Abstract
The end of the eighteenth century is commonly considered crucial in the transition from the gentleman-amateur tradition based on private initiative in science in Britain (but also elsewhere in Europe) to one based on organized public instruction and research. This story is normally told as a purely European one, which then affected the rest of the world inasmuch as this newly institutionalized form of science was progressively deployed in the service of European empires and their hegemonic designs. As we shall see in this chapter, however, the College of Fort William in Calcutta, established in the context of the Napoleonic wars, was to be the locus of a crucial reorientation in the conception of science and government concomitant with a change in the nature both of the ruling elites in India and in Britain, and of society from agrarian to industrial. The college was to partake in this transition, whereby science became organized so as to serve as the grammar of an increasingly globalized industrial society, as its ideology, its set of rules, and, indeed, its working metaphysics.
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Notes
British Library, Burney Collection, vol. 841: The London Chronicle, LXXII, no. 5653 (10 November to 13 November 1792), p. 461. See also Michael T. Davis, ed., London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002).
This thesis is most convincingly developed in Harry Thomas Dickinson, ed., Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan, 1989).
For a general history of this period, see Clive Emsley, Britain and French Revolution (London: Longman, 2000);
John Harold Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950);
and Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1991, 2nd edn).
See, for instance, his speech in Parliament to defend continuing the war with France in 1794, quoted fully in William Torrens McCullagh Torrens, The Marquess Wellesley, Architect of Empire: An Historic Portrait (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880), pp. 101–8.
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of J.B. Fortesque, Drop-more Papers, vol. II, p. 126 (August 1791), quoted in Iris Butler, The Eldest Brother. The Marquess Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington’s Eldest Brother (London: Hodder & Sloughton, 1973), p. 68.
Walter Scott Seton-Karr, Selections from the Calcutta Gazette, 5 volumes (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1864), vol. III, pp. 201–2.
The resemblance in structure and content of Wellesley’s note to Burke’s speech when opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings is too great to be fortuitous. See Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. VI, ed. Peter James Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 280 et seq.
Ibid., p. 326. Cf. Burke’s observation that ‘the India Company however still preserved traces of its original mercantile character; and the whole exterior order of its service is still carried on upon a mercantile plan and mercantile principles. In fact, it is a State in disguise of a Merchant, a great public office in disguise of a Countinghouse.’ Opening of Impeachment, 15 February 1788, in idem, op. cit., vol. VI, p. 283. The rule of three and some knowledge of merchant’s accounts was all that was required of aspiring candidates to the Company’s service. See Anthony J. Farrington, The Records of the East India College Haileybury & Other Institutions (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1976), p. 4.
On munshis, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Making of a Munshi’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 24, no. 2 (2004), pp. 61–72.
For the development of Antiquarianism in Britain, see John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
and Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Ham-bledon & London, 2004).
See, for instance, Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).
William Jardine Proudfoot, Biographical Memoir of James Dinwiddie LLD Astronomer in the British Embassy to China, 1792–1793 (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1866), pp. 98–9;
See Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), p. 18.
John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Biography (London: Macmillan, 1933), p. 108.
See also Dan Lloyd LeMahieu, The Mind of William Paley: A Philosopher of his Age (Lincoln, NE & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1976).
David Owen, English Philanthropy 1660–1960 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 105; For a clear and unambiguous expression of this philosophy, see Humphry Davy, ‘Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, in a Course of Lectures for the Board of Agriculture; Delivered between 1802 and 1812’, Lecture I: ‘It is from the higher classes of the community, from the proprietors of land,— those who are fitted by their education to form enlightened plans, and, by their fortunes, to carry such plans into execution: it is from these that the principles of improvement must flow to the labouring classes of the community; and in all classes the benefit is mutual; for the interest of the tenantry must be always likewise the interest of the proprietors of the soil. The attention of the labourer will be more minute, and he will exert himself more for improvement, when he is certain he cannot deceive his employer, and has a conviction of the extent of his knowledge. Ignorance in the possessor of an estate, of the manner in which it ought to be treated, generally leads either to inattention or injudicious practices in the tenant or the bailiff. ‘Agrum pessimum mulctari cujus Dominus non docet sed audit villicum’. In idem, The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart. ed. John Davy, 9 volumes (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1839– 40), vol. VII, p. 197.
Morris Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution 1799–1844 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 78.
Davy, op. cit., vol. II, p. 323. The epithet ‘wizard experimentalist’ is taken from Roy Porter, op. cit., p. 353. See also David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power (Oxford & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992).
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© 2007 Kapil Raj
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Raj, K. (2007). British Orientalism in the Early Nineteenth Century, or Globalism versus Universalism. In: Relocating Modern Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625310_5
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