In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company
  • Bhavani Raman
Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company. By Miles Ogborn (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007) 288 pp. $ 40.00

In Indian Ink, Ogborn examines how the print culture of the English East India Company compressed distant relations between Asia and Europe to create Britain’s eighteenth-century Empire. Trading companies played an integral role in the European competition for ocean-trade monopolies that began during the late sixteenth century. Among them, the English East India Company and the Dutch East India Company [End Page 265] (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or voc) secured the circuits and sinews of trade and political control through a combination of military action, economic aggression, diplomatic negotiation, and skullduggery that proved essential to the consolidation of European imperialism in Asia.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the English East India Company was using armed trade and assertions of corporate sovereignty to create a seaborne empire bounded by fortified coastal settlements. By the 1800s, the Company had edged out rivals from the subcontinent’s coast, turning its forts into the nucleus of its fast-growing territorial domain in India. Territorial control marked a shift in Company priorities in India from sea to land and a complex power struggle in Britain as the Company became embroiled in public debates about imperial aspirations. The struggle concerning ideologies of imperialism ultimately led to the Company’s mid-nineteenth-century demise, clearing the way for Victorian imperialism. Not surprisingly, the Company’s peculiar institutional form and ideological claims to sovereignty have attracted the attention of both historians of European expansion and scholars of modern India seeking to understand the onset of colonial rule in the region. Against this historiographical background, Ogborn represents a new voice—as a historical geographer interested in written artifacts.

By arguing that the interrelationship of geography and writing was essential to networks of trade and the establishment of political domination, Ogborn offers fresh perspectives on a literature preoccupied with the Company’s involvement in bullion and opium and embroiled in debates about whether the Company’s imperial ambition was preordained or whether it marked a break from earlier political systems in India. Much of this debate, which is conducted from the vantage point of eighteenth-century materials, makes Ogborne’s interest in folding the seventeenth century into his analysis a welcome intervention. His narration of Company history is an attempt “to take seriously forms of writing in order to understand how the changing relationships of knowledge and power shaped the encounter between Europe and Asia between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (xxii). The main claim of the book is that “the Company and those who stood to profit from it depended on forms of writing to construct a new global geography of empire” (22).

Ogborn makes a persuasive case for viewing the geography of writing—the mobility of written objects and circuits of information—as a technique of spatial compression that enabled the making of empire during the eighteenth century. His chronologically arranged chapters lay out the Company’s history according to its writing practices, each chapter centering on a historical geography of a particular documentary form. Chapter 2 presents the exchange of Royal letters as crucial to securing initial trading relations in India. Chapter 3, the most interesting in the book, describes how correspondence and systematic accounts written in Company factories created an ordered office and organized [End Page 266] the trade between Asia and Europe, to be read ultimately by governing committees in London. The focus on Madras in this chapter widens the conventional Bengal-centered view of Company activities.

Chapters 4 and 5 show how a veritable avalanche of printed pamphlets, lists of stock prices, and regulations influenced views about the Company’s credibility in late eighteenth-century Britain. In the final chapter, Ogborn argues that the Company built its empire in Bengal at that time on the security and certainty that printing appeared to provide. Yet, as he shows, even as printing became integral to a political philosophy of imperial rule, it also enabled a critique of empire...

pdf

Share