¹ Kant, Immanuel, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, trans. Schmidt, James, in What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. Schmidt, James (Berkeley, 1996), 58–9Google Scholar. Emphasis in original.

² Vial, Theodore, Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford, 2016), 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Ibid., 22–3, 54 n. 6 (citation from chapter abstract of online edition).

⁴ Citations from Mikkola, Mari, ‘Kant on Moral Agency and Women's Nature’, Kantian Review, 16 (2011), 89–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 89. Mikkola however argues against the most severe feminist critiques of Kant.

⁵ See for example Women, Gender, and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (New York, 2005); Sebastiani, Silvia, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (New York, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge, 2004).

⁶ Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery and the Museum in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. G. W. Anderson, M. L. Caygill, A. MacGregor and L. Syson (2003); Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kim Sloan with Andrew Burnett (2003).

⁷ For an introduction to the museum decolonisation literature, see Giblin, John, Ramos, Imma and Grout, Nikki, ‘Thoughts on Representing Empire and Decolonising Museums and Public Spaces in Practice: An Introduction’, Third Text, 33 (2019), 471–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections, Collaboration, ed. Viv Golding and Wayne Modest (2013); Wintle, Claire, ‘Decolonising the Museum: The Case of the Imperial and Commonwealth Institutes’, Museum and Society, 11 (2013), 185–201Google Scholar.

⁸ A foundational text in this debate is the ‘Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums’ signed by eighteen museum directors in 2002: http://archives.icom.museum/pdf/E_news2004/p4_2004-1.pdf. See also James Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage (Princeton, 2008). For the opposing view, see for example Rafia Zakaria, ‘Opinion: Looted Art and the “Universal Museum”: Can 21st-Century Collections Ever Escape Colonialism's Violent Legacy?’, Frieze (28 November 2018): https://frieze.com/article/looted-art-and-universal-museum-can-21st-century-collections-ever-escape-colonialisms.

⁹ See esp. Enlightenment, ed. Sloan.

¹⁰ Art and the British Empire, ed. T. J. Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham (Manchester, 2007); Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience, ed. Sarah Longair and John McAleer (Manchester, 2012).

¹¹ Neil Chambers, Endeavouring Banks: Exploring the Collections from the Endeavour Voyage 1768–1771 (2016); James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (2017); Kate Donington, The Bonds of Family: Slavery, Commerce and Culture in the British Atlantic World (Manchester, 2019), esp. ch. 7.

¹² Neil MacGregor, ‘Preface’, in Enlightenment, ed. Sloan, 6.

¹³ Enlightenment, ed. Sloan, esp. part I.

¹⁴ For a powerful critique of the ‘discovery’ paradigm of British and European history, see Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (New York, 2020).

¹⁵ Banks, indeed, is the only historical figure in the Enlightenment Gallery to merit two busts. The visual analysis of the gallery in this lecture is based on visits made to the British Museum in August–November 2019.

¹⁶ Significantly, slavery is ‘dealt with’ in passing by referencing abolitionism: Kim Sloan, ‘“Aimed at universality and belonging to the nation”: The Enlightenment and the British Museum’, in Enlightenment, ed. Sloan, 23–5. For the representation and repression of Jamaican slavery in Sir Hans Sloane's eighteenth-century publications, see Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven, 2008), ch. 1.

¹⁷ ‘Enlightenment: Room 1: Discovering the World in the 18th Century’ (London, n.d.), n.p.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ The Enlightenment Gallery can be explored virtually via Google Arts & Culture: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/galleries/enlightenment.

²⁰ For Sarah Sophia Banks, see John Gascoigne, ‘Banks, Sarah Sophia (1744–1818)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), which begins by describing her as a ‘collector of antiquarian items’. See also Valerie Schutte, ‘Cutting, Arranging, and Pasting: Sarah Sophia Banks as Collector’, Early Modern Women, 9 (2014), 127–40, and Catherine Eagleton, ‘Collecting African Money in Georgian London: Sarah Sophia Banks and Her Collection of Coins’, Museum History Journal, 6 (2013), 23–38. Citations are from the British Museum descriptions on display in Room 2. The material culture and texts depicting Sarah Sophia Banks are telling: small reproductions of original images of her, rather than the originals, are on display, under a rubric entitled ‘The Age of Curiosity’.

