Will Brehm  0:53
Joshua Ehrlich, welcome to FreshEd.

Joshua Ehrlich  0:54
Hi, Will. Good to be here.

Will Brehm  0:55
Congratulations on your new book. Absolutely fantastic. So well researched. So in depth. So, to get us started, let’s say; can you give me a sense of the size and the influence of the East India Company? Well, the

Joshua Ehrlich  1:10
Well, the East India Company was founded in 1600. It was chartered by the crown, and its mission was to trade with the East Indies, which at this time meant really most of Asia. There was only a rough idea of the geography there. And it started out fairly small. It was a group of investors, merchants, and they were headquartered in London, they were pooling their resources and sending out ships to trade with Asia. That meant initially a lot of trade in Southeast Asia. Over the course of the 17th century and into the 18th, their operations shifted more towards South Asia, or especially what we would now know as India. They were involved in trading a number of goods in their lifetime. They became notorious in the 19th century for their role in the opium trade with China. And the period that I look at from about the mid 18th to the early 19th century, they are invested in textiles, in bringing over spices, and more importantly, even than their trade becomes their control of territory. So, a major turning point for the East India Company is a war with the Nawab -or governor, almost ruler really- of Bengal in 1757. This ends with the Company emerging as rulers of a territory larger than Britain itself; Bengal, the wealthiest province of the Mughal Empire, which by this point is split off into its own kingdom almost. And this is really the beginning point of the story I proceed to tell; what happens as the Company’s role, which has always been partly political, partly commercial shifts more towards the control of territory? How does it justify this new sovereign role in Asia?

Will Brehm  1:15
And this is where your story picks up. And you start with this man named Warren Hastings. So, can you tell me who Warren Hastings was and what was his relationship to both England -both the crown, the British Empire- but also the East India Company?

Joshua Ehrlich  3:03
Warren Hastings is appointed governor of Bengal, and he becomes the company’s first governor general shortly after that. He’s deputed by East India Company’s board of directors to rule more directly in India than the company has done before. Since 1757, when the Company takes over territory on a large scale, it’s ruled in the shadows with this kind of puppet government. It does away with that fiction and Warren Hastings is sent to go and consolidate power. To go and rule directly and to shore up what’s been a pretty shaky foundation for the company in India as a ruler. And this is why my story starts at this point, because Warren Hastings has to turn to new strategies to legitimize the company and its embattled role.

Will Brehm  3:46
So, it’s quite interesting, because it’s no longer that the Company is simply working in commerce, they also now have to rule territory, they have to be concerned with sovereignty, and you use the phrase “dual constitutions”. And Warren Hastings is sort of the official, the businessman, who’s asked to balance these two rather competing interests -commerce and sovereignty. For a company, it just doesn’t really make any sense. From the vantage point of today, it seems unusual in a way.

Joshua Ehrlich  4:19
Indeed. Even for contemporaries it was very strange that you had this mercantile company that previously had had political responsibilities, had administered law, and its trading ports, had taken on its own defense, had negotiated diplomatically with rulers in Asia. So, it had responsibilities already that we might think odd for a company, but certainly ruling over large territories was a new step even for that time. It was seen as something quite unusual by contemporaries, and they criticized the company. They saw that in the wake of a large famine in Bengal around 1770, maybe this was not an outfit capable of governing a large territory. It was up to Warren Hastings to prove critics, both in Britain and in India, wrong. And this is why he turns to ideas about knowledge, why he turns to the patronage of scholars, it’s to legitimize this embattled company. Both maintain its trade and maintain its power as a ruler. It’s quite a challenge.

Will Brehm  5:13
And so, Warren Hastings uses this strategy -a system of conciliation. What did conciliation mean to Warren Hastings?

Joshua Ehrlich  5:24
So, conciliation is an idea that the company by patronizing European scholar officials and Indian learned elite -particular kinds of scholars who have political connections, connections to ruling and political classes on the one hand in Britain, in the case of scholarly European officials, and on the other hand in India, in the case of the scholar elites- patronizing these is going to win political favor for the Company. It’s going to assuage critics, it’s going to build up a base of support, build up a political constituency for the company among the kind of elite ruling classes on either end of its operations. And this idea is interesting; conciliation, the word that Hastings almost always uses when he discusses scholarly patronage, which he does quite extensively by the way. It denotes a sort of commercial mode of politics. An idea that the company is going to trade in intellectual as well as material goods, it’s going to act as a broker of knowledge. This is related to ideas circulating both in Britain and in India. Edmund Burke uses the term conciliation when he talks about how to deal with the rest of American colonists. In the period just before the American Revolution, he talks about even the most despotic governments having to track and huckster having to behave like merchants in order to manage large and dispersed political communities on the Indian side. Conciliation is a common translation at this time for a Persian concept of sulh-i kull, which sometimes today we translate as universal peace. What sulh-i kull really means ever since the time of Akbar, the Mughal emperor in the 16th century and into Hastings’ own day, what it means is the accommodation of different participants in a political community. The accommodation of difference, the negotiation of differences. And it really although isn’t framed in a commercial way by Akbar or further commentators, you can see how it resonates with this idea of commercial sociability of commercial politics in enlightenment Europe, and in particular, in the British Empire. So, it has a few different sources -conciliation. It’s applied especially in the context of patronizing scholars. This is almost always when Hastings uses the word conciliation, is to talk about these activities. And as you say, he turns this into what he calls a system. He says in a rather late writing towards the end of his Governor-Generalship that he’s long laid down this system and supported it. So, everything that Hastings does to patronize scholars -from founding a madrasa or Islamic Seminary in Calcutta, to sending missions to Bhutan and Tibet to collect information and make recordings of what they find there- all of this is framed as part of a system of conciliation based on scholarly patronage.

Will Brehm  8:01
It’s quite incredible in many ways, and I just wonder, was it successful? Was he able to sort of curry political favor through knowledge -through the promotion of scholarly patronage?

Joshua Ehrlich  8:15
This is a longer story to tell because conciliation remains a key idea for the company for much of the next six decades. In the immediate aftermath of Hasting’s governor generalship, it appears that maybe this idea is going to go away. Hastings was effectively recalled -he resigns and goes back under the threat, which is soon realized of impeachment in Parliament. And this idea of conciliation is challenged, ironically, somewhat by one of the influences on this idea; Edmund Burke, who is Hastings’ key prosecutor in Parliament. Burke, in his speeches, which are full of inflated rhetoric, and the most outlandish charges along with more defensible ones tends to conflate conciliation with corruption. He says that all of Hastings scholarly activities are a thin veil for venality, for corruption, for abuses of the Indian population and of his power, which he wields for his own benefit, according to Burke. And so all of his high minded fluff about patronizing scholars is nothing more than window dressing.

Will Brehm  9:21
Is this because it’s literally giving money from the company to individual scholars that Warren Hastings or a certain somebody in the company decides should receive the money because we might get some political favor later on; like, that’s the corruption part?

Joshua Ehrlich  9:36
That’s part of it. Burke sees that in all of Hasting’s transactions, a buying of favors, a means to embezzle money, and the scholarly transactions he has are no different than that. So, he describes the Islamic seminary, the madrasa in Calcutta, as a school for robbers and house breakers. He points to the principal of the school as being deeply corrupt and says that Hastings has made some kind of dirty deal with him. He’s bought favors and used this as a piece of financial chicanery. And the same goes for all of Hasting’s other transactions. So, Hastings perhaps has elevated rather scroungerly individuals and dressed them up as learned elites. In fact they’re not. They’re pretty dubious. And so this is of a piece with Burke’s criticisms of Hastings overall, but it has some teeth to it because Hastings meanwhile, in his defense, has been playing up his scholarly patronage. He solicited testimonials in his favor from elite constituencies across India, or the parts of India under control, direct or indirect, of the East India Company. And so, Hastings is brandishing all of these testimonials to his scholarly patronage, to his enlightened credentials as a ruler, and Burke feels the need to knock these down by identifying conciliation with corruption.

Will Brehm  10:51
How did the wider British public view this system and what Warren Hastings sort of brought in?

