Abstract
This book provides a survey of British fictional representations of the subcontinent from 1772 to 1823. Although it discusses the consumption of Oriental goods and the development of Oriental tales in early eighteenth-century Britain, the study of British Indian fictional texts really begins with Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (1772). It is appropriate that the journey begins in 1772 as this was the year when the autonomy of the East India Company (EIC) in the subcontinent was being debated by its stockholders in London.1 In addition, this year has particular significance given that the EIC’s revenue collections and nefarious trading practices in Bengal were coming to the attention of the metropolitan press and faced severe criticism in the immediate aftermath of the Bengal Famine (1770–1771) and during Robert Clive’s trial for corruption in Britain.2 It also marks an era when Britain’s empire was still in its formative stages. Despite the fact that the company at this time was the major European power in India, with strong footholds in Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, and furthermore, held the rights to collect and administer land revenue in Bengal, it had yet to expand into central and southern India.3
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Notes
Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule: From the Rise of British Power in 1757 to the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1950), 19–51.
P. J. Marshall, “Western Arms in Maritime Asia in the Early Phases of Expansion,” Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 1 (1980): 26–28.
Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 267.
Amal Chatterjee, Representations of India, 1740–1840: The Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1998), 4–5;.
Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6–7.
Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 3–5.
Michael J. Franklin, “Accessing India: Orientalism, Anti-’Indianism’ and the Rhetoric of Jones and Burke,” in Romanticism and Colonialism, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 56–57.
Nandini Bhattacharya, Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century British Writing on India (London: Associated University Press, 1998), 13–22.
Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 6–7.
See Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 6–43;.
Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism, Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 15–19.
Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge: London, 2003), 32–33.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 40–49.
Linda Colley, Britons Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1992), 17.
Michael J Franklin, “Introduction,” in Hartly House, Calcutta, by Phebes Gibbes, ed. Michael J. Franklin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), xi–lvii.
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregor Elliot (London: Verso, 2009), 15–22.
Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 158–59.
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© 2012 Ashok Malhotra
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Malhotra, A. (2012). Introduction. In: Making British Indian Fictions. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011541_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011541_1
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