 For one who had escaped penury through
his studies and who held a pluralistic view of Indian society, there
was reason to cheer the prospect of mass “enlightenment.”200 Other
scholar-collaborators, however, struggled to reconcile this prospect
with their own endeavors.
The Bhadralok Ramkamal Sen, for example, found it difficult to
square his educational and intellectual aims. This could be observed
in the effort to produce a Bengali-English dictionary that preoccu-
pied him from 1817.201 A tension ran through the project. On the one
hand, Ramkamal sought to make the dictionary comprehensive and
authoritative. On the other, he envisioned it as a popular work for

195
Irvine to Mountstuart Elphinstone, 19 Dec. 1818, BL, Mss Eur F88/298, f. 147v.
196
The Second Report of the Madras School-Book Society (Madras, 1827), pp. i–ii.
197
The First Report of the Calcutta School Book Society (Calcutta, 1818), p. 26; Jana
Tschurenev, Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in
India (New Delhi, 2019), pp. 206–13.
198
Tschurenev, Empire, pp. 260–1.
199
R[am] R[az], “A Short Sketch of the State of Education among the Natives at
Bangalore” (1824), in Second Report of the Madras School-Book Society, pp. 24–5.
200
Ram Raz to Richard Clarke, 13 Oct. 1827, in R. Rickards, India; or Facts Submitted
to Illustrate the Character and Condition of the Native Inhabitants, 2 vols. (London,
1829–32), vol. II, pp. 402–3; [Henry Harkness], preface to Rám Ráz, Essay on the
Architecture of the Hindús (London, 1834), pp. vi–x.
201
For details in this paragraph, see Pradyot Kumar Ray, Dewan Ramcomul Sen and His
Times (Calcutta, 1990), pp. 182–205.

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 Indian Collaborators and the Turn to Education 165

the edification of Indian students. It was hard enough to satisfy his own
standards; it was harder still to satisfy those of his patrons. Whereas
the council of the College of Fort William demanded scholarly rigor,
the committee of the CSBS demanded accessibility. Thus, although the
two groups had members in common – and even convened on the same
premises – they pulled Ramkamal in opposite directions. Although the
college council had a larger budget than the committee, both together
still could not fund the project in its entirety. Ramkamal hoped to make
up the rest of the enormous cost of paying assistants and printing the
dictionary through individual sales. Yet his compromises rendered the
book unfit for scholars and students alike, and upon finally appearing in
1834 it sold poorly. Ramkamal’s predicament reflected the transitional
character of the age: While political attention had shifted away from
scholarship, it had yet to refocus on popular education. In 1817, when
Ramkamal began work on the dictionary, such education was the pre-
serve of voluntary associations. Only in the long course of his travails
would it become a direct concern of the Company.
Another scholar-collaborator who struggled in the interim was
the Parsi Mulla Firuz bin Kawus. The great project that consumed
years of his life was an epic poem in Persian entitled Georgenama.
His nephew described its origins thus:

In the year 1801, the Uncle of your Memorialist learnt from the
late respected Governor [of Bombay, Jonathan] Duncan, that the
Governor General the most noble the Marquis Wellesley having
achieved a splendid victory over Tippoo Sooltan, was much desirous
of having it commemorated in Verse in the Persian language, and
no English scholar in the British settlement coming forward on
the occasion, the Uncle of your Memorialist offered to compile
in Persian Verse not only an account of the Victory over Tippoo
Sooltan, but of the whole of the British Conquests in the East,
which offer Mr. Duncan very gladly accepted, pleased very justly to
encourage the Uncle of your Memorialist in the undertaking.202

202
NAI, Bengal Public Consultations (23 Nov. 1836), no. 2.

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 166 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

As the Company’s territory expanded in subsequent years, so too

did Mulla Firuz’s commission. Eventually, the poem ran to nearly
forty thousand verses and carried up to the year 1817. It related the
events by which the Company “from the condition of merchants
were raised to that of governors; and … attained to absolute domin-
ion.”203 But flattering as this work would seem to have been to the
Company, it attracted only limited support from Company lead-
ers. At one point in the text, Mulla Firuz described feeling “heart-
broken,” with “no friend, nor well-wisher … no one to listen to
this tale.”204 He was sponsored by one after another governor of
Bombay but failed to obtain the greater rewards he sought from
Moira or the directors.205 Finally, after the Mulla died in 1830, his
nephew (and executor) recast the work as an effort in the cause of
popular education. As a condition for underwriting a three-volume
lithograph, the Bombay government fixed its price at the “lowest
that could have been conjectured.”206 But sixty rupees was a still
sizeable sum. And an epic poem in erudite Persian was ill-suited
as a textbook. The Mulla’s magnum opus, like Ramkamal’s, was
caught between the decline of one politics of knowledge and the
rise of another.

Conclusion
From the 1820s, scholar-officials, like their Indian collaborators,
would increasingly hitch their fortunes to the cause of education.
And no wonder: Owing largely to the directors’ lack of interest,

203
Mulla Rustom, Announcement, trans., in “Curious Oriental Literature,” Literary
Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, and Sciences, &c. (18 Nov. 1837), p. 738.
204
Mullá Feruz bin Káwus, The George-Námah, ed. Mullá Rustam bin Kaikobád, 3 vols.
(Bombay, 1837), vol. II, pp. 8–9.
205
For the directors’ refusal to award a pension to the Mulla’s heirs, see Despatch to Bombay
(23 Jan. 1828), BL, IOR E/4/1049, pp. 12–13. For his flattery of Moira, which seems to
have fallen on deaf ears, see John Malcolm to Marquess of Hastings, 20 May 1819, Mount
Stuart, HA/9/35; Edward Rehatsek, Catalogue Raisonné of the Arabic, Hindostani,
Persian, and Turkish MSS. in the Mulla Firuz Library (Bombay, 1873), pp. 159–60.
206
Moolla Rustom Bin Kaikobad, Contents of the George Nameh, Composed in Verses
in the Persian Language ([Bombay], 1836), p. 5.

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 Conclusion 167

many scholarly projects and institutions lately had fallen short. By

1819, the decline of Company scholarship was being noticed as far
away as the European continent: “Literary or scientific zeal appears
to be unknown to the English in India, and the spirit once called
into animation by Sir William Jones seems to have now become
extinct.”207 The author of these remarks, the German oriental-
ist Augustus Schlegel, was surely exaggerating. Still, one direc-
tor spoke for many now when he claimed that the Company did
not need scholars, for India could not be “retained by the force of
erudition.”208
By contrast, the directors showed a readiness to fund the new
education associations that began to appear in India in the late
1810s.209 Why was education starting to interest them and other
prominent figures in the Company in a way that scholarship had not
in recent years? The answer is that with the Company’s rise to “para-
mountcy” came an acknowledgment of new responsibilities. Moira
had suggested already that the consolidation of British India would
allow the Company to attend to the intellectual needs of its subjects.
More to the point, political classes in Britain and India, including
growing public, increasingly expected it to do so. In both places, the
Company was coming to be seen less and less as a merchant and
more and more as a territorial sovereign. Not only the rise of the
Company’s political power but also the decline of its commerce
contributed to this change. Parliament threw open the India trade
in 1813 and within a decade the Company’s share had dwindled to
insignificance (it retained control of the China trade.) Although the
Company state endured, new ideas would be requisite to legitimize it.

207
August Schlegel, “Ueber den Gegenwärtigen Zustand der Indischen Philologie”
(1819), Indische Bibliothek 1 (1820), p. 26, cited and trans. in “Asiatic Society,” AJ 14
(1822), p. 40.
208
Henry St. George Tucker, “The Education of the Civil Service” (1843), in Tucker,
Memorials of Indian Government: Being a Selection from the Papers of Henry St.
George Tucker, ed. John William Kaye (London, 1853), p. 431.
209
H. Sharp, ed., Selections from Educational Records, Part I: 1781–1839 (Calcutta,
1920), p. 45.

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 168 Scholar-Officials and the Later Company State

The concern that scholarly patronage was encouraging a shift toward

large-scale territory receded once this shift became a fait accompli.
The new concern of the directors, and of other Company leaders, was
that such patronage endeared them only to a small elite. “Mass” or
“popular” education promised to draw in a broader swath of Indian
society as well as a liberal public in Britain.

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 5 Education and the Persistence
of the Company State

In 1854, officials observed that in recent decades there was “no

Indian question upon which more had been written” than “native
education.”1 Indeed, in the 1820s to 1830s, in particular, that ques-
tion generated sprawling debates involving all three Company presi-
dencies.2 These debates had different political roots than previous
ones centered on scholarly patronage. At issue now was not whether
the Company could or should secure extensive territory but instead
whether, having done so, it could or should govern it. Paramountcy
in India imperiled the Company’s hybrid constitution anew. The best
option for stakeholders in the Company seemed to be to buttress its
claim to good government. Herein lay the main reason to establish a
system of public education, something the state in Britain was only
just beginning to contemplate.3 But was the Company capable of edu-
cating the mass of Indian society? Or must it, even now, proceed by
conciliating elites?
The politics of the Company’s turn to education has yet to
be properly explicated. Only recently have historians begun to cor-
rect an overemphasis on one minute penned by Thomas Babington
Macaulay in 1835.4 And to the extent that a kaleidoscopic view

1
Cited in Nancy Gardner Cassels, Social Legislation of the East India Company:
Public Justice Versus Public Instruction (New Delhi, 2010), p. 339.
2
Singapore, which figures in this chapter, belonged to the fourth presidency of the
Straits Settlements until this was downgraded to a residency of Bengal in 1830.
3
Not until 1833 would parliament begin to provide funding for schools, and not until
1870 would it establish a system of mass education. For an overview of these devel-
opments, see Gillian Sutherland, “Education,” in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., Social
Agencies and Institutions, vol. 3 of The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–
1950 (Cambridge, 1990).
4
For example, Parimala V. Rao, Beyond Macaulay: Education in India, 1780–1860
(New Delhi, 2019).

169

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 170 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

of education debates in British India has decentered that erstwhile

focal point, it has also left in its place something of an interpre-
tive void.5 A few complications do need to be factored into any
account of how and why the Company came to fixate on educa-
tion. Notably, by the 1820s, its debates had grown to include a
wider range of participants. Dispatches were framed not only by
the directors and Board of Control but also in many cases by the
Examiner’s Office.6 From various causes, above all the turnover of
generations, governing councils were becoming prone to clashes of
views.7 Finally, pressure on the Company in Britain and India now
came largely from “public opinion” as voiced in meetings, peti-
tions, and the press.8 For all of these reasons, the debates on educa-
tion were variegated and diffuse. Even so, they coalesced around
the premise that the Company’s legitimacy was at stake and the
question of how much it could hope to shape Indian society. The
idea of conciliation regained prominence in these debates but also
changed in meaning in several important ways. First, it no longer
entailed patronizing scholar-officials, except as translators for edu-
cation purposes. Second, it did entail patronizing Indian learned
elites but increasingly only to gain access to the wider populace.

5
For a recent overview, see Catriona Ellis, “History of Colonial Education: Key
Reflections,” in Padma M. Sarangapani and Rekha Pappu, eds., Handbook of
Education Systems in South Asia (Singapore, 2021).
6
Martin Moir, “The Examiner’s Office: The Emergence of an Administrative
Elite in East India House (1804–1858),” India Office Library and Records Report
for 1977 (1979); Martin Moir, “The Examiner’s Office and the Drafting of East
India Company Despatches,” in Kenneth Ballhatchet and John Harrison, eds.,
East India Company Studies: Papers Presented to Professor Sir Cyril Philips
(Hong Kong, 1986).
7
On this turnover, see Katherine Prior, Lance Brennan, and Robin Haines, “Bad
Language: The Role of English, Persian and other Esoteric Tongues in the Dismissal
of Sir Edward Colebrooke as Resident of Delhi in 1829,” MAS 35 (2001).
8
See A. F. Salahuddin Ahmed, Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal, 1818–35, 2nd
edn (Calcutta, 1976); C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age
of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2012), chs. 1–3; Partha Chatterjee, The Black
Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, 2012), chs. 4–5;
Rohit De and Robert Travers, eds., Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia,
special issue of MAS 53 (2019).

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 Conciliation and Mass Education in the 1820s 171

Thus, even many officials who advocated conciliation now described

it as merely a temporary expedient. Mass education was held to be
more in keeping with the character of a powerful state.
Throughout the period, officials debated the balance to be
struck between conciliation and mass education. Only briefly was
this question conflated with issues of language, leading to the so-
called Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. For a moment in the 1830s,
thanks largely to the official Charles Edward Trevelyan, English edu-
cation appeared to have prevailed. But the more lasting impact of
the controversy was the end of conciliation and the triumph of mass
education in Company ideology.

Conciliation and Mass Education in the 1820s

In the 1820s, Company officials took preliminary steps toward a
system of public education in India. Not all were partisans of the
Company, as opposed to say the Crown, but all were invested in
maintaining its legitimacy. In Bengal, Madras, Bombay, and the new
settlement of Singapore, they debated which system was most likely
to secure that object. These debates were wide-ranging, but they
centered on the balance to be struck between conciliation and mass
education. The authorities in London too discussed this point and
reached a general conclusion: While the former might be necessary
at present, it was the latter upon which the Company’s legitimacy
would ultimately depend.
In Bengal, public education had emerged as both an object of
attention and a subject of debate by the beginning of the decade.
Among the indications of this development were moves to reform
the Benares Sanskrit College and the Calcutta Madrasa. Whereas the
government hitherto had been wary of meddling in these colleges, a
minute on the former announced a momentous change:

[W]hatever effect the establishment of the institution may have

had in conciliating the attachment of the people, it has hitherto
proved entirely useless as a seminary of learning and it must be

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 172 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

feared that the discredit attaching to such a failure has gone far to
destroy the influence which the liberality of endowment would
otherwise have had.9

The report of the college committee on which this minute was based
contained little that was new. As early as 1804, the committee had
described the college as an object of popular “ridicule … a band of
pensioners supported by the charity of government.”10 In finally
heeding such criticism, however, Lord Moira and his council signaled
that education took priority over scholarly patronage. They also sug-
gested that the opinion of the people at large took priority over that
of pandits. After years of half measures designed not to upset leading
Muslims, meanwhile, the same criticism was making inroads at the
Calcutta Madrasa. From 1823, the fate of both institutions would be
decided by the General Committee of Public Instruction.
The committee was formed by Governor-General John Adam
with a view to allocating the annual grant sanctioned by parlia-
ment a decade earlier. Of its ten original members, several were
scholar-officials, and most had been involved in education associa-
tions. The committee’s initial plan was drawn up by the councilor
Holt Mackenzie and was strongly influenced by the idea of concilia-
tion. “To provide for the education of the great body of the people,”
Mackenzie reasoned, would be “impossible, at least, in the present
state of things.” The Company was new to its vast responsibilities,
remote from Indian society, and subject to financial constraints.
Hence, Mackenzie continued, “the limited classes, who are now
instructed … in the learning of the Country, should be the first object
of attention.” Only by offering “encouragement” to these “educated
and influential classes” could the state exercise any considerable
“influence.” Mackenzie proposed, however, that the committee’s
“ultimate” aim should be “the more general diffusion of knowledge”

9
Governor-General in Council, Minute (17 Mar. 182[0]), in George Nicholls, Sketch of the
Rise and Progress of the Benares Patshalla or Sanskrit College (Allahabad, 1907), p. 38.
10
T. Brooke, Minute (1 Jan. 1804), in ibid., p. 9.

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 Conciliation and Mass Education in the 1820s 173

among “the people of India.” He added that the subject of public edu-
cation was “full of difficulty,” and that his proposals were but “hints,
on which my own mind is quite unsettled.” He enjoined the commit-
tee to “prepare some well digested scheme,” some “comprehensive
plan” that might be “systematically pursued.”11 If Mackenzie hoped
to resolve the tension between conciliation and mass education, then
he was to be disappointed: This tension would continue to shape the
committee’s proceedings for the next decade.
Mackenzie and his colleagues went back and forth but ulti-
mately inclined toward conciliation. Their “indecision, uncer-
tainty and vacillation” owed, at root, to a sense of the limitations
of the Company’s government.12 On the one hand, the committee
founded two institutions for learned elites: the Delhi College and the
Calcutta Sanskrit College. The latter, it wrote, “will consist of men,
who by their Brahmanical birth, as well as by their learning, exercise
a powerful influence.”13 On the other hand, the committee framed
the Agra College along egalitarian lines: While “the existing govern-
ment institutions … are exclusive … the Agra college shall be equally
available to all classes … as they are all unquestionably, equally the
objects of the solicitude of the Government.”14 Significantly, Horace
Hayman Wilson, the committee’s most prominent scholar, did not
endorse these remarks.15 It was Wilson who had drawn up plans for
the Calcutta Sanskrit College, and who enjoyed the closest ties to
maulvis and pandits. And yet, a majority of the committee voted

11
Holt Mackenzie, Minute (17 Jul. 1823), in GIED, pp. 99–100.
12
For the quote, see D. P. Sinha, Educational Policy of the East India Company in
Bengal to 1854 (Calcutta, 1964), p. 95.
13
GCPI to [Lord Amherst], 6 Oct. 1823, in H. Sharp, ed., Selections from Educational
Records, Part I: 1781–1839 (Calcutta, 1920), p. 87. For the committee’s desire to employ
“respectable scholars” at the Delhi College, and to inculcate the “scheme of castes”
among students, see GCPI to Delhi Local Agency, 30 Aug. 1824, BL, F/4/909/25694,
p. 559; Horace Hayman Wilson [1824], cited in C. E. Trevelyan, Minute (Jan. 1834),
in C. E. Trevelyan et al., The Application of the Roman Alphabet to All the Oriental
Languages (Serampore, 1834), p. 5.
14
GCPI to Governor-General in Council, 24 Oct. 1823, BL, F/4/909/25694, pp. 518–19.
15
Ibid., p. 531.

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 174 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

against funding schools for “the mass of the people” near Delhi,
on the ground that resources should be spent first on “respectable
members of Indian society.”16 The committee likewise resisted
giving the Calcutta Madrasa or Benares Sanskrit College a popular
character, proposing instead to reform both in cooperation with “the
educated classes.”17 It insisted that only by catering to “the Maulavi
and Pundit” could the Company influence Indian society.18 Already,
however, this premise was being disputed.
The general committee faced two major challenges in its early
years, both of which concerned its preference for conciliation. The
first came from Rammohan Roy, the Bengali reformer and intellec-
tual, who, in a letter of 1823, took issue with the projected Calcutta
Sanskrit College. In the name of “the native population,” Rammohan
called for instruction in the “useful sciences”: Sanskrit had been but
“a lamentable check on the diffusion of knowledge.” In urging the
committee to seek the good of “society” and not just of “Hindu pun-
dits,” Rammohan was making a case for popular education.19 This
case soon found support in paragraphs of a dispatch that have been
attributed to James Mill, an assistant examiner at East India House.
Mill likewise urged the committee to prioritize “useful learning” and
implied that its regard for the “interests and feelings” of learned elites
had been excessive.20 In responding to these two critics, the commit-
tee acknowledged their concerns, and yet firmly rejected their conclu-
sions. It dismissed Rammohan on the ground that, while he claimed
to speak for “the natives of India,” his “opinions are well known
to be hostile to those entertained by almost all his countrymen.”21

16
William Fraser to W. B. Bayley, 25 Sept. 1823, in Sharp, ed., Selections, p. 14; GCPI to
William Fraser, 29 Nov. 1823, in ibid., p. 15 n.
17
Mackenzie to Madrasa Committee, 8 Aug. 1822, cited in Sinha, Educational Policy,
p. 50. For these reforms, see J. Kerr, A Review of Public Instruction in the Bengal
Presidency, from 1835 to 1851, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1853), vol. II, pp. 66–75, 142–5.
18
GCPI to Governor-General in Council, 18 Aug. 1824, in GIED, p. 121.
19
Rammohan to Governor-General in Council, 11 Dec. 1823, in GIED, p. 111.
20
Extract Revenue Despatch to Bengal (18 Feb. 1824), in GIED, pp. 116–17.
21
J. Harington, Minute (14 Jan. 1824), in Rammohun Roy, The Correspondence of Raja
Rammohun Roy, ed. Dilip Kumar Biswas, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1992–4), vol. I, p. 200.

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 Conciliation and Mass Education in the 1820s 175

It rebutted Mill in similar fashion by claiming that “the literary

classes” were against the introduction of foreign knowledge. It also
held that since these classes controlled “public feeling,” they must
remain the first objects of “the beneficence of the Government.”22
As one official later recalled, the committee’s aim at this time was
to win “over the influential and learned classes, the Pundits and
Mowluvees.”23 The committee appreciated the political value of edu-
cation and yet doubted the social reach of the Company.
Things were different in Madras, where Sir Thomas Munro
launched perhaps “the most comprehensive plan for government
involvement in education ever proposed.”24 As devised by the gov-
ernor, and implemented by his Committee of Public Instruction, the
plan substantially favored popular education. It entailed creating a
hierarchy of institutions: at the top, a central teachers’ college; at the
bottom, hundreds of local tahsildari (township) schools. Munro rec-
ognized that many non-elites were being taught in some districts of
the presidency and sought to encourage this phenomenon. On the one
hand, the committee stipulated that candidates for the teachers’ col-
lege be “respectably connected” and, if Hindu, preferably Brahman.25
Munro implied that the other institutions too would cater largely to
“the middle and higher classes.”26 On the other hand, the commit-
tee, with Munro’s support, aimed to “make these schools free for all
classes, the master to pay no more attention to the Brahmin than to
the Sudra boy.”27 Most telling of all, Munro proposed to spend on the
tahsildari schools nearly twice as much as on the teachers’ college.
He reasoned thus:

22
GCPI to Governor-General in Council, 18 Aug. 1824, p. 121.
23
J. R. Colvin, Note (1839), cited in Sharp, ed., Selections, p. 171.
24
Robert Eric Frykenberg, “Modern Education in South India, 1784–1854: Its Roots and
Its Role as a Vehicle of Integration under Company Raj,” American Historical Review
91 (1986), p. 47.
25
Committee of Public Instruction to N. Webb et al., 24 Jun. 1826, in PP (1831–2), vol.
735-I, p. 462.
26
Sir Thomas Munro, Minute (10 Mar. 1826), in ibid., p. 507.
27
Committee of Public Instruction [1826], cited in ibid., p. 462.

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 176 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

Whatever expense Government may incur in the education of the

people will be amply repaid by the improvement of the country;
for the general diffusion of knowledge is inseparably followed
by more orderly habits, by increasing industry, by a taste for the
comforts of life, by exertions to acquire them, and by the growing
prosperity of the people.28

Munro’s system of education was an outgrowth of his system of land

tenure, which aimed to curb hereditary privileges and forge direct
relations with the ryot (peasant).29 It also chimed with Scottish
Enlightenment theories concerning the emergence and progress of
civil society.30 There was as yet no “public” in India, according to
Munro, but the state would justify itself by educating one into exis-
tence. While he stressed that Indian self-rule was a distant prospect,
Munro saw in its gradual realization the basis of the Company’s
legitimacy.
After Munro’s death in 1827, his system was modified and
ultimately abandoned. The preference of the Madras administra-
tion shifted toward conciliation. One cause was the merger of the
Committee of Public Instruction with the Board of the College of
Fort St. George, several of whose members were orientalists with ties
to learned elites. The combined board, backed by successive gover-
nors, questioned the wisdom of mass education. According to one
report, the government’s “liberality” toward “the poorer classes”
was at best “coldly acknowledged by them.”31 According to another,
because Munro’s schools were “open to all classes,” the “higher

28
Munro, Minute (10 Mar. 1826), p. 507.
29
On this system, see Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State
and His Vision of Empire (Delhi, 1989).
30
For this influence, see Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–
1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on
Indian Governance (Akron, 2001). For a survey of this body of thought, see Fania
Oz-Salzberger, “Civil Society in the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Sudipta Kaviraj and
Sunil Khilnani, eds., Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge, 2001).
31
Board of Public Instruction to Governor in Council, 15 Nov. 1832, in Alexander J.
Arbuthnot, Papers Relating to Public Instruction (Madras, 1855), Appendix, p. l.

