ABSTRACT
The East India Company’s organizational development between the early eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries was both reflected in and sustained by a corresponding reorganization of the European community itself. People of G. Swinton’s mixed race would largely outnumber those of pure European origin – as the latter were within each year sent back to England. Despite the periodic repatriation of Europeans, the asylum building in Madras soon became overcrowded. The Madras asylum provided for the reception of both Europeans and Indians. The crucial point was that the court of directors had ordered that Europeans waiting passage be temporarily kept in the ‘Lunatic Asylum for Natives’, near Calcutta. The authorities’ hesitation in sending upper-class Europeans to the multiracial asylum was partly also occasioned by the derelict and ‘highly dangerous’ state of the buildings. Segregative confinement of asylum inmates of various racial backgrounds came to be laid down by statute and implemented either by inter-institutional or intra-institutional segregation.
