301

Summaries

A view from afar: India in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes

Anthony Strugnell
Raynal’s history of European trade and colonisation in the Orient and
the New World was a best-seller throughout Europe and North America
in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Raynal and the most
significant contributor to his history, Diderot, neither of whom had any
direct experience of the Indian subcontinent, nevertheless conveyed an
authoritative account of the history, culture and contemporary situation
there. They did so principally by drawing on published works, particu-
larly British ones, while incorporating their own ideological and geo-
political perspectives. The resulting accounts, in their attempts to
reconcile the principles of the French Enlightenment with French
interests in the region, heavily compromised by the defeat in the Seven
Years War, offer a necessarily distant, yet strongly articulated, vision of
India which contrasts with the British one drawn from direct experience.

British orientalism, Indo-Persian historiography and the politics of

global knowledge
Claire Gallien
This essay is a study of the narratives on Indian history translated by
eighteenth-century British orientalists from Persian into English. Indeed,
following British expansion in India in the second half of the eighteenth
century, the directors of the East India Company started to commission
works and translations that would help them set up a colonial
administration. Thus, a new corpus of Persian narratives on the history
and administration of India, collected and translated by British
orientalists with the help of local scholars, was produced. This essay
challenges Said’s presentation of orientalism as a monolithic form of
knowledge and highlights the dialogical and polyphonic nature of the
corpus, resulting in the production of hybrid narratives. Additionally, it
forces us to reconsider the concept of hybridity as defined by Bhabha in
colonial contexts. Indeed, it reveals that orientalism could be based on
local sources and rely on Eastern scholars while reinforcing, rather than
disrupting, British authority and rule.
302 Summaries

Globalising the Goths: ‘The siren shores of Oriental literature’ in John

Richardson’s A Dictionary of Persian, Arabic, and English (1777-1780)
Javed Majeed
This essay examines John Richardson’s ‘A Dissertation of the languages,
literature, and manners of Eastern nations’, prefixed to his A Dictionary of
Persian, Arabic, and English. Richardson’s opening out of these languages to
each other forms the background to his reflections on the cultural and
political origins of ‘Englishness’. His revisionary global narrative of the
‘Gothic’ as a political category that underpins distinctively English free-
doms and institutions locates ‘Englishness’ in a world historical context
of overlapping and interconnected institutions and cultures. This nar-
rative includes a transcultural conception of romance as a mode of
writing which aims to broaden his readers’ cultural horizons beyond the
Hellenistic legacy of European civilisation. His arguments are placed
against the backdrop of wider debates in Britain and India in the
eighteenth century, and are related to his own complex subject position
as a Scotsman whose class identity was fluid.

‘Voyage of conception’: John Keats and India

Deirdre Coleman
Towards the end of his life, ‘straining at particles of light in the midst of a
great darkness’, John Keats went searching for an alternative belief
system. Rejecting the gloom of Christianity’s ‘system of Salvation’, he
formulated his ‘vale of Soul-making’, a conception which invoked as part
of its definition other world religions, including the ‘Hindoos’ and ‘their
Vishnu’. This essay argues that some of Keats’s key aesthetic concepts –
including ‘negative capability’ and its closely related paradox of ‘diligent
indolence’ – were all touched by his understanding of Indian thought.
Keats’s circle also included two great champions of India, the literary
critic William Hazlitt and the radical journalist Leigh Hunt, whose
newspaper The Examiner carried notices and reviews of Keats’s poetry
alongside reports of Britain’s ‘Indian atrocities’.

‘The country chosen of my heart’: the comic cosmopolitanism of The

Orientalist, or, electioneering in Ireland, a tale, by myself
Sonja Lawrenson
Published in 1820, The Orientalist, or, Electioneering in Ireland, a tale, by myself
delineates the adventures of the ‘orientalist’, Stuart Jesswunt, as he
endeavours to win both the hand of Lady Eleanor, daughter of Irish
absentee landlord Lord Clanroy, and the parliamentary seat
 Summaries 303

incorporating the Clanroys’ Irish estate. This essay delineates how The
Orientalist refracts contemporary anxieties regarding accelerated British
imperial expansionism in the East through the particularised political
prism of post-Union Ireland. Identifying The Orientalist as the work of a
female novelist with a learned interest in ‘Hindu’ culture, it argues that
the tale offers a parodic exposition of both Romantic nationalism and
Romantic orientalism, whilst simultaneously disrupting the gender pre-
scriptions of both. In so doing, it not only demonstrates why this long
forgotten novel merits further scholarly attention, but uncovers the
subtle insights into the intricacies of regional attitudes to imperial
politics that its jocular irony affords.

