Abstract
The East India Company disappeared from British public view in the 1860s when the imposing building that housed its London headquarters was demolished. The magnificent interiors and their impressive fittings were relocated, while the eclectic collection of objects comprising the Company’s museum was dispersed. It was an underwhelming end for the ‘most powerful commercial corporation of ancient or modern times’. Subsequent scholarship has reinforced the idea of an eighteenth-century heyday followed by a decline into oblivion. This chapter argues, however, that the Company was never far from the public gaze or the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Britain. Building on the work of John MacKenzie—on propaganda and empire, as well as on museums, exhibitions and the exhibiting of empire—this chapter explores the representation of what Thomas Babington Macaulay called the ‘strangest of all empires’.
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Notes
- 1.
Nick Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (London: Pluto, 2006), 10.
- 2.
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- 3.
‘The East India House’, Leisure Hour, 5 September 1861, 567.
- 4.
Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World, 7.
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- 52.
Quoted in Desmond, India Museum, 33–35.
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Quoted in Desmond, The India Museum, 27.
- 55.
Desmond, The India Museum, 28.
- 56.
Quoted in Desmond, The India Museum, 39.
- 57.
Guide to the East India Museum (London: H.G. Clarke & Co., 1851), 1 and 3.
- 58.
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- 61.
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- 62.
Quoted in G. Alex Bremner, ‘Nation and Empire in the Government Architecture of Mid-Victorian London: The Foreign and India Office Reconsidered’, Historical Journal 48 (2005), 734.
- 63.
Quoted in Desmond, India Museum, 26.
- 64.
[Mogridge], Old Humphrey’s Walks in London, 152.
- 65.
Nolan, British Empire in India, I, 390.
- 66.
‘The New Museum at the East India House’, Illustrated London News, 6 March 1858, 228 and 230.
- 67.
Times (London), 7 April 1858, 10.
- 68.
Quoted in Bremner, ‘Nation and Empire’, 732–33.
- 69.
Robert Skelton, ‘The Indian Collections, 1798–1978’, Burlington Magazine 120 (1978), 297–304.
- 70.
‘India Museum at Fife House, Whitehall’, Illustrated London News, 3 August 1861, 125.
- 71.
India Museum and the Department of the Reporter (London: Knight & Co., 1864), 7.
- 72.
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 98.
- 73.
Desmond, India Museum, 104.
- 74.
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 102.
- 75.
Imre Kiralfy, ‘General Introduction’, in Official Catalogue of the Empire of India Exhibition, Earl’s Court, London, SW, 1895 (London: J.J. Keliher, 1895), 11.
- 76.
Official Catalogue, 53–67. See also Journal of Indian Art and Industry 6 (1896), 89–90; and ‘Relics of the EIC at Earl’s Court’, Morning Post, 9 October 1895.
- 77.
Official Catalogue, 17.
- 78.
Official Catalogue, 19 and 21.
- 79.
Official Catalogue, 53.
- 80.
Official Catalogue, 54.
- 81.
Official Catalogue, 65.
- 82.
See, for example, Official Catalogue, catalogue numbers 110, 115, 125, 222, 226, 276, 278, 282, 283, and 284.
- 83.
Official Catalogue, 65.
- 84.
Official Catalogue, 136 and 138.
- 85.
Catalogue numbers 68, 152, 203, 359, 393. Official Catalogue, 85, 105, 108, 140, and 145.
- 86.
Official Catalogue, 65.
- 87.
Official Catalogue, 66. See catalogue number 277.
- 88.
See Lara Kriegel, ‘Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace’, in Louise Purbrick, ed., The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 146–78.
- 89.
For general reflections on this theme, see Vanessa Brand, ed., The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxbow, 1998).
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Penny Magazine, 1 March 1834, 84.
- 91.
John Britton and Augustus Pugin, Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London (London: J. Taylor, 1828), II, 77.
- 92.
Kaye, ‘The House That John Built’, 121.
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McAleer, J. (2019). Exhibiting the ‘Strangest of All Empires’: The East India Company, East India House, and Britain’s Asian Empire. In: Barczewski, S., Farr, M. (eds) The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_3
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