Joshua Ehrlich  10:57
There was great interest among the public in Hasting’s trial. It’s the scandal of the age, at least in the early phase. And when Hastings is finally acquitted in 1795, you see this wave of panegyric in his favor. He’s talked about as a precursor to McCartney, who famously sends the first British embassy to China in 1793. Commentators point out, well Hastings has already done this by sending his emissaries to Bhutan and Tibet, and you have Hastings talked about as an enlightened politician and man of letters, member of the Enlightenment. And so, clearly this way that Hastings has been portraying himself does resonate with a broader newspaper reading public and book writing public because a lot of prefaces to books now feature encomia to Hastings. So, it does seem that there’s some wider reception. And this is where again, we can see this -to get back to your earlier question- idea of conciliation having some success. It goes through an uncertain time in the late 1780s, early 1790s. But after Hastings’ acquittal, the system is vindicated and you now see it emulated by others in the company’s orbit.

Will Brehm  11:57
And what about the perspective within India itself? I mean, some of these sort of learned elites who are being patronized, perhaps might have a favorable view, but do we know anything about the rest of the Indian society and how they might have viewed conciliation and Warren Hastings?

Joshua Ehrlich  12:15
It’s hard, of course, to talk about this in a general way. To say what the majority of the Indian population would have thought of Hastings, if they knew of him at all. This is mostly not a literate population and Hastings efforts are really directed towards the conciliating elite. Those are the people that he sees as political classes. He along with most other company officials and British commentators deny the existence of a public in India, in the same way that they recognize one emerging in Britain at this time. And we may not agree with that judgment, but it is hard to gather a sense of public opinion from India at this time. This is something however, that comes to have a lot of importance by the 1810s and 20s. There is this surge of articulate public opinion in India, which plays into a later phase of the company’s engagement with knowledge. In the 1780s, 1790s, we have these testimonials which are signed by thousands of Indian notables, and they’re at least fixing their names to statements in Hastings favor, and he brandishes this as evidence of a broad support for his rule. But it’s not the same thing as a popular support because he’s talking really about so-called “respectable classes”, the elite classes that are seen to be engaged in politics. There’s an idea, however erroneous, that the mass of society below these elites is somewhat inert politically.

Will Brehm  13:30
So, Hastings is acquitted in time, he leaves the company, the governor generalship goes to someone else. But you say the system of conciliation sort of stays. So, did it change over time after Hastings left? Like how did conciliation sort of unfold in the decades after he was acquitted?

Joshua Ehrlich  13:51
Indeed. This idea continues to be challenged and to evolve. Hasting’s immediate successor, John McPherson, tends to do him no favors in trying to rehabilitate the idea. He is a son of a Scottish Enlightenment, but also deeply suspect. He’s involved in much more perhaps than Hastings’ schemes and scandals playing right into Burke’s criticisms in Parliament. So, it’s incumbent on the next permanent successor of Hastings, Charles Cornwallis of American Revolution fame to fully rehabilitate the idea, to purify it from this appearance of corruption. And that’s what he does. He creates a more distant relationship, a more strained relationship between the company and the scholars it’s patronizing. There have got to be guidelines, it’s got to be professional rather than personal in terms of these relationships and the giving of money to scholarship. There can’t be any appearance of corruption. And Cornwallis severs ties with a lot of the Indian and European scholars that Hastings had patronized because he sees the relationship there as open to suspicions of corruption. He creates a more distant relationship. After Hastings is acquitted, the need for this diminishes. And the next Governor-General John Shore restores something like the system of conciliation under Hastings. But another challenge comes with the arrival of Richard Wellesley, who is this aggressive expansionist governor-general who has a sort of complex about himself; he sees himself as a king in India, wants to rule in a royal way, wants to do away with the company’s commercial trappings, and wants to do away in some sense with the company’s structure and recreate India as an empire. Part of this is going to be doing away with this commercial idea of conciliation and bringing in his own ideas of might and splendor. These are embodied in a college he created the College of Fort William in Calcutta. And this leads to a new dispute with the East India Company’s board of directors. They adhere to this older idea of conciliation. They still think of themselves as patrons of scholars and as trading in intellectual goods. But they’re forced to build a college of their own to rival Wellesley’s and to do something about the education of the civil service and make a serious commitment to knowledge as Wellesley is doing in India, but from their headquarters in London.

Will Brehm  16:05
It’s an interesting example there, where it’s very much the East India Company being like a sovereign state where they are thinking of funding a university and why it might be valuable to have a educated class of bureaucrats. To me, there’s such a parallel to what governments do today in a way of thinking of public funding. But in this case, it’s a mercantile organization that’s doing it. What happens to the concept of conciliation? After this college is built, the system of conciliation eventually disappears, what brought about its decline and disappearance?

Joshua Ehrlich  16:44
So, the fight between Wellesley and the directors really centers on these two institutions, the College of Fort William and Haileybury College, which the directors have founded as a rival to it; a rival institution back in Britain and as a sign that they too are serious about educating civil servants and that they too can be in charge of this learned institution. As always, there are practical as well as ideological considerations here. There’s a practical need to educate civil service and then there’s the trappings of that institution and the way that it reflects well on the company as a learned body, as a liberal minded, enlightened institution or entity. But the company’s directors become increasingly wary of the scholar administrators, the scholar officials that they have patronized since the time of Hastings. A lot of these scholar officials have signed on to Wellesley’s expansionist and anti-commercial anti-mercantile agenda in India. Even after he’s recalled by the directors and his institution reduced in 1805, they start framing grand projects, which are going to bring in data about India and its population, which are going to statistically comprehend this huge landmass and push its boundaries ever further outward. Extending the boundaries of science, in Wellesley’s words -or an approximation of those words- goes hand in hand with extending the boundaries of the company’s territory, and the directors see this as a direct threat. They see this as a concerted push by Wellesley’s acolytes to continue his ideological challenge to the company, even in his absence. And they pull away from the kind of activities that they patronize before. The institutions that have been founded for astronomy and botany and other kinds of science in India, certainly the College of Fort William, they continue trying to trim it down and stop its being a thorn in their side. So, ultimately by the 1810s, they start to feel that conciliation is doing them no favors. This old idea of patronizing scholars has been turned against them rather than serving to ennoble them or to legitimize them.

Will Brehm  18:43
And then eventually there’s this idea of mass education that emerges and takes hold and sort of really puts the final nail in the coffin of conciliation, let’s say. How did this notion of mass education which today we think of is so commonplace, how did this emerge in this moment in India and through and with the East India Company?

Joshua Ehrlich  19:07
So, education at this time was largely a private concern. It was something sponsored by missionary groups and education societies, it was not really a concern of the state, including back in Britain and in Europe. Education was really done locally, it was done privately, and the state did not sponsor a system of mass education. But as the company’s territory continues to expand, it declares itself paramount, the uncontested dominant power in India in 1818, and as its commercial privileges continue to shrink and its commercial activities lesson under pressure from private competitors, private merchants, it starts to need all more and more to establish itself as a good ruler. In the absence of these commercial rights. If it’s going to maintain this more and more creaky and anachronistic system. It’s going to have to establish its credentials to good government and it does this by embracing -what’s at the time quite a radical idea of- mass education. So, from the late 1810s, it starts to donate money to these education societies in India. By the 1820s, it’s talking about building a system of mass education under its own auspices, and it’s astonishing how much ink is spilled on this subject. The governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, writes in 1824 that more ink has been spilled on this subject than on all other subjects by this governing council in the past several years, giving you a sense of just how much education comes to preoccupy the company’s officials. And so, out of the 1810s and the decline of conciliation as a way to legitimize the company, you see mass education emerge as a new kind of engagement with knowledge that’s going to legitimize the company in its new phase it’s entering. And it’s going to establish its credentials with rising, articulate, sometimes combative publics, both in Britain and in India, who are the ones now making these demands for good government. How else to satisfy a public than to tell it that you’re going to educate it?

Will Brehm  21:01
It’s quite amazing to see how the use of knowledge by the company was always about legitimating its existence in India, and it just came up with different approaches to knowledge. Conciliation, at first, it had its heyday, it started being used against it. Then there was sort of this realization that they could take a different strategy in mass education to sort of continue to further their political interests of creating legitimacy as a sovereign ruler in the country. And so then they sort of start embracing mass education. It seems rather cynical to me in a way, but maybe it’s just good business. It’s just very strange. What were some of the challenges that the company faced when it came to trying to actually institute a mass education system?

Joshua Ehrlich  21:50
Well, ultimately, the biggest challenge is financial. It doesn’t have, or it’s not willing to, find the resources to properly establish such a system. And so as all of this discussion is happening, it’s almost comical or tragic how little is being done on the ground. So, you have experimental schools that are created, you have systems started but not completed, you have a raft of different projects that even into the 1850s haven’t really delivered results at any real level. And so you might say that this is where the theory meets reality. And it’s somewhat disappointing how little the company is able or willing to divert into education for all of its grand pronouncements. I’d say that’s the main challenge. Beyond that, of course, it’s simply very difficult to do something for the first time. It’s not until the 1830s that Parliament issues its first grant for schools in Britain. So, the company is at the vanguard of education policy, if not in reality then in theory, at least. And so, it has to decide, is it going to continue to try to conciliate elites? This idea of conciliation comes back in a new context in the 1820s, as company officials debate whether they need a group of middlemen who they can devote their limited funds to, and who they can cultivate, and who will then go out and ultimately, if not immediately, educate a much broader swath of society. There’s a question of whether the company, this hybrid entity with a limited purchase in India, can really hope to speak to and cultivate a mass constituency. Do they need these elite groups that they’ve been cultivating for some time already to talk to the people beyond? Now opposing this idea, there’s the idea that mass education has to be undertaken as a direct commitment. The company has to engage with the broader public directly, not through intermediaries who have their own agendas, who at least is thought may not be willing to cede their hold on knowledge to a number of new competitors. And so this is the key to the education debates of the 1820s and the first half of the 1830s, I argue; a tension between this older idea of conciliation which has been brought into these new debates and this new idea of mass education.

Will Brehm  24:01
And was there any conversation or ink spilt, as perhaps some of the board of directors would say on what language would be the medium of instruction here? You know, a mass education system, was this going to be in the local languages? Or was this going to be an English language? Like, how did the company understand this big issue that still, I would say, you know, is a big issue facing many countries around the world.

Joshua Ehrlich  24:27
This is the most famous issue today. Or at least the one we really remember from the 1830s. The so-called “Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy”. So, for several generations of scholarship, we thought of this being key to the education debates of the period. The question of whether the company is going to continue to patronize languages like Persian and Arabic and Sanskrit or whether it’s going to teach in English. And going along with the issue of language is the issue of the content. Is it going to teach a quote unquote, modern curriculum in English, European knowledge or is it going to continue to teach a more traditional curriculum in these more traditional languages? I have a somewhat revisionist take on this. I think that this issue of language is a late addition to this existing controversy over which class of society to educate and the Bombastic Minute that is issued by TB Macaulay in 1835, declaring, for instance, that one shelf of a good European library is superior to all of the work ever written in Arabic and Persian, these memorable, chauvinistic phrases are somewhat of a distraction from the agenda that’s been adopted by him and originally set out by his brother in law, Charles Trevelyan. It’s Charles Trevelyan from the late 1820s, I argue, who yokes together the issue of which class of society to educate with the issue of which language to do it in. He’s the one who puts together this Anglicist agenda. And I think he and perhaps Macaulay are the only ones who care quite so much about the language issue. Their opponents are not as opposed as Trevelyan and Macaulay claim to the introduction of English. They’re more wedded to the idea that they should continue patronizing these scholar elites in Indian society, that’s where their commitment lies. And so, the issue of language goes along with that, but is not the same thing exactly. And in 1835, when the Governor-General of India, William Bentinck, sides with Trevelyan and Macaulay, there appears to be a triumph of English. This is short lived. The real lasting outcome is the end of conciliation and the triumph of mass education at the heart of the company’s ideology.

Will Brehm  26:28
It’s a really interesting revisionist take and it centers the two different strategies; conciliation versus mass education. And you can see how from the company’s perspective, maintaining their legitimacy, and using these two strategies becomes -the debate is over the strategy, not necessarily the content of what that then looks like. By way of conclusion, what does some of this history that you’re getting into -like you said, some of the first education policy was coming out of the East India Company itself, both in India and in the UK, but perhaps also more globally. What does some of this history tell us about the way in which knowledge and sovereignty and commerce work today?