Orientalism and ‘textual attitude’: Bernier’s appropriation by Southey

and Owenson
Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
François Bernier’s Histoire de la dernière Révolution des états du Grand Mogol
(1670) and Suite des Mémoires [...] sur l’empire du Grand Mogol (1671) were
among the most influential European travel accounts of Mughal India
throughout the eighteenth century, influencing numerous historical and
literary representations of India. This study examines Bernier’s influence
on two English literary texts, Robert Southey’s epic poem, The Curse of
Kehama (1810), and Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary (1811), in the light
of what Edward Said described as a ‘textual attitude’ on the part of
European authors, that is, their supposed reliance and interdependence
on a corpus of textual material that defined the limits of European
understanding of the orient. Both Southey’s and Owenson’s works were
produced in the context of considerable metropolitan interest in India,
which included a hotly contested pamphlet war regarding the issue of the
East India Company’s role in Indian governance. The study assesses the
ways in which Bernier’s text is appropriated by these writers in relation
to their respective ideologies regarding native religious and cultural
practices, and their responses to evangelical calls for the Christianisation
of India.

Intellectual history as global history: Voltaire’s Fragments sur l’Inde and the
problem of enlightened commerce
Felicia Gottmann
Voltaire’s Fragments sur l’Inde show that the Enlightenment could espouse
a universalist vision that was truly global. The Fragments were published
in 1773-1774 after Voltaire had engaged in a decades-long defence of
commerce and luxury as the hallmarks of human civilisation. Yet without
304 Summaries

explanation, this text topples all of these arguments. India is the crucial
factor in this. Even seen in the context of contemporary debates about
Euro-Indian trade, of a renewed interest in Indian culture, and a nascent
anti-colonialist discourse, Voltaire’s stance was radical. He perceived
India as Europe’s equal. He found that luxury and commerce did not, in
their interaction, lead to increased material comfort, humanity and
civilisation as he had been wont to argue, but instead to its very opposite,
namely oppression, slavery and exploitation in India. Thus in this work,
he roundly rejected all of his previous pro-commerce discourse. The
global and universalist nature of his vision of Enlightenment ultimately
won over his European pro-commercial stance.

Fictions of commercial empire, 1774-1782

James Watt
This essay focuses primarily on three novels, the anonymous Memoirs of a
gentleman, who resided several years in the West Indies (1774), Helenus Scott’s
The Adventures of a rupee (1782) and Robert Bage’s Mount Henneth (1782),
which it reads in the context of metropolitan debates about the gulf
between the civilising possibilities of transnational commerce and the
actual operations of the East India Company. It argues that these
rhetorically unstable works at once rehearse anti-Company polemic
and provide counter-narratives to the familiar story of corrupt nabobs.
If they invoke the metaphor of circulation as a means of apprehending
‘global connections’, however, they are – unsurprisingly – unable to
represent an India ‘civilised’ by commerce, and they generally eschew the
sentimental tropes that other contemporary works mobilised in an
attempt to negotiate spatial distance. As a result, it is suggested, the
novels in question draw attention to the fictionality of their fictions of
commercial empire, while rendering India – though also the scandal of
empire – still more remote for their metropolitan readers.

The Spanish translation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s La Chaumière

indienne: its fortunes and significance in a country divided by ideology,
politics and war
Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa
The Spanish translation of Bernardin Saint-Pierre’s La Chaumière indienne
(1791), first published in Salamanca in 1803 by the printer-bookseller
Tójar, who specialised in exotic, Rousseauian novellas, quickly caught the
attention of both the Spanish reading public and the Spanish Inqui-
sition. Could it be because it expressed the anxieties and inner doubts
among the Spanish reform-minded minority about the feasibility of the
 Summaries 305

Enlightenment programme, as well as rejecting the orthodoxies of

traditional Spanish Catholicism? It was soon reprinted in Valencia in
1811, amid the chaos of the Peninsular War, and was widely read both by
patriot liberals and Spanish afrancesados. After the restoration of
Ferdinand VII, it was repeatedly prohibited by secular and religious
authorities, but all these prohibitions came to nothing against the tide of
its continuous success with the reading public, as expressed by its
multiple reprints up to the 1820s.

