Archive of Empire and EIC and Politics of Knowledge

Please join us for our next event in the NACBS Book Launch Series.

Join Asheesh Kapur Siddique and Joshua Ehrlich for a joint session to discuss their recent works The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World and The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge.

Archive of Empire and EIC and the Politics of Knowledge

Thursday, October 17 9am PT/ 11am CT/ 12pm ET/ 5pm BST

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The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World

“Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in repositories known as archives.     As the empire expanded in both the Americas and India, however, this system of political knowledge came to be regarded as inadequate in governing the non-English people who inhabited the lands over which the British asserted sovereignty. This posed a key problem for imperial officials: What kind of knowledge was required to govern an empire populated by a growing number of culturally different people? Using files, pens, and paper, the British defined the information order of the modern state as they debated answers to this question. In tracing the rise and deployment of archives in early modern British imperial rule, Asheesh Kapur Siddique uncovers the origins of our data-driven present.”

The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge

“The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. He shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics.”

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique is a historian of the early modern British empire and early America. He is an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and received his PhD from Columbia University.

Siddique’s first book, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World (Yale University Press, 2024), locates the origins of modern data-driven government in the creation and use of archives in the early modern British empire. He recovers the archive as a center of knowledge and contestation in the politics of empire, and shows how its role was complicated by the challenge of governing in relation to cultural difference.

His other scholarship has appeared in journals such as the Journal of British Studies, Law & History Review, and the William & Mary Quarterly, and his research has been supported by institutions such as the American Philosophical Society, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Social Science Research Council.

Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge and political thought with a focus on the East India Company and the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia. Currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Chicago.

Ehrlich’s first book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2023) reveals how the Company used its commitment to knowledge to justify its commercial and political power. It advances a new approach – the history of ideas of knowledge – to recover a world of debate among Indian and European thinkers on the political uses of knowledge.

Ehrlich’s many articles – on topics including the boundaries and boundedness of port cities, the making and unmaking of libraries through plunder, the crisis of liberal reform in India, and the origins of Indian print culture – have appeared in journals including Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, and Modern Intellectual History.