Journal ArticleDOI
Commanding Correspondence: Letters and the "Evidence of Experience" in the Letterbook of John Bruce, the East India Company Historiographer
TLDR
The importance of the letter form in the conveyance of the "evidence of experience" from India to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century is discussed in this paper, where the authors examine the Letterbook of John Bruce, which preserves the correspondence between Bruce and various Company officials in India he was attempting to recruit for a project of revisionist imperial historiography.Abstract:
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historical and theoretical conditions under which these epistolary texts get classified as literary, personal, or historical documents.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
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).
Majid Siddiqi,C. A. Bayly +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe surveillance and communication in early modern India, and the information order, the Rebellion of 1857-9 and pacification of India, c. 1785-1815.
Dissertation
The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge
Martin Härtl,Joshua Ehrlich +1 more
TL;DR: The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge as mentioned in this paper argues 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.
References
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Location of Culture
TL;DR: The postcolonial and the post-modern: The question of agency as discussed by the authors, the question of how newness enters the world: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation, 12.
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The Location of Culture
TL;DR: The postcolonial and the post-modern: The question of agency as mentioned in this paper, the question of how newness enters the world: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation, 12.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives
TL;DR: This paper argued that the history and the theory that such a conference would want to expose are precisely those of how Europe had consolidated itself as sovereign subject by defining its colonies as "Others," even as it constituted them, for purposes of administration and the expansion of markets, into programmed near-images of that very sovereign self.
Book
The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
TL;DR: In this article, state and empire in British history are discussed, and the political economy of empire and ideology in the Walpolean era are discussed. But the focus is on the British state and its relationship with the British empire.
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Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
TL;DR: Baucom argues that the Zong tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics.