Welcome to the Global Corporation's special series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This special series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations with a focus on the role of law and legal forms.
My name is Dr. Andre Dow, and I am a postdoctoral research fellow with the Laureate Program for Global Corporations and International Law at the Melbourne Law School. My guest today is Dr. Joshua Ehrlich, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Macau.
Josh is a historian of knowledge and political thought with a focus on the East India Company and the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia. I spoke with Josh in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his first book.
The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. The book is a deeply researched and well-written account of how East India Company officials developed and deployed ideas about knowledge to bolster its own authority.
and to manage the transition from corporate sovereignty towards unitary state sovereignty. In the process, Josh developed a novel methodological approach that he calls the History of Ideas of Knowledge, an approach that allows us to recover past meanings and usages of concepts about knowledge. to make them available again in the present. So welcome. I thought we'd begin before we really dive into the book, just with a question really about how you found your way into academia.
and how you became a historian. And then also, I guess, how it came to be. I'm interested in making you. Thanks, Andre. Well, it may surprise some listeners to hear that I actually went to law school for a year after doing my BA.
And I learned pretty quickly within that year that I didn't like the kind of legal writing and research that I thought I might like, having enjoyed writing and research doing my undergraduate degree in history. And that's when I decided to do a PhD in history. And I didn't initially think about...
really even doing legal history. And I still probably would call myself a legal historian second or third or fourth and several other things before that. But it is funny how ultimately my previous worlds have converged again. So once I started doing this PhD at Harvard, I was still very interested in what I had written my BA thesis about, namely the Scottish Enlightenment, ideas about historiography in the 18th century, and how...
The natural philosophy of Newton was colliding with and merging with the religious sensibilities of a lot of the participants in the Scottish Enlightenment. People like William Robertson, who was famous in his own day, less so now, but... was a contemporary of Hume and Gibbon and other luminaries of that period. So I got interested in particular in his own attempts to, well, blend science and religion in his approach to history. And yet when I started my PhD...
We had already had the imperial turn. We were well underway into the global turn. And it didn't seem really like I should simply be focusing on Edinburgh or Scotland or the British Isles. I needed to be looking further afield as so many other.
historians of Europe and Britain were doing by this point. And actually, all of a sudden, this seemed like the logical thing to do, too, because very quickly I saw that all of these seemingly cloistered luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment had connections with empire.
They were relying on sources from networks spanning the British Empire. And in particular, the East India Company kept coming up again and again. I saw that, for instance, William Robertson, the historian I mentioned, had two sons in the East India Company's service. And if you look at the papers of prominent company officials of the time, like Lord Cornwallis, you'll see letters from William Robertson trying to get positions for his sons and sending a copy of his history on.
Ancient India and its Interactions with the World, published in 1791. So the connections between empire and enlightenment were becoming more and more obvious to me. And that's how I got into writing about the East India Company. But in particular, writing about the East India Company is... Engagements with knowledge. Yeah, so it was always coming from interesting knowledge and we've got the questions that are in the file. Well, the book begins with...
somewhat infamous figure, Warren Hastings. And I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about Hastings and maybe set the theme for us of why you decided to start that one. So Warren Hastings is the company's leading official in India. He goes over as governor of Bengal in 1772 and within two years becomes the first governor general of Bengal, a new position.
And he faces an enormity of challenges from the very beginning, trying to stabilize this very shaky company state on the ground in India. He faces huge criticism, both. on the ground in India and back in Britain. The company by this point is in control of vast territories, but seem to be incompetent in managing them. It is held responsible for a devastating famine in Bengal.
not produce the stable revenues that the company, the investors expected. And Hastings is really given the task of creating a stable government. And this is an enormous task. has really arrived on the scene only a decade and a half after Plassey, the major battle that results in the company being in charge of a territory larger than the British Isles in eastern India. And in that time, under Hastings' predecessors...
