This article examines the meanings and controversies surrounding sales by public auction in British colonial Calcutta and in London during the last decades of the eighteenth century. For Britons living in Calcutta's European sector, auctions were essential for acquiring imported European items that granted a sense of gentility and Britishness abroad. Public sales in Calcutta provided Britons with goods that instilled the fantasy of living in a British geography in India. However, by the last quarter of the century, ‘sales by hammer’ throughout the colonial world carried association with corruption, cruelty, and orientalization in the metropolitan imagination. In Britain, textual and visual accounts circulated of Europeans transforming into debauched ‘nabobs’, of the horrors of American slave auctions, and of the British East India Company's use of public sales to defraud and abuse prominent Indians. For some metropolitan observers, sales by hammer were a deceitful means of seizing property and status from the traditional landed elite of India and Britain. British critics feared that colonial auction practices could become common in Britain and could lead to the upending of social hierarchization and the normalization of slavery in the metropolis.
This article examines how the British landscape artists Thomas and William Daniell composed and circulated aquatints depicting the European sector of Calcutta in 1786‐8. The Daniells' streetscapes challenged metropolitan stereotypes and condemnation of Europeans in India. During the eighteenth century Britons described the otherness of both Indians and the lower orders of Britain in terms of oriental qualities. These aquatints presented visual equivalences between the Britishness and orientalness of Calcutta and London. By mystifying dissimilarities between London and Calcutta, the Daniells' aquatints suggested to viewers that the two cities and their populations were intertwined branches of a global British social landscape.
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