Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (review)

The figure of the nabob, well known to scholars of eighteenth-century British India, was long a source of satire, derision, and anxiety for Britons who witnessed the return of their compatriots from India with unseemly amounts of wealth. Much of the comedy in William Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair (published as a serial in 1847-48) comes from Joseph Sedley, a former district tax collector who returns to England after he makes a fortune in private trade in India. A hapless figure who is overweight and silly, Sedley's primary escapade involves avoiding battle against Napoleon's armies, suggesting that he lacks patriotism and masculine courage. The Sedleys lose their fortune in the novel, serving as an object lesson for the Jos Sedleys of the world who imagined they could leapfrog through English class hierarchy to the top. When India-gained wealth was used to buy country estates, it threatened to overturn the respectability and political stability of a landed aristocracy whose wealth was uncontaminated by colonial profits and economic speculation. Images of nabobs' gaudy fashions, heavily tanned skin, and strange comportment circulated in newspapers, pamphlets, plays, and poems, suggestive of how one small group's putative deviance from a carefully managed set of social norms fueled the anxieties of a generation of political observers that included Edmund Burke, Fanny Burney, Samuel Johnson, Tom Paine, and Horace Walpole. Nabobs became a national obsession in part because they threatened the consolidation of a particular brand of domestic Britishness, and in part because they represented the worst excesses in the imperial activities undertaken by servants of the East India Company.

Tillman Nechtman's Nabobs is an exhaustively researched book that carefully details this multivalent historical moment. The book crystallizes a number of important intersections, those between British literature and history, cultural and political history, and what might be called "domestic" and imperial history. Self-consciously styled within the tradition of a "new imperial history," Nechtman's work emphasizes the ways in which India in particular and empire more broadly can never be fully disaggregated from the history of Britain. As he notes, the display of spectacular wealth gained from trade in the East Indies was suggestive of the possible ways in which "India" (as broadly construed and misconstrued) could corrupt the British body politic and the emergent conceptions of civil society, virtue, and political thought that were the hallmarks of Britain's sense of its own superiority. His close reading of texts and images is especially acute; for example, the engravings of James Gillray, which appeared in broadsheets and newspapers at the end of the eighteenth century, are very carefully analyzed in all their complexity (127-29, 144, 164, 183, 217-19).

Nechtman's originality lies in his ability to re-create a dense accounting of the public conversation about nabobs. For example, many of us have heard of Samuel Foote's play, The Nabobs, which was first performed in 1772 and several times throughout the next few decades. Although Foote's play is canonic in postcolonial studies, Nechtman reminds us that it was only one of several performed for English theatergoers in the final decades of the eighteenth century (136-38). Warren Hastings's trial, which was orchestrated by Edmund Burke between 1786 and 1795, is similarly well documented by scholars; Nechtman draws comparisons to the lesser-known and less spectacular parliamentary trial of Lord Clive (81-85) to show how anxieties about nabobs could not be suppressed in political discourse. Although Clive was acquitted, just as Hastings was nearly twenty years later, Nechtman argues that political and economic malfeasance were presumed of all former Company servants, thus calling for public opprobrium. Lord Clive committed suicide shortly after his acquittal in 1774, fueling even more speculation about his guilt; Nechtman closely reads press reports of nabob suicides in the 1780s to demonstrate how the presumed guilt underpinning Clive's suicide was used to narrate the deaths of other young men who had returned from India...