There's been a double government where the company has been given the right to collect the revenues, but has delegated a lot of the responsibilities that you might think would come with that to. The remnants of the Nawab's government, the old governor of Bengal's government, the Indian governor of Bengal's government. And so there's a dual government that isn't really working. And the system is completely broken down, essentially, by Hastings' time. So he has to restore confidence.
in the company and some sense of its accountability, both back in Britain and to power holders in India, to the political classes in Bengal and rulers around the region who are dealing with the company as a new power on the scene. And my argument is that he turns to ideas about knowledge to do this. Maybe I'll pause there. I'm going to talk a little bit about both, I think, understanding, but a bit about the problem between the resonances, but it's really actually higher.
So indeed, conciliation is this term and this concept that really becomes central for Hastings and his attempt to stabilize the government to... exert some kind of authority and claim some kind of legitimacy for the company in Bengal and across its operations. Conciliation is already an interesting word back in Britain. It's been used by Edmund Burke in Parliament.
When it comes to the rest of American colonists, he says that even the most despotic government is forced to truck and huckster to kind of bargain with its subjects in the manner of a street merchant or a trader in a trading house. And conciliation is the word he uses. You know, you need to conciliate your subjects, conciliate this political community across the water, far away, in the manner of a merchant. And so there's this idea of a kind of commercial sovereignty that is being...
referred to with the idea of conciliation. But as you say, it also has resonances in South Asia. Conciliation is often a translation at the time for the Persian concept of sulikul, which is associated with the Mughal emperor Akbar, but still... has a lot of sway, even in Hastings Day, quite a bit later. Sometimes today we translate this term suikul as universal toleration, but really what it meant was coming to an agreement within a political community or...
between and among political communities. So you can see that conciliation again has these associations with negotiation and accommodation. And finally, we can think about the kind of meanings that it's given at the time. as blending the responsibilities of the sovereign and the responsibilities or the activities of a merchant. Conciliation can mean a kind of royal condescension, a kind of speaking down to subjects in the manner of a monarch. It can also mean
a more reciprocal kind of trade, a more reciprocal kind of negotiation that a merchant might be involved in. So it's doing something else, this term, which is combining the two sides of the company, combining its role as a company. a merchant, a trader, and its role as a sovereign. The very word can mean both kinds of activity. And it's a helpful word at this moment when the tension between the company's two roles has never seemed greater, never seemed more fraught.
And so Hastings invoking this word is invoking a kind of commercial sovereignty, the activities of the merchant and the sovereign. a term that would have had meaning both for his South Asian audience and for his British and European audience. So in this one word, it's doing a lot of the work of reconciling the irreconcilable.
when it comes to the political debates the company is involved in in the 1770s and 80s when Hastings is in power. And finally, it's notable that Hastings almost always uses this term in the context of knowledge. So we might think, well, this is quite a broad term that could be used in any kind of diplomacy or politics. Notably, he uses it almost always when it comes to knowledge projects. And towards the end of his career in India...
In 1784, he actually articulates exactly what he's doing, exactly what this vision underlying the term conciliation is. And he says basically that in private letters and in a public facing preface to the Bhagavad Gita. prepared by a company official, Charles Wilkins, a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Hastings writes that by patronizing European scholar officials working for the East India Company and Indian scholar elites, he is actually...
conciliating not only them, but the larger political classes, the rulers, the power holders with whom they have hold. So back in Britain, these scholar officials have access to the upper classes, have access to politicians and influential people. He writes, in fact, to one of his deputies that people back in Britain are more interested in the knowledge that this delegate might bring from unexplored Tibet than they would be in accounts of.
battles in which thousands of the enemy were slain. It's this new knowledge that really is captivating to the audience back in Britain and will win over some of the power holders who are skeptical about the company's public interestedness and even its competence. At the same time, there's a well-established tradition being brought up by the old officer class of the Mughal Empire that's still around in Bengal and by their contacts on the British side.
of patronizing knowledge in South Asia as one of the main duties of a ruler. And scholars, people like the historian Tao Wright, Alexander Tao, are held in higher acclaim than princes in South Asia. So you need to patronize scholars to... prove that you're a good ruler. So again, for both of Hastings' audiences, the idea of conciliation through scholarly patronage is a really powerful one. And Hastings makes this a central part, really, of his...
of his activities in Bengal, patronizing scholarship. And I'm glad you mentioned these two audiences there. And am I right in thinking that these were essentially elite or inclusive for the audience? of these projects with scholarly sponsorship were released both in Britain. Yeah. And so what picture of the company?
