TRANSFERRABLE SURVEYS: NATURAL HISTORY FROM THE HEBRIDES TO SOUTH INDIA (uncorrected proof) (original) (raw)
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In the course of a discussion of the 'phases of empire ' in his lectures of 1881-82 the then Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, J.R. Seeley, claimed that 'the history of the expansion of England must necessarily begin with the two ever-memorable voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the reign of Henry VII. From that moment the position of England among countries was entirely changed, though almost a century elapsed before the change became visible to all the world'. 1 Seeley's remark is of considerable interest from the perspective that occupies us here. In the first place, for the subtle manner in which it virtually reduces what he calls the 'Spanish-Portuguese age of colonial history' to a century-long lag of historical bunk beneath which the deeper meaning and consequences of the two momentous voyages awaits revelation in England's expansion. Columbus' discovery of America and Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India are thus recuperated as foundational markers within a teleological narrative of British history. Published in book form as The Expansion of England in 1883, Seeley's lectures were both an immediate bestseller in the mid 1880s, and a textbook of considerable influence beyond his lifetime. While the book's success alone ensured that it remained in print for over seventy years, its impact was also considerably augmented by the hold it consolidated over the educational sector, where it provided both the staple of teachers' readings and the authoritative text for the adaptations disseminated to a wider readership. More than any other, Richard Aldrich suggests, Seeley's book 'established imperialism as a central theme of modern British history, and in the public mind'. 2 But Seeley's history is of interest also for what it represents, in 1 J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: MacMillan, 1883), p.123. 2 Richard Aldrich, 'Imperialism in the study and teaching of history' in 'Benefits Bestowed'? Education and British Imperialism ed. by J.A. Mangan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp.23-38 (p.35); see also John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The manipulation of British public opinion 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp.179-80. ideological terms, within British historiography itself. His is a British history centred on the expansion of England, and a vision of England decidedly centred in the Empire. And, in keeping with his attitude to the uses of history, it is a corresponding shift in the perspective on her past, for the sake of her future, that Seeley urges and ushers in. Confronting Seeley, therefore, allows us both to take up, and simultaneously destabilise, the terms of reference imposed by the notion of 'British historical culture' along which the chapter is organised. It forces upon us the need to note the historically problematic nature of the concept of 'British' identity, not merely in respect of the imagined nature of all such constructs, but as regards the relations of England with Scotland and Ireland, and the dynamic and contradictory nature that 'Britishness' assumed in the imperial projection of those relations, in particular. 3 The Irish were both subjects and agents of empire. The Scots not only availed themselves of the opportunities afforded by colonial service, which the Union opened to them, but simultaneously launched themselves at the 'cultural invasion' of England. And if the contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment to historiography is here most directly pertinent, Irish literature, the 'national' orientations of school syllabuses, the diverse perceptions of separate and common history and relations, political and religious, with Europe, are no less so. The notion of British cultural memory, therefore, must pass through the cultural memories of each of the component parts of Great and Greater Britain as they embody and negotiate these contradictory relations. 4 In this respect, the discussion offered in these pages will prove distinctly Anglo-centric; only the awareness of its shortcoming offers any redeeming feature. Seeley's foregrounding of the imperial dimension in historical memory is useful in another way. Foreshadowing the creation of imperial history as an academic discipline, Seeley attempted to re-centre the historical perspective of British history in the empire. Its child, post-imperial commonwealth history, is now reversing the perspectives of imperial ideology to the deconstruction of British nationalism. 5 Reading Seeley, therefore, provides a timely reminder of the need to contextualise the discussion of the memory of da Gama against the double articulation of national with imperial historiographies and of historiographies with history. It is no less pertinent that William Julius Mickle championed da Gama's voyage in the context of the polemic over the East India Company's monopoly, and that notices of his book were read first in the context of the the war, and then of the loss of the trans-Atlantic colonies and the 'turn to the East', than it is that in 1897 British voices joined in the chorus of Portugal's 'Discovery of India' commemorations in tune to their own imperial jamboree in celebration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, or that comment on da Gama's contested commemoration in 1997 should be received amidst the revisionism and reevaluation which accompanied the handover of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China and the symbolic 'final closure of a cycle of empire' which it was said to represent.
Matthew H. EDNEY, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2000
that maps do not present truth but, on deconstruction, reveal themselves as a complex tissue of persuasion and misrepresentation. He thus seeks to show that there is a fundamental and unbridgeable gap between the Enlightenment's reasonbased, epistemological ideal of the perfect panopticist survey 'based on correct and certain archives of knowledge' and the flawed hybrid cartographic image of India which the British actually constructed. Although his main concern is with the transplantation from Europe to India, by the British elites, of what he calls 'cartographic culture' based on a 'spatial architecture rooted in non-Indian mathematics and structures' (p. 25), he aims also to address wider questions about the nature of British imperial power. Edney sees his work as an extension of both the Saidean thesis that Europeans constructed an essentialist opposition between themselves and the 'colonised other', and Christopher Bayly's view that British representations were enshrined in myths of coherence, order and rigour.
Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 2018
In the early nineteenth century, the material culture of British science was being transformed by an increasingly centralized colonial information order. Surveys conducted during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars were particularly important to the growth of the East India Company's new collections in London. In the wake of territorial gains, surveyors and their staff bought, plundered, collected and otherwise acquired a wide range of materials related to arts, sciences, history, natural history and literature. Focusing on survey collections formed in Ceylon, Mysore and Java between 1795 and 1820, this essay explores the place of the Company's culture of surveying and collecting within both Company science and wider shifts in the political economy of colonial collecting. Such shifts include changes in property claims, the growing clout of the Company's library and museum in London and, most importantly, the Napoleonic Wars. The wartime context enabled not only basic access to new materials but also cheap modes of collection and a motive to collector to value collections-driven by commercial and territorial competition.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, at its headquarters in the City of London, the Honourable East India Company established a new museum and library. By midcentury this museum would contain one of Europe's most extensive collections of the natural history, arts, and sciences of Asia. This essay uses the early history of the company's museum, focusing in particular on its natural history collections, to explore the material relationship between scientific practice and the imperial political economy. Much of the collections had been gathered in the wake of military campaigns, trade missions, or administrative surveys. Once specimens and reports arrived in Leadenhall Street and passed through the museum storage areas, this plunder would become the stuff of science, going on to feed the growth of disciplines, societies, and projects in Britain and beyond. In this way, the East India Company was integral to the information and communication infrastructures within which many sciences then operated. Collections-based disciplines and societies flourished in this period; their growth, it is argued, was coextensive with administrative and political economic change at institutions like the East India Company. The essay first explores the company's practices and patterns of collecting and then considers the consequences of this accumulation for aspects of scientific practice-particularly the growth of scientific societies-in both London and Calcutta.