The British India Society and its Bengal Branch, 1839-46

Mehrotra, S. R.

doi:10.1177/001946466700400203

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The India reform movement, while animated by kindred concerns, instead eyed the subcontinent as a destination for surplus British capital and waxed hopeful about unlocking its commercial potential to Britain’s benefit. India reform also boasted a wider constituency, counting among its adherents abolitionists, evangelists, free traders, and provincial manufacturing and commercial interests from Glasgow to Singapore (Laidlaw 2012; Leonard 2021; Major 2012; Mehrotra 1967). 5 Uniting such diverse agendas was the prospect of developing India 6 into a major producer of agricultural commodities historically grown by enslaved labor, above all cotton, sugar, and coffee.…”

Section: Situating John Crawfurd: Political Economy Of Imperial Reformmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India

Ince

2021

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Recent literature on racial capitalism has overwhelmingly focused on the Atlantic settler-slave formation, sidelining the history of European imperialism in Asia. This article addresses this blind spot by recovering the aborted project of British settler colonialism in India through the writings of its most prominent advocate, John Crawfurd. It is argued that Crawfurd’s vision of a liberal empire in India rejected slavery and indigenous dispossession yet remained deeply racialized in its conception of capital, labor, and value. Crawfurd elaborated a “capital theory of race,” which derived racial categories from a civilizational spectrum keyed to the capitalist organization of production. His proposals accordingly revamped the conventional terms of colonization by representing India as overstocked with labor but vacant of capital and skill that only European settlers could provide. The article concludes with the broader implications of a transimperial analytic framework for writing connected histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism.

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Section: Situating John Crawfurd: Political Economy Of Imperial Reformmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India

Ince

2021

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…See G. Thompson lack of guiding principles and its monopolistic tendencies, which served to 'endanger the public peace' and 'cramp the exertions of industry and the progress of improvement'. 41 Zoe Laidlaw and Andrea Major have amply documented the society's rise and fall, noting its supporters' often-fractious relations with their humanitarian associates in the APS and British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS). 42 This conflict stemmed in part from disagreement over the proper means of eradicating Indian forms of domestic and agrestic slavery; the BFASS demanded immediate, legislative abolition, while reformers generally favoured a less bullish approach.…”

Section: The Search For Redressmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Blot on English Justice’: India reformism and the rhetoric of virtual slavery

Leonard¹

2020

Mod. Asian Stud.

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Beginning in the late 1830s, a coalition of non-conformists, abolitionists, free traders, and disenchanted East India Company proprietors began to vocally challenge the exploitative policies of the colonial state in British India. Led by lecturer George Thompson, these reformers pursued a rhetorical strategy of associating groups who were converted into ‘mere tools’ by the Company abroad and the aristocracy at home. These monopolistic entities degraded Indian peasant cultivators, the British working classes, and princely sovereigns alike through forms of ‘virtual slavery’ that persisted in the post-Emancipation empire. In staging these protests, reformers ran up against an adversarial Board of Control and Court of Directors who obstructed their efforts to mobilize public opinion. Probing their agitation reveals the existence of a particularly combative strain of liberal imperialist thought that defied the political status quo.

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British Humanitarian Political Economy and Famine in India, 1838–1842

Major¹

2020

J. Br. Stud.

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This article explores the nature and limitations of humanitarian political economy by discussing metropolitan British responses to a major famine that took place in the Agra region of north-central India in 1837–38. This disaster played a significant role in catalyzing wider debates about the impact of East India Company governance and the place of the subcontinent within the post-emancipation British Empire. By comparing the responses of organization such as the Aborigines Protection Society and British India Society to that of proponents of the newly emergent indenture system, the paper seeks to contextualize responses to the famine in terms both of longer histories of famine in South Asia and of the specific imperial circumstances of the late 1830s. In doing so, it explores how ideas of agricultural distress in India fed into competing strategies to utilize Indian labor in the service of colonial commodity production both within India and around the empire.

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The British India Society and its Bengal Branch, 1839-46

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India

Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India

‘A Blot on English Justice’: India reformism and the rhetoric of virtual slavery

British Humanitarian Political Economy and Famine in India, 1838–1842

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