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Koh-i-Noor: Empire, Diamonds, and the Performance of British Material Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2012
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References
1 Balfour, Ian, Famous Diamonds (London, 2000), 172Google Scholar.
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9 See India Office Records (IOR), 1600–1947, IOR/L/PS/11/296/5115, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC), British Library (BL). This file was produced by the East India Company as a result of its own inquest into how the Koh-i-Noor was appropriated by the crown in the late 1850s. It contains copies of earlier memorandums sent out to the company's Court of Directors by the governor-general, correspondence he had with underlings, as well as the research about the stone that was conducted on his behalf.
10 For the Deccan booty settlement of 1828, see IOR, IOR/L/AG/17/2/4, APAC, BL.
11 “Document 2: Governor General's Despatch to Secret Committee, No. 20 of 7th April, 1849,” in The History of the Koh-i-Noor, Darya-i-Noor and Taimur's Ruby, comp. Bhai Nahar Singh and Kirpala Singha (New Delhi, 1985), 4–25.
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25 Lord Dalhousie, governor-general of India, to Queen Victoria, Simla, 15 May 1850, in The Letters of Queen Victoria, 3 vols., ed. A. C. Benson et al. (London, 1907), 2:286–87.
26 When many other gemstones from the Lahore treasury were shown to the queen by members of the East India Company in 1851, she recorded in her diary how impressed she was with Taimur's Ruby: “[It] is the largest in the world, therefore even more remarkable than the Koh-i-noor! I am very happy that the British Crown will possess these jewels, for I shall certainly make them Crown Jewels” (Queen Victoria, quoted in Charles R. Fay, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of the Great Exhibition and Its Fruits [Cambridge, 1951], 71).
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29 Nevil Story-Maskelyne, “On the Koh-i-Noor Diamond” (unpublished manuscript), DF5001/415, Story-Maskelyne Papers, Natural History Museum Archives (NHMA), 15.
30 “Document 44: Theophilus Metcalfe, Lt. Governor of NW Provs, Delhi, to Sir Henry Elliot, Secretary to the Government of India, 7th January 1850,” in History of the Koh-i-Noor, 80–81.
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40 “Document 6,” in History of the Koh-i-Noor, 28.
41 “The Koh-i-Noor,” Illustrated London News, 23 December 1848, 397. The Illustrated London News was particularly involved in covering the Anglo-Sikh war and published one of the first pictures of the Koh-i-Noor available to metropolitan audiences; for this picture, an engraving, see “The Koh-i-Noor Diamond,” 26 May 1849, 332. See also the Illustrated London News, “The War in the Punjab,” 27 January 1849, 52, 56–57; “India—Capture of Moultan,” and “The War in India,” 24 February 1849, 117–18; “The War in the Punjaub,” 10 March 1849, 145–46; “The War in India,” 7 April 1849, 161–66, 230; and “The Victories in the Punjaub,” 28 April 1849, 265–66.
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