Teaching & Learning Guide for: Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late‐Eighteenth‐Century Britain
Authors: Nechtman Tillman W. 
Published: August 2007

Author's Introduction

Nabobs are hardly a new historical subject. James Holzman's The Nabobs in England (1926) is but one of many studies that focus our attention on the scandals that surrounded not only East India Company employees in late‐eighteenth‐century Britain, but also the broader political debates over British imperial ventures in South Asia in the same period. ‘Nabobs Revisited’, then, returns our attention to an old subject, but, at its core, it is revisionist study of the history of East India Company nabobs, written in the spirit of what some scholars have called ‘the new imperial history’. Foundational to this article is the notion that the British Empire and the British nation were and remain mutually constitutive institutions. Rather than arguing that the nabobs found themselves the subjects of widespread criticism as a result of political hostility articulated by the political elite and directed against imperial mismanagement, this article argues that nabobs lived hybridized lifestyles both in India and, most significantly, in Britain. The material culture they brought home with them to Britain from South Asia manifested the relationship between nation and empire to a domestic public that was resistant to this intricately interlaced affiliation. The history of nabobs must, then, also be a history of the material culture of empire and the reaction to empire's footprint on the metropolitan world by domestic observers.

Author Recommends

Hall, Catherine and Sonya O. Rose (eds.), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Edited by two well‐known historians of Britain and its empire and comprised of essays by some of the most respected imperial historians of our day, At Home with the Empire explores the ways and the instances in which empire infused the daily life of metropolitan Britain from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Family life, religion, gender and sexuality, patterns of domestic consumption and class are all shown to be categories that were forged against the framework of Britain's imperial project. Indeed, Catherine Hall argues in a particularly noteworthy article that the British conceptualization of history itself relied upon Britain's status as an imperial power. This collection represents a substantial addition to the field of ‘new imperial history’, and it forces us to recognize that Britons were not just at home when they went out into the empire, but that the empire was also always already at home in Britain with them.

Holzman, James M., The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo‐Indian, 1760–1785 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1926).

Despite its having been published more than eighty years ago, Holzman's work remains a critical starting point for any study of the life of Britons who had been to and returned from India in the second half of the eighteenth century. Written to be truly readable, The Nabobs in England is a detailed investigation into the types of men who went out to India in the service of the East India Company in eighteenth‐century Britain, and it is at its best when it traces the detailed social, political and economic networks among this community.

Lawson, Philip, ‘“Our Execrable Banditti”: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid‐Eighteenth‐Century Britain’, Albion, 16 (1984): 225–41.

Lawson, Philip, ‘Robert Clive, the Black Jaghire, and British Politics’, The Historical Journal, 26 (1983): 801–29.

In a career shortened by his untimely death, Philip Lawson produced a wide array of respected scholarship on the late‐eighteenth‐century British world. His works range from studies of British Canada, to a survey of the East India Company, to articles on the political rivalries and battles of Hanoverian Britain itself. In these two articles, Lawson draws together the social, economic, political and cultural contexts that surrounded the inquiries into the fortunes of Robert Clive in the mid‐eighteenth century. Clive, the first of the great eighteenth‐century nabobs, was also the first to draw widespread attention to the fortunes that could be made in British India in the period. In these articles, Lawson makes the case that the attacks on East India Company nabobs need to be understood not just in political terms, but also as part of a social, cultural and economic contest in domestic Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Marshall, P. J., The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1965).

Written by one of the foremost scholars of British India, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings remains the most authoritative book on the protracted impeachment trial against Warren Hastings, the first governor‐general of British India. Marshall details the Hastings’ impeachment as a political event, a critical battle in the struggle between men like Edmund Burke and William Pitt the Younger to define British imperial ventures in South Asia. The scintillating rhetoric of the Hastings's impeachment helped to insure that nabobs like Hastings were household names in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

Spear, Percival, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Like Holzman's The Nabobs in England, Percival Spear's The Nabobs is a classic but essential text for students of the social life of late‐eighteenth‐century East India Company nabobs. Where Holzman was interested in the nabobs’ domestic connections, Spear's work focuses on the social life of nabobs in India itself, and he demonstrates the ways in which decades spent in India allowed nabobs to develop a very specific pattern of life that was neither fully Indian nor fully British.

Wilson, Kathleen (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Edited by one of the leading figures of the movement known as ‘new imperial history’, this volume is a fresh and exciting collection of articles that range in topic from colonial North America, to South Asia, Africa, the South Pacific and beyond. Central to each article in this collection is the notion that the formation of the British state in the late‐eighteenth century was a political and cultural project that cannot be cleft from the emergence of British imperial power around the globe. The articles that constitute A New Imperial History forcefully make the case that one cannot be speaking about British national identity without always already speaking about British imperial identity. The two are, to use a phrase popular in new imperial circles, mutually constitutive.

Useful Links

1. History in Focus, URL http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Empire/index.html#imp, accessed on 13 July 2007.

Produced through the Institute for Historical Research in London, this, the sixth issue of History in Focus, includes an article by P. J. Marshall, a leading figure in the field of British imperial history, on the relationship between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ imperial histories. The page also includes links to other online resources for imperial research and a series of book reviews covering some of the newest scholarship in British imperial history.

2. MANAS, URL http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/index.html, accessed on 13 July 2007.

Published by Vinay Lal, an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, this Web site is a useful online resource for those looking for quick summaries of Indian and British Indian history as well as those seeking online research resources and bibliographic links. Pages here include biographies of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings as well as broader histories of India before the advent of the British Raj, under the Raj, and since the end of Britain's Indian empire in 1947.

3. Peabody Essex Museum, URL http://www.pem.org/collections/indian.php, accessed on 13 July 2007.

For those interested in early American history, this Web page from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA offers a noteworthy collection of Indian art. The collection, which includes important sculptural pieces as well as an impressive collection of textiles and ceramics, was founded on donations from early American mariners who travelled to India for trade in the wake of American independence. Detailed in Susan Bean's Yankee India (2006), these American merchants and their Indian collections make a fascinating North American counterpart to the British nabobs of the late eighteenth century.

4. The Royal Pavilion, Brighton, URL http://www.royalpavilion.org.uk/, accessed on 13 July 2007.

Though many eighteenth‐century nabobs were accused of building Indian palaces for themselves and their families upon their return to Britain from India, the most famous and the most spectacular Indian palace in Britain is the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. This page is the official online site for the pavilion, and it hosts great images and an online history of this remarkable piece of architecture.

5. Trading Places, URL http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/trading/home.html, accessed on 13 July 2007.

Please note: You will need to secure permission to access the ‘onlinegallery’ on your server.

This online and interactive tour of the British Library's celebrated 2002 exhibit, Trading Places, is a remarkable resource for those interested in the material culture of Britain's imperial project in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century South Asia. The site offers first‐rate images of material artefacts from the exhibition itself as well as a helpful set of links to other materials, including links within the British Library.

Sample Syllabus

Britain and the British Empire: A New Imperial History

Objective: This course will explore the history of Britain from the late sixteenth century to the present. Unlike traditional histories of Britain, however, this course will explore new ways of approaching the historical narrative of the British nation. It will begin by looking at early English engagements with the wider world in a period when England faced substantial challenges from other global powers, both within and outside of Europe. This was a world in which England could still be intimidated by other empires – a period before the conquest of an empire upon which the sun never set. As this course traces the rise of Britain as one of the world's foremost imperial powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it will look at British history and Britain's self‐assured sense of global power through many different sets of eyes as a means of investigating how the British Empire looked to those who lived under its shadow – including communities of Indian travellers, African sailors and Native American traders. The readings in this course will explore the ways in which the British nation, and indeed British history, have been driven by British imperialism around the globe, and the course will end by asking questions about the post‐imperial history for citizens of a nation that was once predicated on its imperial identity.

Course Texts

Selections:

Hobsbawn, Eric, and Ranger, Terence (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–14, 101–64.

Hall, Catherine, McClelland, Keith, and Rendall, Jane, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender, and The Reform Act of 1867 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 179–233.

Burton, Antoinette, ‘Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travelers in Fin‐de‐Siècle London’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996): 127–46.

Burton, Antoinette, ‘A “Pilgrim Reformer” at the Heart of the Empire: Behramji Malabari in Late‐Victorian London’, Gender and History, 8/2 (August 1996): 175–96.

Davin, Anna, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 87–151.

Rose, Sonya A., ‘Sex, Citizenship, and the Nation in World War II Britain’, American Historical Review, (October 1998): 1147–76.

Orwell, George, A Selection of Essays (New York, NY: Harcourt, 1970), 148–56, 171–80.

Cohn, Bernard S., Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 106–62, 175–80.

Tabili, Laura, ‘The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth‐Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (January 1994): 54–98.

Burton, Antoinette, ‘Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating “British” History’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 10/3 (September 1997): 227–48.

Fisher, Michael, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travelers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (New York, NY: Permanent Black, 2005).

Nechtman, Tillman W., ‘Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late‐Eighteenth‐Century Britain’, History Compass 4/4 (2006): 645–67.

Burke, Kathleen, ‘Canada in Britain: Returned Migrants and the Canada Club’, Emigrant Homecomings: The Return of Emigrants, 1600–2000 (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2005), 184–96.

Barber, Marilyn J., ‘“Two Homes Now”: The Return Migration of the Fellowship of the Maple Leaf’, in Marjory Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return of Migrants, 1600–2000 (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2005), 197–215.

Required Texts:

Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

Matar, Nabil, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000).

Colley, Linda, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York, NY: Anchor, 2004).

Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Robert Demaria (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2003).

Bickers, Robert, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (New York, NY: Penguin, 2004).

Woollacott, Angela, To Try her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Forester, E. M., A Passage to India (New York, NY: Harcourt Books, 1965).

Reading Schedule

Part One: British History and the Wider World

Week 1 – The Invention of Britain

Week 2 – Before Britain

Week 3 – Britons in Chains

Week 4 – The Folly of Global Expansion

Week 5 – Britons and Britain

Week 6 – An Island and the Wider World

Part Two: British History from the Outside

Week 7 – Indian Travelers in Britain

Week 8 – Spring Break

Week 9 – British Politics and the Imperial World

Week 10 – The English Adrift in the Imperial World

Week 11 – Gender, Maternity, and Citizenship

Week 12 – Colonialism, Gender, and Modernity

Week 13 – Seeing and Being Seen in the Imperial World

Week 14 – Who is British?

Week 15 ‐ Conclusion

Focus Questions

How would you define the term ‘British’? Is it a label that belongs only to the island nation off the north‐western coast of Europe? Or, is it a label that can be properly conferred on all the myriad locations that were once part of the British empire? In short, is British a national or an imperial identity?

What does it mean for British national/domestic history and British imperial history to be ‘mutually constitutive’ institutions? What new perspectives and insights are gained when we consider empire and nation as concomitant processes? What perspectives and insights are lost?

The nabobs seem to have found their identity somewhere between India and Britain. Because they spent time in both places, they comprehended an identity that bound both places together, and they built material lives that made this hybridity demonstrable. Were the nabobs engaged in a project of violent cultural appropriation, or should we read their actions towards and feelings about India as being more nuanced and compassionate? Is it ever possible for the colonizers to respect the people they are colonizing?

Historians have spent a good deal of time debating the intentionality of British imperialism. J. R. Seeley once wrote that the British had ‘conquered and peopled half of the world in a fit of absence of mind’, and, echoing Seeley, Bernard Porter has recently countered the central arguments of new imperial history in his work The Absent‐Minded Imperialists. Specifically, Porter has argued that new imperial history has made too much of the empire's presence and significance in domestic Britain. Using the controversy surrounding the nabobs as a point of reference, was the relationship between Britain and its empire hammered out absent‐mindedly, or was the relationship forged through a conscious process?

Older scholarship on the nabobs and the debates surrounding them centred on the political debates about the management of Britain's empire in India. In these historical accounts, politicians often used nabobs as surrogates for competing political ideologies. Edmund Burke and William Pitt the Younger, for instance, had different ideas on how to manage the Indian empire, and some historians have read the impeachment of Warren Hastings as a battle of their political wills played out using Hastings’ career in India as their battlefield. ‘Nabobs Revisited’ looks at the debates surrounding the nabobs from a different angle. It argues that the broader British public was as (if not more) likely to reflect upon and react to the material culture with which nabobs surrounded themselves as they were to reflect upon and react to the political debates about British imperial in South Asia taking place in the political sphere. What is the relationship between these two types of history – history from the top down and history from the bottom up? Are the mutually exclusive or is some synthesis of the two possible?

Seminar/Project Idea

The Nabob

: A Public Theatrical Reading and a New Imperial Conversation

Text: Samuel Foote, The Nabob: A Comedy in Three Acts (London, 1795).

In their own day, nabobs were the targets of criticism, political inquiries, trials and no small amount of public scrutiny. These attacks have allowed nabobs to remain persistent and significant historical subjects from James Holzman's 1926 The Nabobs in England down to the present. In an effort to further capture the feel of late‐eighteenth‐century agitation against East India Company nabobs and to marry that agitation to contemporary historical scholarship on British imperialism, students will participate in a public reading of the 1795 play The Nabob: A Comedy in Three Acts. Written by Samuel Foote, a prominent playwright in the last decades of the eighteenth century, The Nabob was a theatrical success in large measure because it tapped into the political, social, cultural and economic arguments that surrounded East India Company nabobs like Warren Hastings and Robert Clive. Following the public reading of the play, students will be required to convene for a class conversation about the new imperial themes and connotations that can be pulled from the play.