Tillman W. Nechtman
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719097898
- eISBN:
- 9781526104403
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719097898.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
When he returned from India in 1808, William Hickey discovered that Britain’s customs house officers wanted to tax as “foreign art” the collectibles he had acquired during his almost forty years in ...
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When he returned from India in 1808, William Hickey discovered that Britain’s customs house officers wanted to tax as “foreign art” the collectibles he had acquired during his almost forty years in South Asia. Hickey saw their efforts as “an infamous transaction.” The art had been produced and purchased in a British settlement, it had been made by people living under British law, it was now the property of a Briton, and it had made its way from British India onboard a British East India Company ship. There was, Hickey noted, “nothing foreign from beginning to end in the whole transaction!”This chapter investigates the way late-eighteenth-century Britons in India framed their cultural life. Rather than delimiting Britishness to a domestic identity, this community braided their sense of self, nation, and empire into one singular narrative. Those, like Hickey, who left Britain with a sense of their own Britishness did not give up that sense merely because of India’s geographic distance from the metropole. Rather, they came to include India’s landscape and culture as part of their notion of what it meant to be British – even if domestic observers failed to appreciate this expanded sense of the national self.Less
When he returned from India in 1808, William Hickey discovered that Britain’s customs house officers wanted to tax as “foreign art” the collectibles he had acquired during his almost forty years in South Asia. Hickey saw their efforts as “an infamous transaction.” The art had been produced and purchased in a British settlement, it had been made by people living under British law, it was now the property of a Briton, and it had made its way from British India onboard a British East India Company ship. There was, Hickey noted, “nothing foreign from beginning to end in the whole transaction!”This chapter investigates the way late-eighteenth-century Britons in India framed their cultural life. Rather than delimiting Britishness to a domestic identity, this community braided their sense of self, nation, and empire into one singular narrative. Those, like Hickey, who left Britain with a sense of their own Britishness did not give up that sense merely because of India’s geographic distance from the metropole. Rather, they came to include India’s landscape and culture as part of their notion of what it meant to be British – even if domestic observers failed to appreciate this expanded sense of the national self.
Máire ní Fhlathúin
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748640683
- eISBN:
- 9781474415996
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748640683.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter traces the evolution of a discourse of consumption and predation throughout the Victorian period. The East India Company’s transformation from a commercial concern into a government was ...
More
This chapter traces the evolution of a discourse of consumption and predation throughout the Victorian period. The East India Company’s transformation from a commercial concern into a government was accompanied by intense public debate over its role in India, focusing on economic relationships of exploitation, and moral relationships of corruption. This debate crystallized around the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1795). The ‘nabobs’ of the Company were represented as exploiting India and its residents for their own material gain, and simultaneously as themselves corrupted by contact with India. Their return to Britain gave rise to a sense that their moral and financial corruption was being imported into the British body politic. While this political moment quickly passed, the debate established the terms and metaphors – greed, excess, predation, and contamination – in which British people imagined their role in India, and India’s effect on them.Less
This chapter traces the evolution of a discourse of consumption and predation throughout the Victorian period. The East India Company’s transformation from a commercial concern into a government was accompanied by intense public debate over its role in India, focusing on economic relationships of exploitation, and moral relationships of corruption. This debate crystallized around the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1795). The ‘nabobs’ of the Company were represented as exploiting India and its residents for their own material gain, and simultaneously as themselves corrupted by contact with India. Their return to Britain gave rise to a sense that their moral and financial corruption was being imported into the British body politic. While this political moment quickly passed, the debate established the terms and metaphors – greed, excess, predation, and contamination – in which British people imagined their role in India, and India’s effect on them.
