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MATERIAL TURNS IN BRITISH HISTORY: I. LOOT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2018

Margot C. Finn
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Abstract

This address explores the writing of history in Britain during the Georgian and Victorian eras, arguing for the need both to trace British historiographical genealogies along routes that extend from Europe to the Indian subcontinent and to acknowledge the importance of material histories for this evolution. Focusing on military men who served in the East India Company during the Third Anglo-Maratha and Pindari War (1817–18), it examines the entangled histories of material loot, booty and prize on the one hand, and archival and history-writing practices developed by British military officers on the other. Active in these military campaigns and in post-conflict administration of conquered territories, a cadre of Company officers (assisted by ‘native’ interlocutors trained in Indian historical traditions) elaborated historical practices that we more conventionally associate with the Rankean historiographical innovations of the Victorian era. The Royal Historical Society's own history is shaped by these cross-cultural material encounters.

Type
Presidential Address
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 28 , December 2018 , pp. 5 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2018 

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Footnotes

I am especially grateful for comments and suggestions from Penelope J. Corfield, Felix Driver, Jagjeet Lally and Sue Stronge.

References

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31 Vartavarian, ‘Pacification and Patronage’, 1756–67.

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34 Vartavarian, ‘Pacification and Patronage’, 1759–61.

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50 Ibid., 28 Jan. 1818.

51 Local villagers who fled to the hill forts to escape warfare took their moveable property with them, but these goods were vulnerable to seizure as booty. See for example Grant Duff, History, ii, 429–31.

52 Petition of Lt-Colonel David Prother to the privy council (1833), BL, MSS Eur, F88/447, 184.

53 For ‘vibrant matter’ and the ‘vital materiality’ that links persons, things and political agency, see Bennett, Vibrant Matter.

54 Prother Petition, BL, MSS Eur, F88/447, 184–5.

55 Rhyghur Prize Committee Proceedings, May 1818, BL, MSS Eur F88/447, 416–18.

56 Prother to Lt-Colonel Leighton, 12 May 1818, BL, MSS Eur F88/447, 417.

57 Cooper, Anglo-Maratha Campaigns, 377 n. 168.

58 Prother Petition, BL, MSS Eur F88/447, 184–7.

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61 John Briggs to Mountstuart Elphinstone (henceforth ME), 25 Apr. 1818, BL, MSS Eur F88/201, 56. For the disputed Nassak diamond, see Evan Bell, Memoir of General John Briggs, of the Madras Army; With Comments on Some of his Words and Work (1885), 61–71.

62 The broader contours of military service as a medium of colonial knowledge formation are explored in Nicholas Dirks, ‘Colonial Histories and Native Informants: Biography of an Archive’, in Orientalism, ed. Breckenridge and van der Veer, 279–313; and Peers, Douglas, ‘Colonial Knowledge and the Military in India, 1780–1860’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 33 (2006), 157–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Deshpande, Creative Pasts, 77–8; James Grant Duff (henceforth JGD) to ME, 28 Dec. 1819, BL, MSS Eur F88/205, 70v–74v.

64 For Maratha historical traditions, see Guha, Sumit, ‘Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400–1900’, American Historical Review, 109 (2004), 1084–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for wider Indian historiographical traditions relevant to these British officers, see Chatterjee, Kumkum, The Culture of History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal (New Delhi, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Rao, Velcheru, Shulman, David and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

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66 JGD to ME, 19 [July 1819], BL, MSS Eur F88/205, 74.

67 JGD to ME, 2 Aug. 1819, BL, MSS Eur F88/205, 84v.

68 JGD to ME, 8 Aug. 1820, BL, MSS Eur F88/205, 123.

69 JGD to ME, 12 Aug. 1820, BL, MSS Eur F88/205, 126.

70 JGD to ME, 14 Mar. 1822, BL, MSS Eur F88/205, 158.

71 JGD to ME, 14 Mar. 1822, BL, MSS Eur F88/205, 158.

72 JGD to ME, 29 Dec. 1822, BL, MSS Eur F88/206, 18.

73 Cited by Hall, Macaulay and Son, 209.

74 JGD to ME, 21 Feb. 1822, BL, MSS Eur F88/205, 152v.

75 Grant Duff, History, i, viii–x.

76 John Briggs, History of the Rise of Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year a.d. 1612… (4 vols., 1829), i, xiii.

77 Ibid., xv–xvi.

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83 For the family's genealogy of this object, see http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O134202/tiger-claws-unknown/.

84 Grafton, The Footnote, challenges the conventional chronology of historiographical ‘modernity’ in referencing, but confines his argument to a European context.

85 See for example the many letters and draft replies in BL, MSS Eur F88/447.

86 Examples include BL, MSS Eur F88/447, 334v–338; contemporary histories used to substantiate claims included Prinsep, History of the Political, esp. ii, 12–13, and Valentine Blacker, Memoir of the Operations of the British Army in India during the Mahratta War of 1817, 1818, & 1819 (1821).

87 See esp. Arthur James Lewis, A Letter to the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury, relative to the Claim of the Representatives of Naroba Govind Ouita on the Deccan Prize Fund (1833), and Inagaki, Haruki, ‘Law, Agency and Emergency in British Imperial Politics: Conflict between the Government and the King's Court in Bombay in the 1820s’, East Asian Journal of British History, 5 (2016), 207–24Google Scholar, esp. 217–22.

88 The recipients were assistant surgeon Thomas Tomkinson (£17 13s 2d, 1874); Mrs Catherine Carmody (on behalf of Sergeant Patrick Carmody, deceased, 6s 8d, 1896) and the children of the late Lt-Colonel Charles Heath (£69 17s 9d, 1897), BL, IOR/L/AG/24/25/8, 414.

89 On the subcontinent, Grant Duff's History became a standard text in the increasingly Anglicised curriculum for men – both Indian and British – serving the Company, and after 1850 its canonical status was such that it spurred fierce Indian nationalist critiques of British imposition of Western education. Deshpande, Creative Pasts, 80–5, 94–114.

90 ‘Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff’, Times, 13 Jan. 1906, 17.

91 Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary 1851–1872 (1897), i, 1.

92 Duff, M. E. Grant, ‘Presidential Address’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 13 (1899), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Liberal imperialism's infantilisation of Indians is underlined by Mehta, Uday, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar; and Koditschek, Theodore, Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of Great Britain (Cambridge, 2011)Google Scholar.

93 Grant Duff, ‘Presidential Address’, 6.

94 Matthew, H. C. G., ‘Duff, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant (1829–1906)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar.

95 Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Notes of an Indian Journey (1876), 221, 220.

96 Ibid., 232, 231.

97 Ibid., 231.

98 Ibid., 28, 58, 70, 138 149.

99 Peers, ‘Colonial Knowledge’, offers an excellent introductory analysis of the production of scholarly works by military men. Bonnie Smith notes the broader, non-academic context in which much Victorian history was produced (by women as well as men) in her The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 1998).

100 See for example JGD to ME, 6 Feb. 1819, BL, MSS Eur F88/205, 2–4v.