Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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collecting as a transparent or programmatic expression of imperial power, the playing-out of an “imperial project.” Rather, the history of collecting reveals the complexities of empire; it shows how power and culture intersected in tangled, contingent, sometimes self-contradictory ways. Instead of seeing collecting as a manifestation of imperial power, I see the British Empire itself as a kind of collection: pieced together and gaining definition over time, shaped by a range of circumstances, accidents, and intentions.
The men and women who populate these pages are not, for the most part, the sorts of people who usually appear in history books. For one thing, they are not defined by conventional social attributes, such as occupation, religion, class, or even ethnicity or nationality. Instead, they shared a habit and interest that cut across imperial society: from princes, officers, functionaries, and traders, through to tourists, wives, artists, and adventurers. Imperial collectors ranged from household names of imperial history, such as Robert Clive and Napoleon Bonaparte, to fringe unknowns such as the minor English diplomat Henry Salt or the eccentric Irish-born soldier Charles “Hindoo” Stuart. Inevitably, who counts as a collector is somewhat arbitrary—and though some of the figures I describe here were passionately dedicated to acquiring objects, others were collectors more by circumstance, hanging on to artifacts that had crossed their paths. But they all shared one crucial characteristic: all of them used objects to advertise, hone, or shape their social personæ. Collecting was a means of self-fashioning.2 In fact, the connection between collecting and self-fashioning was itself a cross-cultural phenomenon, extending from Europeans who valued art collecting as a sign of their being true gentlemen, to Indian princes who collected objects from far-off lands to enhance their personal charisma.
Imperial collectors reached across the lines of cultural difference. It is easy to speak of a “clash of civilizations” when cultures are distilled to the point of abstraction. But real people in the real world do not necessarily experience other cultures in a confrontational or monolithic way. What the stories of imperial collectors make clear is how much the process of cultural encounter involved crossing and mixing, as well as separation and division. Recovering the sheer variety of life “on the ground” in an empire, and its points of empathy, seems especially important now, when theoretical and ideological discussion of empire is prevalent but the willingness to engage with and understand other cultures often is not.
These stories also counterbalance the tendency in postcolonial scholarship to portray Europe’s imperial collision with the rest of the world as a fundamentally oppositional, one-sided affair: the sad, sordid tale of how Western powers imposed hegemony—technological, economic, military, and cultural—over non-Western societies. From Edward Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism (1978), which emphasizes the capacity of Western discourse to define and dominate an Eastern “other”; to the influential Indian journal Subaltern Studies; to more recent work on forms of hybridity—much academic energy has gone into tracing how “the West” exerted and expressed its power over “the rest.”3 To be sure, that is in large part what European empires tried to do. But imperialism is not a one-way street, and power and culture do not always march in lockstep. Alongside trying to understand how European power got asserted over others, one should also consider how others changed and challenged it.
The archives are bursting with as-yet-untold stories of people living on the eastern edges of empire—camp followers, for example, or interpreters, or even common soldiers (about whom surprisingly little has been written), or women and children—whose experiences all warrant research. Collectors make excellent guides across imperial frontiers because of their active, tangible engagement with other cultures, and their preoccupation with status and self-fashioning. Furthermore, by moving objects to Europe, they played an active role in representing foreign cultures to a wider Western public. Many major museum collections of Indian and Egyptian objects—so often assumed to be the product of institutional plunder and appropriation—actually owe their origins to the acutely personal tastes and ambitions of individuals profiled here.
Just telling their stories, then, is the central goal of this book. But like the little mirrors stitched into an embroidered Gujarati cloth, these stories reflect back many features of the larger world in which they are set. How does the big picture look—and how does it look different—when you start small? Next to, and through, these personal histories, I also consider how the broader trajectory of British imperialism in the East was a more complex and uncertain process than traditional narratives suggest. Here, too, the image of empire that comes into view may look unfamiliar.
There was a time when people recounted the rise of the British Empire as a triumphal progress: “heaven’s command,” a sure thing, and a good one.4 Indeed, some still tell the imperial story in this way. Equally one-sided, though of an entirely opposing political cast, were the portrayals of empire by postcolonial nationalists, who represented the British Empire as an insidious behemoth. Neither of these attitudes earns unqualified support from serious scholars today. Yet there is still more than a hint of teleology in discussions of empire, a sense that the end was inevitable: the white man won, the burden was shouldered, the colonized shut out.5 This book, by contrast, stresses the obstacles to Britain’s imperial success. British expansion was hotly contested both by indigenous powers and by European rivals, notably France. It was also only questionably “British,” since Britain depended heavily on continental Europeans, and increasingly on imperial subjects, for manpower and support. Seeing the cracks and insecurities in British power helps explain why and when the empire took the peculiar forms it did.6
Where most accounts of British expansion tend to say little about Britain’s rivals and opponents, the overarching narrative offered here concerns the wider global context in which British power was forged, and challenged. First, the history of the British Empire must be understood together with the history of France and its empire—and specifically, as a history of Anglo-French war. For the nearly six decades between the beginning of the Seven Years War in 1756 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Britain and France fought for more than three. This was the eighteenth-century equivalent of modern “total war.” In Britain, war with France dominated politics, finance, and culture.7 In France, war with Britain had catastrophic consequences for the state, the economy, and ultimately the monarchy. It was also global war. Fought on multiple continents, in defense of imperial interests, it decisively affected the pace, motives, and direction of British and French imperial expansion. Even after Waterloo—when Britain’s global hegemony reached its height—France continued to influence British imperial expansion and imperial desires. In the Ottoman Empire, coveted by both powers, France, if anything, seemed to have the upper hand. Even in India, where conventional wisdom holds that French ambitions died by the 1760s, some French policy makers harbored dreams of renewal, through allies in the Punjab. In short, to write the history of the British Empire without including France would be like writing about the United States during the cold war without mentioning the Soviet Union. France vitally influenced the shaping of the modern British Empire.
The second way my big picture of the British Empire differs from most rests in its emphasis on locations where British power was informal and in the making, rather than on sites that Britain openly conquered, occupied, and ruled. Empire is a flexible term, and interpreting it in a flexible way lets one understand the whole range of mechanisms by which European powers sought and built empires over time. Egypt did not officially join the British Empire until it was made a protectorate in 1914. Even India, considered the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire by the late nineteenth century, was never entirely British. At the time of its independence, in 1947, a full third of the subcontinent was in the hands of nominally independent princes. And before 1857—for the whole period covered by this book—the parts of India that were “British” were ruled not by the British government directly but by the