²¹ The named individuals are Robert Smirke (the Enlightenment architect who designed the room) and George III. The full list of human categories is: ‘people’, ‘collectors’, ‘European collectors’, ‘man-made’, ‘antiquaries’, ‘specialist historians and archaeologists’, ‘the British Museum's founders’, ‘Europeans’, ‘scholars’, ‘Britain’, ‘Merchants, diplomats, explorers and collectors’.

²² Sloan, ‘“Aimed at universality”’, 20.

²³ See for example JoEllen DeLucia, A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759–1820 (Edinburgh, 2015); Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger (Cambridge, 2013); Patricia Fara, Pandora's Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (2004); and Women, Gender, and Enlightenment, ed. Knott and Taylor.

²⁴ For feminist methodology in the British colonial context, see esp. Antoinette Burton, ‘Archive Stories: Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories’, in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford, 2004), 281–93. For the early history of women in archaeology (and their erasure from the discipline), see Amara Thornton, Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People (2018), esp. ch. 3.

²⁵ For the heroic narrative of masculine archaeology in this region, see Eleanor Robson, ‘Old Habits Die Hard: Writing the Excavation and Dispersal History of Nimrud’, Museum History Journal, 10 (2017), 217–32, esp. 218–21.

²⁶ The case description reads: ‘In the seventeenth century … the sites of the destroyed cities of Nineveh and Babylon were still undiscovered. During the Enlightenment, new attempts were made to find the ruins of these cities, famous from descriptions in the Bible … A young Englishman, Claudius James Rich, discovered the site of Babylon, mapped ancient Nineveh and gathered artefacts and inscriptions. This “rubble” … inspired … a century of … scholars.’

²⁷ His reputed father was Sir James Cockburn, 5th Bt: Alastair W. Massie, ‘Cockburn, Sir James, fifth baronet (1723–1809)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Edmund Burke denounced the British plundering of St Eustatius in parliamentary speeches of 14 May 1781 and 4 December 1781. See The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 4: Party, Parliament, and the Dividing of the Whigs: 1780–1794, ed. P. J. Marshall, Donald C. Bryant and William B. Todd (Oxford, 2015), 66–94, 104–14.

²⁸ Constance M. Alexander, Baghdad in Bygone Days: From the Journals and Correspondence of Claudius Rich, Traveller, Artist, Linguist, Antiquary, and British Resident at Baghdad, 1808–1821 (1928), 1–3.

²⁹ Ibid., 4.

³⁰ Ibid., 9–10, 13–17.

³¹ The Bombay Calendar and Register, for the Year 1806; With an Almanac (Bombay, [1806]), 181–3. The Calendar enumerated 176 ‘Ladies’ of Bombay Presidency and 99 for Bombay itself, but did not include any of Lady Mackintosh's three teenage stepdaughters, including the eldest, Mary.

³² Alexander, Baghdad in Bygone Days, 19–22, 24. They sailed on the Princess Augusta East Indiaman. Mary's half-brother recalled the presence of a German governess and that Mackintosh educated the children on the voyage by reading them Milton's works and Addison's Spectator articles. Sir James recorded in a letter of 16 July 1806 that ‘I read through the whole of Gibbon, with such omissions and explanations as children require’, as well as Robertson's Charles V and America ‘with the very delightful interludes of Walter Scott and Miss Baillie’. Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. Robert James Mackintosh (2 vols., 1835), i: 203–4, 254, 291, 438 (citation from 291). He read both Burke and Hume to them as part of ‘a regular course of the political history of England’ (291).

³³ Christopher J. Finlay, ‘Mackintosh, Sir James of Kyllachy (1765–1832)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). For the sale of Mackintosh's estate, and his improvident lifestyle thereafter, see Memoirs, ed. Mackintosh, i: 169, 188. As his son notes, prior to his Bombay appointment, Mackintosh had been offered a position as a judge at Trinidad (ibid., 187), a reminder of the extent to which the empires of Britain's Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds were connected through their governing elites.

