Auctions and the Making of the Nabob in Late Eighteenth-Century Calcutta and London
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8958712 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Patrick D Rasico (0000-0002-5292-2299, Fisk University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 349-370 |
| Publication date | 2021-04-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Historical Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-246X • E-ISSN: 1469-5103 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0018246x21000303 |
| OpenAlex | W3154603672 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 32 |
This article examines the meanings and controversies surrounding sales by public auction in British colonial Calcutta and in London during the last decades of the eighteenth century. For Britons living in Calcutta's European sector, auctions were essential for acquiring imported European items that granted a sense of gentility and Britishness abroad. Public sales in Calcutta provided Britons with goods that instilled the fantasy of living in a British geography in India. However, by the last quarter of the century, ‘sales by hammer’ throughout the colonial world carried association with corruption, cruelty, and orientalization in the metropolitan imagination. In Britain, textual and visual accounts circulated of Europeans transforming into debauched ‘nabobs’, of the horrors of American slave auctions, and of the British East India Company's use of public sales to defraud and abuse prominent Indians. For some metropolitan observers, sales by hammer were a deceitful means of seizing property and status from the traditional landed elite of India and Britain. British critics feared that colonial auction practices could become common in Britain and could lead to the upending of social hierarchization and the normalization of slavery in the metropolis
Archaeology · Colonialism · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Elite · Metropolitan area · Political science · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis
The sense of the people
East Indian fortunes
Excess in the City? The Consumption of Imported Prints in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1780–c. 1795
The Stillbirth of Capital
Representing Calcutta
Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India
Cities of the Dead
Staging Governance
From Little London to Little Bengal
The Discovery of Painting
Voyagers to the West
Nabobs
The marketplace of revolution
The White Town of Calcutta Under the Rule of the East India Company
Mimesis across empires
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |