Scottish Orientalists, Administrators and Missions: A Distinctive Scots Approach to Asia?

Abstract

The Scots had extensive contacts with Asia which embraced intellectual, administrative and religious concerns. From the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, they developed an approach to Orientalist interests in the subcontinent which were distinctively Scottish. They were also involved in major controversies about Indian history, pursued by such major figures as William Robertson, James Mill and Mountstuart Elphinstone. Scottish administrators in India—figures such as Thomas Munro, John Malcolm and Elphinstone—developed policies that were to a certain extent rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment and Civil Society as well as in a romantic attachment to traditional Indian societies. The chapter also discusses the activities of Scottish missionaries, mainly in the fields of linguistic, educational and publishing interests in the Far East, the Middle East and South Asia.