Colesworthy Grant's Portraits of Colonial Society in India: Lithography, Liberalism, and the Global Making of Middle‐Class Culture, c. 1833–57

Abstract

The bourgeois class is international: it must necessarily wield across national differences. 1 (Antonio Gramsci, 1918) Art's role in the making of middle-class culture over the long nineteenth century has primarily been studied through a national or European lens. Yet middle-class 'culture' in the broad, Thompsonian sense of the word was not formed within Europe and then exported, but rather emerged coterminously and transnationally across a world increasingly integrated by European imperialism, the penetration of global capitalism, and technologies affording faster transportation and communication. 2 The homogeneities distinguishing middle-class culture across various national contexts reflect a material history of global integration, as transnational material conditions afforded shared forms of cultural practice, experience, and representation. 3 At the same time, patterns of homogenization indicate the severe asymmetries of power that structured nineteenth-century globalization, with 'hegemonic' forms of middleclass culture rooted in, and reconfiguring in turn, local distinctions of rank, race, and gender. 4 To explore how art histories focused on the national making of middle-class culture might be decentred and placed within this transnational framework, this article explores a case study from nineteenth-century Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), tracing how the changing class interests of British society in India determined fraught negotiations over the representation of race and gender in South Asia's colonial print culture. 5 This art-historical account is grounded in the material history of global integration by foregrounding the relationship of artistic practice to a technological force driving nineteenth-century globalization: lithographic printing.Lithography fundamentally reshaped the international field within which print culture was produced and consumed during the first half of the nineteenth century. Named after its ability to multiply marks made directly onto stone, by 1820 the medium had spread from Bavaria, where it was invented in 1796-98, to territories across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. 6 Liberating print culture from a dependence on metropolitan investment and established traditions of artistic expertise, lithography flourished within globalizing commercial and scientific networks, reshaping visual public culture within so-called peripheral, provincial, or colonial territories. 7 Cities like Calcutta became nodes within an international circulation of illustrated periodicals, magazines, scientific manuals, and diverse visual ephemera. As James Gelvin and Nile Green have demonstrated in modern Islamic contexts, this artistic culture was promoted in turn by the expansion of steam