³⁴ Alexander, Baghdad in Bygone Days, 22–4. Mary may have been the only ‘lady’ sailing with the fleet. She reported reading the theologian William Paley on board. Mary Rich (henceforth MR) to Lady Mackintosh, 18 February–31 March 1808, British Library (henceforth BL), BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 7v.

³⁵ Thabit A. J. Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Basra (Albany, 2001), 3, 11–13.

³⁶ Ibid., 13, 17, 25–7.

³⁷ Ibid., 28.

³⁸ For Manesty, see Robin P. Walsh, ‘Manesty, Samuel (1758–1812)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2010), and M. E. Yapp, ‘The Establishment of the East India Company Residency at Baghdad, 1798–1806’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 30 (1967), 323–36, esp. 323–5.

³⁹ Claudius Rich (henceforth CR) to William Erskine, from Basra, 31 March 1808, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 17; Alexander, Baghdad in Bygone Days, 25–7. Walsh, ‘Manesty’, cites Lachlan Macquarie's April 1807 description of Mrs Manesty as being ‘an Armenian by Birth of a respectable Family, and has brought her Husband no less than 13 Children … Mrs Manesty is still a beautiful Woman, and very pleasing in her manners.’ See also X. W. Bond, ‘Claudius Rich and Samuel Manesty’, Untold Lives Blog (4 March 2016), https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2016/03/claudius-rich-and-samuel-manesty.html, who ascribes Rich's comment instead to ‘Orientalist’ concerns. Mary recorded the incident on 23 March 1808 to her stepmother, Lady Mackintosh. Manesty's letter to Claudius was very pleasant, she observed, but he wished her to meet ‘Mrs Manesty at the Factory … We must if possible contrive some excuse as it is totally out of the question. No I am not quite so dawdling as all that comes to visit a dirty Armenian drab as Claudius calls her.’ BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 12. The couple were convinced that Manesty was not married, and that the invitation was intended to dupe them into thinking that ‘Mrs Manesty was indeed a wife’. Ibid., 13v–14.

⁴⁰ Mary wrote to Maitland on 30 August 1808 expressing sorrow on learning that their father and stepmother disapproved of the couple's response to Manesty and his wife, repeating the rumour that Mrs Manesty was an ‘Armenian Trull’ and saying that she had written to her stepmother for advice on the propriety of their actions. BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 37. On the next folio (38), in contrast, she reported a pleasant visit with the Armenian wife of her husband's servant Coja Mokeill: her perceptions of both Armenian and ‘native’ Iraqi women varied both over time and by context.

⁴¹ Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge, 2014), 8–10.

⁴² Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, 11–12; Tom Nieuwenhuis, Politics and Society in Early Modern Iraq: Mamlūk Pashas, Tribal Shayks and Local Rule between 1802 and 1831 (The Hague, 1982), vii, 9–13, 76, 80.

⁴³ Nieuwenhuis, Politics and Society, 15–16.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 16–17, 23–4 (citation from 24). See more broadly Ottoman Women in Public Space, ed. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (Leiden, 2016).

⁴⁵ She mentioned in a letter to Maitland that she was learning Turkish when she reported her first visit with Baghdad women (‘two Armenian ladies’) three days after arriving in Baghdad (7 May 1808, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 19). On 12 June 1808 she wrote to Lady Mackintosh: ‘I have been so busily occupied in copying dispatches for Claudius that I have hardly a few moments left me to write a few words to you.’ Ibid., fol. 23. Recognition of the roles played by diplomatic wives has emerged as a key component of the ‘new diplomatic history’. See Jennifer Mori, ‘How Women Made Diplomacy: The British Embassy in Paris, 1815–1841’, Journal of Women's History, 27: 4 (2015), 137–59; Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500, ed. Glenda Sluga and Carolyn James (2015).

⁴⁶ For fears of military invasion as a motive for engagement with Baghdad in the Napoleonic era, see for example John Macdonald Kinneir, Journey through Asia Minor, Armenia, and Koordistan, in the Years 1813 and 1814; With Remarks on the Marches of Alexander, and the Retreat of the Ten Thousand (1818), esp. viii and 512–39. Twenty-first-century historians dispute the economic and political motives for British diplomacy in Baghdad. See Jonathan Parry, ‘Steam Power and British Influence in Baghdad, 1820–1860’, Historical Journal, 56 (2013), 145–73, 147, esp. fn. 6.