We're talking about ASTMV, essentially using the project, the only project to defend the conception of what a company is and what it should be and what it should do. Can you say a little bit more about what... Haystings is a complex thinker. And at one level, I think he really resents this enduring company state apparatus. He would love to...
be in charge of a strong, robust, uncommercial kind of sovereignty. He'd like to be a strong ruler, unencumbered by the company's old mercantile character and structure and activities. He calls again and again for as early as the 1760s. for the company to shed this involvement with trade and embrace what it is, what it has become, which is a sovereign of a large, vast territory with a huge population. And yet he finds himself unable to affect this change in the company.
he still has to work within its existing structure. And so to make sense of this, to make it work, to delay what he thinks is probably the inevitable, that the company will be folded up or turned into a purely ruling entity. He turns to this set of ideas about knowledge that will defend its hybrid character as a company state, that will reconcile, or at least appear to reconcile, this tension between its two roles, between its dual characters.
Yeah, and to mention, I mean, one way it plays out, or it's a concept, hopefully, is the sort of sector of corruption, sort of on these debates around the company, and particularly, I guess... thinking about the way the idea of corruption gets deployed in the critique of the company. And I suppose we can think of corruption here as really the improper mixing of public and private interests and functions.
So I wondered what role these ideas about knowledge, especially conciliation, played in managing, shifting, or even producing the public. Well, Hastings, I will pick up the story where we left off. Hastings is effectively recalled in 1785. There's a new charter for the company, and there's a lot of new push.
back in Britain, within Parliament, led by Edmund Burke and some of Hastings' other enemies, to hold the company accountable for what they see as vast abuses of power. So Hastings is hauled before Parliament. And this long-running trial, and chances are that if you've heard of these things, it's in this context, in the context of this impeachment trial in Parliament. He's accused of high crimes and misdemeanors, and this involves a whole range of different alleged offenses.
And in his speeches before Parliament and the British public, Edmund Burke says effectively that all of this high-minded rhetoric about patronizing knowledge and treating intellectual goods is really a cover for corruption. Conciliation, all of this talk is nonsense. It's shallow and window dressing. And what Hastings is really up to is using his position for profit. Just as you said, blending this public position with private interests and private profit.
And all of the activities Hastings has engaged in, from founding a madrasa in Calcutta to patronizing this learned figure, Ali Ibrahim Khan, and making him the chief magistrate in Benares. to patronizing the Bhagavad Gita and these other translations or compilations on the part of company servants, all of this is... a thin veil for venality and corruption dear old work platform it's not you it's us actually it is you
Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new. They're called Monday.com. And it was love at first onboarding. Their beautiful dashboards, their customizable workflows got us floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. Conciliation equals corruption.
Berk is helped in this charge by the activities of Hastings' temporary successor, John McPherson, who interestingly comes right out of the Scottish Enlightenment. He was a favorite student of Adam Ferguson. He was... the kinsman and collaborator with James McPherson of Ossian fame. If anyone has heard of Ossian, this supposed bard of medieval Scotland, these poems were invented or discovered depending on who you ask.
by James McPherson, and John was closely related with these activities. So John McPherson comes out of the Scottish Enlightenment and takes Hastings' already high-minded rhetoric to a new height, talking about... The East India Company is a trader, a broker of the world's knowledge, bringing knowledge from shore to shore and stimulating progress and tolerance through these activities. At the same time that he's indulging in this kind of rhetoric.
He's also, by all accounts, engaged in some pretty grubby activities. We get hints, in fact, that he is using these knowledge activities for his own profit. As the Calcutta Botanic Garden is being set up and founded...
