List of maps Preface Glossary List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Prologue: surveillance and communication in early modern India 2. Political intelligence and indigenous informants during the conquest of India, c. 1785-1815 3. Misinformation and failure on the fringes of empire 4. Between human intelligence and colonial knowledge 5. The Indian ecumene: an indigenous public sphere 6. Useful knowledge and godly society, c. 1830-50 7. Colonial controversies: astronomers and physicians 8. Colonial controversies: language and land 9. The information order, the Rebellion of 1857-9 and pacification 10. Epilogue: information, surveillance and the public arena after the Rebellion Conclusion: 'knowing the country' Bibliography Index.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/2CEAAB96BEEE92D81FEEBC10DA7517F6/S0021911800023202a.pdf/div-class-title-span-class-italic-empire-and-information-intelligence-gathering-and-social-communication-in-india-1780-1870-span-by-c-a-bayly-cambridge-studies-in-indian-history-and-society-cambridge-cambridge-university-press-1996-xiv-412-pp-64-95-cloth-div.pdf

Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 . By C. A. Bayly. Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xiv, 412 pp. $64.95(cloth).

We the Refugees

The rhetoric of english India

Pre-Ottoman and OttomanJANE BURBANK and FREDRICK COOPER, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2010), Pp. 528, $ 24.95 paperREVIEWED BY ALEXANDER COOLEY, Department of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY; email: acooley@barnard.eduJane Burbank and Frederick Cooper of New York University have authored an extraordinary and compelling account of comparative imperial governance and imperial interactions. Rather than produce a definitive or comprehensive account of the major global empires, Empires in World History focuses with great care and precision on identifying the internal process of rule, administration, identity formation, bargaining, and the political legitimation strategies that have made empires such durable and recurring forms of political organization throughout world history.From the outset, the authors distance themselves from an explicitly normative understanding of imperial dynamics, opting instead for an analytical study of the comparative organization and bureaucratic strategies of imperial rule. This analytical move alone makes the book as valuable to sociologists and political scientists interested in empires and organizational dynamics, though historians might complain that much of the cultural nuance and context is lost through these simplifying analytical choices. Yet, the theoretical approach clearly pays off in the sheer scope of the book's inquiry and the explanatory power of its comparative insights.Moreover, de-emphasizing empire as a normative category does not lessen the importance of the work for understanding how particular modes of imperial governmentality institutionalized control, domination and repression. In fact, Burbank and Cooper's analytical focus on empire-states as durable forms of political organization pinpoints how difference, citizenship and hierarchy were managed across different cultures and eras. As the authors note in their chapter 6 account of the maritime empires and the rise of the slave trade, "[d]iplomacy and law were not focused on regulating relationships among equivalent states but gave legitimacy and order to a highly unequal world. If empire always implied governing different people differently, the empires of the Americas brought out explicit debates about what a politics of difference should be" (p. 184).Of the analytical topics, the most important is the careful analysis of the role of mediators or the local elites of each imperial project, especially their recruitment, status and monitoring by the center. All empires faced the acute problem of monitoring the actions and loyalty of their designated rulers, or in the social science literature "principal-agent" problems. Burbank and Cooper reveal the array of different solutions that structured the "vertical connections between rulers, their agents, and their subjects" (p. 14), carefully uncovering the logics, and occasional pathologies, of these mechanisms.Analytically, the examples are as varied as they are fascinating. Rome offered incentives, including citizenship, to elites and traders for rapid promotion and assimilation into its "rules-based order," while in the Chinese Qin laws and judicial matters were located exclusively in the imperial administrative apparatus, intentionally divorced from local nobles. The most extreme example of local accommodation was the highly decentralized Carolingian empire, under which "multiple hierarchies of allegiance made the empire hang together" (p. …

Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference

The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge This study shows that debate over the relations among companies, states, and knowledge is not new, but rather was integral to the politics of the British East India Company. Reconstructing such debate among Company officials and critics from the 1770s to the 1830s, the study makes several further interventions. It argues against what has been perhaps the dominant narrative about Company and British-imperial ideology in this period, a narrative of reorientation from “Orientalist” to “Anglicist” cultural attitudes. It shows instead how the Company shifted from a commercial idiom of sovereignty, concerned with conciliating elites through scholarly patronage, to a territorial idiom, concerned with cultivating popular affection through state-sponsored education. Whereas the field of the history of knowledge has largely developed as a history of structures of knowledge, meanwhile, this study argues for a history of ideas of knowledge. Such an approach is needed to elucidate the category of knowledge and its discursive uses past and present.