⁴⁷ England obtained commercial concessions from the Ottoman sultan in 1809 through the Treaty of Dardanelles. See Iftikhar Ahmad Khan, ‘Indian Shipping at Basra: The Incident of 1820’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 54 (1993), 724. For Rich's engagement in espionage, see Nieuwenhuis, Politics and Society, 85.

⁴⁸ Writing to Maitland on 10 July 1808, she wished one of her sisters would come and stay with her, ‘but I am afraid you young gay ladies would find it rather a bore being shut up in a Haram all day’. On 13 July 1808, again writing to Maitland, she reported that Wahhabi tribesmen had appeared ‘in swarms’ outside the gates of Baghdad and that the pasha and his troops, having marched out against them, decided it ‘more prudent to retreat’. A few years previously, the Wahhabi had, she reported, murdered 8,000 men, women and children of Baghdad, ‘shewing not the least quarter or mercy and it is even said drank in exaltation the blood of their victims. They remind me of the Musselmen in the time of Mahomet and the first Calihs.’ She knew the latter from Gibbon. BL, Add MS 80751, 31–31v, 32–32v. Many of her letters, in contrast, are marked by the generic ennui of white experiences of imperialism, as detailed by Jeffrey Auerbach, Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire (Oxford, 2018).

⁴⁹ The first goods recorded as being dispatches to Bombay were the bottles of red wine from Shiraz that Claudius purchased at Bushire, en route to Basra, for Sir James Mackintosh. MR to Maitland Mackintosh, 16 March 1808, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 7v.

⁵⁰ For the communication networks upon which they relied, see Joshi Chitra, ‘Dak Roads, Dak Runners, and Reordering of Communication Networks’, International Review of Social History, 57 (2012), 169–89 and Edward Ingram, ‘Directing the Mail from Baghdad’, in Edward Ingram, Empire-building and Empire-builders: Twelve Studies (1995), 30–46.

⁵¹ For Maitland's naming, see Finlay, ‘Mackintosh’. James Maitland was the eighth Earl of Lauderdale. Her naming reflects Mackintosh's early commitment to including his daughters fully in his patronage networks.

⁵² For Erskine, Katherine Prior, ‘Erskine, William (1773–1852)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

⁵³ Notwithstanding Mary's location in Baghdad, her provisioning activities mirror in many ways those described for propertied provincial Englishwomen in Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, 1998).

⁵⁴ MR to Maitland, 15 September 1808, 1 October 1809 and 29 April 1811, BL. Add MS 80751, fols. 40v, 113 and 270 (citation from fol. 270).

⁵⁵ MR to Maitland, 29 April 1811 and 22 January 1810, BL, Add MS 80751, fols. 274 and 133. On 4 November 1810, she wrote to Maitland: ‘I do not much like the music you sent me’, observing that Claudius had described it as ‘d—d dull’ (ibid., fol. 206).

⁵⁶ For the Ottoman trade in luxury textiles, see Threads of Global Desire: Silk in the Pre-modern World, ed. Dagmar Schäfer, Giorgio Riello and Luca Molà (Woodbridge, 2018), introduction and chs. 4–5. Examples of French lace, which Mary was very keen for Maitland to provide comparative Bombay prices for, include MR to Maitland, 20 February 1811 and 24 October 1812, BL, Add MS 80751, fols. 243, 274; 24 October 1812, BL, Add MS 80752, fol. 35v.

⁵⁷ For example, Rich's patron, Richard Hall, writing to Sir James Mackintosh on 30 December 1803, stated that ‘He is of Bristol, where I had the pleasure lately of seeing him.’ Hall continued, ‘He is a young man of good family’, without elaborating on Rich's parentage. Memoirs, ed. Mackintosh, i: 201.

⁵⁸ ‘Do you know the Fellow had actually the impudence to imagine that I would suffer Mrs Rich to keep company with his Trull. Oh how my Irish blood boiled.’ CR to Erskine, 31 March 1808, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 17. Mary did not visit Scotland until her return to Britain in the 1820s, but wrote of Inverness, the nearest town to her father's erstwhile Highland estate: ‘I always claim [it] as my Town and will certainly persuade Mr Rich though no Seat to visit your & Major Campbell's in the Highlands from which I am forever exiled having married an Irishman.’ MR to Mrs Campbell, 30 September 1809, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 108v.

⁵⁹ MR to Maitland, 1 October 1809, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 114. Interestingly, she now asked as well for multicoloured Turkish-style nankeen pantaloons, tied at the ankles, but it was to the Irish linen trousers that her letters repeatedly returned, for example in a letter to Maitland of 4 November 1810 (fol. 205v). Trousers entered genteel British men's wardrobes in response to colonial and imperial trade and warfare in the eighteenth century, as discussed by Beverly Lemire, ‘A Question of Trousers: Seafarers, Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress, c. 1600–1800’, Cultural and Social History, 13 (2016), 1–22, esp. 13–18.

⁶⁰ MR to Maitland, 29 April 1811, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 270. Claudius added a note, telling Maitland that he was using some of the goods for his annual clothing allowance for his guard, and made a point of noting ‘as for my wearing them that is all a joke’. John Styles (personal communication) notes that Irish flaxen linen imported into Bombay, although a cool textile well-suited to the tropics, would likely have been intended for plebeian nautical use and very coarse.

⁶¹ MR to Maitland, 27 July 1812, BL, Add MS 80752, fol. 23. E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge, 2001), ch. 2, esp. 62–3, 65–6, discusses the gendered regimes that governed East India Company clothing and fashions.

⁶² Mary herself – although exceptionally punctilious with respect to the weight, composition, colour, pattern and ornamentation of material for her gowns – accepted that Indian textiles were well suited for her own wardrobe. See for example her letter to Maitland, 21 September 1810, BL, Add MS80751, fol. 189.

⁶³ Allan Cunningham, ‘Robert Adair and the Treaty of the Dardanelles’, in Anglo-Ottoman Encounters in the Age of Revolution: Collected Essays, ed. Allan Cunningham (1993), 103–43.

⁶⁴ See for example MR to Erskine, 27 March 1809, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 71v. The horse was caparisoned ‘in the Turkish manner’. See similarly MR to Maitland, 29 October 1810, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 221. The analogous investiture ceremonies for East India Company Residents on the subcontinent are discussed in Margot Finn, ‘Material Turns in British History: II. Corruption: Imperial Power, Princely Politics and Gifts Gone Rogue’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 29 (2019), 1–25.

⁶⁵ She complained to Maitland on 29 May 1811 that the failure of the ‘Poonah Chintzes’ to arrive was especially irksome ‘as Mr Rich is now preparing to make the present to the Pasha and … the Chintzes would have been very acceptable & saved me great expence as now I shall be obliged to set them down in my own account whereas otherwise they would have been purchased for the Company & been very much admired by the Turks.’ BL, Add MS, 80751, fol. 277–277v.

⁶⁶ MR to Kitty Mackintosh, 23 December 1810: ‘A Turk would not allow even his dearest friend even to mention the name of his wife and two men would be intimate for 30 years without either presuming to speak concerning their Haram.’ BL, Add MS, 80751, fol. 226v.

⁶⁷ MR to Maitland, 10 July 1808, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 27.

⁶⁸ MR to Maitland, 1 October 1809, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 111.

⁶⁹ MR to Maitland, 5 October 1810, BL, Add MA 80751, fols. 196v–197. The complexities and internal contradictions of Enlightenment ‘Orientalist’ interpretations of Ottoman gender norms are explored by Joanna de Groot, ‘Oriental Feminotopias? Montagu's and Montesquieu's “Seraglios” Revisited’, Gender and History, 18 (2006), 66–86.

⁷⁰ MR to Maitland, 19 March 1810, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 149. She went on to specify Madras gold muslin, Pune muslin embroidered with gold and silver, and kincob from Gujarat: ‘mind however in choosing them not to consider your own taste, but to let them be as gaudy as possible’.

