Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff

Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 43-72.

5Though see Jean Meyer et al., Histoire de la France coloniale: Des origines à 1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991) and Jean Martin, L’Empire renaissant 1789-1871 (Paris: Denoël, 1987) for an outline of key events of the period.

6See Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism 1798-1836 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998) for an excellent exposition of this theme in general, and the place of Egypt across regimes in particular.

7Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of the World…, 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), Part I, IV, pp. 334-39.

8William Foster, ed., The English Factories in India 1618-21 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), pp. viii, 38-40.

9Philip Lawson, The East India Company (London: Longman, 1993), p. 20.

10Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies…, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1727), quoted in P. T. Nair, ed., Calcutta in the Eighteenth Century (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1984), p. 4.

11“A Voyage to Calcutta in 1761,” quoted in Nair, ed., p. 134. This writer reported that “Of 84 rank and file, which our company consisted of on our arrival, we had but 34 remaining in three months.” Captain Hamilton, visiting Calcutta in the first decade of the century, commented that 460 of 1,200 Europeans had been buried in four months.

12The poignant and tragic story of the dragoman, Étienne Roboly, can be followed in the archives of French consular correspondence, AN: AE B/I/109. The allegation that Roboly was in fact an Armenian, and had taken service with France without the sultan’s permission, does seem to have been justified; though his treatment was not, and indeed was one of the outrages later cited by French lobbyists to argue for an invasion of Egypt. It is not surprising that the dragoman—the quintessential man on the margins—was also a collector, desperate to send pieces of classical sculpture (and prove his loyalty?) to Louis XV.

13The Company’s late-seventeenth-century expansionism, promoted particularly by Sir Josiah Child and supported by James II, was mostly erased under the “trade to conquest” narrative that made Plassey the starting point of a newly militant era in Company history. For a detailed account of these earlier maneuvers, see Philip J. Stern, “ ‘One Body Corporate and Politick’: The Growth of the English East India Company-State in the Later Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2004).

14Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

15Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 132.

16J. F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 253-81; Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707-1748 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). This period used to be characterized as one of “decline”; more recent interpretations have stressed that it was the very success of the old imperial system at promoting regional autonomy that led to its unraveling.

17Robert Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Hindoostan, 2 vols. (London, 1763-1778), II, p. 47.

18Michael Edwardes, Plassey: The Founding of an Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969), p. 65; Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World 1600-1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), pp. 255-56. The sensationalism was started by one of the survivors, John Zephaniah Holwell, A Genuine Narrative of the deplorable deaths of the English gentlemen, and others, who were suffocated in the Black-Hole in Fort-William, at Calcutta… (London, 1758). Holwell gives the—undoubtedly exaggerated—figure of 23 survivors, from a group of 146.

19Orme, II, pp. 127-35.

20Captain Edmund Maskelyne, “Journal of the Proceedings of the Troops Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Clive on the Expedition to Bengal,” OIOC: MSS Eur Orme 20, p. 35.

21“Letter from Mr. Watts to his father giving an account of events in Bengal from the treaty concluded with Seerajah Doulet on the 6th of February to August 13 [1757], including Changernagore, the battle of Plassey, etc.,” OIOC: MSS Eur Orme 20, p. 109. Orme gives rather higher numbers in his History, II, p. 173.

22On the conspiracy, see Edwardes, pp. 111-29; and Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India (London: Constable, 1974), pp. 119-32.

23“Letter from Mr. Watts…,” p. 111.

24Orme, II, pp. 179-84.

25The last flowering of French activity in Indian courts was in the Punjab: Jean-Marie Lafont, La Présence française dans le royaume sikh du Penjab, 1822-1849 (Paris: École Française de l’Extrême Orient, 1992); Jean-Marie Lafont, French Administrators of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (New Delhi: National Book Shop, 1986).

26C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 47-52.

27John Splinter Stavorinus, quoted in Nair, ed., p. 163.

28Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998; 1st pub. 1932), p. 30.

29Mrs. Nathaniel Kindersley, quoted in Nair, ed., p. 145.

30Suresh Chandra Ghosh, The British in Bengal: A Study of the British Society and Life in the Late Eighteenth Century (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1998), pp. 96-109.

31T. B. Macaulay, Macaulay’s Essays on Clive and Hastings, ed. Charles Robert Gaston (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1910), pp. 89-90. The essay is a review of Sir John Malcolm’s three-volume hagiography, commissioned by Clive