An Empire of the Understanding

Abstract

While an integral element of the East India Company’s governance of India in the eighteenth century was its policies of cultural conciliation and the courting of indigenous elites for the influence they wielded, historiographies of the nineteenth century have tended to highlight the relative power and aloofness of the British imperial state. Certainly, the attitudes of cultural superiority and self-confidence which were a part of British strategies of rule after 1800 have frequently been interpreted as integral to the ‘imperial century’, and contrasted with the apparently ‘friendlier’ cosmopolitanism of the early empire. Of course, few would care to argue that British rule of India in 1772 closely resembled that of 1835, nor would many deny that the personal qualities and governing policies of Warren Hastings and William Bentinck were significantly distinct. But there are important reasons for questioning the viability of drawing broad chronologically-based distinctions about the ‘character’ of Britain’s empire in India, and the usefulness of such distinctions for a historiography which recognises complex metamorphoses in the broad variety of personal and institutional relationships which composed and underpinned the imperial state. Ascribing to the Company’s eighteenth-century state a character of cultural ‘tolerance’ based upon selected cross-cultural marriages, for example, obscures the inherent violence of the Company’s expansion, in much the same way as overemphasising the importance of T. B. Macaulay’s intemperate rhetoric in his (in)famous minute of 1835, which promoted the virtues of English, has served to elide the greater significance of its critiques in determining educational policy in the 1840s and 1850s.