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the brokered world ch00_FM_5375.indd 1 9/9/09 8:50:36 AM 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. ch00_FM_5375.indd 2 9/9/09 8:50:36 AM 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 ch00_FM_5375.indd 3 9/9/09 8:50:36 AM 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. ch00_FM_5375.indd 4 9/9/09 8:50:36 AM 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 ch00_FM_5375.indd 5 9/9/09 8:50:36 AM 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 ch00_FM_5375.indd 6 9/9/09 8:50:36 AM 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 ch00_FM_5375.indd 7 9/9/09 8:50:36 AM ch00_FM_5375.indd 8 9/9/09 8:50:36 AM 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 ch00_INTRO_5375.indd 9 9/9/09 8:54:01 AM 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. ch00_INTRO_5375.indd 10 9/9/09 8:54:01 AM

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