⁷¹ She told Maitland that she could now follow their conversations in Turkish, but not yet participate in them. 22 December 1810, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 226. Mary Rich's status as a wife and a Christian was important in this context. Both Claudius's predecessor as Baghdad Resident and Samuel Manesty at Basra had been entangled in diplomatic rows involving European men's alleged or actual relations with Muslim women in the pashalik. For Sir Harford Jones, who was expelled from Baghdad in 1804 as a result of such allegations, see Yapp, ‘Establishment’, 331–2. For Manesty, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, in Asia, Africa, and Europe, during the Years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, and 1803. Written by Himself, in the Persian Language, trans. Charles Stewart (2 vols., 1810), 371–6.

⁷² MR to Maitland, 19 May 1812, BL, Add MS 80752, fols. 11–11v. See also MR to Erskine, 12 March 1817, BL, Add MS 80752, fols. 230–230v.

⁷³ Alexander, Baghdad in Bygone Days, exemplifies this characteristic interpretation of Claudius Rich: ‘He … had the gift given to few Europeans, that of thoroughly understanding the Oriental mind and outlook … He understood the Oriental phlegm and patience, and could become as Oriental as themselves.’ (32–3).

⁷⁴ Rich had begun to seek out manuscripts for his brother-in-law within a few days of his arrival in Baghdad: ‘I have instituted a search for such MSS as I think you should like’, he wrote four days after their schooner docked. CR to Erskine, 8 May 1808, BL, Add MS 89751, 21v.

⁷⁵ CR to Maitland, 14 December 1810, BL, Add MS 80751, fols. 223–223v. Lindsay Allen offers an excellent analysis of the wider context of East India Company families and the collection of antiquities in ‘“Come Then Ye Classic Thieves of Each Degree”: The Social Context of the Persepolis Diaspora in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Iran, 51 (2013), 207–34.

⁷⁶ MR to Maitland, 27 February 1812, BL Add MS 80752, fols. 20–3.

⁷⁷ Claudius, for example, recommended that she read the multi-volume eighteenth-century Universal History, in the edition with a preface by Mr Sale, and at his recommendation Mary read Robertson's Charles V aloud to him. MR to Maitland, 10 July 1808 and 15 September 1808, BL, Add MS 80751, fols. 27v–28 and fol. 43. MR to Maitland, 12 June 1808: ‘I am now reading the first Vols of the second part of the Universal history containing the History of Life of Mahomedt which I believe [is] reckoned the best part of the whole book. Though rather dry I read it with great pleasure & interest & after I intend going through carefully Monsieur Sale's prefatory treatise on the Arabs. Claudius has recommended [it] to me as the best book I could possibly read on that subject.’ Ibid., fols. 28–28v. For the Universal History, see Guido Abbattista, ‘The Business of Paternoster Row: Towards a Publishing History of the Universal History, 1736–65’, Publishing History, 17 (1985), 5–50.

⁷⁸ MR to Maitland, 1 October 1809, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 112.

⁷⁹ MR to Maitland, 26 September 1808, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 43.

⁸⁰ Rich's first excursion was framed by a desire to test the assertions of the Company's official surveyor, James Rennell, with actual fieldwork. Rennell's arguments are found in James Herodotus Rennell, Geographical System of Herodotus Examined and Explained by a Comparison with Those of Other Ancient Authors, and with Modern Geography. In the Course of the Work are Introduced, Dissertations on the Itinerary State of the Greeks, the Expedition of Darius (1800). See Rich's Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon. With Three Plates (1815), esp. 51–2.

⁸¹ For this argument with respect to the East India Company in particular, see Edney, Matthew H., Mapping and Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar. Edney, however, does not mention Rich. For Rich in this context, see Mayhew, Robert J., Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1650–1850 (Basingstoke, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 10, esp. 205. For an argument that the nexus between empire and geography was more heterogeneous and less relentlessly instrumental, see Driver, Felix, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar.

⁸² Or so the advertisement for the probate sale of these goods claimed they were: Bombay Gazette, 17 April 1822.

⁸³ Rennell disputed Rich's interpretation in ‘Remarks on the Topography of Ancient Babylon’, Archaeologia (1816). Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography, 205, notes that it was Rich, not Rennell, who undertook observational fieldwork.

