Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T18:58:11.016Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

British Society in India under the East India Company

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

P. J. Marshall
P. J. Marshall
Affiliation:
King's College, London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The British in India have always fascinated their fellow countrymen. From the eighteenth century until the demise of the Raj innumerable publications described the way of life of white people in India for the delectation of a public at home. Post-colonial Britain evidently still retains a voracious appetite for anecdotes of the Raj and accounts of themores of what is often represented as a bizarre Anglo-Indian world. Beneath the welter of apparent triviality, historians are, however, finding issues of real significance.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , February 1997 , pp. 89 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See, for instance, Chaudhuri, Nupur and Strobel, Margaret (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, 1992).Google Scholar

2 British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 (London, 1993), pp. 330–2.Google Scholar

3 Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (London, 1989), pp. 251–2.Google Scholar

4 P[arliamentary] P[apers], 1863, LIII, i, pp. 214–17.Google Scholar

5 Risley, H. H. and Gait, E. A., Census of India, 1901: Report (Calcutta, 1903), p. 394.Google Scholar

6 cf Mitchell, B. R. (ed.), British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988), p. 576Google Scholar and Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, 15 vols (London, 1803–1806), IV, p. 60.Google Scholar

7 Cf Mitchell, , pp. 581–3 and PP, 1852, X, pp. 426–7.Google Scholar

8 28 Geo. III, c.8, sees 1,2.Google Scholar

9 53, Geo. III, c.155, sec. 87.Google Scholar

10 PP, 1852, X, p. 409.Google Scholar

11 See Stanley, P. A., ‘White Mutiny: The Bengal Europeans, 1825–75, a Study in Military Social History’, Ph.D. Thesis, The Australian National University, 1993. I am very grateful indeed to Dr Stanley for supplying me with a copy of his thesis.Google Scholar

12 PP, 1863, XIX, i, p. 288.Google Scholar

13 PP, 1859, V, p. 364.Google Scholar

14 PP, 1863, XIX, i, p. 101.Google Scholar

15 Steedman, Carolyn, The Radical Soldier's Tale. John Pearman 1819–1908 (London, 1988), p. 147.Google Scholar

16 ‘A King's Officer’, ‘Sketch of a Barrack Life in India’, Remarks on the Exclusion of Officers of His Majesty's Service from the Staff of the Indian Army (London, 1825), pp. 122–3.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., p. 129.

18 PP, 1863, XIX, i, 14–17;Google ScholarArnold, David, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-century India (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 69–70;Google ScholarCurtin, Philip D., Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990).Google Scholar

19 Murray, John, Of the Topograpy of Meerut (Calcutta, 1839), pp. 13–14.Google Scholar

20 Baird, J. G. (ed.), Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie (London, 1910), p. 166.Google Scholar

21 Hawes, C. J., ‘Eurasians of British India, 1773–1833’, Ph.D. Thesis, London University, 1993.Google Scholar

22 Razzell, P. E., ‘Social Origins of Officers in the Indian and British Home Armies, 1758 to 1962’, British Journal of Sociology, XIV (1963), pp. 248–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Reports from Committees, IV, pp. 506–7.Google Scholar

24 PP, 1831–1832, XIII, p. xiii; 1852, X, p. 20.Google Scholar

25 PP, 1831–1832, XIII, p. xiii; 1852, X, p. 20.Google Scholar

26 PP, 1859 (2), XVII, p. 37.Google Scholar

27 PP, 1852–1853, XXXII, p. 218.Google Scholar

28 See discussion in Cowell, Lorenzo M., ‘Military Professionalism in a Colonial Context: The Madras Army c.1832’, Modern Asian Studies, XXIV (1990), pp. 248–73.Google Scholar

29 Badenach, W.,Inquiry into the State of the Indian Army (London, 1826), p. 259.Google Scholar

30 Kaye, J.W., The Life and Correspondence of Major General Sir John Malcolm, 2 vols (London, 1856), I, p. 393.Google Scholar

31 Bourne, J. M., Patronage and Society in Nineteenth-century England (London, 1986), pp. 87–94; Stanley, ‘White Mutiny’, pp. 26–39.Google Scholar

32 Sumpter, Ronald M., Patronage and Politics in Scotland, 1707–1832 (Edinburgh, 1986), p. 9.Google Scholar

33 Stanley, ‘White Mutiny’, p. 31.Google Scholar

34 Marshall, P. J., East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), p. 15.Google Scholar

35 ‘Calculation by Mr Anderson’, Scottish Record Office, GD 51/3/16.Google Scholar

36 Letter to Directors, 15 Aug. 1787, Oriental and India Office Collections, E/4/46, p. 216.Google Scholar

37 See, for instance, Corfield, P. J., ‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenthcentury Britain’, History, LXXII (1987), p. 43.Google Scholar

38 PP, 1831–1832, IX, pp. 236–7.Google Scholar

39 PP, 1852–1853, XXXI, p. 548.Google Scholar

40 PP, 1850, XV, pp. 181–2.Google Scholar

41 PP, 1831–1832, IX, pp. 709–11.Google Scholar

42 Dalhousie Letters, p. 226.Google Scholar

43 Renford, R. K., The Non-Official British in India to 1920 (New Delhi, 1987), p. 140.Google Scholar

44 Jenkins, Owain, Merchant Prince: Memoirs of India 1929–58 (London, 1987), p. 36.Google Scholar

45 Head, Raymond, ‘Corelli in Calcutta: Colonial Music-Making during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Early Music, XIII (1985).Google Scholar

46 Yalland, Zoe, Traders and Nabobs: The British in Cawnpore 1765–1857 (New Delhi, 1987);Google ScholarHarfield, A., Meerut: The First Sixty Years 1815–75 (London, 1992).Google Scholar

47 The Nabobs (Oxford, 1963), p. 130.Google ScholarPubMed

48 Cited in D. M. Peers, ‘ “Those Noble Examples of the True Military Tradition”: Constructions of the Indian Army in the Mid-Victorian Press’, infra, p. 110.Google Scholar

49 The argument in this paragraph is derived from Peers, D. M., ‘Between Mars and Mammon; the East India Company and Efforts to Reform its Army, 1796–1826’, Historical Journal, XXXIII (1990), pp. 385–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 Journals of the House of Commons, XXXVIII, p. 97.Google Scholar

51 Cited in Clive, John, Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (London, 1973), p. 336.Google Scholar

52 Marshall, P. J., ‘The Whites of British India, 1780–1830: A Failed Colonial Society?’, The International History Review, XII (1990), pp. 32–5.Google Scholar

53 Fraser, W. to his father, 21 Aug. 1804, reference kindly supplied by Mr A. P. Coleman.Google Scholar

54 PP, 1852, X, p. 262.Google Scholar

55 Mackintosh, R. J. (ed.), Memoirs of the Right Hon. Sir James Mackintosh, 2 vols (London, 1835), I, p. 212.Google Scholar

56 Note, ‘178–, April 14’, University of Minnesota, Ames MSS, MS B.114.Google Scholar

57 Singh, Bawa Satinder (ed.), The Letters of the First Viscount Hardinge of Lahore to Lady Hardinge and Sir Walter and Lady James 1844–y (London, 1986), p. 240.Google Scholar

58 PP, 1831–1832, XIII, p. 386.Google Scholar

59 Colchester, Lord (ed.), The Indian Administration of Lord Ellenborough (London, 1874), P. 440Google Scholar

60 PP, 1852, X, p. 257.Google Scholar

61 Philips, C. H. (ed.), The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, 2 vols (Oxford, 1977), I, p. 710.Google Scholar

62 Trevelyan, George, The Competition Wallah (London, 1907), p. 7.Google Scholar

63 Administration of Ellenborough, p. 448.Google Scholar

64 The Black Book or Corruption Unmasked (London, 1820), p. 372.Google ScholarPubMed

65 Robson, J. M., Moir, M., Moir, Z. (eds), Writings on India by John Stuart Mill (Toronto, 1990), p. 37.Google Scholar

66 Ibid., p. 38.

67 Hansard, 3rd ser, CXXVII, col. 1157.Google Scholar

68 Essays Military and Political Written in India (London, 1859), p. 474.Google Scholar

69 Eden, Eleanor (ed.), Letters from India by Emily Eden, 2 vols (London, 1872), I. 131Google Scholar

70 ‘The English India: Our Social Morality’, Calcutta Review, I (1844), pp. 331–2;Google Scholar ‘English Women in Hindustan’, Ibid., IV (1845), PP106–7; ‘Married Life in India’, Ibid., IV (1845), pp. 411–13; ‘English Literature in India’, Ibid., V (1846), pp. 207–9.