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 Conciliation and Mass Education in the 1820s 177

orders” were reluctant to send their children to them.32 Many local

officials gave favorable accounts of Munro’s schools, but the board
gave greater weight to those who dissented. In the 1830s, Governor
Sir Frederick Adam ended support for the schools and his succes-
sor, Lord Elphinstone, charted “a new direction.” Munro’s system,
Elphinstone alleged, had “produced nothing but disappointment”:
The state should focus on “influential and respectable natives.”33 As
one of his allies put it, in defense of plans for an elite university, “the
light must touch the mountain tops before it pierces to the depths.”34
Another system was developed by another Elphinstone: the
uncle, Mountstuart, who was appointed governor of Bombay in 1819.
Having served in the newly conquered areas of Poona and the Deccan,
he was well aware of the need to shore up “the slippery foundation of
our Government.”35 Education might not be the first priority, wrote
Elphinstone, but it was the key to all of the other ones.36 Like his
counterparts in Bengal and Madras, he faced a dilemma: to conciliate
elites or to educate the masses? At first, he leant toward conciliation.
He kept up the dakshina, a grant long given by the peshwas to learned
Brahmans. He also founded the Poona Hindu College “to preserve the
attachment” of this class, “whose influence has a very considerable
effect over the feelings and conduct of the people at large.”37 From
1823, however, Elphinstone pursued a more ambitious object: “to
diffuse knowledge among all orders of the people of this country.”38

32
Board of Public Instruction to Governor in Council, 6 Dec. 1834, in ibid., Appendix,
p. lvii.
33
Lord Elphinstone, Minute (12 Dec. 1839), in ibid., Appendix, p. cxxiii.
34
George Norton, cited in ibid., p. 47 [emphasis removed].
35
Mountstuart Elphinstone, Minute [13 Dec. 1823], in Elphinstone, Selections from the
Minutes and Other Official Writings of the Honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone,
Governor of Bombay, ed. George W. Forrest (London, 1884), p. 101.
36
A. L. Covernton, “The Educational Policy of Mountstuart Elphinstone,” Journal of
the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society new ser. 1 (1925), p. 71.
37
William Chaplin to Governor in Council, 24 Nov. 1820, in R. V. Parulekar, ed.,
Selections from the Records of the Government of Bombay: Education, 3 vols.
(Bombay, 1953–7), vol. I, p. 92.
38
Mountstuart Elphinstone, Minute [1823], cited in Kenneth Ballhatchet, Social Policy
and Social Change in Western India 1817–1830 (Oxford, 1957), p. 251.

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 178 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

Elphinstone maintained that some “conciliation” of Brahmans was

necessary owing to their great “numbers and influence,” and that
educating the very “lowest” and “most despised” castes would only
ensure that “our system” and “our power” never spread beyond
them.39 At times, he made a gradualist argument similar to that of
Mackenzie in Calcutta: It would become easier to educate “the lower
orders … after a spirit of inquiry and improvement shall have been
introduced among their superiors.”40 He proposed measures to ben-
efit these “lower orders” from the beginning, however, and, after the
advent of Munro’s system, sought to afford them “the same means of
instruction … as at Madras.”41 What Elphinstone advocated was to
combine the conciliation of elites and the education of the masses –
to act upon almost the whole body of society.
It was largely this new degree of state social involvement that
generated resistance to Elphinstone’s plans. His early efforts had
occasioned sundry debate. But from 1823, he would face sustained
opposition from one of his councilors. Responding to Elphinstone’s
minute of that year, Francis Warden objected that “education, as
a Government concern” would dampen “individual exertions.”
He preferred to “excite the zeal of individuals,” in part through a
proposed English-medium college. The urban upper classes would
contribute to the institution, Warden predicted, and schoolmasters
would arise from the student ranks. The Bombay Native School
Society would handle most of the details; donations and school fees
would provide most of the necessary funding. Warden was adamant,
however, that “the Government should not be too forward in tak-
ing the education of the natives on itself …. From an over anxiety
to complete so good a work, we run the danger of attempting too
much at once, and defeating our object.”42 Elphinstone was no less
adamant that, having “assumed the Government of the Natives, it

39
Elphinstone, Minute [13 Dec. 1823], pp. 96–7, 105, 109.
40
Elphinstone to Thomas Hyde Villiers, 5 Aug. 1832, in PP (1831–2), vol. 735-I, p. 293.
41
Mountstuart Elphinstone, Minute [1826], cited in Ballhatchet, Social Policy, p. 274.
42
Francis Warden, Minute (29 Dec. 1823), in PP (1831–2), vol. 735-I, pp. 519–20.

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 Conciliation and Mass Education in the 1820s 179

is our duty to assist in their improvement.”43 “If we are to do any-

thing” about education, he asseverated, “we must do it through our
own Agents.”44 In 1825, Elphinstone observed that in the past year
he and his council had spilt more ink on the subject “than both the
other Presidencies have on all subjects.”45 And yet, despite these
“almost constant discussions,” they remained at an impasse.46 After
Elphinstone’s departure in 1827, the debate extended to the profes-
sorships endowed by wealthy Indians in his name: It would be nearly
a decade until the first “Elphinstone Professors” commenced their
lectures.47 The new governor, John Malcolm, followed Elphinstone
in seeking both to “conciliate … learned Hindoos” and to spread
“knowledge among all classes.”48 In these attempts, however, he too
was hindered by the intractable Warden.
Yet another system was tried in Singapore and debated
along similar lines as in the other presidencies. The major differ-
ence here was that the Company’s interests, in the words of Sir
Thomas Stamford Raffles, still lay in “trade, and not territory.”
As Raffles put it, upon founding the settlement in 1819, Singapore
must be conducted on “purely commercial principles.”49 He
repeated this view in a pamphlet of the same year that advocated

43
Mountstuart Elphinstone, Minute [1824], Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay
General Volumes, vol. 8/63 (1824), p. 226.
44
Mountstuart Elphinstone, Minute (1 Mar. 1824), ibid., p. 298.
45
Mountstuart Elphinstone, Minute (23 Aug. 1825), Maharashtra State Archives,
Bombay General Volumes, vol. 8/92 (1825), p. 625.
46
Mountstuart Elphinstone, Minute (Sept. 1826), cited in Parulekar, ed., Selections,
vol. II, p. xviii.
47
See Kenneth Ballhatchet, “The Elphinstone Professors and Elphinstone College,
1827–1840,” in C. H. Philips and Mary Doreen Wainwright, eds., Indian Society and
the Beginnings of Modernisation, c. 1830–1850 (London, 1976); Naheed F. Ahmad,
“The Elphinstone College, Bombay, 1827–1890: A Case Study in 19th Century English
Education,” in Mushirul Hasan, ed., Knowledge, Power and Politics: Educational
Institutions in India (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 392–7.
48
John Malcolm, Minute (1828), in PP (1831–2), vol. 735-I, p. 526; John Malcolm, Minute
(30 Jul. 1828), ibid., p. 472.
49
Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, “On the Administration of the Eastern Islands in 1819,”
in Sophia Raffles, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford
Raffles (London, 1830), Appendix, pp. 12–13.

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 180 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

the establishment of a college on the island. In continental India,

he observed, the Company had disseminated knowledge as a means
of augmenting “the power … of the state.” Around the Strait of
Malacca, however, the Company must act according to a different
principle: “While with one hand we carry to their shores the capi-
tal of our merchants, the other should be stretched forth to offer
them the means of intellectual improvement.” Raffles proceeded
to outline a system of conciliation in which educating “the higher
orders” – the sons of Malay chiefs – would “attach them more
closely to us.”50 The Lieutenant-Governor was not ignorant of the
latest education theories: In Bencoolen, he had set up schools on
the Lancastrian model. Moreover, like counterparts in India, he
proposed to eventually educate a wider range of the populace.51
Unlike these officials, however, Raffles understood education in
fundamentally commercial terms: as a commodity to be bartered
for security, goodwill, and other advantages. His views were ambi-
tious, but the ambitions they bespoke dated back to the previous
century.52 It was a question whether these views would take hold
in the 1820s.
Events provided an answer in the negative. After vari-
ous delays, Raffles took steps to establish his college in 1823.53
Without waiting for approval from London, he endowed lands,
collected subscriptions, and commissioned a grand edifice for his
“Singapore Institution.”54 But the building was poorly planned and

50
[Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles], On the Advantage of Affording the Means of Education
to the Inhabitants of the Further East (1819), repr. as Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles,
The First Printing of Sir Stamford Raffles’s Minute on the Establishment of a Malay
College at Singapore, ed. John Bastin (Eastbourne, 1999).
51
Raffles to William Wilberforce, Sept. 1819, in Raffles, Memoir, p. 408.
52
See generally G. G. Hough, “Notes on the Educational Policy of Sir Stamford Raffles,”
Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 42 (1969).
53
For details, see R. L. O’Sullivan, “The Anglo-Chinese College and the Early ‘Singapore
Institution,’” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 61 (1988),
pp. 48–52.
54
Raffles, Memoir, Appendix, pp. 74–86; Munshi Abdullah, “The Hikayat Abdullah”
(1849), trans. A. H. Hill, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
28 (1955), p. 160.

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 Conciliation and Mass Education in the 1820s 181

executed.55 When funding ran out, all that had been built was “a
mass of Brick Work,” which soon became a “shelter for thieves.”56
By the time of Raffles’ death, in 1826, his college too seemed des-
tined for oblivion.57 According to a report by the Company’s res-
ident, John Crawfurd, the institution’s problems ran deeper than
hasty construction and inadequate funds. The far-flung royalty that
Raffles had hoped to attract had not materialized; the need among
local inhabitants was for a school or two rather than a college.58
Crawfurd and other officials saw the institution as ill-situated,
befitting perhaps a territorial capital but not an island outpost. In
a letter to the directors, the new governor in council declared that
its grandiose objects “were not at all adapted to the circumstances
of this infant colony.”59 This thinking was reflected in a Malay-
language address distributed by the local administration in 1827:
From a wish to extend to Singapore “the advantages enjoyed by …
other parts of their Dominions,” the Company would allocate funds
for elementary instruction.60 Thus, despite the link between com-
merce and conciliation, which Raffles had revived, the idea of mass
education won out in Singapore. When the Singapore Institution was
reestablished in the 1830s, it took the form of a local boys’ school.
Just as the Company’s authorities in Asia differed and dithered,
so too did its authorities in London. In a single dispatch of 1827, they
praised the general committee for focusing on the higher classes in
Delhi and for instructing all classes in Agra.61 They at first supported

55
Philip Jackson to J. A. Maxwell, 14 Jul. [1824], Raffles Archives and Museum, Raffles
Institution Records; “Education in Eastern Asia,” Malacca Observer, repr. in AJ 28
(Jul. 1829), p. 106.
56
Extract General Despatch from Singapore (20 May 1828), BL, IOR F/4/1043/28683,
f. 10r; Newspaper, cited in Charles Burton Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old
Times in Singapore, 2 vols. (Singapore, 1902), vol. I, p. 127.
57
For further details, see E. Wijeysingha, The Eagle Breeds a Gryphon: The Story of the
Raffles Institution 1823–1985 (Singapore, 1989), ch. 3.
58
Crawfurd to Governor-General in Council, 7 Feb. 1826, BL, IOR F/4/1043/28683, ff. 77r–v.
59
Extract General Despatch from Singapore (20 May 1828), f. 10v.
60
Address, trans. in Singapore Resident’s Diary (25 Jan. 1827), Singapore National
Archives, N1, pp. 67–70.
61
Extract Public Despatch to Bengal (5 Sept. 1827), in PP (1831–2), vol. 735-I, pp. 489–90.

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 182 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

Munro’s system and described “the education of the great mass of

the population” as “worthy of great encouragement.”62 Yet, on a
later occasion, they issued the following admonition to the Madras
government:

The improvements in education … which most effectually

contribute to elevate the moral and intellectual condition of
a people, are those which concern the education of the higher
classes; of the persons possessing leisure, and natural influence
over the minds of their countrymen. By raising the standard of
instruction among these classes, you would eventually produce a
much greater and more beneficial change in the ideas and feelings
of the community than you can hope to produce by acting
directly on the more numerous class.63

The chief author of this dispatch was the assistant examiner John
Stuart Mill, who, like his father, James, had once approved of mass
education.64 This variance between father and son, and between the
son and his former self, illustrated the confused and shifting state
of thinking in London. No longer in doubt, at least, was the value
of education in attracting support for the Company, including in
Britain. By 1826, the directors were boasting of what they had “done
for the purpose of extending education generally throughout India.”
According to the chairman, they were spending in Bengal and its
northern dependencies “nearly one lac [lakh] and a half” more than
the sum provided for by the Charter Act, not to mention one lakh in
Bombay and Madras and a “considerable” amount in Singapore and
the other Straits Settlements.65 On every occasion, the home authori-
ties avowed the ultimate desirability of educating the Indian masses.

62
Extract Public Despatch to Bengal (9 Mar. 1825), in ibid., p. 489.
63
Public Despatch to Madras (29 Sept. 1830), in GIED, p. 126.
64
Penelope Carson, “Golden Casket or Pebbles and Trash? J.S. Mill and the Anglicist/
Orientalist Controversy,” in Martin I. Moir, Douglas M. Peers, and Lynn Zastoupil,
eds., J.S. Mill’s Encounter with India (Toronto, 1999), pp. 157–9.
65
[Campbell Marjoribanks], Speech in East India House Debate (21 Jun. 1826), AJ 22
(1826), p. 117.

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 The Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy Revisited 183

They seem to have determined already that any system of conciliation

would be temporary.

The Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy Revisited

Upon reaching the 1830s, most surveys of Indian education have con-
cerned themselves with the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. As the
previous section has shown, however, the 1820s witnessed a number
of other education debates. To the extent that these centered on any
one issue, it was the choice between conciliation and mass education.
The question then becomes how contention on this issue fed into the
later controversy. The answer can be summarized in the name Charles
Edward Trevelyan. In Delhi and then in Calcutta, the young official
advanced the view that English and mass education went together.
He and his “Anglicist” allies were opposed by the “Orientalists,”
who in truth were wedded less to oriental languages than to the
idea of conciliation. What the Charter Act of 1833 accomplished, by
ending the Company’s trade altogether, was to make its legitimacy
rest all the more on its claim to good government. The act, framed
largely by Thomas Babington Macaulay, also empowered Governor-
General Lord William Bentinck to settle the education question. This
Bentinck did in 1835 by endorsing Trevelyan’s program, which was
now Macaulay’s as well. For the moment, English education appeared
to be in the ascendant. The more permanent result was the eclipse of
the idea of conciliation by that of mass education.
The origins of the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy are prop-
erly dated to 1827. In that year, Trevelyan came to Delhi and began
“labouring in the cause” that he would carry to victory eight years
later.66 The young Company official was inspired by Evangelical
and Utilitarian doctrines – but only in part.67 As studies of his later

66
Trevelyan to Lord William Bentinck, 30 Apr. 1834, in Bentinck, The Correspondence
of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, ed. C. H. Philips, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1977), vol. II,
p. 1261.
67
For these influences, see J. F. Hilliker, “Charles Edward Trevelyan as an Educational
Reformer in India 1827–1838,” Canadian Journal of History 9 (1974), pp. 278–9.

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 184 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

career have discovered, his interests were eclectic, his motivations

unusual.68 “To be widely different from others” was the motto of his
fictional double in Anthony Trollope’s The Three Clerks (1858).69 It
was from his obsession with the “influence of language on national
habits of thinking” that the Anglicist position emerged.70 This posi-
tion was developed in minutes of the Delhi College Committee
of which Trevelyan was the principal author.71 Its distinctive fea-
ture was the twinning of considerations of social reach and of lan-
guage. The committee held that the masses could be educated only
through English and English-inflected vernaculars, and that to pre-
serve Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic was “to throw the people into
the hands of intermediate Agents.” These “literary Mohamedans”
and presumably pandits, according to the committee, were attached
to “the old system” and opposed to any new one. By contrast, “the
bulk of the people” were “attached to no previous system” and
“ready to adopt our own Literature.”72 Affording them this oppor-
tunity, the committee added, would have profound political ben-
efits: It would “tend rapidly … to amalgamate all classes” and to
“form a bond of union between ourselves and them.” The combined
effect of attaching the people to each other and to their rulers would
be to establish “a sort of national character.”73 Trevelyan and his

68
Jenifer Hart, “Sir Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury,” English Historical Review 75
(1960); Kevin Theakston, Leadership in Whitehall (Basingstoke, 1999), ch. 2; Robin
Haines, Charles Trevelyan and the Great Irish Famine (Dublin, 2004).
69
Anthony Trollope, The Three Clerks: A Novel, 3 vols. (London, 1858), vol. I, p. 107.
70
C. E. Trevelyan, A Treatise on the Means of Communicating the Learning and
Civilization of Europe to India (Calcutta, 1834), p. 14. One source for this idea – and
the immediate source for this phrase – was a history of Islam that “enjoyed as exten-
sive a circulation in British India as in the mother country.” Charles Mills, An History
of Muhammedanism (London, 1817), p. 350 n.; [Augustine Skottowe], A Memoir of
the Life and Writings of Charles Mills (London, 1828), p. 63.
71
There are at least two reasons to infer that Trevelyan was the principal author: The
committee’s arguments changed noticeably after he became a member, and many of
these arguments appeared again in his later writings. See especially [Charles Edward
Trevelyan], Draft Minute [c. 1833–4], Newcastle University Library, CET 102. For the
attribution, see J. F. Hilliker, “Trevelyan and the Reform of Indian Education,” Indo-
British Review 6 (1974).
72
Delhi College Committee to GCPI, 12 Feb. 1829, BL, IOR F/4/1170/30639, pp. 313–39.
73
Delhi College Committee to GCPI, 14 Apr. 1829, ibid., pp. 372–4.

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 The Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy Revisited 185

colleagues thus proposed to make education – for the masses and in

English – a vehicle for state-building.
The proposal met with a mixed response. The General
Committee of Public Instruction fell back upon the idea of concili-
ation. It objected, in the first place, to the Delhi officials’ plan to
create a system of English schools and colleges. To divert funds from
the Delhi College for this purpose, the committee alleged, would
anger “the most influential Mahomedans, and particularly the men
of learning,” who “would have the strongest interest in opposing a
change that was to deprive them of all credit and subsistence.” The
committee doubted, moreover, whether qualified teachers and inter-
ested students could be found outside of Calcutta. It concluded that
it was best to continue introducing English in a piecemeal and peace-
able fashion.74 In this way, the committee sidestepped the arguments
of its Delhi subsidiary and upheld its own modest English initiatives.
Yet the acknowledgment that English instruction was sought-after,
at least in Calcutta, weakened its position. Holt Mackenzie, who had
done much to shape the committee’s views, now took the unusual
step of recording a partial dissent. He held, first, that the demand for
English should be investigated, and, second, that English should fully
replace Persian as the official language.75
Mackenzie’s note in support of English and popular education
found a receptive audience in Bentinck. Already, by 1829, the new
governor-general had expressed a desire to engage with the Indian
public. He relaxed controls on the press and invited suggestions
from “all Native Gentlemen, Landholders, Merchants and others.”76
Fostering “native agency” was part of a larger project to give the
Company’s territories what he called “nationality.”77 This project
shaped Bentinck’s response to the minutes of the general committee

74
GCPI to Governor-General in Council, 2 Jun. 1829, ibid., pp. 341–5.
75
Mackenzie, Note (3 Jun. 1829), ibid., pp. 350–52.
76
A. Dobbs, Notice (23 Feb. 1829), Government Gazette (2 Mar. 1829), repr. in Ahmed,
Social Ideas, p. 4 n.
77
On this project, see John Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal
Imperialist, 1774–1839 (Berkeley, 1974), pp. 180–89.

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 186 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

and of its Delhi subsidiary. Like Mackenzie, Bentinck endorsed the

former for the moment but showed greater enthusiasm for the lat-
ter. He wrote of “giving to our Institutions for Native education …
a more popular character.”78 Moreover, he described “encouraging
the acquisition of the British language” as “the key to all improve-
ment.”79 If Bentinck had yet to act on the views of the Delhi commit-
tee, then he had at least proved sympathetic to them. For Trevelyan,
the question was how to secure his commitment.
Prevented from founding his schools, at least temporarily,
Trevelyan pressed ahead with other reforms in Delhi. Many of these
involved shifting the Company’s base of support from nobles and
learned elites to a broader public. In 1829, he succeeded in having the
resident, Sir Edward Colebrooke, dismissed for corruption. Bound up in
the case were larger questions of language and social policy. Whereas
Colebrooke had courted the city’s Persianate aristocracy, Trevelyan
championed its English-leaning middle classes.80 It was in the context
of a turning tide against the old guard – British and Indian – that the
English class at Delhi College commenced. “This little class,” accord-
ing to its sponsor, Trevelyan, “was formed amidst the scoffs of the
learned natives, and the … objections of … European residents.”81
The college maulvis shunned the Muslim students, causing most to
unenroll, and the college pandits seem to have pressured the Brahman
ones.82 Hence, from almost the beginning, most of the students came
from other social groups:

78
Governor-General in Council to GCPI, 26 Jun. 1829, BL, IOR F/4/1170/30639,
pp. 385–92.
79
Bentinck to Metcalfe, 16 Sept. 1829, in Bentinck, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 288.
80
Prior, Brennan, and Haines, “Bad Language”; Margrit Pernau, Ashraf into Middle
Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (New Delhi, 2013), pp. 91–6.
81
C. E. Trevelyan, “Memoir,” in Mohan Lal, Journal of a Tour through the Panjab,
Afghanistan, Turkistan, Khorasan, and Part of Persia (Calcutta, 1834), p. ix.
82
Shahamat Ali, The Sikhs and Afghans, in Connexion with India and Persia,
Immediately before and after the Death of Ranjeet Singh (London, 1847), pp. viii–ix;
Michael H. Fisher, “Mohan Lal Kashmiri (1812–77): An Initial Student of Delhi
English College,” in Margrit Pernau, ed., The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the
Colonial State, and Education before 1857 (New Delhi, 2006), p. 241.

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 The Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy Revisited 187

Christian, Mohammedan, and Hindu boys, of every shade of

colour and variety of descent may be seen standing side by side
in the same class …. This is a great point gained. The artificial
institution of caste cannot long survive the period when the
youth of India … disregard it…. Habits of friendly communication
will thus be established between all classes, they will insensibly
become one people, and the process of enlightening our subjects
will proceed simultaneously with that of uniting them among
themselves.83

Trevelyan would record this triumphant account in 1838. But as early

as 1830, he observed that “the large and intelligent classes of Kaiths
[Kayasths] and Cashmerians [Kashmiris]” were exchanging Persian
for English.84 He predicted that, by raising up this middling order,
the English class would serve as “the nucleus of a system which, to
all appearances, is destined to change … the whole of Upper India.”85
And yet Trevelyan sought to change the whole of British India,
a goal furthered by his transfer to the capital, Calcutta, in 1831.
Before long, he was the chief reformer among the younger officials
and, in particular, “the soul of every scheme for diffusing education
among the natives.”86 Trevelyan’s ascent owed to his skill, on the one
hand, in cultivating officials, and, on the other, in cultivating pub-
lic opinion through the press.87 These efforts worked in tandem: He
went to great pains to convince Bentinck, especially, that his views
on education were popular.88 He tried other methods too. When an

83
Charles E. Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India (London, 1838), p. 20.
For evidence on the social makeup of the class, see Margrit Pernau, introduction to
Pernau, ed., Delhi College, pp. 27–8.
84
Trevelyan, Treatise, pp. 19–20. He dated this section 21 May 1830.
85
Trevelyan, “Memoir,” p. ix.
86
Thomas Babington Macaulay to Mrs. Edward Cropper, 7 Dec. 1834, in Thomas
Babington Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas
Pinney, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1974–81), vol. III, p. 100.
87
A. D. Webb, “Charles Edward Trevelyan in India: A Study of the Channels of Influence
Employed by a Covenanted Civil Servant in the Translation of Personal Ideas into
Official Policy,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies new ser. 6 (1983).
88
Trevelyan to Bentinck, 18 Mar. 183[3], in Bentinck, Correspondence, vol. II, p. 777.