He writes to an accomplice of his that, would you like to be the superintendent of this new garden? An accomplice who has no botanical expertise at all writes back that he might consider it if the thing is made worth my while. So basically, like, if the salary is good enough and I don't have to do anything, fine.
you know, put me in charge of the Britannic Garden. So there are little hints here that the kind of criticisms Burke is making of Hastings might well apply to his successor, McPherson. But this charge of corruption being made by Burke is taken much more seriously by... Hastings' permanent successor, Lord Cornwallis, who comes in just 18 months after Hastings departs. And Cornwallis takes it as his task to not end this idea of conciliation.
and the policy of scholarly patronage that it underwrites, but to purify it from the taint of corruption. So he sets up a much more rigid and distant set of relationships with scholar officials and Indian scholar elites. is a friend to the new Asiatic society set up by the polymath William Jones, but keeps his distance from it. And in all kinds of ways is not doing away with conciliation, but trying to remove the taint of corruption that is...
now applied to it by Burke back in Parliament during the Hastings trial. And it's only by the mid-1790s, a decade after Hastings leaves, that the trial is wound up. a new mood has set in in Britain after the French Revolution, a new mood of patriotism and support for the East India Company. It's only then that this kind of rigid regime can be relaxed again. It's one of the things I really like.
about your book and I think it comes out really clearly even in just the enthusiasm that you bring in speaking about it now is the way you bring these characters to life for us and I think you're evident fascination with the complexity of these men and their thinking and their interests and what's driving them really comes through on the page as well.
in our conversation. And so one of those sort of fascinating characters is Lord Wellesley. And I wondered if you could, I mean, set the theme for us a little bit here. So income. this new figure at the helm who is opposed to the company state. And perhaps you could say a little bit about what that opposition means in terms of what he brings to.
to his ideas about knowledge. Yes. So by 1798, Hastings has been rehabilitated. His idea of conciliation has been taken up by the Board of Control, this new supervisory body set up to regulate the company or at least oversee it. There are all kinds of new participants in the knowledge activities of the East India Company. And it seems like he is one and can enjoy his retirement. But almost no sooner as the Hastings trial wraps up, within a few years, a new character...
is on the scene in India, the company's new governor general, Wellesley, Richard Wellesley. And he is really a critic of the company from within. He makes clear his antipathy towards the company from the beginning. He thinks and acts on...
the belief that the company's sovereignty is undercutting its trade and its trade is undercutting its sovereignty. The whole entity should be split up and maybe nationalized. Anyway, the thing is not working and it needs to be dissolved. And he attacks it from within.
The alternative vision that he upholds is that of a kind of kingly territorial sovereignty, and he imagines himself in the role of the king. Later commentators often describe Richard Wellesley as vice regal, as kind of taking on some of the pomp and pageantry of monarchy.
But my line on this is that there's really nothing vice about it. He sees himself as the king, at least when it comes to a company's territories in India. And the comparison that's often drawn with Lord Curzon a century later is not even apt because whereas Curzon is... quite a viceroy and himself fond of pomp and pageantry. He describes Wellesley as a little autocrat who has gone far beyond his real title and responsibilities. So just to give you a sense of...
how much of a king Wellesley is trying to be. Even that comparison, I think, falls short. And the main prop, or one of the main props for his local monarchy, as Bentham is later to call his regime, is... an institution called the College of Fort William. So at one level, this is quite a practical institution. It's built in Calcutta to train and educate would-be or soon-to-be civil servants in the company's service, which is now...
expanding as the company's territories have expanded, who now have new responsibilities going far beyond trade. And so it will train them in the languages. It will give them a kind of liberal education so that they can govern and conduct diplomacy as well as conduct trade.
But at another level, it plays a huge ideological role for Hastings in buttressing his alternative form of sovereignty, his rejection of the commercial sovereignty of the company, and his embrace of a kingly territorial sovereignty, notably the building that...
he envisions is going to be this vast campus. It's going to have an observatory. It's going to be built on a large scale. Before the thing is even built, he orders a brickworks across the river to be dismantled because it will spoil the view from his... university campus. And the thing never gets built, but this is the idea. And even as it actually takes shape, the college is really a place where he can perform this role of sovereign. There's an annual disputation.
which is held, where the students of the college get up and deliver speeches, and there are hundreds of observers. It's reported and circulated to a virtual audience back in Britain and around the company's territories and beyond that may extend to thousands more.
And everything is done on the most lavish scale with ceremony and pomp attending it. And he sits in a throne. It's described as a gilt chair, but really, if you look, it's a throne. Fanned by attendants and flanked by mace bearers and all of this. And so what he's doing, really, and I should add that the college's activities extend beyond education. He invites, through widely circulated advertisements, scholars from across the region, not only India, but also from...
the Malay states. He tries to get help and training in Chinese from an Armenian living in Macau. Doesn't work out, but he tries. And so he's inviting scholars from across the region to this new center of knowledge production. It's also... building a massive library, partly plundered from rulers that the company has defeated, like Tipu Sultan in South India, and its publishing books, something like 100 volumes in the first three years. So this is a massive institution involved in...
all kinds of knowledge activities in support of Wellesley's idea of kingly territorial sovereignty. And you can see, you can imagine what the company's directors back in London thought about all of this. Here's this rebellious governor general. who not only is conquering territory against our wishes and running up a huge debt, but also building this edifice, claiming himself as a kind of king in control of these territories that are rightfully ruled by us back in London.
And so the college plays a large role in a heated set of disputes between Wellesley and the directors of the company back in London, which eventually end in Wellesley finally being kicked out in 1805. One of it. Interesting things about your description of Wellesley and these knowledge activities at William is that there seems to be some continuity in terms of this continued patronage of certain...
scholarly activities, the publication of books, but also beyond patronage, this real emphasis on spectacle. And I wondered if you had thoughts about what that shift seems to say about, I guess, an idea of... how to represent authority and the sort of model of authority that goes with different modes of patronage. Yeah, thanks for bringing me back to that point about conciliation, which I haven't answered yet.
For Wellesley conciliation, this idea, you know, started by Hastings is anathema because it's a term that blends the activities of the king and the merchant. And he, of course, is trying to separate these activities entirely. So he almost never uses the word conciliation, certainly not in the context of knowledge and knowledge activities. For him, later when he's Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he uses the term to talk about...
conciliating the Catholic population in Ireland but it's a very different context. He uses different ideas and different terms to talk about what he's doing. It's a lot about the relationship he has with Indians. in the company's territories. He refers to them as our subjects, as if he's the king. I think he even says my subjects. He embraces ideas about spectacle that are going to redound to his own majesty and his own...
position at the head of this newly envisioned empire. And at the same time that he's lording it over this institution in Calhada, he's also the most aggressively expansionist governor general the company has ever had. And he's extending the company's power in the South and...
in the West. And for the first time, it's possible to really talk about a British India taking shape, I think, in Wellesley's period. So the ideas about knowledge wrapped up in the college and the college's more practical activities as well in training civil servants.
are all bound up with this project of an expanding empire claiming paramountcy across the Indian subcontinent. So stepping back from Wellesley for a moment, I think the broad story... you tell in the book is a shift from conciliation, which we've already discussed the way conciliation was aimed at sort of elite audiences.
and as well as having this emphasis on sponsoring scholarship. And a shift to claims about educating mass publicists. So this is in sort of period after Lord Wellesley. And I wondered what... You think that shift might tell us about shifts in the company's underlying model of authority, but in England, India. So in other words, what form of authority could be shored up by conciliating and what form of authority could be bolstered by plans to educate?
So to say this briefly and then to expand on it, conciliation is an idea that really fits with a company as a hybrid entity engaged in trade and sovereignty. for all the reasons I kind of explained in what is bound up with that word. But as the company's trade is increasingly regulated and diminished in the early decades of the 19th century, and as its sovereignty comes to mean a lot more as it extends over a much...
wider, greater territory, this idea no longer seems appropriate. It runs up against the reality of a very different company state than had existed in Hastings' time. Meanwhile, as the company seems to be fully sovereign, nonetheless, with this corporate structure, it has to increasingly make the case for its good government. And it has to make that case for good government above all, not, you know, ability in trade, but ability in governance.
to a different audience, which is a more politically engaged public back in Britain and a more politically engaged, broader, very self-conscious public in India in the so-called Age of Reform from about the 1810s to 1830s. So the public, the company is facing a different audience and inhabiting a very different character by this time. And it has to ultimately embrace different ideas about knowledge to address these audiences and mollify them.
So now I'm going to backtrack to 1805 where we left off and try to explain how it gets there, how it comes to embrace this different set of ideas about knowledge, about education rather than conciliation. After Wellesley leaves in 1805, when in fact is recalled, He leaves behind many scholar officials who are wedded to his ideology, who believe in this expanding empire, fully embracing its responsibilities as a sovereign, and see this mission as unfulfilled.
further territories that it might expand to and further consolidation of the empire as being possible. And the kind of projects they cook up are massive statistical, linguistic, ethnographical surveys. which go hand in hand with mapping and mathematical projects. They see the possibility for new botanical and astronomical institutions, not only in Calcutta, but across the company's newfound...
territorial empire. Basically, they see this imperial consolidation as their political goal, abandoning the company's old mercantile identity completely. And they see knowledge projects of this kind on this vast scale as one means to accomplish this. Of course, the directors are still not a fan of this, not only because of the expense, but also it runs completely counter to their own ideology, which remains.
wedded to the company's historic role as a hybrid entity, a company and a state engaged in commerce and politics. And so they end up cutting off support for scholar officials and becoming disillusioned with conciliation and the policies. going with it. They see this as really not doing them any favors. However, by the later 1810s, they do come to support newer educational associations. And by the 1820s, education is...
one of the key topics being debated in Madras, in Bombay, and in Calcutta. In 1824, Governor Eltonstone writes that more ink has been spilled on the topic of education than on all other topics in his presidency over the past few years. Essentially, education and the possibility of educating a mass public and winning over a mass constituency of supporters for the company comes to seem well worth the company's time and investment in a way that conciliation and...
patronizing elite scholars no longer does. And it's these debates over education that take up much of the last chapter of my book, going from the 1820s up to the famous Orientalist-Inguicist debate in Calcutta in the 1830s. and ending around the middle of the 1830s with mass education rather than conciliation enshrined in the company's ideology.
This is really an important question, and it's one of the key questions that's debated at this time. Is mass education possible with the state that is really only coming to being very quickly? Still in the guise of this company that has only recently accepted such responsibilities and has only a very limited kind of interaction with the population at large, is new to its responsibilities, maybe not very good at carrying them out.
What kind of mass education is really possible? Do you still have to work through intermediaries? And this is where the idea of conciliation has a surprising comeback. It's now discussed at each of the presidencies that perhaps we still have to conciliate this older set of... Indian scholar elites. Maybe they're the gatekeepers to this wider society. Maybe we can't afford or we can't even hope to successfully
educate the mass of society directly, but maybe we can do so indirectly, at least at first, through these scholar elites. Maybe we can conciliate them and through them reach and cultivate this broader public as Supporters of the company receiving an education and being grateful for it. And what were the ideas about education? So I snatched education. They sort of parallel this procedure.
I think one reason the company really turns to education as the way of demonstrating its good government is that this is quite a radical idea back in Europe at the time. Parliament doesn't give a grant to public education until 1833. That's the first grant it gives to schools. And so talking about a state supporting a system of mass education in the 1820s is quite radical. It's quite an old demonstration of good government.
Of course, I should add here that the company never follows through on this commitment. There's a lot of talk about education and it becomes ideologically central, but it never occupies a large place on the budget sheets of the company. Although it commits a certain amount to education and often boasts about this, it's pretty meager in consideration of its overall revenues and operations compared with its expenditure on the military or on...
even paying the dividend to shareholders in Britain. It's fairly minor. But it has swayed back in Britain, as well as among some members of this public in India, because it seems like quite a... progressive forward-thinking activity for a state to be engaged in. So if the company, still retaining much of its old corporate structure, can lay claim to educating a public, this is a bold demonstration of good government.
At least this is how the company sees it and how it hopes that the public in Britain will see it. So turning now to sort of ask some questions about that method, about how you went about putting this book together and writing it. So in your introduction, you're critical of a turn to culture slash structure, as exemplified in figures, which is.
That line of scholarship you suggest too readily understands production and accumulation of knowledge to be entirely in service of the world, to dominate. In contrast, you want to say that these actors, these... these characters that you sort of brought to life in this book, were themselves occupied with what you call complex and cheating concerns.
So was there something distinctive then about the commercial concerns of company officials? You referred to them as scholar officials. Is there something distinctive about their commercial concerns when it came to knowledge? To put it another way, is there something...
or what is to be gained from making an analysis of power, knowledge, more attentive to it? I think what's really at stake here is how we write about power. I think what was valuable about this... set of approaches that's often called histories of colonial knowledge associated with post-colonial studies after Said in the 1980s and 90s was attention to power in a way that the older lowercase o Orientalist scholarship
did not really pay attention to. And so that's what was valuable about this turn to studies of colonial knowledge in the 80s and 90s, putting power front and center and asking whether knowledge projects were not simply... the benevolent actions of a ruling power, but were in fact in service of expanding that power, dominating new subjects and territories. And I think all of that was valuable. However...
I find their analysis of power to be a bit simplistic. So you read in this literature claims that it's this primal will to power being expressed through projects to dominate. And they talk about a cultural project of control. But do we really think that politics...
only boils down to the naked exercise of power? Or do we think that, in fact, ideology comes into the picture and that ideas are wielded and that power is configured in different ways? In other words, do we think that the history of political thought is a valuable kind of academic exercise? Or do we only think that all of history can be boiled down to domination and being dominated and the pure exercise of power? If knowledge is power, then knowledge would seem to me to be political. And yet...
It hasn't been in the existing literature. The debates around knowledge that actually shaped what policies were implemented have not been really explored. And that's what I wanted to get to in this book were actually these very... sophisticated debates around what policies to enact around knowledge, whether it be patronizing scholar officials or educating mass publics, for instance. Those seem to be crucial to understand.
how knowledge and power interact. It's not simply about domination. It's about politics. And to stay with method, you describe your method as the history of ideas. That approach, you say, allows us to recover past meanings and usages of concepts about knowledge and to make them available again in the present. So one such concept is the idea that the company accumulated knowledge not only to profit, but to minimize itself.
And you end the book with the brief, sort of tantalizing prospect that that idea might be deployed today to critique and perhaps even hold accountable contemporary corporations, especially the tech giants. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on. So like most historians, I'm a little wary of making predictions or calling for particular policies in the present. But I do think that there are things to be learned from the history of...
the knowledge debates in which the company was involved. And one of those things is that, of course, as I'm not the first or the only one to say, companies are not only economic entities, they're also political. And they have, to some extent, a need for legitimacy, which makes them accountable to outside constituencies, at least potentially. And this is, I think, how ideology works. If you express an ideology...
you commit yourself to a certain stance, you can be held up to that commitment by critics from the outside, by these outside constituencies, at least to some extent. It doesn't always work. But there's a possibility there of holding companies to account by...
holding them to their own mission statements. And critics of the company often had more luck when they tried to hold the company up to the enlightened promises it had made than when they simply dismissed the possibility of its ever meeting those promises because it was a company.
and not a state. So simply claiming that companies can never do the kind of things that states do seems ineffective in a world in which they are doing many of those things and looking at a history in which they have done many of those things in the past. And I think that that...
That point that the roles of states and companies have evolved and morphed in countless ways over time, remembering that these are not static but dynamic categories, I think that is what can be important for knowledge debates today. So in areas like higher education or publishing or scientific or medical research today, in which companies are increasingly encroaching on the long held, you know, domains of states.
I think we do well to remember all of the various ways in which companies and states have performed these roles in the past and hold companies to account by insisting that they meet the standards that we... believe apply in those realms rather than simply dismissing the possibility that they can ever do so. That, I think, is the claim that might be important for contemporary debates around knowledge. So that's a kind of not being fixated on.
I guess, static and frequency, like ladies, companies that actually know what they're doing. Yeah. Trying to work from that. I wondered if you had... If you go back to the India company, so the examples of when those critics were successful in turning some of their claims, whether about infiliation or, say, metal education, to turn those back on.
Did critics have success? Yeah, I think that we can turn to the education debates and see a lot of participation by critics and skeptics about the company from Bengali intellectuals like Ramahan Roy to... education reformers back in Britain, many of whom had served in the company and belonged to new education associations. I think you do see these debates taking shape through these outside criticisms. And the company...
I've already admitted never fully fulfilling the role that it has set for itself, not committing the kind of resources through mass education to make it a workable reality. I've kind of acknowledged already that this didn't happen. But again... I think that they were more effective than those critics who simply wrote off the possibility of the company ever, ever meeting the commitments that it had made.
And look, I mean, if you do look at the whole course of the company's engagements with the knowledge, you see it having to substantiate this ideology it has laid out, this enlightened commitment to knowledge. It has to...
put money behind it occasionally to support both South Asian and European scholars in the field to support educational institutions, many of which survive today. So I'd be the last person to argue that the company was this enlightened benefactor in the way that it presented itself.
But I do think we see the potential to hold companies to account because they are ideological entities as well as economic ones. Because they announce commitments, the way to deal with them is to ask them to meet those commitments if you agree with them. I think it's really important about the ways in which we approach proper power. And I do think that this book has something to tell us about.
the politics of knowledge today as much as in the 19th centuries. So, I mean, this is always a terrible question to ask someone whose first book has just come out. What are you working on now? Is there another book project? I think if there's a thread that connects my various projects, it's looking for politics and political thought in unexpected places. So in this case, the knowledge activities of a corporation.
In my two new projects, these are different unexpected places to find political thought. I have one project on the Darbar as a political institution. In fact, maybe the most important political institution you've never heard of. have barely heard of. This was an institution that emerges from medieval Persia, travels to early modern South Asia, gets picked up by the British, exported as far west as Nigeria and Ghana, and as far east as the Malay states.
which continues to be this important political forum for negotiation, for dissent and confrontation at multiple levels of this complex polity. It's the place where agreements are hashed out. where the different levels of the empire are brought together, where publics are addressed and conciliated, to use the word again. And so I think it's a crucial institution for the British empire, as well as in global history, because it still survives.
some of those places I just mentioned. So that's one project, looking at the Darbar and making the case for this as a key political institution in global history. The other is about the globalization of print in the 18th century. saying that in South Asia and beyond, I'm looking at the moment at least around the Indian Ocean, non-European reading publics were coming into being by the 18th century, not in the 19th century as we've tended to hear.
And these publics were buying books at auction in huge numbers, were patronizing the publication of books, subscribing to them, were engaging with them in all kinds of ways that we can get at, at least partially, through these. probate records and subscription lists and other underused sources. So what I hope to do with this project is build out this sense that a lot of the cultural and intellectual encounter between European empires and
a wide range of Asian societies happened earlier than we thought and happened through different means perhaps than we've recognized. So our stories about, for instance, opposition to the British Empire in India have to be changed when we... realized that Indian intellectuals had access and were making use of this access to political pamphlets, often radical political pamphlets, coming from Britain as early as the 1750s, long before we thought.
And this makes us reread the early critiques of the British Empire by figures like Ghulam Hussein Khan or even Tipu Sultan when we realized that they had access to all of this printed material coming from Britain and Europe and were making use of it. we get a different sense of their intellectual influences. And so this is at some level a material and social history. It's also an intellectual and political history. Well, thank you. I think both those projects sound fascinating.
I certainly love the idea of looking into fighting places and also love the idea of the most important political institution that's something I've never heard of. So I look forward to seeing. about this project. And thank you for joining us.