Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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this period, all of Egypt and much of India continued to be the preserve of long-established Eastern imperial rulers—the Ottomans and the Mughals. Though at times the Mughal and Ottoman régimes may have looked like window dressing to European empire, their persistence was significant for several reasons. It suggested, for one thing, just how much Britain, and to a certain extent France, derived its own imperial legitimacy from older, non-European reservoirs of power. It also meant, particularly in the case of India, that cultural fusions were embedded in the very workings of the imperial state, everywhere from legal systems and tax collection to rituals, ranks, and personnel. European powers inherited—and often purposely echoed—Mughal and Ottoman ways of ruling. Finally, as long as the Mughal and Ottoman figureheads endured, the game was not up between European powers, who continued to struggle among themselves for behind-the-scenes influence. In all these respects, British rule in Mughal and Ottoman domains took shape as something far less “British” and less formal than its later incarnations might suggest.
Over the century from 1750 to 1850, Britain “collected” an Eastern empire in India and beyond, beginning with Bengal and adding other domains from there. This is certainly not to say that there was no system, no grand narrative, to imperial expansion. Britain did not simply acquire its empire, as the Victorian historian J. R. Seeley famously remarked, “in a fit of absence of mind.”8 If anything, and as Seeley knew, it did so in a fit, many decades long, of war with France. But by characterizing British imperial expansion in this period as collecting writ large, I also want to suggest that it was more piecemeal, contingent, uncertain—and in many ways collaborative—than the familiar language of an “imperial project” would suggest.
Britain itself resembled an imperial collector in two important respects. Like the individual collectors described here, Britain was in some senses marginal. It was marginal to Mughal, Ottoman, and other indigenous régimes, whose material and technological resources rightly gave it pause and whose manpower easily outstripped its own. It was also, and certainly felt itself to be, marginal to other European rivals, chiefly France.
And, like other collectors, Britain used collecting to reinvent itself, to define its sense of imperial purpose. In 1750, the British Empire had been primarily Atlantic, colonial, and mercantile, bolstered by an ideology of Protestantism and liberty.9 This was self-consciously different from the land empires of Catholic Europe, “the Orient,” and even ancient Rome, which were widely critiqued as tyrannical, despotic, and autocratic.10 Yet the empire Britain had come to possess by 1850 was just that: a transcontinental entity formed by conquest and entailing direct rule over millions of manifestly foreign subjects. What was more, many Britons—so skeptical of land empires only a few generations before—were proud of this. For if war against France had effectively won Britain a new empire, it had also consolidated a new understanding of what Britain stood for, both as a nation and an imperial power.11 Earlynineteenth-century British liberals began to articulate a new political ideology that encompassed both nation and empire in a shared set of terms.12 Liberal reforms ensured that by the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne, in 1837, her Catholic subjects could sit in Parliament; her indigent subjects could be fed and housed (albeit not pleasantly) at state expense; and her middle-class subjects, most of them for the first time, could vote. Crucially, with the abolition of slavery in 1833, no Briton would ever again legally own—or be—a slave.
The imperial ramifications of the liberal ideal were set out most clearly in a neo-Roman vision of a British imperium that would embrace all subjects in a fold of “British” rights. This was the note so ringingly sounded in 1850 by Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Anglo-Irish, Scottish-educated, fluently multilingual, and outspokenly imperialist foreign secretary, when, leaping to the defense of an abused British imperial subject, he proclaimed: “As the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.”13 Who was the British subject in question? Don David Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew, born in Gibraltar (and thus British) and living in Greece.
There was more than a little political theater in this, to say nothing of selfrighteousness. Nevertheless, Palmerston and his peers recognized a truth about imperial expansion that is easy to lose sight of now, when so much emphasis is placed on the ways in which the British Empire worked to exclude various others from an essentially white, male, Christian, empowered mainstream. Empires include people and cultures.14 When their boundaries grow, no matter how rigid they become, they contain more within. Indeed the central challenge for nineteenth-century Britain to survive as an empire, and as a nation, was to find ways of accommodating difference, especially overseas. Of course there were paradoxes here. But imperial expansion, Britishness, and cross-cultural inclusion were joined at the hip—and however awkward, stumbling, and painful their progress, they hobbled along together.
This does not mean that the British (or any other) Empire was somehow immune from racism, repression, violence, or prejudice of all kinds. But the “white man’s burden” attitude of the late nineteenth century should not be imposed over this earlier, denser, more complicated entangling of human experiences.15 The chauvinistic ethos popularly associated with the British Empire did not drive imperial expansion in the East. On the contrary, it hardened only after Europeans had for generations accrued influence in Eastern domains. It hardened in the context of global Anglo-French war. And this imperial ethos was a misleading and inaccurate construction to boot, because British hegemony was never as total as its cheerleaders (or many of its critics today) tended to suggest. Indeed, to some extent the “white man’s burden” was a piece of wishful thinking, a way of justifying and compensating for, with rhetorical and moral purpose, the fundamental vulnerabilities and contradictions embedded in British imperial rule.
I have organized my narrative of how Britain collected its Eastern empire into three chronological sections, moving from India to Egypt; they could loosely be considered to address places, powers, and personalities, in turn. The first third of the book describes in detail the sheer cosmopolitanism of late-eighteenth-century India, beginning with the East India Company’s acquisition of Bengal, and the uphill struggle of its great generalissimo—and collector—Robert Clive, to make a place for himself in British society. It then visits the vibrant North Indian city of Lucknow, just beyond the bounds of Company control, which flourished as a haven for collectors and cultural chameleons of all kinds. The middle three chapters focus on a pivotal moment in British imperial collecting: the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the British capture of Seringapatam, in South India, in 1799. Though fought on different continents, and against two different Muslim opponents, these campaigns were in fact linked fronts in the same Anglo-French war. Together they marked a shift in British imperial policy toward one of active conquest, of “collecting” territory along India’s frontiers and borders. In these years, Britain and France also became imperial collectors of objects as never before; notably, the campaigns yielded the first imperial trophies to go on public display in Britain. The last portion of the book traces collecting and empire in early-nineteenth-century Egypt, where ongoing Anglo-French rivalry for political influence was channeled into an open war to collect antiquities. Finally, I reflect on some of the ways in which, even in an age of more rigid cultural stratifications, collecting on imperial frontiers—by individuals and by the imperial state—continued to subvert, manipulate, and distort cultural boundaries to enduring effect.
So familiar is the late-nineteenth-century empire of crowns and trumpets (or, more accurately, pith helmets and bagpipes), of white church