Indian Ink
Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company
A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, Indian Ink examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Miles Ogborn takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffeehouses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, Ogborn argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word.
Navigating the juncture of imperial history and the history of the book, Indian Ink uncovers the intellectual and political legacies of early modern trade and empire and charts a new understanding of the geography of print culture.
“Indian Ink makes legible the forms of writing that helped produce differential understandings of metropole and empire in its early days. How, for example, could the British devise proper type in order to print documents in Bengali? In this illuminating analysis of geography’s intersection with reading, printing, and distribution, Miles Ogborn exhaustively traces the ever-shifting relations of power between Europe and India as revealed in East India Company charters, royal letters, merchants’ accounts, and stock price listings, to expose the imperial power relations implicit within technologies of writing and print. This is an important and innovative interdisciplinary study of the global trading networks of inscription and its exchange from 1600 to 1800.”—Felicity Nussbaum, editor of The Global Eighteenth Century
“Miles Ogborn’s important and original account of the East India Company shows how global power was projected and maintained as much by paper and ink as by blood and iron. Empire was made of the write stuff.”—Steven Shapin, author of A Social History of Truth
“In this bravura performance, Miles Ogborn uses the diverse and changing writing and printing practices of the English East India Company to expound on how and why we need to understand the history of knowledge geographically. Indian Ink makes a remarkable contribution to a number of literatures and charts new interpretive vistas. The exciting new spatial directions in which Ogborn presses historical and literary inquiry will fascinate scholars in a range of disciplines.”—Mary Poovey, author of A History of the Modern Fact
“For long enough, we have known that in the making and maintaining of empires, the pen is mightier than the sword. Now Miles Ogborn complicates this story in a work of remarkable breadth and insight. With great skill he reveals the variety, fragility, and flexibility of marks on paper disclosing how imperial power was both reproduced and resisted through the complex circuitry of written words. Whether tracing the physical and cultural voyages of royal letters from shore to shore, uncovering the moral economy of documentary accounting, or exploring the imperial politics of pamphleteering, Ogborn elucidates with great power the micro- and macrogeographies of ink in the forging of the English East India Company. A wonderful achievement.”—David N. Livingstone, author of Putting Science in Its Place
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter 1 The Written World
Chapter 2 Writing Travels: Royal Letters and the Mercantile Encounter
Chapter 3 Streynsham Master’s Office: Accounting for Collectivity, Order, and Authority at Fort St. George
Chapter 4 The Discourse of Trade: Print, Politics, and the Company in England
Chapter 5 Stock Jobbing: Print and Prices on Exchange Alley
Chapter 6 The Work of Empire in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Postscript
Bibliography
Index
Asian Studies: South Asia
Economics and Business: Economics--History
Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography
History: British History
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