ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been a shift in the direction of the historiography of the English East India Company, both in terms of the period studied and in terms of the focus of the historian. Up until the past few years, the field was proliferate with research on the commercial activities of the company and its servants in eighteenth-century India. The company was, after all, a corporation, and the eighteenth century represents the most visible period of its expansion. Such research traces its heritage back to Holden Furber’s pioneering study John Company at Work (1948) and arguably culminated in the works of eminent historians P. J. Marshall (1976) and the late C. A. Bayly, especially the latter’s most definitive monograph, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (1983). These studies revealed the breadth and depth of connections between the company’s European servants and the Indian societies they interacted with and lived among. There was little of the coloniser-and-colonised dynamic of traditional early twentieth-century histories of the British in Asia, but rather a culture and practicality of cooperation and interdependence. Indeed, some historians describe the relationship between company servants and Indians in the eighteenth century as creating an ‘Age of Partnership’ (Kling and Pearson 1986), while Bayly revealed how European expansion relied entirely on the pre-existing networks of Indian capital and credit made available to them by certain groups of Indian elites.
