Nabobs

Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Bibliographic Data

ID9740272
AuthorsR Wheeler (The Ohio State University, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume126
Issue523
Pages1543-1545
Publication date2011-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe English Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ehr/cer311
OpenAlexW2322092209
LanguageEN
Citations received27

The organising question of Tillman Nechtman's study explores the reasons why Britons attached disproportionate opprobrium to the numerically small number of men who made enormous fortunes in the East Indies; chief among these reasons is that these East India Company men returned to Britain to accumulate new political and economic influence by purchasing estates and flaunting the architectural flourishes, gustatory predilections, and fashion items that symbolised their imperial experiences in the service of the East India Company. These derisively-termed nabobs were, according to Nechtman, lightning-rods for a new aspect of British identity, one that was inextricably linked to imperial aspirations. In this central claim that deals in perceptions and myths, Nechtman emphasises the global component of Britishness as it manifested itself within the nation's borders. Situated in the shift from what he characterises as an empire of trade to an empire of conquest, Nechtman's late eighteenth-century Britain was one that feared hybridity and scorned the incursions of foreignness that nabobs made all too real. Nabobs therefore served contradictory purposes: an overdetermined symbol, they ‘were central to the conceptual construction of India as a stadial backwater and, by extension, to the comparative sense that Britain was a paragon of stadial advancement’ (p. 231). At the same time, however, nabobs’ ostentatious wealth stood for the luxurious evils of empire, the avarice and the criminal violence associated with imperial conquest; when nabobs returned to Britain, they brought with them ‘all of India's difference’ (p. 232)

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