Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company - Hardcover

Ogborn, Miles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226620417 ISBN 13: 9780226620411

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press, 2007

Synopsis

A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, Indian Ink examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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.

About this title

About the Author

Miles Ogborn is professor of geography at Queen Mary University of London.

Review

"By arguing that the interrelationship of geography and writing was essential to networks of trade and the establishment of political domination, Ogborn offers fresh perspective on a literature preoccupied with the Company's involvement in bullion and opium." (Bhavani Raman Journal of Interdisciplinary History)

"Written in a fluid and enjoyable style, this book is an outstanding addition to the research into knowledge production and practices in the early British Empire. Ogborn's research establishes the relevancy for the reader of applying studies of specific geographies of place to current explorations of the role of print and print culture in the dissemination of knowledge and the consequences and ramifications for the establishment of authority and the spread of political power." (George H. Thompson Libraries & the Cultural Record)

"[A] remarkable achievement in cultural nd economic history." (Studies in English Literature)

"This is an original and compelling study that reveals through a series of well-chosen case studies how the production, dissenmination, and performance of knowledge was shaped by time and space." (Douglas M. Peers International History Review)

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0226620417
• ISBN 13: 9780226620411
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288