Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) - Hardcover

Ogborn, Miles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226620417 ISBN 13: 9780226620411

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, Indian Ink examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Miles Ogborn takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffeehouses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, Ogborn argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word.

Navigating the juncture of imperial history and the history of the book, Indian Ink uncovers the intellectual and political legacies of early modern trade and empire and charts a new understanding of the geography of print culture.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Miles Ogborn is professor of geography at Queen Mary University of London.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

INDIAN INK

Script and Print in the Making of the English East India CompanyBy MILES OGBORN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-62041-1

Contents

List of Figures..........................................................................................................ixAbbreviations............................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments..........................................................................................................xiiiPreface..................................................................................................................xv1. The Written World....................................................................................................12. Writing Travels: Royal Letters and the Mercantile Encounter..........................................................273. Streynsham Master's Office: Accounting for Collectivity, Order, and Authority at Fort St. George.....................674. The Discourse of Trade: Print, Politics, and the Company in England..................................................1045. Stock Jobbing: Print and Prices on Exchange Alley....................................................................1576. The Work of Empire in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.............................................................198Postscript...............................................................................................................266Bibliography.............................................................................................................277Index....................................................................................................................305

Chapter One

The Written World

Writing Empire

Understanding the history of European engagements with the rest of the world through the written word is nothing new. There is, however, substantial debate over how that might be done. In the last twenty-five years some of the most highly charged disputes over the study of empire, and particularly the British empire in India, have related to questions of writing. The development of various forms of postcolonial theory, drawing most prominently on the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, has provoked a strenuous debate across a broad interdisciplinary field about the relationships between imperial power and the written word. It is questions of the relationship between writing and the written-about world that have engaged both those who have followed Edward Said in attempting to map out the terrain of colonial discourse and the critics who accuse them of mistaking rhetoric for reality. And it is the relationship between power, resistance, and meaning that structures attempts in the wake of the Subaltern Studies group to deconstruct the documentary record of the imperial archive and has animated those who are suspicious of the power of theories of language to reveal the full force of colonialism. Although it is important not to minimize the significance of these debates, it is evident that they have frequently proceeded by oversimplifying the stance of their opponents instead of exploring the substantial and increasing degree of shared ground. While it might be stated in different ways, it is evident that there is a sense that the textual and the material are to be understood together in the exertion of imperial power over people and places. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak put it some time ago, "the concept-metaphor of the 'social text' is not the reduction of real life to the page of a book." Also, while there are significant debates over both conceptualization and historical exemplars, there is, more often than not, an underlying consensus that formations of imperial power and knowledge are both potentially transformative and, at the same time, contested, fragmentary, contradictory, and anxious. These formations should be understood as "work in progress," involving the necessary engagement of Europeans with other peoples and their forms of power and knowledge, in an ongoing process of the construction and deconstruction of empires. The aim, therefore, should be to find ways of understanding imperial power and knowledge that begin from these premises and try to be adequate to them. What I want to argue here is that ways forward can be found by bringing together questions raised by the turn towards geographical interpretations in both the history of empire and the history of the book. This provides objects of study and modes of interpretation that can be used across the broad historical period covered in this book from the opening maneuvers in long-distance trade to the establishment of the formal structures of a territorial empire.

Historical accounts of empire are becoming more concerned with geography in two important and related ways: a reconsideration of empire as defined through a hierarchical geography of center and periphery; and an attention to the specific characteristics of imperial and colonial sites, territories, and networks. The first recognizes that the shape and politics of the growing and changing British empire from the seventeenth century onwards is not adequately captured by simple models based upon the assumed centrality of Britain within a hierarchical set of relationships to discrete overseas colonies, territories, and trading zones. Instead, alternative models of "networks" or "webs" seek to explore a different geography that allows a range of competing and contradictory relationships to come into view. These alternatives emphasize the vulnerability of empire as well as its dynamism. They stress the unity of empire, as a single network or web, as well as the multiple differentiation of sites within it, the many forms of connectivity between them, and the ever-changing nature and shape of those connections. An important part of this has been to find ways to "treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field." This has meant exploring the means by which imperial sites are rendered distinct and different from the metropolitan core in terms of what sorts of rights or forms of production and coercion are made possible in each. It has also meant insisting on the ways in which the history of the empire has shaped the making of nations, states, and identities in the metropolis. Political disputes over empire, changing patterns of consumption, and the agency of colonized and enslaved people demanding rights and recognition has meant that what was "out there" was also simultaneously "in here." Investigations of this complex whole refuse, both as impossible and as undesirable, calls to provide totalizing accounts of this reconceived British empire, or the global geography of which it was a part. Instead the focus is on analyzing and tracking particular sites, connections, and movements. As Kathleen Wilson puts it, "In one sense, empire as a unit was a phantasm of the metropole: all empire is local."

This, then, is the second element of imperial history's renewed engagement with geography. Here the specific "local" geographies of imperial sites, territories, and networks are understood as a vital part of the exertion of imperial power, of the forging of new relationships between people and places, and of the making of the modes of resistance that challenged these imperial reconfigurations of the world. This is not the determining and supposedly invariant backdrop of oceans, mountains, and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226620417
• ISBN 13: 9780226620411
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 318
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar