Excluding and including "natives of India": Early-nineteenth-century British-Indian race relations in Britain

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 303-314

  Fisher, Michael H ^a  

^a OBERLIN COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL RELATIONS; IMPERIALISM; NINETEENTH CENTURY; RACE;

EURASIA; EUROPE; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE;

EID: 35148897206     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-2007-007     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. For largely Anglocentric studies of the forging of British identity, see Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992);
2. and William Roger Louis, editor in chief, Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998-99).
3. For a more global approach, see C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian (New York: Longman, 1989).
4. Kathleen Wilson, Island Race (New York: Routledge, 2003), 11.
5. See Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain (London: Pluto, 2002);
6. and Michael H. Fisher, Shompa Lahiri, and Shinder Thandi, A South Asian History of Britain (Oxford: Greenwood, 2007).
7. Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee, Journal of a Residence of Two Years and a Half in Great Britain (London: William H. Allen, 1841), 26-27. This is a repeated theme among the score of Indian written accounts in Persian, Urdu, and English during this period.
8. See, e.g., Lutfullah, Autobiography, ed. Edward B. Eastwick and S. A. I. Tirmizi (London: Smith, Elder, 1857; New Delhi: International Writer's Emporium, 1985), 403-4.
9. For example, Sake Dean Mahomed (1759-1851), the "Shampooing Surgeon" of Brighton who used allegedly Asian medicine and cuisine to rise in British society. See Michael H. Fisher, First Indian Author in English (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).
10. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
11. See also Michael H. Fisher, "Persian Professor in Britain: Mirza Muhammad Ibrahim at the East India Company's College, 1826-44," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 21 (2001): 24-32.
12. Substantial scholarship has recently traced the ways that British territorial assertions in India interacted with such British cultural theorizations of race and sovereignty during the formative decades following 1757. See Nicholas B. Dirks, Scandal of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006);
13. Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2002);
14. Robert Travers, Asiatic Empire: British Ideology and Colonial State-Formation in Bengal, 1757-1793 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
15. and Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
16. Exempt were company officials and "menial servants" (almost all Europeans rather than Asians). Court of Directors Minutes (hereafter Court Minutes), 17 October 1651-14 April 1813, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library (hereafter BL).
17. These issues came up in terms of legal jurisdiction, however, for example, in the extent of the authority of the Calcutta Supreme Court.
18. The membership of Parliament and of the shareholders and directors of the company overlapped, with rival factions competing in each. From 1784 Parliament's "Board of Control" supervised the company, especially its political relations in India.
19. Court of Directors to Fort William, 17 March 1769 and 12 July 1782, National Archives of India, Fort William-India House Correspondence, 5:186, 9:58-59;
20. Court Minutes, 26 February 1773.
21. See also Shipping Committee Minutes, 31 July 1816, BL.
22. Home Public Consultations, 5 January 1798, no. 55, Extract Proceedings of Military Department, 22 December 1797, National Archives of India, Delhi.
23. Court Minutes, 29 July 1807. The British army also attempted to prevent its soldiers from bringing their Indian wives back with them to Britain. Douglas Peers, personal communication with author, 28 February 2003.
24. These lists have survived in various files in the British Library and the West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra state archives.
25. Marine Department, L/MAR/C/902, 2 vols. (hereafter Lascar Papers), BL;
26. East India Trade Accounts of Ships, Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Sessionals 1823/17/149-56, and Return, 5 June 1823.
27. Ordered by Commons, 5 May 1823. In 1855 Colonel Hughes estimated ten thousand to twelve thousand lascars served the British merchant fleet, with five thousand to six thousand reaching Britain annually, of whom three thousand to thirty-six hundred were Indian. Cited in Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes (London: Pluto, 1984), 52.
28. Lascar Papers, vol. 1, fol. 120.
29. An appointment as cadet came by nomination by one of the company's directors or by the British government.
30. Court Minutes, 19 April 1791. This debate parallels those within the company's armies in India at this time about the identities, and worthiness for pensions, of the Indian wives and children of British officers and men.
31. Court Minutes, 20 April 1791.
32. Court Minutes, 9 November 1791.
33. Factors determining this exception apparently included Devaynes's influence and that the appointment was at Fort Marlborough (in Sumatra). Court Minutes, 1 March 1792.
34. Court Minutes, 7-22 December 1791.
35. Court Minutes, 9 February 1792.
36. Court Minutes, 19 February 1800.
37. Act 54 Geo. 3, c. 134;
38. Lascar Papers, vol. 1, fol. 59;
39. Shipping Committee Minutes, 30 November 1814.
40. Shipping Committee Minutes, 2 June 1813; repeated 15 December 1813, 25 November 1814, and 12 April 1831.
41. Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Sessionals 1814-15/2/587-91 and 593-97;
42. Bill to Make Further Regulations for the Registry of Ships Built in India, 5 May 1815; amended 6 June 1815.
43. Shipping Committee Minutes, 7 July 1815.
44. Shipping Committee Minutes, 12-19 July 1815.
45. Shipping Committee Minutes, 24 July 1816.
46. Court Minutes, 23 October 1816.
47. Correspondence Committee Minutes, 24 January 1817, BL.
48. Correspondence Committee Minutes, 4 June 1818.
49. Shipping Committee Minutes, 17 December 1819.
50. Shipping Committee Minutes, 17 November 1819, 1-14 December 1819.
51. E.g., Shipping Committee Minutes, 11 November 1818.
52. Shipping Committee Minutes, 12 July 1820.
53. Shipping Committee Minutes, 23 August 1820.
54. Shipping Committee Minutes, 28 February 1821;
55. see also 7 November 1821-19 January 1825.
56. Shipping Committee Minutes, 7 April 1820.
57. Shipping Committee Minutes, 17 May 1820-8 October 1823.
58. Seminary Committee Reports, 28 November 1821, BL.
59. Court Minutes, 5 December 1821, 2-16 January 1822.
60. Shipping Committee Minutes, 27 June 1821.
61. Shipping Committee Minutes, 22 May 1822.
62. Shipping Committee Minutes, 17 June 1823.
63. Shipping Committee Minutes, 21 March 1820-21 September 1825.
64. Shipping Committee Minutes, 14-21 July 1824, 25 August 1826, 6 September 1826.
65. Shipping Committee Minutes, 12 February 1823.
66. Shipping Committee Minutes, 22 September 1824.
67. Correspondence Committee Minutes, 29 June 1825, 30 December 1825, 1 February 1826, 29 December 1826.
68. Correspondence Committee Minutes, 30 October 1827;
69. Court Minutes, 31 October 1827, 7 November 1827.
70. Shipping Committee Minutes, 30 March 1827, 16 April 1828, 10 September 1828.
71. Court Minutes, 14 April 1830.
72. See also Shipping Committee Minutes, 6 April 1827.
73. Shipping Committee Minutes, 12 June 1833, 1 August 1833.
74. Chistopher J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773-1833 (London: Curzon, 1996).
75. See, e.g., Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 224-54;
76. N. Gerald Barrier, ed., Census in British India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981), 73-101;
77. Sumit Guha, "The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India, c. 1600-1900," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 148-67.
78. See the classic Edwa Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978);
79. and also Ussama Makdisi, "Ottoman Orientalism," American Historical Review 107 (2002): 768-96.