Empire and Science in the Making

Dutch Colonial Scholarship in Comparative Global Perspective, 1760-1830

P. Boomgaard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137334015
• eBook ISBN: 9781137334022
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Drawing on extensive new research, and bringing much new scholarship before English readers for the first time, this wide-ranging volume examines how knowledge was created and circulated throughout the Dutch Empire, and how these processes compared with those of the Imperial Britain, Spain, and Russia.

Chapter 1

Science and the Colonial War-State: British India, 1790–1820

David Arnold

Despite the recent growth in studies of the history of science, medicine, technology, and environment relating to the non-European world, most accounts of the rise of the British Empire in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries contain few, if any, references to these new disciplinary approaches.¹ There is extensive discussion about the changing nature of the English East India Company as it morphed from being an essentially commercial enterprise to an extensive territorial power, and there has been wide-ranging consideration of the changing patterns of trade and political relations between Britain and the local “country powers.” But there is scant acknowledgment of the role of science in this seminal episode in the making of modern empire—whether as a means by which British power was materially enhanced relative to that of Indian and European adversaries or as a means by which the British attained a new confidence in the beneficial nature and transformative effects of their rule. Part of the purpose of this chapter is, then, to suggest ways in which the history of science (broadly understood) might be foregrounded in relation to this moment of imperial arrival and to evaluate both its empirical and ideological role in the process of empire building in India.

The second aim of this discussion is to further address, through the science of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the nature and function of “colonial knowledge” in this transitional period.² Scholars have debated the extent to which such a body of “knowledge” (if, indeed, it existed and amounted to more than mere fragments of “information”) reflected a close and reciprocal engagement by the British with Indian knowledge systems as well as with scientific circles in metropolitan society, the ways in which it explicitly served imperial needs or occupied a more detached and independent position, and the nature of the human agencies and the scholarly and administrative means employed in its pursuit. But the question remains as to how the scientific knowledge of early colonial India was assembled and disseminated, and how closely this can be aligned with British military needs and strategic imperatives.

Imperial Wars and the Colonial State

Between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British, acting through their East India Company, were involved in a series of prolonged diplomatic and military confrontations with an array of Indian states, “country powers” that were themselves formidable military regimes. Among the principal conflicts were, first, those with the southern state of Mysore until the death of Tipu Sultan and the fall of his capital, Seringapatam, in 1799, which made possible British control over the southern Deccan; second, the wars with the Marathas from 1780 until their conclusive military and political defeat in 1817–18, which opened the way to British domination of western and central India; and, third, the Anglo-Gurkha war of 1814–16 in which the British overpowered the Nepalese and gained dominance over a large swathe of the sub-Himayalan region. Aside from these local wars and the territorial acquisitions that resulted from them, the British were also locked in conflict with rival European powers—the Dutch, until ousted from Ceylon and several small enclaves on the Indian mainland in the 1790s, the French, who, despite their defeat in the Seven Years’ War, continued to be seen as dangerous opponents and potential allies for Mysore and other hostile states, and the Danes, whose Indian settlements, including Serampore in Bengal, were annexed during the Napoleonic Wars.

In order to sustain these lengthy and hard-fought struggles, the British developed a large and powerful military organization in the subcontinent. The Company’s own army (divided between the three presidencies or provinces of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay) consisted of Indian (sepoy) regiments supplemented by a smaller number of European battalions. The Indian Army was further supported since the late eighteenth century by detachments of the British Army. At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, this “formidable war machine” could count on a fighting strength of more than a quarter of a million men. Beginning with around 25,000 soldiers in 1761, by 1810 the Company army had soared to 189,000 men.³ The combined strength of Company and royal troops peaked in 1826 at the time of the first Anglo-Burmese war with a total of 292,000 men. This, as C. A. Bayly has observed, put at the Company’s disposal, “one of the biggest European-style armies in the world” at the time. But it was also costly to maintain: expenditure on the army in India was put at £8 million in 1813, rising to £13 million by 1826.⁴ The colonial war-state did not entirely disappear in the 1820s. Military conflict continued in Burma in the 1820s and again in the early 1850s and in Punjab until the annexation of the province in 1849, and the widespread mutiny and rebellion of 1857–58 generated fresh military priorities and strategic preoccupations. But the heavily military nature of the company administration can be said to have diminished with the end of the Maratha wars in 1818, and thereafter colonial governance assumed a more civilian character. Despite the mutiny episode, British control over India grew more secure as the era of Anglo-French conflict receded, and scientific activity became correspondingly less attached to military needs, if not to imperial aggrandizement.

But in the short term, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one consequence of a rapidly expanding military presence in India was the need to utilize vast amounts of income derived from the taxation of trade and from land revenues to pay for the upkeep of the army. Funding the military became, and long remained, one of the principal items of state expenditure in British India. A further consequence of having a large army, whose prestige and authority had grown immensely as a result of its successes, and of the heavy reliance placed on army officers to provide the European personnel for an administration that had greatly expanded in its size and responsibilities, was the rise of what Bayly terms “the growing military character of the Company.”⁵ Encouraged by the patriotic fervor and imperialist spirit generated by decades of war against Indian and European rivals, this new militarism was most evident during the final struggle against Mysore and at a time when the perceived threat of French intervention was at its height. The Company’s militaristic ethos was particularly prominent during the governor-generalship of the unabashedly expansionist governor-general Lord Wellesley between 1798 and 1805.⁶ Wellesley saw in the envy of the French and the “unqualified hostility” of Tipu Sultan the foremost danger to Britain’s eastern empire, a threat that could only be overcome by the necessary “expense and hazard of war.”⁷

Wellesley was a dynamic figure as well as a divisive one. He assumed personal direction of the exceptionally aggressive phase of British expansionism directed against Mysore and the Marathas. The momentum his policies generated lasted well beyond his recall in 1805 and despite the growing alarm of the Court of Directors, the Company’s managing body in London, at the escalating costs of the Indian administration, its mounting debts, and spiraling political entanglements. But, as seemed to befit his august office, Wellesley was also pleased to present himself as a patron of science, and his many scientific interests and objectives provide an insight into the nature and operations of what can conveniently be called the “Company science” of the time.

Wellesley looked first of all to the military establishment of doctors and engineers for a kind of scientific accountancy. In seeking to justify his war against Tipu Sultan in 1799 and rebut widespread criticism, Wellesley stated that his ultimate aim was not just to protect existing British possessions and commercial interests in India but also to save Mysore from the baleful consequences of tyrannical rule—“to improve its cultivation, to extend its commerce, and to secure the welfare of its inhabitants.”⁸ To carry this grand ambition into effect, Wellesley called for surveys of the territories that war and diplomacy had brought under British rule. In February 1800, immediately after the fall of Seringapatam, he despatched the surgeon-naturalist Francis Buchanan on a one-man mission to Mysore to investigate the current state of agriculture, trade, and manufacturing. On the one hand, this was a propaganda exercise intended to demonstrate how oppressive Tipu’s rule had been and how inimical to material progress, and, on the other, it was designed to show how, aided by science, the province might in time become peaceful and prosperous. Buchanan was more than equal to the task. His report, while affecting an air of scientific detachment, was imbued with the spirit of capitalist “improvement,” which informed so much British agrarian policy in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and replete with observations on the primitive and neglected state of agriculture and manufacturing.⁹ Here and elsewhere, under Wellesley, science was used to justify imperial purpose (as well as to serve the governor-general’s personal ambitions), to critique Indian poverty, ignorance, and misrule, and to sketch out prospects for a more prosperous and orderly so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   From the Mundane to the Sublime: Science, Empire, and the Enlightenment (1760s–1820s)
• Chapter 1   Science and the Colonial War-State: British India, 1790–1820
• Chapter 2   Collecting and the Pursuit of Scientific Accuracy: The Malaspina Expedition in the Philippines, 1792
• Chapter 3   Empire without Science? The Dutch Scholarly World and Colonial Science around 1800
• Chapter 4   Why Was There No Javanese Galileo?
• Chapter 5   For the Common Good: Dutch Institutions and Western Scholarship on Indonesia around 1800
• Chapter 6   “A Religion That Is Extremely Easy and Unusually Light to Take On”: Dutch and English Knowledge of Islam in Southeast Asia, ca. 1595–1811
• Chapter 7   A Moral Obligation of the Nation-State: Archaeology and Regime Change in Java and the Netherlands in the Early Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 8   Meeting Point Deshima: Scholarly Communication between Japan and Europe up till around 1800
• Chapter 9   Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Dutch Cape Colony at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century: De Kaffers aan de Zuidkust van Afrika (1810) by Ludwig Alberti
• Chapter 10   Intellectual Wastelands? Scholarship in and for the Dutch West Indies up to ca. 1800
• Index