Picturing India- People Places and the World of the East India Company

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

About the Book The British engagement with India was am intensely visual one Images of the subcontinent, produced by artists and travelers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth century heyday of the East India Company effect the increasingly important role played by the Company in Indian life. And they mirror significant shifts in British policy and attitudes towards India. The Company's story is one of wealth, power and the pursuit of profit. It changed what people in Europe ate, what they drank, and how they dressed Ultimately, it laid the foundations of the British Raj.

Few historians have considered the visual sources that survive and what they tell us about the link between images and empire. pictures and power. This book draws on the unrivalled riches of the British Library-both visual and textual- to tell that history. It weaves together the story of individual images, their creators, and the people and events they depict. And, in doing so, it presents a detailed picture of the Company and its complex relationship with India, its people and cultures.

About the Author John McAleer is Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on the British encounter and engagement with the wider world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, situating the history of empire in its global and maritime contexts. He was previously Curator of Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is the author of Britain's Maritime Empire: Southern Africa, the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, 1763-1820.

Introduction Eighteenth-century India was the theatre of scenes highly important Britain So wrote the artist and traveller William Hodges. He was in a good position to Hodges was one of the first British professional landscape painters to visit India, spending six years there under the patronage of Warren most important British official in the subcontinent. As well as painting portraits and creating other works for Hastings, Hodges undertook extensive travels throughout India. And of these experiences were documented in sketches and drawings, many which were later worked up into finished oil paintings or published prints (Fig 1.0. In matters of trade and war, Indian subcontinent had assumed increasingly.

important role in British political and economic life in the second half of the eighteenth century. This relationship between Britain and India was complex and had its roots in the activities of a London-based trading company. The 'Company of Merchants of London, trading to the East Indies-usually abbreviated as East India -controlled British trade with Asia from its foundation in 1600 until the nineteenth and was once described as the wealthiest and most powerful commercial century corporation of ancient or modern times. Any examination of Britain's relationship with India must take account of this extraordinary organization. By the time working, the Company had become a powerful economic and political player there. And its influence was felt not just in Asia. The Company's commercial, political and military activities altered the way politicians and merchants in Britain thought the wider world. Ultimately, it helped to lay the foundations of the British Raj. American colonies and Caribbean islands had once captured the British imagination, the commercial possibilities offered by the Indian subcontinent increasingly occupied the British politicians, merchants and travelers as the eighteenth century neared its But the intimate connection, as Hodges termed it, between India and Britain was not just a commercial or political one. It was also an one. torian P. J. Marshall reminds us that the British encounter with India 'prolonged and intense, and that it was concerned with cultural exchange as well as commercial Endeavour and exploitation:

Even by 1800, thousands of Englishmen had been to India, a huge flow of trade had developed (including the import of artifacts of high artistic quality), many books about India had been published in Britain and visual representations of India and Indians were being widely reproduced.

Ames Rennell's much reprinted Memoir of a Map of Hindustan, which first appeared in 1783 offers visual evidence of this (Fig. 1.2). It gave the public in Britain an image of in which, as Rennell put it. 'no considerable blanks' remained. It was a time, in their words, in which Europeans attempted to fill the linguistic, cultural and visual gape in their knowledge of India. Images played a crucial part in this process. The a variety of the subcontinent presented so many valuable subjects for the painter' that it attracted a host of artists and travelers keen to record, depict and bear witness.

**Contents and Sample Pages**