The East India Company at home, 1757-1857

2018·30 MB·English

by  Finn, Margot

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The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British m
The East India
country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from
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researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, 17 a E
heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond
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Company at Home
conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing 7 a
y
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debates around how empire impacted Britain. 1 at
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The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of 7 Hn 1757-1857
Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising d
o
in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company i
ma
service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political

administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons e
journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired
wealth, tastes and identities in India which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories,
Edited by
the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain
that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.
Margot Finn and Kate Smith
M
a
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Margot Finn is Professor of Modern British History at UCL. The author of After Chartism go
t
(1993) and The Character of Credit (2003), she has published extensively on the families
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and material culture of the East India Company. A former editor of the Journal of British n
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Studies, she is President of the Royal Historical Society. a dit
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d
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Kate Smith is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History at the University of K y

Birmingham. Kate specialises in material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century a
t
e
Britain. She published Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England,
S
m
1700-1830 in 2014.
i
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Cover image:
©National Trust Images/Martin Trelawny
Brush strokes:
Vecteezy.com
Free open access versions available from Cover design:
www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press www.ironicitalics.com
The East India Company

at Home, 1757– 1857

The East India Company

at Home, 1757– 1857
Edited by
Margot Finn and Kate Smith
First published in 2018 by
UCL Press
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ ucl- press
Text © Contributors, 2018
Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in the captions, 2018
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library.
This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).
This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the
work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the
authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the
work). Attribution should include the following information:
Finn, M. and Smith, K. (eds). (2018). The East India Company at Home, 1757– 1857.
London: UCL Press. https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787350274
Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http:// creativecommons.org/
licenses/
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DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787350274
Acknowledgements

Any edited volume is a collaborative venture, but this one is perhaps
more collaborative in character than is typical. This book is the product
of a three-year research project funded (first at Warwick University and
then at UCL) by the Leverhulme Trust (grant number RPG- 174). Our
first thanks are to the Trust for its generosity in supporting The East India
Company at Home, 1757–1 857 from September 2011 through August
2014. Drs Helen Clifford and Ellen Filor, fellow members of the project’s
core team for its duration, were acute, enthusiastic and rollicking inter-
locutors; Helen not only played a formative role in shaping the original
funding application but also connected the project to a capacious spec-
trum of material culture experts and enthusiasts both inside and outside
the academic community. Paul May designed the website, which played
a central role in recruiting researchers to our programme: http:// blogs.
ucl.ac.uk/ eicah/. Drs Chris Jeppesen and Yuthika Sharma, who joined
The East India Company at Home as short-t erm fellows funded at UCL
by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, added new dimensions
to both the project’s research base and its public engagement work, and
were also great fun to have on board. Small awards from the National
Association of Decorative & Fine Arts Societies (NADFAS) and the Royal
Historical Society allowed us to provide bursaries for our final confer-
ence, for which we are most grateful.
From the outset, throughout the project and beyond its period
of Leverhulme funding, we enjoyed the support and generosity of a
proactive – at times provocative (in the nicest sort of way) – advisory
board. Viccy Coltman (Edinburgh University), Marion Moverley (inde-
pendent historian), Margaret Makepeace (British Library), Lowri Ann
Rees (Bangor University), Sue Stronge (V&A), and Keith Sweetmore
(then at the North Yorkshire Record Office and now at The National
Archives) were sage advisors and good companions on our investigative
forays through the archives, collections and built environments of the
imperial past.
v
During the Leverhulme-f unded stage of our research, over three
hundred researchers – archivists, curators, family and local historians,
genealogists, staff and volunteers at stately homes and other heritage
sites, as well as academics – joined us as project associates. Both literally
and figuratively, they brought to the table a rich spectrum of expertise,
manuscript evidence and material objects from their own collections.
They asked us questions and offered us answers that significantly
changed how we approached the East India Company’s history and leg-
acy. Several are represented as authors in this volume. Others to whom
we owe particular thanks include Hannah Armstrong, Alison Bennett,
Huw Bowen, Deborah Cohen, Oliver Cox, Marietta Crichton Stuart,
Brian Crossley, Francesca D’Antonio, Joanna De Groot, Lucy Dow, Stuart
Howat, Ruth Larsen, Elizabeth Lenckos, Rosie Llewellyn-J ones, John
McAleer, Stephen McDowell, George McGilvary, Andrew MacKillop, Joe
Mason, Angela Nutting, Kevin Rogers, Jan Sibthorpe, Doreen Skala, Blair
Southerden, Jon Stobart and Spike Sweeting. Jane Wainwright’s warmth
and hospitality have been appreciated by the core team throughout the
project. We have benefitted from comments, suggestions and questions
from seminar, lecture and workshop audiences at (among many other
places), the British Library, Edinburgh University, Institute of Historical
Research, North Yorkshire County Record Office, Southampton
University, National Museums Wales, Queen Mary University London,
Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield University and UCL.
Staff at several archives, businesses, heritage sites, museums,
private homes and universities that hold Company or cognate col-
lections have been generous in providing us with access and expert
knowledge. We are especially grateful to Mr Andan and the late
Mr Mand (Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha, Hounslow), Liesl Barber
(Shugborough House), David Beevers (Brighton Pavilion), Penny
Brook, Phil Hatfield, Antonia Moon and Richard Morel (British
Library), Andrew Bush and Emile de Bruijn (National Trust), Ainsley
Cameron and Rosemary Crill (V&A), Judith Quiney (NADFAS),
Patrick Conner (Martyn Gregory Gallery), Andrea Davies, Angela
Pierce and Margaret Woodall (Belmont House), Judith Evans and
Claire Reed (Osterley House, National Trust), Martin Fiennes and
Lady Saye and Sele (Broughton Castle), Andrew Grout (Edinburgh
University Special Collections), Andrew Renton and Oliver Fairclough
(National Museums Wales) Helen Dorey (Soane Museum), Lord
Ronaldshay (Aske Hall), the Tamil Community Centre of Hounslow
and Dawn Webster (Kiplin Hall).
vi AcKnowlEdgEMEnt S
At Warwick University, where this project was conceived, we
derived much support from the History Department, History of Art
Department and the Global History & Culture Centre, especially David
Arnold, Maxine Berg, Rosie Dias, Anne Gerritsen, Felicia Gottmann,
Hanna Hodacs, Maria Luddy, Chris Nierstraz, Liese Perrin and Giorgio
Riello. At UCL, we benefitted in particular by support and engagement
with Stephen Conway, Laura Cream, Kate Donnington, Nick Draper,
Catherine Hall, Rachel Lang, Keith McClelland, Claire Morley and
Kristy Warren. An Octagon Gallery exhibition we co- curated at UCL
with Claire Dwyer, Ulrich Tiedau and Stephanie van Gemert gave us
new perspectives on the challenges of exhibiting the material past. At
UCL Press, Lara Speicher’s early enthusiasm for the project and Chris
Penfold’s patient assistance with a volume that has proven complex
to produce have been warmly appreciated. After completing her work
as Research Fellow on The East India Company at Home project, Kate
Smith moved to the History Department at Birmingham University
and has benefitted from support and suggestions generously offered
by Chris Moores, Sabine Lee, Matt Houlbrook, Tara Hamling, Marga
Small, Nick Funke, Richard Cust, Matthew Hilton, Jonathan Willis,
Dan Whittingham, Matthew Francis and Manu Sehgal. This book ben-
efits from the work of many hands; responsibility for any errors that
have emerged from (or survived the scrutiny of) this collaborative
teamwork remains our own.
Margot Finn (UCL)
Kate Smith (Birmingham University)
AcKnowlEdgEMEnt S vii

Contents

Figures and tables xii
Abbreviations xxii
Contributors xxiii
Introduction 1
Margot Finn and Kate Smith
Section 1 The social life of things
1. Prize possession: the ‘silver coffer’ of Tipu Sultan and
the Fraser family 25
Sarah Longair and Cam Sharp Jones
2. Chinese wallpaper: from Canton to country house 39
Helen Clifford
3. Production, purchase, dispossession, recirculation:
Anglo- Indian ivory furniture in the British country house 68
Kate Smith
4. ‘A jaghire without a crime’: the East India Company and
the Indian Ocean material world at Osterley, 1700– 1800 88
Yuthika Sharma and Pauline Davies
Section 2 Objects, houses, homes and the construction
of identities
5. Manly objects? Gendering armorial porcelain wares 113
Kate Smith
6. Fanny Parkes (1794– 1875): female collecting and
curiosity in India and Britain 131
Joanna Goldsworthy
ix