Teaching & Learning Guide for: Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late‐Eighteenth‐Century Britain

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

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