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 188 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

Awadhi nobleman came to Calcutta, Trevelyan exhorted him to

study English; he also likely assisted him with an ode to Bentinck
that celebrated his founding of schools open to “High and Low …
Poor and Rich.”89 Trevelyan may have been the loudest advocate of
mass or English education, but increasingly he was joined by other
voices. Indian pupils flocked to the English school of the missionary
Alexander Duff; pleas for government schools on its model appeared
in local newspapers.90 Such was the state of affairs in March 1833
when Trevelyan wrote the following to Bentinck:

It is now my intention to apply myself seriously to what I have

for a long time past considered the great enterprise of my life.
I mean the moral and intellectual renovation of the people of
India. I long to see established under your Lordship’s auspices
a system of education so comprehensive as to embrace every
class of public teachers, so elastic as to admit of its being
gradually extended to every village in the country and so
interwoven with the constitution of the state … as to furnish
the highest motives to intellectual exertion to the whole body
of the people ….91

If Trevelyan meant to forward his candidacy for the general com-

mittee, then he succeeded: An appointment followed in April. And
in May, the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy began in earnest. “We
have … arrived at a crisis in the annals of the Education Committee,”
declared one member, “and the question has become ‘whether the
natives of India are to remain orientalists or to be made English in
their language and literature.’”92

89
[Iqbal ud-Daula] Icbal-ood Dowlah, Icbal-e-Furung or British Prosperity (Calcutta,
1834), pp. 21, 23, 31, 33.
90
For examples of such appeals, see Reformer (Calcutta; 18 Mar. 1833); “Native
Education,” Gyananneshun (25 Jul. 1833), repr. in Suresh Chandra Moitra, ed.,
Selections from Jnanannesan (Calcutta, 1979), p. 73.
91
Trevelyan to Bentinck, 18 Mar. 183[3], pp. 776–7.
92
James Prinsep, Minute (20 May 1833), West Bengal State Archives, GCPI Proceedings,
vol. 4, p. 252.

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 The Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy Revisited 189

“Orientalists” was a term less often applied to Indians than

to Trevelyan’s opponents on the general committee. It seems to
have been Trevelyan himself who coined this somewhat mislead-
ing epithet.93 Their resistance to mass and English instruction he
attributed to their pursuit of a “reputation for oriental learning”:
They wished to spend the committee’s funds on abstruse scholar-
ship instead of on the “education of the people.”94 Trevelyan had
a point. With the terminal decline of the College of Fort William,
some scholar-officials turned to the committee for patronage.95 The
committee’s own secretary, Horace Hayman Wilson, obtained a
large grant to prepare and print several works in Sanskrit. But not
all so-called Orientalists matched this description. Nor was fame
their only motivation. The committee, led by Wilson, still avowed
the necessity of “conciliating” the “influential and learned classes.”
It cited “the limited means at the Committee’s disposal, and the
inadequacy of any means to the education of a whole people,” as
well as a political imperative to offset the loss of these scholars’
“natural patrons.”96 The Orientalists’ preference for India’s “learned
languages” was thus largely a byproduct of their preference for
learned elites. Tellingly, Wilson objected less to the teaching of
English at Delhi College than to the supposedly low social class of
its superintendent.97 After the accession of Trevelyan, Wilson did

93
The term “Anglicists” seems to have originated with B. H. Hodgson, Preeminence of
the Vernaculars; or the Anglicists Answered (Serampore, 1837).
94
Trevelyan, Minute (Jan. 1834), pp. 16–26. See also [Trevelyan], Draft Minute [c. 1833–4],
ff. 9r–v; Trevelyan to Bentinck [1834] University of Nottingham Libraries, PwJf 2105.
95
For the decline of the college’s literary fund, in particular, see David Kopf, British
Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization,
1773–1835 (Berkeley, 1969), pp. 220, 234.
96
Report on the Colleges and Schools for Native Education, under the Superintendance
of the General Committee of Public Instruction in Bengal 1831 (Calcutta, 1832), BL,
IOR V/24/946, pp. 44, 47.
97
For Wilson’s disapproval of this “East Indian” (Eurasian) superintendent, John Henry
Taylor, see Horace Hayman Wilson, Note [1830], West Bengal State Archives, GCPI
Correspondence on Delhi College, vol. 2, part 1, pp. 304–5. Elsewhere, he wrote
that he was “as friendly” as Trevelyan to “a wide extension of English.” Wilson to
Ramkamal Sen, 25 Sept. 1835, cited in Peary Chand Mittra, Life of Dewan Ramcomul
Sen (Calcutta, 1880), p. 19.

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 190 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

worry that the committee had gone “English-mad” and would alien-
ate “Pundits and Moulvis.”98 Henry Thoby Prinsep, who replaced
him as leader of the Orientalists, began to fervently oppose the pro-
motion of English.99 In this way, the Orientalist position came to
mirror the Anglicist one. On neither side, however, did issues of
social class simply give way to issues of language.
For all of its rhetorical sprawl, the controversy turned substan-
tially on the same question that had exercised officials for over a
decade. This was clear from the summary arguments of each side
between which Bentinck, in January 1835, was asked to adjudicate.
Whereas the Orientalists declared as their “first great principle …
that of aiding … the enlightened and influential Classes,” the
Anglicists upheld the government’s duty to educate “all classes of its
Indian subjects.”100 Trevelyan persisted in characterizing the divide
as one between a “popular” party and an “anti-popular” party.101 For
that matter, his adversaries scarcely attempted to shift the terms of
debate. Prinsep and other Orientalists, including his brother James,
could countenance the “peaceful and insensible” spread of English.102
Trevelyan, however, would accept nothing less than “radical” social
change. “Our object,” he wrote, “is to instruct the people of India by
the united means of English and of the popular languages,” not to
“conciliate” the “learned few” by patronizing their studies in Persian,
Sanskrit, and Arabic.103 This argument prevailed on Bentinck, who
had inclined toward it from the beginning. In February 1835, he broke
the committee’s deadlock by endorsing the minute of Trevelyan’s
ally Macaulay.
Bentinck was roused to action by events in London as well as
in Calcutta. By ending the Company’s trade, the Charter Act of 1833

98
Wilson to Ramkamal Sen, 21 Dec. 1833, in Mittra, Life, p. 14.
99
John Featherston Hilliker, “British Education Policy in Bengal, 1833–1854” (PhD dis-
sertation, University of London, 1968), pp. 93–9.
100
GCPI to Governor-General in Council, 21 Jan. 1835, in GIED, pp. 137, 154.
101
Trevelyan to Bentinck, 9 Apr. 1834, in Bentinck, Correspondence, vol. II, pp. 1238–9.
102
J. Prinsep, Minute (2 Jan. 1834), in Trevelyan et al., Application, p. 35.
103
Trevelyan, Minute (Jan. 1834), pp. 4, 18, 26.

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 The Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy Revisited 191

resolved a longstanding dialectic.104 As Bentinck put it, “Our char-

acter is no longer the inconsistent one of Merchant and Sovereign….
Our future care is that of a vast Territory ….”105 The Company state
endured, in the sense that the corporate structure remained intact and
served as an umbrella for private trading interests.106 Family connec-
tions, too, sustained “the nexus between state office and business activ-
ity.”107 Yet if the Company was now, to quote one official, “a company
of sovereigns,” then its legitimacy rested all the more on claims to good
government.108 Its regime in India must appear to be, in Macaulay’s
words, “an enlightened and paternal despotism.”109 As secretary to the
Board of Control, Macaulay played a leading role in drawing up the
act and defending it in parliament. Through the recently returned Holt
Mackenzie, and through parliamentary reports, he would have become
acquainted with the full range of British views on Indian education.
Although the act made no explicit provision for education, its entire
logic depended upon it. This at least was what Macaulay suggested in
the peroration of a climactic speech before the Commons:

It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our
system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government
we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government;
that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may,
in some future age, demand European institutions.

104
On the significance of the act, and for details mentioned below, see Joshua Ehrlich,
“The Crisis of Liberal Reform in India: Public Opinion, Pyrotechnics, and the Charter
Act of 1833,” MAS 52 (2018). Since 1813, the Company’s monopoly had been limited
to the China route. Long before 1833, its share of the India trade had dwindled in
consequence.
105
Lord William Bentinck, Minute (20 Jan. 1834), BL, IOR F/4/1551/62250, p. 83.
106
Anthony Webster, The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-
Asian Commerce and Politics, 1790–1860 (Woodbridge, UK, 2009).
107
D. A. Washbrook, “India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism,” in Andrew
Porter, ed., The Nineteenth Century, vol. 3 of The Oxford History of the British
Empire (Oxford, 1999), p. 412.
108
Charles Metcalfe, Minute (11 Oct. 1829), in Bentinck, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 309.
109
Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speech in HC Deb (10 Jul. 1833), in Macaulay, The
Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. (London, 1866), vol. VIII,
p. 139.

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 192 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

Macaulay closed by invoking the distant prospect of a self-ruled

India that shared “our arts and our morals, our literature and our
laws.”110 The speech was a triumph. Macaulay wrote to his sis-
ter that it had drawn “such compliments as … you never heard”
from his fellow members of parliament.111 It not only cemented
Macaulay’s reputation as an orator but also smoothed the way for
his appointment to the Supreme Council. One of his new admir-
ers was Bentinck, who declared himself “delighted with Macaulay’s
appointment.”112 And no wonder: Among other things, Macaulay
had given Bentinck the authority he needed to settle the education
question.
The Charter Act, especially as put forward by Macaulay, hardened
Bentinck’s resolve. He had long favored Trevelyan’s views on education
but had hesitated to give them his full support. For one thing, he had
been ordered to retrench by the home authorities and felt compelled to
consult them on important decisions.113 For another, he feared making
enemies of the Orientalists; hence playing “his cards unusually close to
his chest.”114 Most importantly, he harbored doubts about the extent
of Indian demand for English.115 The Charter Act altered all of these
calculations by authorizing Bentinck to act independently. He was
now governor-general of India, not just of Bengal, and could override
his council, the other governors, and the Supreme Court if necessary.
Along with these powers came expectations, among which the provi-
sion of mass education figured prominently. Macaulay would have con-
veyed this expectation to Bentinck upon his arrival in India in late 1834.
Bentinck would have required little convincing: He had declared already
that India’s “great want” was “knowledge” and “general education …

110
Ibid., p. 142.
111
Macaulay to Hannah Macaulay, 11 Jul. 1833, in Macaulay, Letters, vol. II, p. 268.
112
Bentinck to Daniel Wilson, 1 May 1834, in Bentinck, Correspondence, vol. II, p. 1264.
113
Albert H. Imlah, Lord Ellenborough: A Biography of Edward Law, Earl of Ellenborough,
Governor-General of India (Cambridge, 1939), p. 44 n. 65; C. H. Philips, The East
India Company, 1784–1834, 2nd edn (Manchester, 1961), p. 262.
114
Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck, p. 220.
115
See Trevelyan to Bentinck, 9 Apr. 1834, p. 1238.

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 The Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy Revisited 193

my panacea.”116 After appointing Macaulay to the general committee,

Bentinck endorsed his minute without consulting the home authori-
ties.117 Nor did he show any compunction about excluding from the
council minutes a rebuttal from Prinsep.118 In a final sign of the impact
of the Charter Act, Bentinck signaled that he would no longer wait for
“the public mind” to “become better prepared.”119 As the Anglicists put
it in their summary argument, the people had no “inherent right … to
demand” an “erroneous education at the expense of the state.”120
Bentinck’s resolution has been remembered as a victory for
English, but it was at least as much a victory for mass education.
The purpose of Macaulay’s minute, for all of its polemical fireworks,
was in keeping with the ideas of his now brother-in-law Trevelyan.
Macaulay’s greatest departure was to focus, like the Orientalists, on
teaching a fraction of the people instead of the people at large. Yet
what he advocated was not conciliation: He aimed not to patronize
old elites but rather to replace them. Like Trevelyan, Macaulay envi-
sioned a system that would bring together students of various social
origins and unite them into a new leading class.121 Like Trevelyan
too, and perhaps more sincerely than their opponents, he ultimately
hoped to convey “knowledge to the great mass of the population.”122

116
Bentinck to G. Norton, 11 Apr. 1834, in James Barber, A Letter to the Right Hon. Sir
John Cam Hobhouse, Bart. M.P. President of the India Board, Etc. Etc. Etc. on Steam-
Navigation with India (London, 1837), pp. 43–4; Bentinck to unknown, 1 Jun. 1834,
in Bentinck, Correspondence, vol. II, p. 1287. See also Lord William Bentinck, “Lord
William Bentinck’s Reply to the Society’s Address” (8 Apr. 1835), Transactions of the
Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India 2 (1836), p. 211.
117
For a severe response, which was never sent, see [John Stuart Mill], Draft Public
Despatch (1836), in GIED, pp. 225–43.
118
See Henry Thoby Prinsep, Minute (20 May 1835), in Sharp, ed., Selections, pp. 137–9.
119
Trevelyan to Bentinck, 9 Apr. 1834, p. 1238. See Bentinck, Minute (20 Jan. 1834),
pp. 78, 81.
120
GCPI to Governor-General in Council, 21 Jan. 1835, p. 138 [emphasis removed].
Macaulay made the same claim. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute (2 Feb. 1835),
in GIED, p. 168.
121
See Trevelyan, Education, pp. 135–7, 142.
122
Macaulay, Minute (2 Feb. 1835), p. 171. Elsewhere, Macaulay described this new class
as “conductors of knowledge to the people.” Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute (30
Dec. 1837), in Macaulay, Macaulay’s Minutes on Education in India, ed. H. Woodrow
(Calcutta, 1862), p. 51.

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 194 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

It was this popular program that appealed to Bentinck. Two weeks

earlier, he had approved the reformer William Adam’s plan to survey
schools across the province. He implied that the government’s best
course of action was to found “a few good institutions” that “natives
of all ranks and classes” would attend. He also implied that the “vari-
ous” other questions under discussion, including the “languages to
be cultivated,” were of secondary importance. Bentinck’s main con-
cern, as ever, was to establish “education upon the largest and most
useful basis.”123
Bentinck’s restatement of this concern, as much as his endorse-
ment of English, determined the response by the Orientalists. In his
minute, Prinsep subtly but significantly shifted tack: He stressed
the good of “the mass of the people” above that of maulvis and pan-
dits. While still finding use for such men as “the teachers of many
pupils,” he now argued that “we must endeavour to carry the people
with us.”124 William Hay Macnaghten too now framed the instruc-
tion of learned elites in terms of its benefit to “the great mass of the
people.” The “grand object,” Macnaghten declared, was not that “the
few … should be enlightened but that thro[ugh] their means … light
should be diffused over the whole surface of society.”125 John Tytler,
a favorite object of the Committee’s patronage, and of Trevelyan’s
scorn, had expressed this view already.126 In 1836, it was taken up by
Wilson in the pages of the Asiatic Journal:

As long as the learned classes of India are not enlisted in the

cause of diffusing sound knowledge, little real progress will be
made…. [O]ne able pundit or maulavi, who should … advocate

123
Bentinck, Minute (20 Jan. 1835), in Bentinck, Correspondence, vol. II, pp. 1395–7.
Trevelyan and Macaulay also supported Adam’s plan. See Trevelyan to Bentinck,
5 Jan. 1835, in ibid., vol. II, p. 1393; Macaulay to Bentinck, undated, University of
Nottingham Libraries, PwJf 1327.
124
Henry Thoby Prinsep, Note (15 Feb. 1835), in GIED, pp. 175, 181, 185. His brother James,
uniquely among prominent Orientalists, remained opposed to popular education. See
James Prinsep, Minute (30 Apr. 1835), BL, IOR F/4/1846/77633, pp. 269–71, 275–6.
125
NAI, Bengal Public Consultations (22 Apr. 1835), no. 10A.
126
Tytler to GCPI, 3 Apr. 1834, NAI, Home Miscellaneous, vol. 472, p. 160; Tytler to
Wilson, 26 Jan. 1835, BL, Mss Eur E301/2, f. 103v.

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 Conclusion 195

the adoption of European knowledge and principles, would work a

… revolution in the minds of his unlettered countrymen ….127

Thus, the Orientalists conceded the principle of popular education

and sought to salvage merely a supporting role for learned elites.128
In this, they were helped by a petition against the rumored abolition
of the Calcutta Madrasa bearing over eight thousand signatures.129 By
demonstrating popular support for ostensibly elite interests, the peti-
tion undercut the Anglicists’ premises. No wonder that Macaulay’s
first response was to accuse Prinsep of engineering the whole affair.130
The Charter Act authorized Bentinck to override such opposition,
but as a practical matter, his plans relied on acquiescence. He ended
the controversy with a compromise: The state would not close any
school or college so long as the people were “inclined to avail them-
selves” of it.131

Conclusion
The end of the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy spelled the end
of the idea of conciliation in Company ideology. Mass education,
though far from a reality, had become an ideological imperative that
precluded scholarly patronage. The General Committee of Public
Instruction, with the approval of the governor-general in council, dis-
continued support for “oriental works.”132 It was clear to Wilson,
at least, that the Company now “sought to deter its servants from
Oriental studies.”133 It was equally telling that the first Indians

127
Wilson to ed., 5 Dec. 1835, AJ, repr. in GIED, p. 216.
128
William Adam alluded to this change when he wrote that Wilson had not been “always
happy or Consistent in applying” the views he expressed in the Asiatic Journal. Adam
to Wilson, 26 Sept. 1836, BL, Mss Eur E301/2, f. 174v.
129
Petition (21 Feb. 1835), trans. in AJ, repr. in GIED, pp. 189–93.
130
Henry Thoby Prinsep, Autobiography (1865), cited in Sharp, ed., Selections, p. 134.
131
Governor-General in Council, Resolution (7 Mar. 1835), in GIED, p. 195.
132
GCPI to Governor-General in Council, 20 Apr. 1835, in GIED, pp. 201–3.
133
[Horace Hayman Wilson], “The Late John Tytler, Esq., of the Bengal Medical
Service,” AJ new ser. 23 (1837), p. 2. For the attribution, see Gerald Sirkin and Natalie
Robinson Sirkin, “The Battle of Indian Education: Macaulay’s Opening Salvo Newly
Discovered,” Victorian Studies 14 (1971), p. 413 n. 23.

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 196 Education and the Persistence of the Company State

appointed to the general committee were neither pandits nor maul-

vis but rather Bhadralok.134 Scholar-officials and learned elites, once
pillars of the Company state, no longer served its purposes.
The idea of conciliation was a relic of the Company’s ear-
lier history that proved inconvenient to it in its final incarnation.
As Trevelyan put it, “That age with its peculiar exigencies and
the policy which they were supposed to require, has long since
pas[sed].”135 By 1853, when parliament examined reputed experts
on the education question, Trevelyan’s view had long predomi-
nated. Wilson was the only witness, among several dozen, who
still espoused the idea of conciliation.136 Alexander Duff spoke
for the rest: This idea might have been appropriate to the age of
Warren Hastings and Lord Cornwallis, to “so new a conjuncture of
affairs,” when “we were … very nearly strangers in the country in
our capacity as Governors.” Now, however, “that sort of concilia-
tion which was in vogue in those early days” was positively dam-
aging: It served only to align the Company with a “small coterie”
of pandits and maulvis “who look down with contempt upon the
masses.”137
Mass education, meanwhile, succeeded more in theory than in
practice. Funding remained limited.138 Lord Auckland’s policy rep-
resented a step backward.139 Critics, in the spirit of Edmund Burke,
accused the Company of making a mockery of knowledge: now, by
framing grand plans for education that embraced but a “small portion
of the inhabitants.”140 One described these plans thus:

134
Jana Tschurenev, Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in
India (New Delhi, 2019), p. 233.
135
[Trevelyan], Draft Minute [c. 1833–4], f. 2r.
136
Horace Hayman Wilson, Testimony (5 Jul. 1853), in PP (1852–3), vol. 627-I, p. 265;
Horace Hayman Wilson, Testimony (18 Jul. 1853), in PP (1852–3), vol. 897, p. 6.
137
Alexander Duff, Testimony (6 Jun. 1853), in PP (1852–3), vol. 627-I, pp. 87–8. See
similarly, Thomas Erskine Perry, Testimony (26 May 1853), in ibid., p. 17.
138
“Sums Spent on Native Education, India, Since 1834,” PP (1854), vol. 29, p. 3.
139
Auckland, Bentinck’s permanent successor, nonetheless refused to revive the idea of
conciliation. Lord Auckland, Minute (24 Nov. 1839), in GIED, pp. 311–15.
140
“Education,” Meerut Universal Magazine 1 (1835), pp. 227–8.

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 Conclusion 197

[T]he crude instruction of a few hundred Hindoos and

Mahomedans, will only teach them to comprehend more clearly
their depressed and degraded condition—to feel more deeply …
the injustice and arrogance of their rulers, and … to direct the
physical force of their … countrymen to the downfal[l] of an
insatiably rapacious and foreign despotism.141

In 1854, upon what would prove to be the final renewal of the

Company’s charter, a final attempt was made to translate the idea of
mass education into reality. The “Intellectual Charter of India,” as
the plan of that year would come to be known, was inspired by the
recent parliamentary testimony, framed by the president of the Board
of Control, and endorsed by the governor-general and the directors.142
Mass education had come to loom large, if not in the Company’s bud-
get, then in its ideology. At a time when publics in Britain and India
were demanding more from their rulers, this idea provided a basis for
claims to good government. The upshot of decades of debate was ably
summarized by the directors in their dispatch announcing the new
plan: No subject “can have a stronger claim to our attention than …
education” – specifically, “the education of the mass of the people.”143

141
Robert M[ontgomery] Martin, Remarks on the East India Company’s Administration
over One Hundred Millions of British Subjects (Dublin, 1830), p. 25.
142
R. J. Moore, “The Composition of ‘Wood’s Education Despatch,’” English Historical
Review 80 (1965); R. J. Moore, Sir Charles Wood’s Indian Policy 1853–66 (Manchester,
1966), ch. 6.
143
Public Despatch to Bengal (19 Jul. 1854), in J. A. Richey, ed., Selections from
Educational Records, Part II: 1840–1859 (Calcutta, 1922), pp. 364, 389.

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 Epilogue

In 1869, eleven years after the Crown assumed the government

of British India, a eulogy of sorts appeared in the pages of the
fashionable Westminster Review: “The liberality of the Court of
Directors of the late East India Company, and their enlightened
readiness to promote every kind of scientific and literary explora-
tion in the East, supply one of their highest titles to fame, not to
say excite something akin to regret.”1 Just as the Review implied,
the new regime had backed away from the Company’s scientific
and humanistic commitments. Education was no longer a prior-
ity: The “Intellectual Charter” of 1854 was a dead letter.2 Nor, for
that matter, was the new India Office to revive the old policy of
sponsoring scholars. To quote one report, it deemed it generally
“inexpedient to expend the revenues of India in literary patron-
age.”3 If India’s British rulers still nurtured ideas about knowledge,
then they were ideas of a different kind, which had less to do with
cultivating either elites or publics than with asserting a technical
mastery over territory.4 Nostalgia for the Company may have been
rare, even in Britain. Among those who expressed it, however, the
reasoning of the Review remained common.
Modern readers are unlikely to be convinced by claims that
the Company was an enlightened promoter of knowledge. Nor has it

1
“Contemporary Literature,” Westminster Review new ser. 35 (1869), p. 264.
2
See Tim Allender, Ruling through Education: The Politics of Schooling in the
Colonial Punjab (Elgin, Ill., 2006).
3
“Report of the Library Committee” (1877), cited in Sir Malcolm C. C. Seton, The
India Office (London, 1926), p. 252.
4
See C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social
Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 10; Jon Wilson, India
Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London, 2016), ch. 9.

