Corporate Character: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786–1901 by Eddy Kent (review)

Corporate Character analyzes the corporate and administrative structures of the East India Company whose “unique constitution and organizational aims” were responsible for encouraging “a particular set of practices, codes, and behaviours among its membership” (172). These practices, codes, and behaviours, argues Kent, resulted in charged relationships that informed discussions of ideas about duty, honour, virtue, and shame and led to the consolidation of the Empire. Such complexities and ideas were recorded in fiction, novels, short stories, poems, essays, memoirs, and parliamentary speeches, in works by canonical writers such as Kipling, and in the writings of philosophers such as Edmund Burke along with that of his successors—Richard Wellesley, Thomas Robert Malthus, and Thomas Babington Macaulay. The latter made recommendations that directly impacted the early training of a great majority of Anglo-Indian administrators. Additionally, Anglo-Indian literature recorded the complexities of the cultural lives of administrators and their communities in India. Kent examines select texts in order to show how “human subjects and human institutions” (172) were mutually constructed in the company culture of British India and how this culture influenced daily lives, everyday spaces, and postcompany India in the nineteenth century. To this end, Kent chooses to eschew the “macropolitics” of the company and examines instead the “micropolitics at the level of the individual agent, the company man” (16).

Kent outlines the salient features of the book in the introduction and, by reading history and literature together in five chapters and a conclusion, promotes an understanding of the operations of power within the company and beyond. The wide-ranging source material analyzed in these chapters—from literary texts such as Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Kipling’s Kim to political speeches—lends a complexity and density to Kent’s arguments. Kent approaches these and several other texts as records of the hopes, fears, and complex relations that emerged between British India, Britain, and the local population, alongside the tensions that marked the relationships between Anglo-Indians and colonial administrators.

A notable feature of the book is Kent’s discussion of the trial of Warren Hastings. Initiated by Burke, the trial, a momentous event that has been characterized by Nicholas Dirks as the “Scandal of Empire,” became a pivotal point in the consolidation of British power. As Kent argues, “In prosecuting Hastings and in highlighting the structural deficiencies in the present constitution of the East India Company, Burke passes over the ignoble details of British conquest, arguing that history cannot be undone” (58). Kent suggests that the “public spectacle of the impeachment powerfully symbolized Britain’s intention to govern India justly” (65), as a result of which the prosecution of Hastings “facilitated the transformation of a mercantile operation with shaky credit into an honourable enterprise” (65).

In addition to this analysis, there are several notable features of this study. One is its attention to Anglo-Indian literature, which, as Kent points out, is a distinct genre referring to “works written by Britons living in India” (113). This body of literature, he argues, is of critical importance in shedding light on the complex web of social relations operative in British India. Yet this literary corpus gets overlooked because postcolonial critique has not paid extensive attention to literature before the arrival of Kipling on the literary scene. Kent’s study makes an enormous intervention in this regard by showing the relevance of studying this earlier period’s literary, cultural, and political developments in pursuit of a more complicated understanding of the role of the East India Company in enabling the consolidation of the empire. In this regard, his methodical analysis of the structural transformation of the East India Company and the influence of such transformations on the Indian Civil Service (a governing body that became central to the management and control of empire and colony) is highly insightful. Kent’s analysis of “major Company novelists” (96), in particular William Delafield Arnold, author of Oakfield; Or Fellowship...