Displaying its wares: material culture, the East India Company and
British encounters with India in the long eighteenth century
John McAleer
This essay considers how the East India Company, its history and the
story of Britain’s diverse encounters with eighteenth-century India can
be understood through the production, collecting and display of objects
and artefacts. Material culture formed a crucial part of the Company’s
mercantile, corporate and political identities. Cultural artefacts – vari-
ously collected, commented upon and displayed by the Company and its
officials – had a significant impact on British understandings of India
and Indians. And, through its collecting activities and the establishment
of the India Museum, the Company also influenced the development of
museum collections and played a role in shaping museum narratives.
The study concludes by considering how changing historiographical
trends have influenced the interpretation of this material culture in
the recent past. In doing so, it suggests that the East India Company, its
history and its material culture can act as a springboard for introducing
both British encounters with India in the long eighteenth century and
broader themes in the history of the British Empire.

The Danish Asiatic Company: colonial expansion and commercial

interests
Mogens R. Nissen
This study focuses on the Danish Asiatic Company (Asiatisk Kompagni),
which was the largest Danish trade company, and the company that
existed, significantly, for the longest time. It was established in 1616 and
closed down in 1843, but it is the period from the early 1730s to the 1790s
that is the focal point in this study. It was during this period that the
Company peaked financially, and it was in the latter half of the 1700s that
the basis for private merchants’ trade in India was formed. The focus is
on the economic and political interests of the company. It is an exam-
ination of the political debates regarding the Company’s privileges and
306 Summaries

responsibilities, including a growing debate concerning a continuation

of the monopolised trade or a liberalised free trade for all Danish
merchants.

Whose pirate? Reflections on state power and predation on India’s

western littoral
Lakshmi Subramanian
Studies on buccaneer ethnography in the eighteenth century have
revealed insights into the links between privateers and the making of
empire, and on how representation of outlaws configured British col-
onisation, impacted on maritime power and the language of imperial-
ism. The processes of nation-building and empire-making found it
critical to define legitimate subjects and citizens, making it possible –
even desirable – to reclaim the savage European pirate. The same could
not be said for the Indian pirate whose ethnographic examination was
initially framed within a paradigm of lawlessness which proved less
malleable. Much ethnography on pirates and privateers of Kathiawar
was spearheaded by naval officers and administrators, whose appreci-
ation was as informed by considerations of power and strategy as by
notions of traditional rights, clan honour and bravery. Underlying the
understanding of predation were the politics and market dynamics that
added complex dimensions to the acts of maritime violence and contra-
vention within the existing parameters of legitimacy and authority
differently understood by different agents and actors. This essay evalu-
ates moments in the articulation of an ethnology on piracy and its
milieu.

A comparative study of English and French views of pre-colonial Surat

Florence D’Souza
Based on the observations of the trading centre of Surat by three
significant European commentators – the English medical doctor John
Fryer (1650-1733), the Anglican clergyman John Ovington (1653-1731)
and the French orientalist scholar Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) – this
study situates the views of these visitors in the context of the changing
political and commercial scene in India between approximately 1670
and 1760. The comments of these observers highlight Surat’s ethnic and
religious diversity and the improvised trading practices used by the
different trading communities (Indian and European) in Surat. The
travel accounts studied furnish lively details on the role of Surat in the
politics and trade of both Europeans and Indians in the region, prior to
the full establishment of British colonial power in India. Constant
 Summaries 307

adaptation to evolving circumstances by all groups concerned seems to

have prevailed over any legalised stability or any long-term arrange-
ments.

The Mughal decline and the emergence of new global connections in

early modern India
Seema Alavi
This chapter offers a revisionist view of social change in eighteenth-
century India. It connects the history of ideas with the narrative of the
Mughal Empire’s fragmentation so as shift the spotlight away from the
state-centric view of social change. Instead, it focuses on the individual’s
perception of political transformation, which it foregrounds as an active
agency in propelling the global reach of Indian society. Via the histories
of men of religion, soldiering and medicine, it highlights how changes
within such individual communities shaped the political culture and
impacted upon the making of the more regulatory state apparatus of the
nineteenth century.