198

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 Epilogue 199

been the contention of this book that they ought to be. These claims
are still worth revisiting, however, in part because they so closely
resemble ones made by business corporations today. The history
of the Company in general commands attention because, now too,
relations between states and companies are in flux. Company states
may be unlikely to return anytime soon.5 To fixate on this nar-
row point, however, is to miss the broader one. In many spheres,
ranging from the military to infrastructure, the roles of states and
companies have increasingly overlapped.6 “Corporate responsibil-
ity,” “corporate governance,” even “corporate sovereignty” have
become common expressions. In this “knowledge age,” the “knowl-
edge sector” – including science, publishing, and education – has
emerged as perhaps the key site of corporate encroachment. What
lessons might participants in debates on this growing phenomenon
glean from earlier debates involving the Company?
At one level, the record of these debates reinforces the reign-
ing skepticism about corporate knowledge. Critics, from the time
of Warren Hastings onwards, made a number of now-familiar alle-
gations. Some charged the Company with seeking to monopolize
intellectual goods, much as it did material ones. Others accused it
of corrupting or destroying once-proud scholarly institutions. Many
claimed that its commercial character prevented it from being a
good steward or patron of knowledge. Yet these critics also tended to
appreciate something that their modern counterparts have ignored:
in a word, ideology. Running through the knowledge debates of the
Company was a general understanding that it was not its business, in
a narrow sense, but rather its legitimacy that was primarily at stake.
Attending not only to the practical or instrumental but also to the

5
Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman, Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made
the Modern World (Princeton, 2020), pp. 215–22.
6
Alfred D. Chandler and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Leviathans: Multinational Corporations
and the New Global History (Cambridge, 2005); Joshua Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty:
Law and Government Under Capitalism (Minneapolis, 2013); John Mikler, The
Political Power of Global Corporations (Cambridge, 2018); Swati Srivastava, Hybrid
Sovereignty in World Politics (Cambridge, 2022).

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 200 Epilogue

ideological aspects of corporate involvement with knowledge may

open up more thoroughgoing and effective lines of critique.
At the same time, to recognize that companies are not “merely
profit-maximizing machines” is to refute a basic assumption of their
modern critics. To understand them as partly political bodies with a
need for legitimacy is to allow that they might be made accountable
to outside constituencies.7 The Company’s enlightened promises were
enforceable, at least to some extent, when political classes in Britain
and India took them seriously. Scholars and friends of knowledge
accomplished more when they held the Company to these promises
than when they dismissed the possibility of its meeting them. To con-
ceptualize companies as purely economic in nature is thus to foreclose
a powerful means of reforming their behavior. A well-earned distrust
of companies is compatible with a sense that it may be in the best
interests of knowledge to expect more rather than less from them.
One overarching conclusion to be drawn from this book is
that the relations among states, companies, and knowledge are mal-
leable. The state-led knowledge order now threatened by business
corporations dates back no further than the nineteenth century. To
create this order, states had to contend with preexisting notions of
what would now be called corporate social responsibility.8 Company-
states benefited in the interim because they could play to knowl-
edge’s affinities to trade as well as sovereignty. Indeed, it was in
its dual character that the Company patronized scholars and, later,
sponsored mass education. From a future vantage point, the state’s
leading role in such activities – if not the state itself – may look
merely “intermezzate.”9 Along with the “historicity, flexibility, and

7
Timothy Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England
(London, 1998), pp. 1–2.
8
For this concept’s antecedents, see William A. Pettigrew and David Chan Smith, eds.,
A History of Socially Responsible Business, c. 1600–1950 (Basingstoke, 2017).
9
For this suggestion about the state, see Sophus A. Reinert, “Rivalry: Greatness in
Early Modern Political Economy,” in Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind, eds.,
Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire
(Oxford, 2014), p. 362.

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 Epilogue 201

contingency of any assumed distinctions between public and pri-

vate,” the Company’s debates attest to the long presence of ideas
about knowledge in corporate ideology.10 Such ideas may not inspire;
nevertheless, they instruct. Corporate involvement with knowledge
can be made to look very different than it does today.

10
Philip J. Stern, “English East India Company-State and The Modern Corporation: The
Google of Its Time?,” in Thomas Clarke, Justin O’Brien, and Charles R. T. O’Kelley,
eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation (Oxford, 2019), p. 85.

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 Bibliography

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Dalhousie University Archives, Halifax, Nova Scotia
James Dinwiddie Fonds

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Bombay General Volumes

National Archives of India, New Delhi, Delhi

Bengal Public Consultations
Bengal Public Proceedings
Home Miscellaneous
Proceedings of the College of Fort William
Report of the General Committee of Public Instruction: Bengal
Enclosures

National Library of India, Kolkata, West Bengal

Vincent-Francklin Correspondence

Tamil Nadu Archives, Chennai, Tamil Nadu

Madras Public Consultations

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Hyde Notebooks

West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata, West Bengal

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Straits Settlements Records
Singapore Resident’s Diary

Raffles Archives and Museum

Raffles Institution Records

United Kingdom
British Library, London, England
Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections
European Manuscripts
Barlow Papers
Charles Francis Greville Papers
Elphinstone Papers
Henry Wellesley Papers
Letters to H. H. Wilson
Macpherson Collection
Records of the East India Company Library
Tipu Sultan Papers
India Office Records
E/4: Correspondence with India
F/3: Draft Despatches Submitted to the Board
F/4: Board’s Collections
H: Home Miscellaneous
J: Records of the East India College, Haileybury
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Letters from Anand Rao Gaekwad and Fateh Singh Rao Gaekwad
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Ali Ibrahim Khan, Tarikh-i Chait Singh
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Blechynden Papers

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 204 Bibliography

Erskine Diary
Gibbon Papers
Hardwicke Papers
Hastings Papers
Holland House Papers
Leyden and Erskine Papers
Liverpool Papers
Mackintosh Papers
Vansittart Papers
Wellesley Papers

Cambridge South Asian Archive, Cambridge University,

Cambridge, England
Macpherson Family Papers (microfilm)

Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, England

Additional Manuscripts
Edmonstone Papers
Islamic Manuscripts
Letter to the Marqu[es]s Wellesley

Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, Aylesbury, England

Grenville Papers

Edinburgh University Library, Edinburgh, Scotland

Carlyle Papers
Ferguson Papers

Glasgow City Archives, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, Scotland

Bogle Papers

John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Manchester,

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Linnean Society of London, London, England

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Marquess of Hastings Papers

National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland

Irvine Papers
Letters of Baptist Missionaries
Leyden Papers
Melville Papers
Minto Papers
Walker of Bowland Papers

National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland

Buchanan Family Papers

Natural History Museum, London, England

Buchanan Manuscripts

Newcastle University Library, Newcastle, England

Trevelyan Papers

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Northern Ireland
Castlereagh Papers

Reelig House, Inverness-shire, Scotland

Fraser Papers

Staffordshire County Record Office, Stafford, England

Dartmouth Papers

The National Archives, Kew, England

Chatham Papers
Cornwallis Papers

University of Nottingham Libraries, Nottingham, England

Bentinck Papers

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 206 Bibliography

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Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Osborn Collection

Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland, Ohio

East India Company Manuscript Collection

Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Hastings Manuscripts

Ames Library of South Asia, University of Minnesota,

Minneapolis, Minnesota
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 Index

Abu al-Fazl, 33–4 Sanskrit College, 54–5, 81–2, 108, 127,

Abu Talib Khan, Mirza, 80 136, 171–2, 174
Adam, John, 172 Bencoolen, 180
Adam, Sir Frederick, 177 Bengali, 16, 40, 106, 112, 164–5
Adam, William, 194 Bentham, Jeremy, 95
Afaz ud-Din Husaini, 50 Bentinck, Lord William, 185–6, 188, 192–5
Agra College, 173, 181 Bhadralok, 164, 196
agriculture, 22, 57 Bhagalpur, 56–7
Ahmad, Maulvi, 51, 65 Bhagavad Gita, 34, 38, 40, 44, 46
Akbar, Emperor, 33–4, 77 Bhutan, 42–5, 135
Alexander, 77 Blackstone, William, 28
Ali Ibrahim Khan, 51–2, 65, 68, 71, 72, 80 Board of Control, 90, 100–2, 117, 118, 130,
Amsa ud-Din, 55 131, 170, 191, 197
Anderson, David, 39–40, 53, 66 Bogle, George, 42–5
Anderson, James, 144 Bolts, William, 36
Anglicist-Orientalist controversy, 183–5 Bombay, 30, 91, 107, 142, 162, 165–6, 177–9,
Arabia, 110, 112, 113 182
Arabic, 48, 50, 112, 150, 155, 184, 190 Native Education Society, 164
Arcot, Nawab of. See Carnatic:nawab of Native School Society, 178
Armenian, 113 observatory, 140
Asiatic Society of Bengal, 63, 74, 85, 87, 89, botany. See natural history
91, 126, 139 Brahmans, 65, 82, 130, 133, 159–64, 173,
astronomy, 54, 61, 105, 108, 140, 144–5 175, 178, 186
Auckland, Lord, 196 Briggs, John, 146–7
Aurangzeb, Emperor, 83 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre, 37
Australia, 149 Brown, David, 98, 106–7
Awadh, 188 Bruce, John, 90–1, 156
nawab of, 49, 52, 88 Buchanan, Claudius, 98, 106–7, 112, 113,
116, 120, 159
Bacon, Francis, 37 Buchanan, Francis, 118, 121, 147, 148,
Baghdad, pasha of, 114 154–5, 158, 163
Bangalore, botanical garden, 140 Burdwan, 55, 66
Barelli, 128 Burke, Edmund, 29, 32–3, 64, 67–9, 87
Barlow, Sir George, 118, 128, 144 Burrow, Reuben, 54
Baroda, 160
Barrackpore, 119, 137 Calcutta
Basra, resident, 159 Botanic Garden, 77, 83, 89, 139–40, 144
Bay of Bengal, 16, 39 Court of Requests, 147
Bayly, C. A., 13–14 Madrasa, 55–6, 60, 65, 69, 73, 79–80,
Benares, 38, 44, 51–2, 71, 91, 131, 159 108, 127, 171–2, 174, 195
resident, 67, 82 mint, 148

238

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 Index 239

Sanskrit College, 173 Danish, 106

School Book Society, 137, 164, 165 Dartmouth, Lord, 100, 102
School Society, 164 de Staël, Madame, 126
Supreme Court, 27, 48, 74, 192 Deccan, 146, 177
Calicut, 161 Delhi, 5, 38, 124, 186
Cambridge school of Indian history, 13 College, 173, 181, 184, 185, 187, 189
Cambridge, University of, 103, 125 resident, 159, 186
cannibals, 39 schools, 174
Carey, William, 106, 114, 142 Deshasthas, 160
Carnatic, 36, 56, 160 despotism, 191, 197
Nawab of, 72, 160 dhobas, 16–18
caste, 132, 135, 162–4, 173, 175, 178, 187 dictionaries, 16–18, 32, 112, 142, 158, 161,
Castlereagh, Lord, 100–2, 118 164–5
Ceylon, 112, 161 Dinwiddie, James, 105–6, 109
Chait Singh, Raja, 44, 45, 51–2 diplomacy, 42, 110–11, 141
Chambers, Robert, 48, 59–60 diwani, 24, 25, 56
Chambers, William, 73–4 Dow, Alexander, 47, 72
Champion, Joseph, 71 dubashes, 16–18, 160
Charter Act of 1793, 87, 90, 93 Duff, Alexander, 188, 196
Charter Act of 1813, 106 Duncan, Jonathan, 67, 81–2, 162, 165
section forty-three, 125–38, 182 Dundas, Henry, Lord Melville, 90–3, 101, 105
Charter Act of 1833, 190–3 Dutch East India Company, 39
China, 42, 44, 45, 83, 91, 106, 135, 167
Christians (Indian), 161, 187 East India College. See Haileybury College
civil society, 176 Edinburgh, 39
Cleveland, Augustus, 56–8 University of, 71
Clive, Lord, 140 Edmonstone, Neil Benjamin, 111
Clive, Robert, 26, 36 education, 125–38, 163–97
Cohn, Bernard, 12 Egypt, 109–10
Colebrooke, Henry Thomas, 128–9, 142, 157 electrical experiments, 72
Colebrooke, Sir Edward, 186 Ellis, Francis Whyte, 142
College of Fort St. George, 139, 144, 161, 176 Elphinstone, Lord, 177
College of Fort William, 94–122, 124, 139, Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 141, 179
143–4, 149–52, 159, 165, 189 Enlightenment, 37–40
colonization (settlement), 100 Scottish, 70, 176
commercialization, 5, 31 Erskine, William, 142, 163
Compagnie des Indes. See French East India ethics, 112
Company Eton College, 125
company-state (concept), 7, 199 Evangelicals, 98, 100, 106–7, 124, 133–4,
conquest, 23, 35, 36, 45, 57, 79, 87, 97, 109, 159, 183
111, 122, 124, 134, 145, 155, 165 Examiner’s Office, 170, 174, 182
constitution (of the Company), 7
Cornwallis system, 79 fables, 112
Cornwallis, Lord, 62–3, 77–87, 118 Ferguson, Adam, 71, 74–6
corruption, 60, 67–9, 77–86 Firdausi, 71
Crawfurd, John, 181 Foucault, Michel, 9–12, 35
Crown, 6, 24, 97, 156, 171, 198 Fox, Charles James, 30
Curzon, Lord, 95 Francis, Philip, 27, 60, 66–7, 69
Francklin, William, 154
dakshina, 177 French East India Company, 76
Dalrymple, Alexander, 89 Frissell, E. S., 159

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 240 Index

Garden Reach, 108 ideology, 2–3

General Committee of Public Instruction, India Museum and Oriental Library, 90,
172–5, 185, 188–90, 195 119–20, 152–5
geography, 61, 89, 143 information, 14
German, 167 order, 14, 19
Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i, 31–2, Institution for Promoting the Natural
46–8, 51, 66 History of India, 118–19
Ghulam Yahya Khan, 50–1 Intellectual Charter of India, 197, 198
Gibbon, Edward, 77 intellectual history, 9–11
Gilchrist, John, 21, 73, 92, 112, 121, 150 intelligence, 14
Gillray, James, 110 Ireland, 105
Gladwin, Francis, 83 Irvine, Francis, 142, 148–9, 158, 162, 163
go-betweens, 15 Isaac Newton, Sir, 54
Gohad, 52–3
rana of, 52–3 Jackson, Randle, 151
Gordon, Peter, 155 Jacobinism, 100
Gosains, 135 Jagannatha Tarkapanchanan, 81
Government House, 114, 116 Jaunpur, 128
grammars, 37, 40, 112 Java, 148
Grant, Charles, 97–8, 106–7, 122, 133–4, Jenkinson, Charles, Lord Liverpool, 59
151 Johnson, Richard, 38–9
Grant, Charles (son), 105 Johnson, Samuel, 21, 32, 37–8
Greater India, 19 Jones, Sir William, 21, 37, 62–3, 74, 76,
Greek, 48 84–7, 167
Grotius, Hugo, 151 Justinian, 63
Gujarat, 56
Gurkhas, 137 Kanhardas, 88
Gwalior, 52–3 Karam Ali, 31
maharaja of, 52–3 Kashmir, 56
Kashmiris, 187
Hager, Joseph, 92 Kasinath Sharma, 55, 81
Haileybury College, 102–3, 149–52 Kayasths, 187
Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey, 40, 41, 49, 66, King of Clubs, 126
68 Kinnaird, Douglas, 152
Hamilton, Alexander, 84 knowledge
Hastings, Marquess of. See Moira, Lord age, 199
Hastings, Warren colonial, 12–13, 19
acquittal, 88, 91 communities, 14
idea of conciliation, 18, 21–61 debates, 9, 11, 19, 199
impeachment, 1–2, 64–70 economies, 10
in retirement, 89, 98–9, 104, 131–6, 153 enterprises, 3
Hertfordshire, 102 entrepreneurs, 15
Heyne, Benjamin, 140, 144, 159 history of ideas of, 3, 9–16
Himalayas, 141 order, 200
Hindustani, 112, 150 politics of, 3, 13
history, 51, 61, 88, 143, 146–7, 154–6 revolutions, 10
Hooghly River, 16 sector, 2, 199
husbandry, 57 Koenig, Johann, 74
Hyderabad, resident, 39, 80, 159 Komatis, 161
hydrography, 61, 89 Kopf, David, 12

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 Index 241

Krishnachandra, Raja, 54–5 Marathas, 53, 117, 124, 137, 147

Kyd, Robert, 83 peshwa, 147, 159, 177
Marathi, 110, 112
Ladakh, 44 mathematics, 54
Lamb, Charles, 156 maulvis, 45, 49–51, 55–6, 85, 86, 164, 174,
Lambton, William, 145 175, 186, 190, 194, 196
Latin, 115, 125 Maurice, Thomas, 91, 105
law, 41–2, 49–52, 68–9, 81, 85–6, 151 medicine, 54, 123
Leyden, John, 123, 126, 140, 142, 143, 148, microhistory, 16
163 Mill, James, 156, 174–5, 182
Lhasa, 44 Mill, John Stuart, 182
Lucknow, 38, 88 Minto, Lord, 120, 127–9, 147–8
resident, 159 Mir Sher Ali Afsus, 112
Lumsden, Matthew, 143 Mirza Abu’l Hasan, 155
missionaries, 106, 133, 137
Macao, 113 Moira, Lord, 132–8, 141, 166, 172
Macartney, Lord, 91, 105 Monboddo, Lord, 39–40
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 126, 169, Montesquieu, 37, 77
190–5 Mubarak ud-Daula, Nawab, 48
Mackenzie, Colin, 140, 143, 146, 153–4, Mudaliars, 161
158, 160, 162 Mughals, 4–5, 25, 31, 33–4, 47, 48, 51, 52,
Mackenzie, Holt, 173, 185, 191 56, 108, 124
Mackintosh, Sir James, 105, 126, 142, 159 Muhammad Bey al-Alfi, 155
Macnaghten, William Hay, 194 Muhammad Israel, 80
Macpherson, David, 92 Muhammad Reza Khan, 26, 47–51, 66–7, 73
Macpherson, James, 72 Mulla Firuz bin Kawus, 165–6
Macpherson, John, 70–8 Munro, Sir Thomas, 176
Madras, 60, 62, 72, 91, 107, 123, 142, 161, munshis, 114, 139
175–7, 182 Murshidabad, 66
botanical gardens, 89, 144 Mustafa, Haji, 46–7, 66
Committee of Public Instruction, Mysore, 97, 111–12, 124, 160
175–7 resident, 146
natural history museum, 140, 144 surveys, 111, 140, 145–6, 158
observatory, 61, 140, 145
School Book Society, 163 Nabakrishna, Raja, 68
Maecenas, 68 nabob controversy, 36–7, 87
mahzarnamas, 50, 59 Nadia, 54–5, 65, 128
Majd ud-Din, 49, 56, 65, 69, 73, 79–80 Napoleon Bonaparte, 109–10
Malabar, 161–2 native informants, 14, 19
Malay, 181 natural history, 43, 44, 61, 89, 118–19,
Malayalam, 162 139–40, 144, 161
Malays, 113, 115, 180 natural philosophy, 143
Malcolm, John, 141, 147, 179 Nepal, 44, 135
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 150, 151 news-writers, 30
Mamadi Venkayya, 161 Nicobar Islands, 39
Manila, 76 Niyogis, 160
manufactures, 57, 89
manuscripts, 54, 111, 119–20, 153, 154, Oriental Repository. See India Museum and
159–60 Oriental Library
maps, 42, 44 orientalism, 11, 13, 123, 189

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 242 Index

Orientalist-Anglicist controversy, 12 Ramalocana Kanthavarna, 74

Orme, Robert, 41–2, 89 Ramkamal Sen, 16–18, 164–5
Ossian, 72 Rammohan Roy, 174
Oxford, University of, 37, 103 razinamas, 65, 66, 88
Red Sea, 19
Palmer, William, 52–3, 84, 88 Regulating Act of 1773, 27, 29, 41, 49
Pandarams, 161 Rennell, James, 26, 42, 61, 89, 105
pandits, 17, 42, 45, 49, 55, 65, 82, 85, 86, 88, Robertson, William, 77–8
113, 114, 130–2, 136, 139, 159–64, Roebuck, Thomas, 150
174, 175, 186, 190, 194, 196 Romanticism, 124
paramountcy, 18, 141, 167, 169 Royal Asiatic Society, 156–7
parliament, 31, 32, 58, 60, 64, 87, 101, 125, Royal Society, 43
126, 128, 129, 167, 191, 192, 196 Russell, Patrick, 92
Parsis, 164, 165 ryots, 176
Passanha, Joseph, 162
Peacock, Thomas Love, 156 Saharanpur, botanical garden, 140
Pearl River Delta, 19 Said, Edward, 12–13, 35
Persia, 112, 113, 141, 155 Salim Allah, 47
Persian, 52, 53, 83, 111, 112, 150, 155, Sanskrit, 84, 112, 142, 158–61, 184, 189, 190
165–6, 184, 187, 190 Schlegel, Augustus, 167
Peru, 76 scientific instruments, 44
Peshawar, 141 Scotland, 148, 149
philosophy, 48, 54, 78, 151 Scott, David, 98, 105, 117
Pindaris, 137 Scott, Jonathan, 66, 150
Pitt, William, 58, 79, 101 Scott, Walter, 147
Pitt’s India Act, 29, 78–9, 90 Scottish, 147
Plassey, Battle of, 7 self-rule, 176, 192
poetry, 22, 51, 54, 71, 72, 74, 135, 165–6 Serampore, 106, 142
police, 109 Mission Press, 139
political economy, 28, 93, 141, 148, 150 Shore, Sir John, Lord Teignmouth, 64, 84,
political thought, history of, 9–11 88, 107, 122
Poona, 177 Singapore, 179–82
Hindu College, 177 Institution, 179–81
residency, 147, 159 Skye, Isle of, 71
Price, Joseph, 30 Smith, Adam, 28–9
Prinsep, Henry Thoby, 190, 193–5 Smith, Robert Percy “Bobus,” 125–7,
Prinsep, James, 190 129–30
proprietors, 151 South Park Street Cemetery, 62
public credit, 75–6 sovereignty
public opinion, 18, 46, 135, 167–8, 170, 175, commercial, 7–8, 105, 155
176, 185–7, 193, 197 composite, 6, 28
Pufendorf, Samuel, 151 corporate, 199
kingly, 104
Radhakanta Tarkavagisa, 88 Mughal ideas of, 4–6
Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford, 179–81 scaffolding of, 117
Raj, the, 8 shared and layered, 4
Rajmahal, 57 shares in, 5
Rajputana, 137 territorial, 104, 121, 132, 167
Rajputs, 162 unitary, 28
Ram Raz, 164 St. Helena, botanical garden, 89

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 Index 243

statistics, 148 Tuanko Attil, 113

Stewart, Charles, 120, 150 Turner, Samuel, 44, 74
Stewart, John, 43 Tytler, John, 194
Strait of Malacca, 180
Straits Settlements, 182 Utilitarianism, 124, 183
sulh-i kull, 33–4
Sumatra, 113 vakils, 44, 52–4
surveying, 111, 140–1, 145–6, 154, 158 Vellalars, 161
Sutlej River, 141 Vennelakanti Subbarao, 161, 163
Swedish, 39 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie.
See Dutch East India Company
Tafazzul Husain Khan, 52–4, 65, 80, 88 village teachers, 132–3
Tamil, 161 vocabularies, 142
Tanjore, 160
Telugu, 161 Wales, Prince of, 80
textiles, 23 Walker, Alexander, 161–2
Thiruverkadu Muttiah, 161 Wallich, Nathaniel, 139, 144
Thompson, George, 64, 66–7, 84 Warden, Francis, 178–9
Thornton, Robert, 128 Wellesley, Henry, 105
Tibet, 42–5, 74, 76, 91, 135 Wellesley, Lord, 94–122, 140, 142, 149–52
Tidore, 76 Wellington, Duke of, 94
Timur Shah Durrani, 76 Westminster School, 22
Tipu Sultan, 87, 111, 165 Wilford, Francis, 159
library of, 111, 119–20, 155 Wilkins, Charles, 34, 40, 66, 89, 130–3, 153
Tirhut, 128 Wilks, Mark, 146, 147, 160
Tod, James, 162 Wilson, Horace Hayman, 158, 173, 190,
Travancore, 112, 159 194–6
Trevelyan, Charles Edward, 183–90, 196
Tribonian, 63 Zain ud-Din ‘Ishqi, 74
Trollope, Anthony, 184 zamindars, 27, 45, 82

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