Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T04:04:51.772Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Negotiating the Disinformation Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2023

Callie Wilkinson
Affiliation:
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Get access

Summary

Political intelligence was vital to the Company’s subsidiary alliance system; to enforce it, Residents needed to be able to identify when its conditions were being breached. Yet, the Residents’ papers indicate that the problem was not so much collecting intelligence as determining how to use it. Fraud, or the possibility of fraud, was an important consideration; Residents devised elaborate strategies for identifying forgeries as well as for managing the composition and transmission of letters at court. News passed by word of mouth proved even more ungovernable. Residents were prone to distrust rumour, viewing it as either idle gossip or as insidious disinformation propagated by enemies. Still, they sometimes had no choice but to engage with rumour, particularly when allegations of Company brutality circulated in the streets. Mistrust might have been a common feature at royal capitals, but it also permeated the Residents’ relationship with his superiors in the Company. Residents sometimes misrepresented their activities as a means of shoring up their authority, but they also relied on keeping lines of communication open; frequently, it was Calcutta that remained frustratingly silent. In sum, though gathering and disseminating intelligence was one of the Residencies’ primary functions, fulfilling this responsibility was never simple.

Type
Chapter
Information
Empire of Influence
The East India Company and the Making of Indirect Rule
, pp. 63 - 108
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×