Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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and rubicund Englishmen attended by bevies of native servants, that it is sometimes difficult to think back to an earlier period before the ideology of an imperial “civilizing mission” was in place. This book endeavors to do just that. It steps back into a time and into places where people lived, loved, fought, and identified themselves in ways considerably more complicated than later imperial chauvinism, or even many present-day treatments of empire, might suggest.
Most of all, this book is a plea for bringing a human dimension to imperial history, a topic that is often treated in the abstract, whether by sweeping chroniclers of conquest or by postcolonial critics of imperial discourse. These collectors and their world have vanished. But the objects they collected, moved, and brought together still tender proof of their passion. In Britain and its former colonies—indeed, around the world—the artifacts give hard evidence of the human contacts that underpinned the otherwise intangible quantities of globalization and empire. In no way do I wish to make an advertisement or an apology for empire, past, present, or future. But empires are a fact of world history. The important question for this book is not whether they are “good” or “bad,” but what they do, whom they affect, and how. To the extent the history offered here seeks to reflect on a newer age of empire, it is to make an appeal for remembering the essential humanity of successful international relationships: for borrowing, learning, adapting, and giving. For collecting, and for recollecting.
1. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), pp. 4-10. The population anxiety was eased only by the first British census, undertaken in 1801.
2. I am influenced here by Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). The links between collecting and gentility have been investigated in detail by many scholars of early modern Europe: Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
3. The binary terms set out in Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) have been modified by many scholars, including Said himself, in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. xxiv-xxvi. Cf. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1-37; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 15-18; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 4-5; Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 20-23.
4. I do not mean here to censure Jan Morris’s “Pax Britannica” trilogy (Volume 1: Heaven’s Command ), which presents probably the most vivid, detailed historical chronicle of the British Empire at its height.
5. Consider, for instance, the closing words of Angus Calder’s otherwise brilliant Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (London: Phoenix, 1998), a firm Marxist indictment of British imperialism: “After Cook, it seemed that the British would go everywhere…The younger Pitt and his colleagues, like the classes whose support they mobilised, believed that markets must be captured, and could be captured, all over the globe. Despite the loss of the North American colonies, Britain was stronger than ever before. Not far behind brave explorers and honest if foolish missionaries, Manchester cotton would follow Birmingham guns” (p. 535).
6. I would certainly come in for the criticisms levied by Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 309-13.
7. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (New York: Vintage, 1989); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1986); Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793-1815 (London: Macmillan, 1979).
8. J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 12.
9. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
10. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 126-29. Many French theorists were equally suspicious of a Spanish-style empire of conquest and, for that matter, of their own state: Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes. published in 1721, fictionalized a visit by two Persian ambassadors to Paris as a way of critiquing the despotic institutions of absolutist France.
11. Colley, Britons, pp. 321-24; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 109-11.
12. But see Uday Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion” in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire, esp. pp. 59-62—who detects an exclusionary strand in Locke and demonstrates how in Victorian liberal thought, a society’s level of “civilization” could become a prerequisite for inclusion. See also Bernard Semmel, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire: Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. ix-x, 28-42.
13. Quoted in Muriel E. Chamberlain, Lord Palmerston (Cardiff: GPC, 1987), p. 74.
14. This is what Partha Chatterjee influentially termed the “rule of colonial difference.” Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). Inclusion could of course sharpen hierarchical distinctions based on race or class; see Catherine Hall, “The Nation Within and Without” in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender, and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 179-233.
15. The phrase comes from Rudyard Kipling, whose 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden” was in fact addressed to Americans, on the subject of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines.