Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies
School of Social Sciences
ZHCES Seminar Series
The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge
Dr. Joshua Ehrlich
Associate Professor of History, University of Macau
Abstract: The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. He shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics.
Bio: Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge and political thought with a focus on the East India Company and the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia. Currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Chicago.
Ehrlich’s first book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2023) reveals how the Company used its commitment to knowledge to justify its commercial and political power. It advances a new approach – the history of ideas of knowledge – to recover a world of debate among Indian and European thinkers on the political uses of knowledge.
Ehrlich’s many articles – on topics including the boundaries and boundedness of port cities, the making and unmaking of libraries through plunder, the crisis of liberal reform in India, and the origins of Indian print culture – have appeared in journals including Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, and Modern Intellectual History.
DATE: 27th January, 2025 (Monday)
TIME: 03.00 pm
(All are Welcome)
