In 1875, the civil servants and scholars George Birdwood and Clements Markham both submitted proposals to the India Office regarding the cataloguing and arrangement of its archive. These proposals had in common that they both involved the records of the early modern East India Company, and evinced an understanding of the archive as both a privileged repository of historical artefacts and a technology of imperial government. However, they articulated divergent ideologies of empire, ways of conceptualising the past and its materials, and understandings of the ways in which information and knowledge should be mobilised in an imperial context. This article analyses the two proposals in the light of their proposers' biographies, their politics, and their institutional and disciplinary commitments; and it notes each proposal's contribution to the production of a historiography which valorized early modern navigators, traders and mercantile communities as progenitors of the British imperial state. The proposals' troubled bureaucratic history emerges as an expression of conflicts of practice, ideology and administrative cultures within the India Office, and more broadly within the imperialisms of the time.
In late 1837 and early 1838 the British imperial government was preparing for an empire-wide transition from bonded to nominally free labor. This article builds upon recent scholarship that promotes a holistic, global approach to this transition, by narrowing the temporal frame and expanding the spatial. We emphasize interconnectivity and simultaneity rather than chronological succession, and we analyze the governance, rather than the experience, of this transition. Our approach is founded upon analysis of correspondence passing from every British colonial site through the Colonial Office in 1837–1838. We suggest that this hub of imperial government sought to reconcile the persistence of different conditions in each colony with the pursuit of three overarching policy objectives: redistributing labor globally; distinguishing between the moral debts owed to different kinds of bonded labor, and managing tradeoffs between security, economy, and morality. We conclude that the governance of the transition to free labor is best conceived as an assemblage of material and expressive elements of different spatial scales, whose interactions were complex and indeterminate. Through these specific governmental priorities and a particular communications infrastructure, these elements were brought into critical alignment at this moment to shape a significant transition in relations between people across the world.
In the 1800s it was not only merchants from British India who participated in the expanding trade with China, but also those from the princely states who sought to profit from the increased demand for cash crops. Smuggling—just as most commercial activities unsanctioned by the Bombay Government were labelled—was a source of great anxiety for the colonial authorities in India, especially in the western territories. This article looks at smuggling activity in and around the Bombay Presidency during the first half of the nineteenth century. It will assert that local ‘smuggling’ was, in many cases, the continuation of pre-colonial trade relations, labelled as illegal as a result of ill-defined boundaries and ambiguous legal restrictions. In fact, the success of these activities was less a reflection of widespread criminality than structural weaknesses in the colonial administration. Evidence suggests that British anxieties over smuggling had a greater effect on the political economy of western India than the actual financial damage caused by the illicit trade. The coordinated subversive smuggling network, ultimately, did not exist, and held power largely as a figment of the imperial imagination.
Ruling the World tells the story of how the largest and most diverse empire in history was governed, everywhere and all at once. Focusing on some of the most tumultuous years of Queen Victoria's reign, Alan Lester, Kate Boehme and Peter Mitchell adopt an entirely new perspective to explain how the men in charge of the British Empire sought to manage simultaneous events across the globe. Using case studies including Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, India and Afghanistan, they reveal how the empire represented a complex series of trade-offs between Parliament's, colonial governors', colonists' and colonised peoples' agendas. They also highlight the compromises that these men made as they adapted their ideals of freedom, civilization and liberalism to the realities of an empire imposed through violence and governed in the interests of Britons.
To this point, nineteenth-century Bombay – including its urban development, economy and population – has most often been analysed in relation to the city's position within British imperial, and overseas maritime, networks. In contrast, this article calls into question established scholarly definitions of ‘colonial’ and ‘princely’ spaces in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, through an in-depth examination of Bombay's socio-economic ties with wider Indian networks. It focuses on connections that stretched across colonial borders and into the princely states, suggesting that both the city's economy and its business elite were rooted in cross-border Indian capital networks. It further highlights the contributions of Indian princes, their states and populations to the development of urban culture in Bombay.
In India, as in much of the world, the 19th century witnessed the emergence of urban capitalist classes, effected by the rapid growth of global mercantile capitalism and, later, industrial manufacturing. As a colonial city, Bombay—like its eastern counterpart, Calcutta—developed two connected, but distinct business communities: one, a European community with foreign, imperial connections, and the other, an Indian community with roots in long-standing regional networks. In Bombay, the latter took the form of a class known as the “Merchant Princes,” who capitalized on long-standing commercial traditions in western India and their ability to command both Indian and colonial networks to establish themselves as commercial powerhouses. These commercial networks and patterns of behavior, established before the arrival of the British, had an indelible impact on the character of Indian business in colonial Bombay. The business community brought such traditions with them when they migrated to Bombay at the end of the 18th century and used them to build the famous mercantile firms of the early 19th century. The Indian business elite likewise built collaborative links within their own community to expand their business interests; when barriers erected by the colonial establishment sought to limit their expansion, Indian businessmen used the resources at their disposal (both in the Indian hinterland and within the city itself) to circumvent them. Class identity similarly began to emerge as they cooperatively campaigned for particular agendas, intended to improve the fortunes of the entire community. They fought for greater influence in the Bombay government—in line with the wealth they then commanded—and used their financial resources to mold the physical and intellectual landscape of the city in their favor.
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