Abstract
This book is about the idea of British India and the works of Sir John Malcolm. Famous as a hawkish soldier-diplomat from the time of the Napoleonic Wars until his death in 1833, Malcolm was also an influential orientalist, a pioneering historian of the East India Company, and one of its most important ideologues. The unequaled range of his interests and the sophistication of his historical analysis of Britain’s place in South Asia make him the most comprehensive contemporary commentator on the drive toward imperial expansion after the trial of Warren Hastings in the era of the French Revolution and beyond.1 By examining Sir John Malcolm as a key thinker about the formation of British India before the uprising of 1857, this study sheds light on the connection between intellectual activity and the day-to-day development of imperial rule in this period of haphazard and rapid empire building.
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Notes
See, for example, Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 63–98.
Sir John Malcolm, The Life of Robert Lord Clive, 3 vols. (London: Murray, 1836); hereafter Clive.
M. E. Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan, 1798– 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 16–17.
Edward Ingram, In Defence of British India: Great Britain in the Middle East 1775–1842 (London: Frank Cass, 1984), p. 80.
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 144–45.
Sir John Malcolm, The Political History of India (London, 1826), II, p. cclxvii;
In a letter to Lord William Cavendish Bentinck of January 24, 1828, he quoted Burke, referring to him as “that wonderful man.” C. H. Philips (ed.), The Correspondence of Lord William Bentinck, Governor General of India, 1828–1835 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 7;
He often stated in conversation that Burke and Robert Burns were his favorite authors, J. W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir John Malcolm, G. C. B., Late Envoy to Persia, and Governor of Bombay: Late Envoy to Persia, and Governor of Bombay; from Unpublished Letters and Journals (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1856), II, pp. 229, 603.
John Malcolm, “An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Infantry, from its first formation in 1757 to 1796, when the present Regulations took place: together with a Detail of the Services on which several Battalions have been employed in that period. By the Late Captain Williams, of the Invalid Establishment of the Bengal Army” Quarterly Review, XVIII(1818), p. 409.
Peers, Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India 1819–1835 (London: Tauris, 1995), pp. 36, 64.
Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India; Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830. Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001).
Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780 to 1830(London: Longman, 1989), pp. 85–86, 115.
S. Collini, D. Winch, and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 96.
The most compelling recent exposition of this argument is Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 125;
See also Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 196;
And Anindyo Roy, Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Routledge, 2005), p.78.
Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s the History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 123.
James Mill, The History of British India, William Thomas (ed.) (London, 1975), p. xxiv.
Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 32; Rajan, Under Western Eyes, p. 243.
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) pp. 3, 11, 103.
Phillip Constable, “Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-century India,” The Scottish Historical Review, 86, (2007), 278–313, p. 279.
These dimensions have been well considered in recent studies of the mideighteenth century by Robert Travers and Jon E. Wilson. Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Jon E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Burton Stein, Sir Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 198.
John Kaye, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 331.
C. A. Bayly, “The British Military-Fiscal State and Indigenous Resistance in India 1750–1820,” in L. Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 324.
R. Pasley, Send Malcolm! The Life of Major-General Sir John Malcolm, 1769– 1833 (London: Basca, 1982), p. 4; Kaye, Malcolm.
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© 2010 Jack Harrington
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Harrington, J. (2010). Introduction. In: Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117501_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117501_1
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