ABSTRACT
Colebrooke returned to London with a hallowed reputation as a scholaradministrator. He belonged, as a past member of the supreme council of Bengal, to an elite group who participated in formal, public EIC events, for example the dinner offered in July 1816 to honour George Canning on his appointment as president of the Board of Control for India (AJ 1817, 2: 219). But he did not seek a role in the EIC’s administration; he did not even own EIC stock. Nor did he seek employment as other Orientalists had done: Halhed as a civil secretary, Wilkins as librarian, Hamilton and others as professors at East India College. He attended to the welfare and education of a young family, managed his estates and led an active life as a member and founder of learned societies and intellectually orientated social clubs. While continuing to support scholarly research in India, he made it his primary mission to raise his compatriots’ awareness of the commercial and intellectual opportunities of their colonial situation and to make England a country open to the world, a free trader in goods and in knowledge. He provided a foundation for Indological scholarship by giving his manuscript collection to the East India Library and an institutional base for it by founding the Royal Asiatic Society. He was disappointed with Britain’s flaccid embrace of the riches its empire opened. Revealingly, it was primarily a new generation of continental scholars who read his works, used his collection, and made of him a model and mentor.