The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge

This article discusses the centrality of the letter form in the conveyance of the "evidence of experience" from India to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. It examines the Letterbook of John Bruce, which preserves the correspondence between Bruce—the "official historiographer" of the East India Company hired in 1793—and various Company officials in India he was attempting to recruit for a project of revisionist imperial historiography. A study of the Letterbook as a record of the project's novelty for colonial bureaucrats unused to the relationship between historiography and the letter form as "evidence of experience," the article investigates the institutional, historical and theoretical conditions under which these epistolary texts get classified as literary, personal, or historical documents.

Commanding Correspondence: Letters and the "Evidence of Experience" in the Letterbook of John Bruce, the East India Company Historiographer

To speak about orientalism now is to explain the persistent concern, among academic and non-academic readers and writers alike, with the transformative effect of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Said's text has been taken as a challenge by historians of society and of literature alike. To these scholars, the book offered a vast new field of inquiry into the relationship between European and colonial history, between cultural production and capitalism, and between Enlightenment idealism and the politics of domination. Orientalism was also a particular model of interpretive methodology, which repurposed Orientalism, once a term for cultural appreciation and interest, to name a relationship of mistrust, abuse, and control. We show in this essay that Said's argument about the inextricable ties between Europe and its colonial domains has been so deeply absorbed as an intellectual, ethical, and political imperative that no serious scholarship is now imaginable that remains unaware of imperialism as a formative element of European history and culture. As a model of interpretive methodology, Said's work has been subjected to some of the most poignant and compelling criticisms, especially by contemporary British historiography and literary criticism working on the eighteenth-century period and whose purpose and effect have been to expand and improve the examination and understanding of imperialism and the enduring practices and implications of imperial culture. What has perplexed eighteenth-century scholars and then encouraged them to take up the question of Orientalism was the fact that Said largely omitted periods prior to Bonaparte's expedition in Egypt in 1798 and provided a monolithic and hegemonic version of Orientalism as discursive formation, transportable and translatable to any given time and place. Scholars of the eighteenth-century period, and more particularly, given the scope of Said's research, those working in the fields of the history of empire and in literary criticism, have been keen to respond to the Orientalist challenge. This allowed them not only to embrace the Saidian perspective and revisit the corpus of eighteenth-century literature through the Orientalist prism but also, at a second stage perhaps, to refine and adapt the concept of Orientalism to time and place specifics and display a more anxious history of empire. The re-reading of European textual materials with an eye to Orientalism has been (and continues to be) enabling of historicist understandings of literary representation and its potentially collusive relationship with the histories of colonialism. Developments in colonial historiography and related fields such as historical anthropology have made possible new insights into the relationship between eighteenth-century English literature and empire. Orientalism also provided an analytical frame to think about matters related to the construction of tropes, the transformation of Eastern texts as they traveled across countries and continents, the promotion and demotion of genres, the question of canon formation, the birth of the " English " novel, gender, and the impact of other forces than empire, such as the book market, in determining Orientalist fashions. To speak about orientalism now is to explain the persistent concern, among academic and non-academic readers and writers, with the transformative effect of Edward Said's Orientalism. The text has become a challenge for historians of society and historians of literature alike because

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Eighteenth-Century Orientalism in Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism

This article discusses how works of popular fiction cultivate affective attachments to unstable distinctions between citizens and migrants, “refugees” and “economic migrants”, or “legal” and “irreg...

No country, no cry: Literature of women’s displacement and the reading of pity

This article studies the production, transmission, and reception of a cluster of archival documents about an alleged abduction and murder of a "beautiful Moor woman" in the colonial town of Madras in 1776. The papers provide evidence of interpretive commotion among late eighteenth-century colonial bureaucrats—writers and readers of colonial documentation—about the plausibility of the different versions of the surprising archival narrative about an indigenous woman in India. Their discussion about proper forms of documentation ties plausibility to ideological positions regarding the nature and legitimacy of imperial rule, to the colonizers' treatment of indigenous rulers as subjects or allies, to the role of women in the colonial encounter, and to the generative force of literary genres in shaping official reports from the colony. A study of the nature and status of archival documents as narratives caught up in political, social, and literary history, the article reflects on our definitions of and uses for...

Death of a Beautiful Moor Woman: Obstinate Clerks and the Form of Evidence in the British Colonial Archive

The prevailing attitude that she must be a bit queer in all ways, otherwise she would not be interested in "men's" subjects, was indicated by Boswell's surprise that she gave him "a good breakfast, like any other woman."1Jane Austen's letters are not "just as real"-they are real, and as we read them we too can watch the daily business of herself, her family, and friends passing before our eyes, and, if we wish, think away two hundred years to participate unseen in their joys and sorrows.2Biographers of Catharine Macaulay (1731-91), much like her contemporaries, often agreed that the woman's reputation was shaped by the peculiar company she kept: prominent, intellectual, political, radical, revolutionary, and occasionally "foolish."3 This essay examines why it matters what company a writer keeps, especially when that writer is a woman and her reputation is tied to the status of her letters and her correspondents.In scholarship on eighteenth-century writing, the letter has been crucially tied to the figure of "a woman writing a letter," an embodiment of the imagined privacy of the letter, of women's "experience" of seclusion and domesticity, and the turn inward characteristic of modernity.4 Letters were a means of political intervention for those who aspired to have their opinions known and distributed, and among those who did not, especially if the opinions were inadequately represented or potentially seditious. In this context, recovery of women's correspondence has been a crucial way of showing that eighteenth-century women kept good company (of other women, other women writers, reputable male writers), and that their "private" writing testified to intellectual worth along with a measure of propriety.5 A woman writing a letter in that context could become "a myth of origin in her own right" which "accounts for the emergence of modern subjects and modern social structures; of gender rela- tions, and perhaps even of the concept of gender itself; of literary, cultural and feminist theory."6Macaulay's letters have been studied in the context of genealogies of prominent women's writing, and cited as evidence of her influence on prominent figures in the history of feminism.7 Kate Davies has treated the correspondence between Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, a prominent "patriot" figure in the American Revolution, as extraordinary evidence of the women's explicit and complex political activity. Assuming an organic relationship between femininity and the letter, Davies suggests that "a language of feeling and the space of the letter might afford an important forum for transatlantic debate on women's literary and political identities."8 The women's letters help to re-appropriate the traditionally feminine discourses such as "'natural' affections, feminine privacy, religion, learning, profession, sensibility, and sociability," offering evidence of women's experiences otherwise unrepresented.9I turn to letters between Catharine Macaulay and three of her friends-Mary Knowles, John Collett Ryland, and Lord Buchan-to suggest that the letters' significance goes beyond the concerns of women, women's writing, and "women's experience." Macaulay has always been difficult, for her contemporaries as for the modern readers, to sequester into the sphere of privacy, unambiguous femininity, political reticence, and inaction often said to have marked eighteenth-century women's lives and activities.10 Conspicuous and celebrated for her work in her own day, between 1763 and 1783 she published eight volumes of The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line that made her the famous "female historian." In 1779, she was Clio, the muse of history, among "The nine living muses of Great Britain" of Richard Samuel's painting, shoulder to shoulder with famous Bluestockings and women in the arts. Her interest in historiography was only one expression of her interest in writing and national politics, at a time when the subject seemed to compromise the propriety of women who addressed it. …

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Olivera Jokic

Papers

Commanding Correspondence: Letters and the "Evidence of Experience" in the Letterbook of John Bruce, the East India Company Historiographer

Eighteenth-Century Orientalism in Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism

No country, no cry: Literature of women’s displacement and the reading of pity

Death of a Beautiful Moor Woman: Obstinate Clerks and the Form of Evidence in the British Colonial Archive

The Odds and the Ends: What to Do With Some Letters of Catharine Macaulay