Rewritten and Reused: Imaging the Nabob through "Upstart Iconography"

Thomas Babington Macaulay's much repeated description of a "nabob" as a man with "an immense fortune, a tawny complexion, a bad liver, and a worse heart" certainly captures the imagination, but does little to articulate the complexities of this despised eighteenth-century figure.¹ For the first century and a half of the East India Company's existence, nabob was simply an Anglicization of the Persian term nawab and referred to the Muslim officials of the Mughal Empire of the Indian subcontinent. By the 1760s, however, the term was applied to the servants of the East India Company who had returned to Britain equipped with ill-gotten prosperity, an insatiable appetite for luxury, and a desire to climb into elite spheres of power and influence.² Horace Walpole's 1761 complaint that "West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals" were overwhelming every parliamentary borough in the general election may well have been the first application of the derogatively modified term.³ But subsequent literary references, exemplified by Samuel Foote's play The Nabob (1772), Timothy Touchstone's Tea and Sugar: or the Nabob and the Creole (1772), and Richard Clarke's The Nabob: or, Asiatic Plunderers (1773), firmly established the vile figure of the nabob in the British parlance.⁴

Published in 1926, the seminal work by James M. Holzman, The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760-1785, became the first effort to isolate the study of the nabob from the mammoth historical field of "British India." Holzman's goal was to determine how the nabobs spent their money, which necessitated proving their existence as a class of nouveau riche who were, as he put it, "assailing insular and agricultural England" (15). Recent scholarship has made substantial strides towards tracing the more symbolic, even mythological nature of the nabob by directing the focus to representations of this figure in popular, cultural material of the eighteenth century. Philip Lawson, Jim Phillips, Renu Juneja, James Raven, and Elizabeth M. Collingham illustrate the development of the nabob in his emblematic role as political, psychological, financial, physical, and social antagonist.⁵ Furthermore, their works illustrate how the view of the nabob shifts when seen through a lens of a specific type of primary source material. Lawson and Phillips focus on political sources that featured the nabob as a new, potentially destructive political player who threatened to devastate the parliamentary status quo (226). Juneja approaches the nabob as a fictional character, constructed through popular literature, who expressed the psychological displacement British men in India suffered and the consequences their mental "corruption" would wreak upon the metropole (183). Raven studies responses to economically based fears and examines the assumption that nabobs were economic destablizers who could drive domestic prices up, and value down (221-48). Concentrating on perceptions of the body by tracing the transformation of the "effeminate" nabob to the sahib, an officious agent of the British Empire, Collingham discovers that the physicality of the nabob was vital to Britain's approach to rule in India (13). One variety of primary source material conspicuously underutilized in all these studies is graphic satire, which is rather surprising, considering the wealth of sources available and the popularity satirical prints enjoyed during the period of the nabob. Graphic satire was an immediate and highly effective method of expressing concerns in the eighteenth century, and the years between 1776 and 1832 in particular marked the peak of British print culture.⁶ The nabob could legitimately be described as a favored character of this medium at its zenith.

Through illegal three-party trades with China, mercenary king-making, and territorial acquisition, the East India Company facilitated the accumulation of vast, private fortunes. These shady deals inspired a critical climate in Britain manifested in the figure of the rapacious Company servant. There is little doubt the creation of the nabob was meant to express imperial anxiety in the second half of the eighteenth century, but the fear was that he would fulfill the tenets of his definition and return home, as explained by Eliza Parsons, in Woman as She...