⁸⁴ For example, Michael Seymour offers a perceptive account of Rich's 1811 investigations at Babylon, but mentions Mary only in the context of her subsequent sale of his collection to the British Museum. Michael Seymour, Babylon: Legend, History and the Ancient City (2016), 133–8, esp. 137.

⁸⁵ For the description of Kitty (born 1795) as a ‘madcap’, see MR to Maitland, 29 May 1811, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 275.

⁸⁶ MR to Maitland, 9 April 1811, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 261.

⁸⁷ The marriage took place in Baghdad on 8 January 1812, and may have been performed by Rich as Resident. The Riches and Kitty left Baghdad for Babylon on 9 December 1811. MR to Maitland, 18 December 1811, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 311.

⁸⁸ Kitty (Catherine) Mackintosh to Maitland, from Babylon, 18 December 1811, fols. 313–313v.

⁸⁹ The first edition of the Memoir was published in Vienna in 1813 in the journal Mines de l'Orient. It was republished without corrections in London 1815, a second edition appeared in 1816 and a third in 1818. A Second Memoir on the Ruins also appeared in 1818. Mary Rich additionally published his ‘Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon in 1811’ in an edited compilation of his and her journals and writing published in London in 1836: Claudius James Rich, Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, and on the Site of Ancient Nineveh; With Journal of a Voyage down the Tigris to Bagdad and an Account of a Visit to Shirauz and Persepolis [ed. Mary Rich] (2 vols., 1836).

⁹⁰ Claudius James Rich, Memoir of the Ruins of Babylon: With Three Plates (3rd edn, 1818). Lockett is mentioned on 3; the Kurdish historian and geographer Abu ‘l-Fida (1273–1331), for example, on 8; and the Turkish man on 29.

⁹¹ Claudius Rich, Second Memoir on Babylon: Containing an Inquiry into the Correspondence between the Ancient Descriptions of Babylon and the Remains Still Visible on the Site: Suggested by the “Remarks” of Major Rennell in the Archæologia (1818), 1–4.

⁹² Memoirs, ed. Mackintosh, i: 366, 432, 435, 438.

⁹³ For the role of ‘native’ men as brokers of Enlightenment knowledge, see esp. Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 2007), and The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, ed. Simon Schaffer, Lisa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo (Sagamore Beach, 2009).

⁹⁴ Seymour, Babylon, 135–6, notes that ‘A final merit of Rich's account, no doubt enhanced by the author's long residence in Iraq and linguistic ability, is its incidental coverage of local and non-European tradition relating to the site [of Babylon], a subject that is only now reappearing in archaeological discourse generally.’

⁹⁵ For British instances, see for example R. C. Richardson, ‘The “Servant Problem”, Social Class and Literary Representation in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Literature as History: Essays in Honour of Peter Widdowson, ed. Simon Barker and Jo Gill (2010), 106–17; Steedman, Carolyn, ‘Servants and Their Relationship to the Unconscious’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003), 316–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Colonial examples include Macdonald, Charlotte, ‘Why Was There No Answer to the “Servant Problem”? Paid Domestic Work and the Making of a White New Zealand, 1840s–1950s’, New Zealand Journal of History, 51 (2017), 7–35Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ Alexander, Baghdad in Bygone Days, 60. She estimates that there were fifteen hussars; the steward, who stayed with Rich until his death, was known as Pietro.

⁹⁷ MR to Maitland, 18 November 1808, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 59v.

⁹⁸ Alexander, Baghdad in Bygone Days, 60, states that an Armenian maid was her only servant, but the information in the letters and journals that record her travels speak of ‘attendants’, and name the mother of Claudius's dragoman (chief interpreter) among them.

⁹⁹ MR to Maitland, [November 1810], BL, Add MS 80751, fols. 211–212v. She was to pay him 30 rupees per month, half to the tailor himself and half to his family in Madras, an arrangement that proved very difficult to effect.

¹⁰⁰ MR to Maitland, 28 October 1811, BL, Add MS 80751, fols. 307–307v.

¹⁰¹ MR to Maitland, 7 May 1808, BL, Add MS 80751, fol. 19v.

¹⁰² The ability of ‘subaltern’ Indian women to negotiate East India Company power hierarchies in this period is discussed by Durba Ghosh, ‘Making and Un-making Loyal Subjects: Pensioning Widows and Educating Orphans in Early Colonial India’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31 (2003), 1–28.

¹⁰³ Mary's letters are punctuated with requests that the Erskines would forward the correspondence of the Riches’ Indian tailor to his family in Madras, to prevent him from leaving their household in Baghdad. See for example MR to Maitland, 5 August 1812, BL, Add MS 80752, fol. 26.

¹⁰⁴ See for example MR to Maitland 24 June 1812, 19 November 1812, 7 May 1813 and 21 May 1813, and CR to Erskine, 26 April 1813, BL, Add MS 80752, fols. 14–14v, 47, 90–90v, 94 and 68.

¹⁰⁵ For this aspect of East India Company knowledge-making, see esp. Onni Gust, ‘Mobility, Gender and Empire in Maria Graham's Journal of a Residence in India (1812)’, Gender & History, 29 (2017), 273–91.

¹⁰⁶ Rich, Narrative of a Residence, i: 5. Aga Minas ‘had all the patience and good humour which such a post required – was unwearied in his endeavours to make everyone comfortable, and most zealous in the discharge of his duty’. Significantly, this detailed description comes not from Rich's text but from Mary's editorial footnote.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., i: 3 (CR), 331–2 (MR).

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., i: 2.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., i: 2 (CR), 333 (MR). She notes that as ‘Minas's mother is very stout, and Taqui very slender, it was a difficult and nice operation to make the balance equal by throwing in a quantity of stones on Taqui's side.’

¹¹⁰ ‘Fragment of a Journal from Bagdad [sic] to Sulimana by Mrs. Rich’, in ibid., i: 373–5 (citations from 374). For Enlightenment British women and vaccination, see esp. Bennett, Michael, ‘Jenner's Ladies: Women and Vaccination against Smallpox in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, History, 93 (2008), 497–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Grey, Daniel, ‘“To bring this useful invention into fashion in England”: Mary Wortley Montagu as Medical Expert’, in British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Barnard, Teresa (Farnham, 2015), 15–32Google Scholar.

¹¹¹ Rich, Narrative of a Residence, i: 303, 268. For the mixed record of such vaccination campaigns, see also Heydon, Susan, ‘Death of the King: The Introduction of Vaccination into Nepal in 1816’, Medical History, 63 (2019), 24–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foxhall, Katherine, ‘The Colonial Travels and Travails of Smallpox Vaccine, c.1820–1840’, in Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World, ed. Cox, Catherine and Marland, Hilary (New York, 2013), 83–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹² Her trip to London (while Claudius remained behind in Paris) to negotiate with the East India Company on his behalf is detailed in CR to Erskine, 24 October 1815, BL, Add MS 80752, fol. 189.

¹¹³ Claudius Rich died intestate; Mary was awarded administration of his estate in Bombay in February 1822. The decision to send his ‘variety of valuable oriental Manuscripts and natural curiosities’ to England for sale reflected the assessment that they could not be sold at Bombay ‘except at a ruinous sacrifice’. Account of the estate of Claudius Rich, 5 April 1823, BL, IOR/L/AG/34/27/391, 1–7 (citation from 1).

¹¹⁴ Rich, Narrative of a Residence. In addition to including an excerpt from her own journals in this volume, Mary Rich used the footnotes to register her own presence in her husband's life and career.

¹¹⁵ Forgeries of antiquities attest to the agency of ‘native’ men and women caught up in East India Company collecting cultures. Case 15 notes the presence of nineteenth-century forgeries of ancient figurines in the Claudius Rich collection, which it purchased from Mary Rich in 1825. See for example the fired clay figurine, British Museum number 91893 (Registration number R. 97).

¹¹⁶ Tristram Hunt, ‘Should Museums Return Their Colonial Artefacts?’, The Guardian (29 June 2019). The alternative case is made by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics, trans. Drew S. Burk (November 2018): http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf.