Chapter 2 examines attempts to develop a new model observatory in which the physical sciences could be investigated. Although often positioned as the poor cousin to the pursuit of terrestrial magnetism, the study of meteorology was a critical component of activities at physical observatories at home and overseas and was required to conform to the same exacting requirements. The chapter focuses on Britain’s magnetic crusade and the establishment of a series of so-called colonial observatories across the British Empire. It then investigates the history of one physical observatory – the Colaba Observatory in Bombay, India. The chapter considers Colaba’s place within a set of imperial and climatic geographies that extended across the Indian subcontinent.

Our Introduction traces the biography of John Cleland, the notorious and hitherto elusive eighteenth-century author, as we now see it through the letters and documents published in this volume. We follow his early career in Bombay, climbing the ranks of the East India Company, his prison writing of and subsequent re-arrest for Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, his volatile relationship with his mother, his disappointment in writing for the stage, his patronage by the Delaval family, and – new to Cleland scholarship – his intriguing friendship with Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and the French spy Thomas Pichon, which reveals new attributions to Cleland and his attempted assimilation amongst a literary Francophone community as ‘Jean de Cleland’.

In 1835, the East India Company sequestered the salt lake at Sambhar from the Rajput states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, until 1842. This historical footnote left behind a set of financial accounts in the Company records that are alive with musicians and dancers and the cycle of the ritual year in Rajasthan. One courtesan stands forth as exceptional: Mayalee “dancing girl”. Her insistence on being paid in salt reveals the extraordinary stories the fleeting appearance of performers in the official records of the East India Company can tell about relations between the British and the princely states in the 1830s and 40s, about the Rajput notions of prosperity and sovereignty invested in courtesans and in salt, and the existence of a salt commons at Sambhar before the ill-informed interference of the Company there.

My proposals for decolonizing romanticism are threefold. First, and most obviously, transforming the romantic canon by including BAME writers such as Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, James Wedderburn, Mary Prince, Mirza Abu Talib Khan, Ramohun Roy, Henry Derozio. But decolonizing the curriculum must do more than just “add BAME writers and stir.” My second proposal would accordingly remap the established narrative of British romanticism in relation to the wider world of empire; both in relation to canonical figures like Blake and Austen, and to lesser-known writers like Southey and Hemans. My third proposal locates colonial travel accounts alongside poetry, drama, and the novel, given its role in establishing European “planetary consciousness.” Selecting writing by Mungo Park, James Bruce, Humboldt, Maria Graham, Belzoni, Reginald Heber, students can explore the contingency (and sometimes confusion) determining the “cultural entanglements” of European travelers on the colonial frontier. Travel texts restore a sense of the global interconnectivity of Britain’s and Scotland’s colonial and imperial history, allowing citizens of our multicultural society to recognize themselves in it.

There was no legal definition of the British Empire and it possessed no explicit constitutional meaning. The empire was diverse and incoherent and terminology was not very clear. The terms ‘colony’, ‘dominion’, ‘possession’, ‘plantation’, and other expressions were used in different ways at different times. Indeed, an anti-formalist attitude tended to prevail – often eschewing formal law in favour of informal assurances, customs, and conventions. There was no attempt to establish a uniform legal code. And the sovereignty of the Parliament in London was only one of many types of sovereignty that existed. Much of the British Empire lent itself to a more pluralistic type of sovereignty – one that was divided, shared and indeterminate. Indeed, it was likely that power was the only unifying factor underlying the empire, aided by British naval supremacy, and the fact that, in the nineteenth century, global communications were predominantly in British hands. However, that power could not be derived from a unified, coherent account of legal and political sovereignty. And power by itself lacks legitimacy – it must be validated by something else – which is where sovereignty becomes relevant, in providing that grounding. Yet, the claims of sovereignty made by the empire were often mutually self-contradictory.

This chapter discusses how the English nation was imagined in new ways in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It argues that the idea of a distinct English self was increasingly articulated in the context of imperial and mercantile ambitions and and ventures. These ventures helped consolidate the idea that the English were better than foreign peoples, as well as superior to their rivals such as the Spanish or the Dutch. The English both defined themselves in opposition to those they sought to colonise or trade with or to their imperial rivals and also borrowed from them. Imperial nationalism deeply reshaped ideas about proper gender roles, coupledom and marriage, procreation and child-rearing and racial and religious identities. To illustrate this, the chapter discusses the writings of Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and other writers of the period.

The East India Company is remembered as the world’s most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s, it was also the world’s most enlightened one. As Joshua Ehrlich reveals in this original account, a commitment to the cause of knowledge was integral to the Company’s ideology. Ehrlich shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company—just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

While much has been written about tea utensils as signs of politeness, by comparison very little has been discussed about the box of tea, an indispensable article in the East India Company’s China trade. Still less has been written about the smallness of the box, which facilitated the movement of tea across ocean and land and shaped the aesthetics of protest in North America. Might the box of tea enable us to reassess how the material culture of an emergent British empire was fundamentally an empire of small things? This chapter analyzes smallness as the hallmark of a British colonial aesthetic sharpened by the complexities of the China trade. It examines boxes of tea as maritime merchandise before turning to botanical containers and tea caddies as sites of sensory engagement. Smallness, this chapter contends, emerged as a paradigm of intimacy that embedded an article of botany and commerce into the ebb and flow of domestic life. Like porcelain tea utensils, the small box played its part in tea ceremonies, while securing the careful management of a luxury product.

This concluding chapter considers the reforms of Governor-general Charles, Lord Cornwallis (1786-93) as the culmination of a decades-long process of imperial co-option, whereby British authorities had gradually expropriated and recast a late Mughal, Persianate system of taxation and justice. Cornwallis’s famous minute on civil justice from 1793 proclaimed itself as a great leap forward in its assertion of ‘British’ justice, making all civil disputes over land and taxation cognizable in separate law courts. Yet Cornwallis, like earlier British reformers, while he railed against the supposedly despotic practices of earlier Indian rulers, was also intensely aware of the multitudes of Indian petitioners and agents (wakils) crowding the Company’s ‘adalats and making legal claims on the Company. His minute on civil justice therefore did not simply announce the arrival of a new rule of law, but envisioned it as a crucial engine of colonial pedagogy, which would eventually turn clamorous and unruly Indian litigants into law-abiding subjects.

This chapter shows how the judicial reforms of Governor Warren Hastings in 1772 attempted to recentre sovereign authority in the British settlement of Calcutta byco-opting and recasting late Mughal venues and practices of petitioning and dispute resolution. It explores how Hastings attempted to found the Company's legal system, not just on 'religious' forms of Muslim and Hindu law, but on Mughal practices of revenue administration. Even after 1772, the chief revenue office in Calcutta (khalisa sharifa or ‘khalsa’) – retained an important role as a site for investigating disputes over land and revenues, and for discovering a new form of ‘civil law’ based on the Company’s interpretations of late Mughal precedents.