Moral Accounting as Field Foundation in an Early Modern Empire: The English East India Company in the Late Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Field analysis and the relational approach to historical social-scientific explanation of which it is an instance -helps illuminate the administrative dynamics of empires. While most studies of imperial dynamics emphasize the 'high imperialism' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article extends field analysis to a crucial case from the second half of the eighteenth century: the English East India Company's transition from a (largely) merchant trading company to a territorial power. In this disordered space of administration, officials struggling with one another for metropolitan recognition provided moral accounts of themselves which, on the one hand, explained their behaviour in terms drawn from abstract, purportedly universal social spaces, and, on the other hand, claimed credibility through a personal 'interest in disinterest'. I argue that these moral accounts helped delimit the boundaries of and shape the dynamics within a distinctively imperial administrative field. To analyse this transformation, I suggest a synthesis of three varieties of relational analysis: Bourdieu's field theory, Fligstein and McAdam's analysis of strategic action fields, and Padgett and Powell's work on network folding and robust action.

Field Theory Beyond the Nation State

“…Two empirical foci are of particular importance in post-national field analysis. First, contributions are often concerned with political entities, among them nation states and their transnational colonial pasts (Go 2008, Steinmetz 2008, Wilson 2016, relations between nation states (Adler-Nissen 2013, Schmitz, Heiberger, and Blasius 2015), or the emergence of political entities on the supranational scale (Adler-Nissen 2011, Cohen 2011, Büttner and Mau 2014, Kauppi 2018. Second, perhaps the most prevalent empirical focus for post-national field analysis are fields of education and higher education.…”

“…A fourth and last level of distinction that can convey a topology of post-national field analyses sheds light on the methods mobilized in the literature. A large share of contributions draws on qualitative, text-based methods, the majority being interview transcripts (Adler-Nissen 2008, Mudge andVauchez 2016, Stray andWood 2020), but also discourse analyses of documents (Baier andGengnagel 2018, Maesse 2020), interpretative analyses of archived records (Dromi 2016, Wilson 2016) and memoirs (Stampnitzky 2016). Only few other qualitative methods are mobilized.…”

“…Contributions to post-national field theory that pursue the first strategy of theorizing rescale theoretical concepts to be adequate to study transnational or global phenomena but leave the fundamental analytical architecture of said concepts unchanged. Rescaled for transnational or global fields, field theoretical concepts facilitate insights, for example, into the emergence of fields in terms of a differentiation of a social space from existing spaces (Buchholz 2016, Wilson 2016, into struggles, competition, and power relations within transnational fields (Krause 2016, Petzke 2016, into internal struggle or external disruption as sources for change in transnational fields (Go 2008), and into the effects transnational fields exert on different geo-spatial scales (Mudge andVauchez 2016, Stampnitzky 2016). It is telling to review these innovations in light of my previous diagnosis of the conceptual isolationism of post-national field analysis.…”

Examining the links between beliefs and institutional emergence

“…Conversely, comparative historical sociologists have drawn fruitfully from Bourdieu's work and have examined the formation of new social fields. Such scholars have looked at how certain domains of social action developed defined systems of valuation that sparked competition among actors seeking to improve their social positions (e.g., Bourdieu, ; ; Krause, ; Wilson, ). Elsewhere, scholars in organizational sociology have theorized organizational field emergence in several different ways (Dimaggio & Powell, ; Fligstein & McAdam, ; Lawrence & Phillips, ).…”

“There Is an Eye on Us”: International Imitation, Popular Representation, and the Regulation of Homosexuality in Senegal

“… 3. These works include studies of, for example, colonialism and imperialism (Steinmetz 2007, 2008, 2016; Wilson 2016); empire (Go 2008, 2011); global humanitarianism (Dromi 2016; Krause 2014; Petzke 2016); global professionals involved in the transnationalization of economics (Fourcade 2006); the literary field and the global market of translation (Sapiro 2008, 2010); global visual arts field (Buchholz 2016); international humanitarian and criminal law (Hagan and Levi 2005); internationalization of the social sciences (Gingras and Heilbron 2009; Guilhot 2016; Heilbron 2014; Heilbron, Guilhot, and Jeanpierre 2008); trends toward hyperscientization at the EU central bank (Mudge and Vauchez 2016); international security and diplomacy (Brundage 2018; Pouliot 2010, 2016); international market of expertise (Dezalay and Garth 1998, 2011); transnational lawyers who constructed a transnational legal field and international commercial arbitration (Dezalay and Garth 1995, 1996); Western exportation of economic policy and international human rights law (Dezalay and Garth 2010); and democracy promotion and human rights (Guilhot 2005; Savelsberg 2015). …”