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Managing Expertise: The Problem of Engineers in the English East India Company, 1668–1764
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 June 2021
Abstract
This article challenges the assumption that the early modern engineer acted as a reliable agent for colonial authorities. Far from acting as trusted mediators between colony and metropole, experts could exacerbate tensions. The English East India Company knew this, and avoided engineers throughout its early history. This article considers the interplay between authorities in London and their subordinates in Bombay. The company's directors saw engineers as untrustworthy agents who increased expenditure and disrupted the company's system of consultative governance. For much of its early modern history, the company's fortifications and built environments relied on a knowledge network of informal expertise. Examining these experts-in-context reveals how expertise was managed and built environments maintained in colonial settings. When the company did turn to experts in the mid-eighteenth century, it struggled to utilise and incorporate them. This demonstrates that in some colonial contexts experts could be profoundly disruptive.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University
References
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Bennett, Jim. “The Mechanical Arts.” In The Cambridge History of Science, volume 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Park, Katharine and Daston, Lorraine, 673–695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Chaudhuri, K. N. The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company: 1660–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Pollak, Martha. Cities at War in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
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Riding, Tim. “‘Making Bombay Island’: Land Reclamation and Geographical Conceptions of Bombay, 1661–1728.” Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018): 27–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandes, E. W. C. The Military Engineer in India. London: The Institution of Royal Engineers, 1933.Google Scholar
Saunders, Andrew. Fortress Britain: Artillery Fortification in the British Isles and Ireland. Liphook, Hants: Beaufort Publishing, 1989.Google Scholar
Shammas, Carole, ed. Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment: Europeans, Asians, Settlers and Indigenous Societies. Leiden: Brill, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sivramkrishna, Sashi. “From Merchant to Merchant-Ruler: A Structure-Conduct-Performance Perspective of the East India Company's History, 1600–1765.” Business History 56:5 (2014): 789–815.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sudan, Rajani. The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veevers, David. “‘The Company as Their Lords and the Deputy as a Great Rajah’: Imperial Expansion and the English East India Company on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1685–1730.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41:5 (2013): 687–709.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walton, Steven A. “State Building through Building for the State: Foreign and Domestic Expertise in Tudor Fortification.” Osiris 25:1 (2010): 66–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winterbottom, Anna. Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.Google Scholar