Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company available in Hardcover
Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company
- ISBN-10:
- 0226620417
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226620411
- Pub. Date:
- 06/15/2007
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0226620417
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226620411
- Pub. Date:
- 06/15/2007
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company
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Overview
Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Miles Ogborn takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffeehouses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, Ogborn argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word.
Navigating the juncture of imperial history and the history of the book, Indian Ink uncovers the intellectual and political legacies of early modern trade and empire and charts a new understanding of the geography of print culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226620411 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2007 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
INDIAN INK Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company
By MILES OGBORN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-62041-1
Chapter One The Written World
Writing Empire
Understanding the history of European engagements with the rest of the world through the written word is nothing new. There is, however, substantial debate over how that might be done. In the last twenty-five years some of the most highly charged disputes over the study of empire, and particularly the British empire in India, have related to questions of writing. The development of various forms of postcolonial theory, drawing most prominently on the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, has provoked a strenuous debate across a broad interdisciplinary field about the relationships between imperial power and the written word. It is questions of the relationship between writing and the written-about world that have engaged both those who have followed Edward Said in attempting to map out the terrain of colonial discourse and the critics who accuse them of mistaking rhetoric for reality. And it is the relationship between power, resistance, and meaning that structures attempts in the wake of the Subaltern Studies group to deconstruct the documentary record of the imperial archive and has animated those who are suspicious of the power of theories of language to reveal the full force of colonialism. Although it is important not to minimize the significance of these debates, it is evident that they have frequently proceeded by oversimplifying the stance of their opponents instead of exploring the substantial and increasing degree of shared ground. While it might be stated in different ways, it is evident that there is a sense that the textual and the material are to be understood together in the exertion of imperial power over people and places. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak put it some time ago, "the concept-metaphor of the 'social text' is not the reduction of real life to the page of a book." Also, while there are significant debates over both conceptualization and historical exemplars, there is, more often than not, an underlying consensus that formations of imperial power and knowledge are both potentially transformative and, at the same time, contested, fragmentary, contradictory, and anxious. These formations should be understood as "work in progress," involving the necessary engagement of Europeans with other peoples and their forms of power and knowledge, in an ongoing process of the construction and deconstruction of empires. The aim, therefore, should be to find ways of understanding imperial power and knowledge that begin from these premises and try to be adequate to them. What I want to argue here is that ways forward can be found by bringing together questions raised by the turn towards geographical interpretations in both the history of empire and the history of the book. This provides objects of study and modes of interpretation that can be used across the broad historical period covered in this book from the opening maneuvers in long-distance trade to the establishment of the formal structures of a territorial empire.
Historical accounts of empire are becoming more concerned with geography in two important and related ways: a reconsideration of empire as defined through a hierarchical geography of center and periphery; and an attention to the specific characteristics of imperial and colonial sites, territories, and networks. The first recognizes that the shape and politics of the growing and changing British empire from the seventeenth century onwards is not adequately captured by simple models based upon the assumed centrality of Britain within a hierarchical set of relationships to discrete overseas colonies, territories, and trading zones. Instead, alternative models of "networks" or "webs" seek to explore a different geography that allows a range of competing and contradictory relationships to come into view. These alternatives emphasize the vulnerability of empire as well as its dynamism. They stress the unity of empire, as a single network or web, as well as the multiple differentiation of sites within it, the many forms of connectivity between them, and the ever-changing nature and shape of those connections. An important part of this has been to find ways to "treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field." This has meant exploring the means by which imperial sites are rendered distinct and different from the metropolitan core in terms of what sorts of rights or forms of production and coercion are made possible in each. It has also meant insisting on the ways in which the history of the empire has shaped the making of nations, states, and identities in the metropolis. Political disputes over empire, changing patterns of consumption, and the agency of colonized and enslaved people demanding rights and recognition has meant that what was "out there" was also simultaneously "in here." Investigations of this complex whole refuse, both as impossible and as undesirable, calls to provide totalizing accounts of this reconceived British empire, or the global geography of which it was a part. Instead the focus is on analyzing and tracking particular sites, connections, and movements. As Kathleen Wilson puts it, "In one sense, empire as a unit was a phantasm of the metropole: all empire is local."
This, then, is the second element of imperial history's renewed engagement with geography. Here the specific "local" geographies of imperial sites, territories, and networks are understood as a vital part of the exertion of imperial power, of the forging of new relationships between people and places, and of the making of the modes of resistance that challenged these imperial reconfigurations of the world. This is not the determining and supposedly invariant backdrop of oceans, mountains, and plains: the geography behind history. Instead, it recognizes that imperialism is constituted through its arrangements of spaces, places, landscapes, and networks of connection. In this vein, imperial history involves the investigation of the small-scale geographies of sites such as trading posts, mercantile offices, imperial and colonial cities, and plantations and slave gardens, or of encounters between Europeans and others on ship and shore. Alternatively, it means investigating the survey and delineation of specific imperial and colonial spaces through exploration and mapping, or a variety of administrative schemes of property ownership, settlement, and cultivation. Finally, it is pursued through demonstrating the ways in which specific global connections forged by natural philosophers, merchants, and political renegades to further projects of knowledge creation, profit making, and liberation from oppression transformed the worlds within which they were constructed.
These new geographies of early modern empire are, therefore, attentive both to what happened in particular sites and settings and to what moved between them. In particular, there is a renewed attention to questions of knowledge that has involved a more careful tracing of the production, dissemination, and consumption of ideas and information through the circuits of empire. This can be seen in recent work drawing on the history of political thought that has paid careful attention to resituating arguments about imperial policy and practice in the intellectual traditions, administrative contexts, and ideological battles of which they were originally a part, as well as seeing how they moved between places. These concerns are also evident in discussions of information gathering and knowledge creation in imperial settings that stress both the imperial purposes of surveillance, science, and scholarship and the importance of local contexts, practices, and relationships to what could be made known. Finally, they are apparent in studies of imperial and mercantile connections and forms of integration that stress the importance of flows of knowledge and information in such diverse forms as the manuscript letters of merchants, the passing of news and ideas among enslaved people, the transportation of botanical specimens, and even the printed papers of scholars. In all these cases, questions of imperial power can be investigated through relationships between knowledge and space that work through forms of communication in speech, script, and print.
The Geography of Writing
A productive way into these relationships between imperial spaces, knowledges, and powers is through recent work in the histories of reading, writing, and publishing that often goes under the catch-all title "the history of the book." This vibrant and growing area of scholarship has sought to transform the relationship between textual and literary studies on the one hand and social and cultural history on the other by emphasizing the importance of the variety of material instantiations of the written word and the significance of readers' diverse appropriations of those artifacts within cultural practices that involve and combine talk, handwriting, and the printed word and image. Doing so, its practitioners argue, makes possible a series of histories of the production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge in ways that can demonstrate how it was positioned and differentiated socially, historically, and geographically, and how it was both put to work and contested. These histories of the book locate the construction of meaning and the workings of power in the concrete processes of the making, distribution, and use of texts as material objects.
As with the recent developments in imperial history it is striking how concerned the histories of writing, of the book, and of reading have become with questions of geography. It is, of course, an area that has been littered with grand historical transitions: Walter Ong and Jack Goody's accounting of the dramatic transformations in forms of society and consciousness in the shift from orality to literacy; Marshall McLuhan and Elizabeth Eisenstein's elaborations of the revolutionary implications of moveable metal type; and Rolf Engelsing's identification of a late eighteenth-century "reading revolution" in the move from the "intensive" reading of a few texts to the "extensive" reading of many. Yet, without denying the significant changes brought by new forms of script and print and the increasing variety of available texts, notions of singular, dramatic, and universal transformations have been dispersed into investigations of the simultaneous variety of forms of the production, dissemination, and use of texts at any point in time. In each part of what Robert Darnton has called the "communications circuit" there is a focus on the local, concrete, and particular historical geographies of writers, printers, manuscripts, books, booksellers, and many different sorts of readers.
In terms of the production of texts, questions of authorship remain important but have been redistributed across the range of people involved in producing the written word. Thus, the "routine authorship" involved in editing, compiling, correcting, annotating, and anthologizing, as well as the practical processes of production by scribes, compositors, and pressmen, are given their due in the making of manuscript and printed texts. This acknowledges that scribal copying and letterpress printing were not simply processes of transparent replication, but active modes of production. Scribes and printers were producers of new forms of the written word. First, they changed the texts that came into their hands simply through the process of changing their forms; in the choices of paper and binding, and of the handwriting or typography that that involved. Second, they changed them through the processes of editing that they saw as their duty as workers with words. Only in very rare circumstances was the early modern text a sacrosanct one. There were, of course, social rules and norms governing the sorts of changes that were made, and what they might mean. These were inscribed both in the norms of artisanal and professional communities of scribes and printers and in the legal forms of regulation, licensing, and censorship that they negotiated in their working lives. Understanding these, for different forms of both script and print, means attending, then, to the specifics of places of production and their social organization. For example, for seventeenth-century London, Harold Love has situated the scribal publication of large numbers of political documents-parliamentary speeches and the manuscript equivalent of pamphlets-within the scriptoria inhabited by the armies of clerks necessary for the workings of the law, the church, and the government, particularly around the Inns of Court. He then differentiates this from the chain copying of single versions of politically contentious manuscripts by and for individual readers in what he calls "scribal communities" stretched across a network of country houses and other spaces. For printing in the same period, Adrian Johns has argued that we need "a topography of the places of printed material in early modern London," and that it was this "social geography" of printing houses, bookshops, and the wider urban environment that "conditioned the knowledge that could be produced and encountered." For both script and print, it is the detailed geographies of local processes of production that can explicate the process of the making of meaning in texts as they are produced as material objects.
These processes are also pursued via questions of distribution and dissemination, in order to render concrete the particularities and inequalities of access to information. In place of general formulations about print and the public sphere are more specific questions of the material geographies of texts. Where did letters, manuscripts, account books, pamphlets, newspapers, and books go, and into whose hands did they fall? That there is no simple relationship between publishing and the public sphere is evident in the variety of modes of publication from oral proclamation, through manuscript circulation, to licensed printing. All constituted different relationships between the public and the private, and different modes of publication and distribution might be chosen for different sorts of texts and authors. However, there always had to be journeys, carriers, destinations, and transactions as texts moved from writers to readers. Where these can be mapped out, there is the possibility of tracing the cultural geographies of the demand for particular forms of writing or particular books. As Robert Darnton prosaically put it, "The wagon, the canal barge, the merchant vessel, the post office, and the railroad may have influenced the history of literature more than one would suspect." These geographies of distribution were, as Harold Love affirms, always political. The use of scribal publication by chain copying, with its nonmetropolitan, dispersed, and serial form of reproduction beyond the purview of the Crown, meant that "the scribal text had a politics, and that this politics was also a geography." It was, he notes, a geography and politics of distribution and dissemination different from that characteristic of seventeenth-century print.
Finally, accounts of the uses of written objects in script and print have also taken a material and geographical turn. In particular this involves recognizing reading itself as a differentiated and situated practice, taking different forms for different reading communities in different periods and places. Here reading is understood as a significant cultural act, a process of appropriation that is shaped by the text and its materiality, but not governed by it. A range of studies in the history of reading have therefore located readers in their specific contexts, elaborating not just where reading took place, but the array of written materials that they had at hand, what they did to them, what technologies they employed, and how reading fitted into readers' lives. Thus, the marginal annotations Dr. John Dee made in his library at Mortlake, Anna Larpent's combination of intensive reading and polite urban sociability in eighteenth-century London, and Gabriel Harvey's use of a book wheel to marshal texts in the service of Elizabethan political grandees in their country houses were all located readers making meaning in the process of reading specific texts in particular ways. This suggests the usefulness of reconstructing the "geography of reading" to emphasize this process of appropriation as a cultural practice located in place. However, such histories also need to acknowledge the diverse uses to which the variety of written objects have been put. Harold Love, for example, draws attention to the need to understand the uses of words within the complex and changing relationships between voice, script, and print, which often required particular combinations of speech and writing. Thus, the authority of the king, the law, and Parliament in seventeenth-century England was a matter of the spoken word, but that might become a basis for action only via a written document. Equally, written forms of speech might act as authority and precedent in a court of law, but only when respoken in the right place at the right time. Indeed, writings in script or print might serve their purposes in being venerated, brandished, or just stored away, rather than them actually needing to be read.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from INDIAN INK by MILES OGBORN Copyright © 2007 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of FiguresAbbreviations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter 1 The Written World
Chapter 2 Writing Travels: Royal Letters and the Mercantile Encounter
Chapter 3 Streynsham Master’s Office: Accounting for Collectivity, Order, and Authority at Fort St. George
Chapter 4 The Discourse of Trade: Print, Politics, and the Company in England
Chapter 5 Stock Jobbing: Print and Prices on Exchange Alley
Chapter 6 The Work of Empire in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Postscript
Bibliography
Index