The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820

560 Pages·64.885 MB·English

by  Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, James Delbourgo

the
brokered
world
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Uppsala Studies in History of Science 35
H. Otto Sibum, editor
In 1984, Uppsala Studies in History of Science was inaugurated by Professor
Tore Frängsmyr who also established and directed the Office for History of
Science at Uppsala University. As the newly appointed director and Hans
Rausing Professor of History of Science at Uppsala University, H. Otto Sibum
has assumed the series editorship with the current volume.
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the
brokered
world
Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence,
1770–1820
Simon Schaffer
Lissa Roberts
Kapil Raj
James Delbourgo
editors
Science History Publications, u.s.a.
a division of
Watson Publishing International LLC
Sagamore Beach
2009
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First published in the United States of America
By Science History Pulications/usa
a division of
Watson publishing International LLC
Post Office Box 1240, Sagamore Beach, MA 02562-1240, USA
www.shpusa.com
© 2009 Watson Publishing International LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission of the copyright holder except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
If the publishers have unwittingly infringed the copyright in an illustration reproduced,
they will gladly pay an appropriate fee upon being satisfied as to the owner’s title.
ISBN 0-88135-374-4
978-0-88135-374-7
This book has been produced thanks to generous support from—
Centre Alexandre Koyré
La Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris
National Science Foundation
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
Office for History of Science, Uppsala University
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The brokered world : go-betweens and global intelligence, 1770-1820 / Simon
Schaffer . . . [et al.], editors.
p. cm. — (Uppsala studies in history of science ; 35)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-88135-374-7
ISBN-10: 0-88135-374-4
1. Intercultural communication—History. 2. Mediation—History. I. Schaffer,
Simon, 1955–
HM1211.B76 2009
303.48'209033—dc22
2009032023
Designed and manufactured in the U.S.A.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix
Chapter 1
Frontier Tales: Tokugawa Japan in Translation 1
Robert Liss
Chapter 2
The Asiatic Enlightenments of British Astronomy 49
Simon Schaffer
Chapter 3
Mapping Knowledge Go-betweens in Calcutta, 1770–1820 105
Kapil Raj
Chapter 4
Friendship and Knowledge: Correspondence and Communication
in Northern Trans-Atlantic Natural History, 1780–1815 151
Margaret Meredith
Chapter 5
Full Steam Ahead: Entrepreneurial Engineers as Go-betweens
During the Late Eighteenth Century 193
Lissa Roberts
v
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vi Contents
Chapter 6
Spies, Dyes and Leaves: Agro-intermediaries, Luso-
Brazilian Couriers, and the Worlds They Sowed 239
Neil Safier
Chapter 7
Fugitive Colours: Shamans’ Knowledge, Chemical
Empire and Atlantic Revolutions 271
James Delbourgo
Chapter 8
Across Nations and Ages: The Creole Collector and
the Many Lives of the Megatherium 321
Juan Pimentel
Chapter 9
Self Preservation: French Travels between
Cuisine and Industrie 355
Emma Spary
Chapter 10
Boundary-crossings, Cultural Encounters and
Knowledge Spaces in Early Australia 387
David Turnbull
Chapter 11
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Some Afterthoughts 429
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Contributors 441
Bibliography of Secondary Sources 445
Index 491
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Acknowledgements
T
he development of this book has been consistently pursued in the wet.
The project was launched one evening on a boat in the harbour of Hal-
ifax, Nova Scotia in August 2004 during the Fifth British-North American
Joint Meeting of historians of science, and we thank the organisers of that
meeting for their maritime hospitality, notably Lesley Cormack, Jan Golin-
ski and Gordon McOuat. The project has since been supported by a generous
grant from the Internationalisation Programme of NWO, the Netherlands
Organisation for Scientific Research. An initial workshop for the contributors
was held at Teyler’s Museum in a rainy Haarlem in December 2006, and we
give special thanks to the director of the Museum, Marjan Scharloo, who wel-
comed us in person and graciously allowed us to use the Museum’s facilities
without charge and to Lissa Roberts, who organised stunning digs and cater-
ing. A second meeting of the contributors was held in the balmy and reso-
nant milieu of the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid in May 2008 with the
courteous and happy guidance of Juan Pimentel and Joserra Marcaida Lopez,
who cannot be held responsible for the Castillian rainstorms, yet were expert
guides to flamenco and ham museums. We thank the Spanish Ministerio de
Educación y Ciencia (HUM2007-29182-E), the Consejo Superior de Investiga-
ciones Científicas (PMB001113) and the Instituto de Historia for their financial
support for these arrangements. Just as the deluge seemed about to overwhelm
us, very generous aid from the Office for the History of Science at Uppsala
University and from the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the Centre
Alexandre Koyré brought us safely into port. We also thank the contributors
to this book for their goodwill, patience, enthusiasm and punctuality, and we
express our considerable gratitude to H. Otto Sibum, editor of this series, for
his indispensable support.
vii
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Introduction
T
‘ he world is governed by go-betweens.’ Thus wrote Edmund Burke in
1791. The term ‘go-between’ had until then most commonly been used for
those employed to mediate between the sexes: messengers or matchmakers,
procurers or pimps. Go-betweens appeared as characters in conduct manuals
and select letters, in salon comedies and witty gossip.1 Burke now stretched
the concept from privy to public affairs. He used it to make sense of the British
response to the turmoil of revolutionary France. The Anglo-Irish statesman
sought to explain how some of his former political allies had been seduced
into what he judged foreign sedition. He alleged that backstairs go-betweens
had cunningly exploited relations between party elites and their supporters.
There were good political, financial and colonial reasons to extend this notion
globally. Burke was already familiar with government by go-betweens through
his extensive experience of the business of the East India Company, especially
in the wake of its seizure in the 1760s of military and fiscal power in Bengal.
For more than fifteen years he had been involved in scrutiny of the Company’s
administration, culminating with the impeachment of its governor-general
Warren Hastings.
One of Hastings’ defenders, a maritime trader and pamphleteer Joseph
Price, sought to show why go-betweens were unobjectionable, indeed vir-
tuous and indispensable. When he answered an earlier report attributed to
Burke on the mismanagement of justice in Bengal, Price invited his readers
1 Go-betweens have been widely studied in Romance literature as messengers and
matchmakers in amorous encounters: Leyla Rouhi, Mediation and love: a study of
the medieval go-between in key Romance and Near Eastern texts (Leiden: Brill, 1999);
Diana O’Hara, Courtship and constraint: rethinking the making of marriage in Tudor
England (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000), chapter 3; Gretchen
Mieszkowski, Medieval go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006). Their crucial role is emphasised even in the earliest manuals on the
conduct and management of amorous encounters: see for example Vatsayana, Kama-
sutra, tr. Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
pp. 115–121.
ix
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x THE BROKERED WORLD
to imagine how, in Calcutta, Hastings negotiated with Indian rulers: the
term ‘go-betweens’ played a crucial role. ‘Used to the manners and customs
of the natives and by long habit easy in admitting and bearing his part in
them’, the British governor would of course use ‘go-betweens for carrying
on the current affairs of the government.’ Price explained how ‘a confi-
dential officer of the country government’ and other ‘trusty messengers’
were essential. Officials relied on interpreters ‘in the Persian language,
couched in the most elegant terms of compliment used in Asia.’ Practices
of gift-giving, graceful translation and covert negotiation were ‘honest not
crooked policy.’ Those such as Burke and his bloody-minded metropolitan
friends who wrongly saw go-betweens as agents of corruption allegedly
failed to understand oriental life. Drawing boundaries and crossing them
were not simple matters. Ingenious mediation would only seem distasteful
to one ‘who knows no distinction of character, between Europeans and
Asiatics, except that of a black man and a white man, or as the common
people of that country have it, a Turban wearer, or a hat wearer.’2
This book sets itself the task of exploring how such agents, whatever their
headgear, made and changed the contents and the paths of knowledge. These
were the people whom late eighteenth century commentators such as Burke
and Price then identified as crucial for regimes of politics, commerce and
empire: brokers and spies, messengers and translators. Price, the East Indian
sea captain trading between Muscat, Calcutta and Canton, was right to reject
simple-minded categorical distinctions in these intriguing worlds of trade and
power. Burke, the Westminster orator, self-declared prophet and victim of the
2 Edmund Burke, An appeal from the new to the old Whigs (London, 1791), pp. 96–7;
Joseph Price, A letter to Edmund Burke, esq., on the latter part of the late report of the
Select Committee on the state of justice in Bengal (London, 1782), pp. 84–6. See Sara
Suleri, The rhetoric of English India (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), chapter
2; Nicholas Dirks, The scandal of empire: India and the creation of imperial Britain
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), chapter 2. Europeans have traditionally been
referred to as ‘hat wearers’ (in contrast to Asian ‘turban wearers’) in most South Asian
languages: see John Ovington, A voyage to Suratt in the year 1689 (London, 1696),
p. 411. The distinction between ‘hat wearers’ and ‘turban wearers’ was also made in
1770 by the ruler of Arcot in conversation with a Dutch trader; and in 1781 by the
scholarly diplomatic agent Tafazzul H.usain Khān during negotiations between Brit-
ish and Maratha commanders: see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Turbans and hats: South
Asia between two regimes,’ Penumbral visions: making politics in early modern South
Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1–21 on p. 6; C. A. Bayly, Empire
and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India 1780–1870
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 97. For its aftermath see Bernard
S. Cohn, ‘Cloth, clothes, and colonialism: India in the nineteenth century,’ Bernard S.
Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India (Princeton: Princ-
eton University Press, 1996), pp. 106–62.
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