The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge

Bibliographic Data

ID19906536
AuthorsJoshua Ehrlich (0000-0002-5526-9360, University of Macau, corresponding author)
Year2023
Publication date2023-07-06
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueEast India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/9781009367967
OpenAlexW2953091463
Open LibraryOL57740522M
ISBN9781009367967
GOOGLE_BOOK_IDVDHEEAAAQBAJ
LanguageEN
Citations received10

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. He shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics

Colonialism · Corporation · Economics · Ideology · Management · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Subject (documents) · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · History · Law

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Open DOILibgenOpen Access