ABSTRACT

Katie Trumpener notes that “Britain’s national disfranchisements and domes­ tic penury created generations of predatory fortune hunters” and that these “ad­ venturers” often settled in the colonies.16 The late-eighteenth-century satire of the nabob as one who attempts to efface his class origins when he returns to England by ostentatious shows of imperial wealth expressed the general awareness that those who served the British empire tended to come from Britain’s lower classes.17 As a member of the lower class, the East India Company servant appeared to be dissoci­ ated from the property that classical republicanism claimed made men masters, provided them the leisure necessary to enter public service, and gave them political virtue. At the same time, he seemed also to be dissociated from the urban manners that Whig ideology claimed the British merchant gained by means of his participa­ tion in exchange relationships and consumer activities.18 Hence, the individuals who created the British empire in India were thought to be outside of civil society and beyond the pale of the nation-state even before they arrived in India.