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Useful knowledge, ‘industrial enlightenment’, and the place of India*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2013

Maxine Berg
Maxine Berg*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Research is now turning to the missing place of technology and ‘useful knowledge’ in the debate on the ‘great divergence’ between East and West. Parallel research in the history of science has sought the global dimensions of European knowledge. Joel Mokyr's recent The Enlightened Economy (2009) argued the place of an exceptional ‘industrial enlightenment’ in Europe in explaining industrialization there, but neglected the wide geographic framework of European investigation of the arts and manufactures. This article presents two case studies of European industrial travellers who accessed and described Indian crafts and industries at the time of Britain's industrial revolution and Europe's Enlightenment discourse on crafts and manufactures. The efforts of Anton Hove and Benjamin Heyne to ‘codify’ the ‘tacit’ knowledge of a part of the world distant from Europe were hindered by the English East India Company and the British state. Their accounts, only published much later, provide insight into European perceptions of India's ‘useful knowledge’.

Keywords

East India CompanyEnlightenmentIndiaIndustrial Revolutiontechnology
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 117 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes to thank the European Research Council, under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement no. 249362. Participants in the Third European Congress on World and Global History, London School of Economics, April 2011, and at conferences at the University of Kent, the European University Institute, and the University of Uppsala, and anonymous reviewers for this journal all provided valuable comments on earlier drafts.

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