Joshua Ehrlich  27:08
I should preface this by saying that the company is not exactly a modern multinational corporation. It’s this early modern company-state entity, and so there are obvious differences that a historian feels compelled to bring up whenever they enter a conversation on present-day analogies. Nonetheless, I think there are analogies, or at least there are important ways that we can learn from these knowledge debates the company was involved in. Our own time is one of blurred lines between companies and states, and especially perhaps in the realm of knowledge. We see corporate encroachment happening perhaps more intensely in the knowledge sector in places like publishing, and education, and scientific research than anywhere else. And there are live debates over what the role of corporations should and can be in these areas. One lesson for us, I think, is as critical or suspicious as we may be of companies, it may be better to expect more rather than less from them. Instead of dismissing the possibility of them ever contributing meaningfully and substantively, to these knowledge arenas, holding them up to the high standards they’ve set. This tended to be a more successful strategy for critics of the company, who when they simply dismissed the possibility of the company doing anything good for the world of knowledge, their criticism ended there and tends not to have results. On the other hand, when they tried to hold the company up to its enlightened promises, they were sometimes able to get more funding from the company, or able to hold it accountable. That may be a lesson in there for us. I think, even at a broader level, we need to recognize that companies are political, as well as economic actors. This makes them accountable to outside constituencies, at least to some extent. And at the very broadest level, I think we should recognize that all of these entities -the company and the state- are malleable. They’ve changed a lot in the course of history. Companies did many of the things that we think of as preserves of the state in the early modern era. It was only in the 19th century that states really emerged on a global level as the caretakers of knowledge, the patrons of research and universities, and sometimes publishing. So, that role is historically dynamic. It’s not set in stone, and it may change in the future. We need to have this arsenal of historical experience at our hands when we go into these debates over the roles of companies and states. And rather than have a very high bound and flexible idea of what states do and what companies do, we might want to have in mind, instead, what our values are, what we think knowledge is for, and whether we think of education, for instance, as a private commodity or a public good. And if we believe it’s a public good, we expect whoever’s going to provide it to think of it in the same way or to honor that commitment. So, I think that’s where I ultimately see this as having present-day relevance. We continue to have debates over what the roles of companies and states are, over who’s in charge of knowledge and whom it belongs to.

Will Brehm  29:53
Well, Joshua Ehrlich, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Congratulations on your new book, I would highly recommend it to all listeners, and I can’t wait for perhaps your follow up.

Joshua Ehrlich  30:02
Thanks so much, Will. It’s been a pleasure.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Related Guest Publications/Projects

East India Company and the politics of knowledge

Straddling the Imperial Meridian: Warren Hastings as an observer of change in British India

New Lights on Raja Krishnachandra and Early Hindu-European Intellectual Exchange

Empire and enlightenment in three letters

The emergence of British power in India, 1600-1784

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Charters of the East India Company with enactments

Memoirs of the life of the Right Hon. Warren Hastings  – Governor of Bengal

The East India Company 1784-1834

Patronage and revolution: Edmund Burke’s reflections…and his theory of legislative corruption

The promulgation of  universal peace

The trial of Warren Hastings

Edward Burke’s controversial prosecution of Warren Hastings

Britain’s first view of China: The Macartney Embassy 1792-1794

Documents explanatory of the case of Sir John Macpherson

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Rulers of India: Richard Wellesley

The letters of Marquis Wellesley respecting the college of Fort William

The East India college debate and the fashioning of imperial officials, 1806-1858

Education of masses in India

History of education in India under the rule of the East India Company

A historical analysis of the language controversy in Indian education – 1614-1970

T.B McCaulay’s minute on education, February 2, 1835

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A brief history of the English East India Company 1600-1858

Empire incorporated: The corporations that built British colonialism

Hybrid knowledge in the early East India Company World

The Speeches of Edmund Burke on the impeachment of Warren Hastings

Selected writings of Edmund Burke

Lord Macartney, India and China: The two faces of the enlightenment

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Fort William College and the origins of the renaissance

The abolition of patronage in the Indian civil service and the closure of Haileybury College

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com