Nabobs: Empire and identity in eighteenth-century Britain (review)

In his 1926 book The Nabobs in England: A study of the returned Anglo-Indian, 1760–1785, historian James M. Holzman suggests that in historical memory, East India Company officials, derisively referred to as nabobs, have “survived only as the victims of glib, and often erroneous, generalization.”¹ Holzman further suggests that Nabobs were no better understood in their own time. The seemingly mysterious origins of the nabobs’ fortunes, combined with an atmosphere of political cynicism in the eighteenth century meant that Britons displayed “a readiness to believe anything of the Nabobs, always provided that it was sufficiently lurid.”²

Nearly eighty-five years and numerous historiographical trends later, Tillman W. Nechtman explores the scandal and spectacle surrounding East India Company officials in his 2010 book Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. And while Holzman declared that his rather straightforward task was to understand how nabobs spent their fortunes, Nechtman’s project is a much more ambitious, revisionist history of the subject. By focusing on public perceptions of nabobs in addition to anti-nabob rhetoric among political elites, Nechtman argues that the nabob controversies illustrate the centrality of empire—and India in particular—to the fraught and contested construction of Britishness, as eighteenth-century Britons became aware that “Britain was changing the rest of the world but also that the rest of the world was changing Britain.” (21)

As Nechtman’s introduction explains, the term “nabob” is an Anglicized form of the word nawab, which was a title held by regional elites within the Mughal Empire. In Britain, nabob was used as a mocking reference to East India Company officials, some of whom returned home from South Asia with new, and presumably dubious, fortunes. A series of controversies in the eighteenth century, highlighted by the government inquiry into the dealings of Robert Clive, and the nearly ten-year impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, serve as evidence of the uneasy relationship between nabobs and their fellow domestic countrymen. For Nechtman, the nabob controversies represented far more than merely internecine disputes among political elites. Rather, nabobs were viewed with popular suspicion and hostility “because they were themselves the harbingers of a globalized and imperial sense of Britishness as a consequence of the material culture they brought home with them to Britain from South Asia.” (16) The presence of nabobs and their “exotic” accouterments, Nechtman argues, made it impossible for domestic Britons to conceive of their nationhood and identity in isolation from Empire. The book contends that because nabobs were potentially corrupted by the supposed luxury, sloth, superstition, and despotism of India, the presence of nabobs in Britain represented a visible threat to “Britain’s established order—the political securities of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the religious structures of the established Protestant church, and the sense of national vigor that had fought for an achieved them all.” (91)

Nechtman’s study is impressively researched and argued, and the book’s clearly written prose is divided into an introduction, five substantive chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter examines Indian travel narratives in the context of Enlightenment thinking, establishing the intellectual background to the nabob controversies. In the second chapter, Nechtman discusses imperial taxonomies and the extent to which Britons attempted to create narratives of British and Indian civilization that fit eighteenth-century concepts of stadial theory. The third chapter considers the representation of nabobs within a broader perspective, focusing on the changing nature of Britain’s global empire and its impact on the domestic scene. The fourth chapter, perhaps the most interesting, examines the material objects nabobs brought home, and the impact of this “imperial clutter” on their fellow Britons’ sense of self. Such objects, Nechtman argues, “were, to domestic audiences, unsettling declarations of the imbrication of Britain and India, empire and nation,” and as such, they were “the most solid representations of the larger intellectual problems posed by Britain’s growing prominence as an imperial power.” (146) The fifth chapter continues in this vein, but focuses...