ABSTRACT
In 1783 Sir William Jones was appointed a judge in Calcutta, the capital of Bengal. Bengal was a British-controlled territory under the management of the East India Company, the joint-stock trading company based in London that ended up controlling most of the Indian subcontinent by the middle of the nineteenth century. Jones founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal in 1784 to pursue his interests in Sanskrit and antiquarian matters, and played a central role in establishing the concept of an Indo-European family of languages that united cultures across wide swathes of Europe and Asia. This philological approach became a widely used tool for classifying and distinguishing between human groups, and was later used as a model for historical filiations among varieties and species of organisms by Charles Darwin. Although strictly speaking the groupings used for language groups were independent of biological and genetic relationships among people.
