Author: Nicholas B Dirks
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 389
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178241757
Description
Many have told of the East India company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy. But this is only a fraction of the story.
When Warren Hastings was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission.
In this fascinating, devastating account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India.
The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development. It shows how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess, and how these three things provided the ideological basic for far-flung British expansion.
In this brilliantly readable and powerful critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning us to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable he gives us a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized.
REVIEWS
This is a brilliant work of historical excavation…Dirks shows that, contrary to the imperialist ideologues then as now, the scandals of conquests, violence, and oppression were at its center, not its incidental sideshow. Civilizing the native necessarily entailed the practice of barbarism, the assertion of imperial sovereignty required the exercise of despotism.
-Gyan Prakash
This lucid and masterful interpretive essay serves as a timely reminder that modern empires, caught in ideological contradictions of their own making, are fundamentally unpleasant, oppressive, and immoral formations. A stimulating contribution to contemporary debates.
-Dipesh Chakrabarty
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
Map of India
Prologue
Scandal
Corruption
Spectacle
Economy
Sovereignty
State
History
Tradition
Empire
NOTE
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX