[silence]
Sarah Turner: Okay, everyone,
welcome back to
the Public Lecture Course, Week Two.
It's great to see so
many of you here, again.
I feel like we're building a
real entangled histories team.
It's nice to have that moment before
the lecture to chat and share ideas.
Thank you Nermin and to Bryony
for organising that.
I'm delighted to welcome
one of those people that
I said we would ask to
join our conversation to
build up this idea and stretch
the idea of entangled
histories across five
weeks of our course.
This week we're going to hear
from Rosie Diaz who is Associate
Professor in the
Department of History
of Art at Warwick University.
Rosie is a great friend of
the Paul Mellon Centre.
We have worked with her
over a number of years,
publishing her book and
having many talks from her.
It was really through
conversations about some new
teaching projects, that Rosie
has embarked on recently
and structured a course
called East Meets West,
which is about colonial
and post-colonial India.
Just really interesting
conversations,
thinking about how people are
teaching entangled histories in the
university and also recent research
projects thinking
about the entangled
histories of the East India Company
and the political cultures of art
history in the 18th
and 19th century.
I won't say too much more
because Rosie will take us
through this idea of the
East India Company at home.
As we said last week, we're
thinking about these different
locations, these different
sites of entanglement
and the idea of the
institutional being one of
those key areas in which
South Asia meets Britain.
Rosie, welcome to the
Public Lecture Course.
I'll hand over to you.
Rosie: Thank you very much, Sarah.
I'd like to thank Sarah and Hammad
for the very kind invitation
to come speak at this very
exciting programme of events.
My lecture tonight deals
with the entangled
histories of Britain
and South Asia through
the lens of the East India
Company and It's visual
culture in 18th and
early 19th century.
Of course, in this period, it
makes sense to think about
those entangled histories through
the East India Company,
because the company was almost
exclusively means through
which the British public
encountered India in this period.
It brought prized
exotic commodities back
to Britain on an
unprecedented scale.
Indeed, we could argue that
much of the development
of Georgian London,
came about through
the the trade and the
consequent dispersal of wealth
that the East India
Company set into motion.
The company was, also, the
means through which images
and information about India
circulated in Britain.
It was filtered by the
company, as well.
I'll be signalling, tonight, some of
the ways in which visual
culture conceived
with that entanglement
between Britain
and Asia in terms of commerce
and politics in an era
when the relationship
between Britain and
the subcontinent to
move from a trading relationship, to
something that's more
imperial in flavour.
I should perhaps start
with a little bit of
basic information about
the East India Company.
Bear with me if you're already
familiar with this, I don't want
anyone to be confused about what
the company was and what it did.
The East India Company
was a trading company
which was established by
Royal Charter in 1600,
by Elizabeth the first,
who essentially granted
the company a monopoly
over the Asian trade.
In 1601, this man here, James
Lancaster, commands a voyage to Asia
Initially, it was the spice trade in
Indonesia that the
company had its eye on.
However, the Dutch
East India Company was
already heavily embedded
in that region.
The British East India Company or
the English East India Company,
at that point, moves the focus
of its activity to South Asia.
It sets up a commercial treaty
with the Mughal Emperor.
It sets up a settlement
in Surat, initially,
and then in Bombay,
Madras, and Kolkata.
When many of us, I suspect,
think about the East India
companies visibility in London,
perhaps, the most conspicuous
widely talked about event,
the moment at which
the company really
came to before in the
public imagination.
We might think about the 1851 Great
Exhibition, and many of
us are familiar with
these images of the
exhibition itself,
and also, with some of
the objects that were
exhibited at that
exhibition, which today
have afterlives in the
V&A and the Royal
Collection, objects like
miniature paintings,
woven silks, enameled spice boxes.
Items which really captured
the public imagination,
like the Queen of Diamond,
Ranjit Singh's throne,
the beautifully carved ivory
throne sent to Queen Victoria by
the Maharaja [?] court in the
in the Royal Collection.
The India court at
the Great Exhibition
was organised by the company,
by an employee of the company, John
Forbes Royal, who was a botanist.
As we might expect, he took a very
painstaking approach to categorising
and arranging the objects, display,
raw and manufactured products, also,
objects that don't really fit into
that category, which were, perhaps,
trophy objects acquired from leaders
that the company had deposed.
What I find really
interesting about this
exhibition is the way in which trade
and imperialism are displayed
alongside each other
as if they were one
and the same thing.
I think it makes sense and to
start thinking about how this
comes to be in how in that
earlier period, which we're
perhaps less familiar with,
that balance of trade
and imperialism, shifts, and
eventually reaches this point.
Before I get to thinking about
artworks, I just wanted
to point out that throughout
the 17th century,
and in the first half of the
18th century, the British
public's encounter with
Asia primarily came about
through its consumption of
exotic commodities imported
by the East India Company,
the consumables like
spices, coffee, and tea,
and perhaps, most visibly,
textiles, particularly,
silks, cottons, and chintzes.
Chintz becomes controversial
in the 18th century.
It's banned by the British
government in in 1720 against
a controversy that the local
manufacturers felt they couldn't
compete with these
desirable imported goods.
Another very prized commodity
was Chinese porcelain.
In Britain, the taste for porcelain
was often satirised and criticised.
Its consumption was seen
as being something of
a marker or female weakness,
desire, and superficiality.
I really love this portrait, this
18th century Dutch portrait, where
this woman has chosen
to have herself
depicted with her porcelain vase.
A sign, perhaps, of how
desirable these were.
A recent book by the
art historian Julie [?]
has unpacked and
revealed the histories
of such commodities
which pervade Dutch
still life painting in particular.
She looks at porcelain, pepper,
tobacco, sugar, objects like these,
and how they were manufactured,
traded, marketed, and consumed.
She accounts for their
visibility in Dutch
visual culture of the 17th century.
I think we need to
question the extent
to which consumers understood their
connection to commodities'
origins and to
the cultures in which
they originated.
Porcelain is a great
example of this,
because its technique
was highly secretive.
Other goods, I would argue, also
conceal the processes of their
manufacture and the
local and personal
histories which they contain.
It's not really until the second
half of the 18th century that
the British public envisages
India in a more direct fashion.
The moment at which this comes
about is roughly around
the mid-century,
following the Battle
of Plassey, which was a turning
point in Britain's relationship
with India, a moment at which
Britain starts to adopt a more
territorial relationship.
At this point, British
artists have not yet
been to India, so
they're envisaging that
relationship rather
indirectly through
written accounts or
through oral histories.
What's very interesting, though,
is that this imagery starts
very quickly to emerge into
public spaces of leisure.
In Vauxhall Gardens,
the pleasure gardens,
the annex to the music room, you can
see that on either
side there are very
large picture frames
empty at this point.
The Hayman painting
of Lord Clive meeting
Mir Jaffar is one of
the very large scale
canvases depicting
episodes from the Seven
Years War that ends
up in those frames.
There's a very strong sense in which
the East India Company
avails itself of
the emerging exhibition
culture in the second
half of the 18th century in London.
The first British artist to go
out to India was Tilly Kettle.
He was a theatrical painter.
He stayed in India for seven years.
He starts off in Madras and moves
to Faisalabad and Calcutta.
He envisaged a new
opportunity for patronage,
and not only patronage from the East
India Company, but
also local rulers, who
he does paint along
with their families.
He displays some of these canvases
in the Society of Artists
and the Royal Academy exhibitions
in the 1770's and 80's.
These paintings really
caused a stir in London.
They were really the
first opportunity
that the public had to see
what they believed was a realistic
representation of a Mughal ruler.
I interject a sense
of skepticism into
that, because there
is a sense in which
Kettle does play up
the theatricality
of his scenes for a local audience.
He plays up the idea of the
fabulously wealthy Eastern ruler
dripping in pearls and with
his huge sword, indicating
the sense of despotism with which
the Mughal dynasty were often
characterised in writings in
the 17th and 18th centuries.
Tilly Kettle obtains
patronage from local
rulers, but also from
the East India Company.
This particular portrait
of the Nawab of Arcot
was bought by not the
Nawab himself, but
actually by Warren Hastings,
who went on to be
the governor general of
the East India Company.
Other of Kettle's
works really envisage
the sense of a
diplomatic relationship
between the company's officials
and the local rulers
with which they engaged.
General Robert Barker,
who we see over here in
the military uniform,
commissioned this work as
a pendant to another
work in which he formed
a treaty of alliance with
the kingdom of Oudh.
These two pendant
paintings were intended
to be displayed in his
country home when he
returned to Britain,
but along the way it
was also exhibited at
the Royal Academy.
What's quite interesting here
is the date of this painting.
Barker had long since returned
to Britain by this point.
This was an event that was
very much in the past.
There's already a sense in which
the company officials are creating
a sense of history of the British
relationship with India.
In the 1780's and 90's,
the visual output of
British artists in India
accelerates greatly.
If we take 1787 as an example,
this is a year in which
one artist, William Hodges,
exhibits seven works at
the Royal Academy, including
this View of a Mosque at
Raj Mahal, which you can
see on the back wall here.
As well as exhibiting at the Royal
Academy, Hodges has his works
aquatinted for a publication
called Select Views in India.
Again, the historical
narrative that develops
around this image is
really quite interesting.
He describes, first
of all, the Mughal
origins of this building, thought
by Hodges to have been built by
Sultan Shuja, the son of Shah Jahan.
He then goes on to
signal its importance
for British endeavours in India.
He tells us that after
the Battle of Buxar
the company's troops
lodged in this building.
This was a moment, Hodges tells
us, which effectively gave
the British complete control
over the kingdom of Bengal.
Again, we get this sense
of a history of British
endeavour in India
starting to be written.
In addition to availing
themselves of the exhibition
culture of 18th century London
artists and increasingly
amateur artists as well,
started to establish
networks of publishing,
aquatinting, and lithography.
What's interesting here
is that a lot of these
artists are not professional
artists but are figures
who are involved in the
East India Company,
either as military officers
or as administrators.
Often they were very accomplished
draftsman, and during leisure
time produced watercolor sketches
typically of their experiences.
It's their attempt to
give a sense of their
experiences in the
company's service.
Charles D'Oyly, for example, was
an administrator in the
Bengal civil service.
His publications, which
include Views of
Calcutta and its Environs, and also
a semi-satirical
illustrated poem called
the Adventures of Tom
Wall, where he describes
the mishaps of a young
cadet in the East
India Company service,
these publications
are very concerned to give a flavour
of the British experience in India.
More typically amateur
artists would produce
rural landscape views
for publication.
Charles Ramus Forrest,
another employee
of the East India Company, produced
a series of views depicting points
along the Rivers Ganges and Jumna.
He was very keen to flag up the
authenticity of his works.
In the preface he notes
that these were works that
were taken on the spot, not
only drawn on the spot,
but also coloured or tinted
on the spot in order to
really capture the environment
that he travelled.
Increasingly, the British
public is coming to see images
of India, but it's also
the case that there comes
to be from the 1770s onwards
perhaps a more direct
political relationship
between Britain and India.
On the left, we can see
the politician Henry Dundas,
who is shown with one
foot in Leadenhall street
the headquarters of the East India
company and the other in Bengal.
The implication is that his
political activities in Britain are
very much motivated with an eye
to the fabulous riches [?] offer.
This caused a lot of
consternation from
the 1770s onwards, and particularly
with the what was perceived off as a
rise of the so-called nabob class.
The nabobs were East India company
employees who had acquired
huge riches through their employment
in the company's service.
They returned to Britain enriched
and typically brought
country estates.
Perhaps the most infamous example
of this man Paul Benfield
who went out to India in 1764
as a humble civil servant
and returns home several years later
with a fortune of £500,000 which
I think would be roughly in the
region of £5 million today.
He acquires that fortune
through private trade
and also through loans to local
rulers [?] with interest.
He not only enters parliament
but he's able to fund
seats for eight other members
of parliament as well.
This causes a great
deal of consternation.
Edmund Burke the politician,
for example, complains
about how these people are
coming home with all their
money, they're buying an
estate, they're marrying
into the aristocracy, and
then they enter parliament.
I think there's a
little bit more than
a snobbery vis-a-vis
new money there.
I think today if perhaps
something like Google
or Amazon have started
inserting people with
their interests into
parliament, it would quite
rightly cause a great
deal of consternation.
The sense was that this was
destabilising to the British state
largely because these men was
seen very often as corrupt.
What's quite ironic
is that they're seen
as corrupt, not because of their own
behaviour but because
there is something
inherently corrupting
about being in the [?]
I just want to think a little
bit about the physical
fabric of the East India
Company in London.
By the end of the 18th
century, the company's
administrative headquarters
and their storage
facilities were contained
almost exclusively with
the exception of the docks
at black all within
a very small area of
London which extended from
the quays just by the custom
house and lower Thames street
up to Cutlass street just
off Houndsditch which
is just north of the
center of this map.
Then from [?] from Bishopsgate and
then to [?] square in the east.
We can see you get a sense of
the economic and
social ascendancy of
the East India Company by looking at
the buildings in which it inhabited.
It started out at the beginning
of the 17th century in
the home of its first governor
effectively, Sir Thomas Smythe.
By 1721, it moves to Crosby house
on Bishopsgate, then in 1648, to
Craven house on Leadenhall street
which is the building on the left.
It remains there for 80 years.
It becomes very meshed in the
urban culture of 18th century
London and also the controversy
through the 17th century London.
In 1661, it installs
this superstructure that
you see at the top with
the painted ships.
The merchant, the figure of the
merchant this is to celebrate
the coronation Charles the second
installed a few days before that.
Then in 1697, it becomes a focus of
controversy as Spitalfields weavers
attack the building because they're
unhappy about the import of silks.
Eventually, the company
outgrows Craven
house and it moves
to this new building
designed by Theodore Jacobson who's
a merchant and an amateur architect.
It was completed in
1729 but it's not long
again before further
extensions are needed.
During the 1790s, the company
acquires and pulls down buildings to
either side of the original building
and it employs the company.
They're [?] to design the
interior space and the facade.
It's completed in 1799 and
that gives the company
space for its very
wide-ranging activities.
It has administrative
and committee rooms.
It has a wine cellar,
sale room, and a library.
As you can see the enlarged Pelagian
edifice consisted now of 15 bays.
The upper storeys were unified
with a single window.
It removed Yacobson's
original Doric columns
and triglyphs in favor
of a very substantial
ionic portico with a clear
sculptural programme.
Although this is a commercial
building it very much
has the flavour of a public
or civic institution.
What's interesting there is that
there's nothing in the architectural
style which would suggest
a relationship between
Britain and India.
There were buildings in
the city which did do so.
An example of this is George Dance
the youngest gothic porch
for the guild hall.
I'm thinking in particular of this
section of the facade which drew
upon a view by William Hodges which
back in Britain was known as
Hindoo-Gothic,
although it's actually
a connection between Islamic
and Gothic architecture that Hodges
and Dance are most interested in.
There's a number of
reasons really why
perhaps a neoclassical
facade was more
appropriate for East
India House than
perhaps a more hybrid
kind of structure.
This might be because
in the 1790s, company
policy enforces a
much clearer racial
separations and
hierarchies within its
political, administrative,
and social affairs.
It tries to reverse some of
the entanglements of British
and Indian culture that had
occurred in the 1760s and '80s.
For example, when company officials
in places like Lucknow went native.
However, India or the
relationship with India was
contained within the
building's pediment by John
Bacon and the elder which
was suggestive really
of the East India Company's
position at the time.
What Bacon does here is to
yoke together an assemblage
of real and allegorical
and mythological figures.
At the centre of the frieze
here, we have the figure
of Britannia who has the cap
of liberty on her staff.
She embraces a figure who's
supposed to represent liberty.
Then holding a shield
of protection over them
is the King George the
third in Roman dress.
On Britannia's other
side is the figure
of Mercury who represents commerce.
He's attended by Navigation who
points out to Britannia this
figure of Asia pouring this
cornucopia of riches at her feet.
On the other side, we
have a figure of order.
Behind her, religion and justice.
Then to the right figures
representing industry and integrity.
Then at the angles of the pediment,
we have figures representing
the Thames on the right and
then the Ganges on the left.
There were precedents for
this kind of iconography.
The most obvious one perhaps
is the town hall in Amsterdam
with what is now the royal
palace which similarly
aligned commercial and civic
imperatives through its
pediment frieze by the Flemish
sculptor, Artus Quellinus.
I'm sorry these
images are not great.
It's quite hard to find a
good image of its pediment.
At the centre of the composition,
we have a figure of Amsterdam
who is receiving trade from Europe,
Africa, Asia, and America.
There's a lot in common with East
India House pediment like Britannia.
Amsterdam is flanked by two rivers,
the Amstel and the [?] There's
no Mercury, but his caduceus
is worn by Amsterdam himself.
In the Amsterdam Pediment,
the continents are
accompanied by animals,
elephants and parrots, and also
specific goods like
incense and tulips.
An industry which we remember
was personified in earth of
allegorical form by John Bacon
here has given more literal form.
There are men hauling
goods or working
in South American silver mines.
Perhaps thinking about a more local
and recent precedent
for John Bacon's
iconography, we can
look to the revenue
committee room of East
India House itself.
What we see here is a
consistent iconography
of commerce and of tribute both
of which accommodates
Britannia, incorporate
Britannia and overflowing gifts.
Personified rivers and
continents and in Spiridone
Roma's case, the other
familiar figure of Mercury.
However, Bacon's Pediment
doesn't just draw upon
those iconographies and
sculptural programs.
Neither is it simply facilitating
the architectural expression of
an iconographical program
that was already
established within East India House.
What's notable here is that
unlike its precedents, this
pediment features at the very
centre reigning monarch.
This, and the inclusion of
other allegorical figure,
liberty, justice, integrity,
which until now are really
quite extraneous to the imagery
of commerce suggests perhaps
something of a new approach
to this subject matter.
It's perhaps we might
suggest a approach
that's necessitated
by recent debates
and legislation around the
role, the activities,
and also the morality
of East India trading.
The result of those debates
is we could argue a renewed
attempt on the part of the
East India Company to
address moral and
constitutional concerns through
a very careful calibration
of architectural and others.
The 1780 is really a very
critical time for the company.
During that decade, it
faced arguably its most
serious moral and
constitutional crisis to date.
There were two key events.
The first of which
was the passing of
the East India Company Act in 1784.
Then the following year, the
announcement of Warren Hastings
impeachment on his return to
Britain on charges of corruption
and the resulting trial
over seven years
brought to the public's attention,
the nature, the extent and the
moral failures of company policy.
A key player in both of those events
was the politician Edmund Burke.
In 1783, he makes a
very lengthy speech
in Parliament in which he assesses
the extensive crimes he alleges that
the East India Company
has committed.
This is a speech which
runs to 35,000 words.
In 1786, he opens the impeachment
proceedings against Hastings
by reading out a series of charges
which lasts for two days.
It's important to mention
that Burke wasn't against
Britain's colonial presence
and expansion in India.
He didn't either believe that it was
essentially wrong
in any way to leave
such an extensive
political powers in
the hands of a company of merchants.
The problem essentially for him
was the company's monopoly.
That was something that caused quite
a lot of consternation to many
commentators, including the sort of
free trade advocates like Adam Smith
who believed that this was really
the worst kind of trading, but for
Burke, the problem was really one
to do with fundamental rights.
He believed that the
magna carta effectively
established the rights of
men and their liberties.
He believed that it was a charter to
restrain power and destroy monopoly.
There was something
of a constitutional
contradiction in the crown
giving a monopoly to
the East India Company which
he believed was a charter
to establish monopoly
and to create power.
This charter that was
effectively granted by
Parliaments implicated
Parliament itself and those
corruptions they couldn't
look away, Burke argued
while these kinds of crimes
were being committed.
Burke supports Charles James
Fox's India Bill of 1783.
That bill is defeated,
but the following year,
an act is passed
based on legislation
proposed by the new Prime
Minister William Pitt.
The 1784 East India Act
effectively curtailed
the power of the East India Company,
and made it subject
to a Board of Control
that was run by government figures.
It was essentially, it created
a partnership of crown
and Company through which
the governor-general
was extensively in-charge
of British India, but
under the authority of
the British government.
Those events in 1784 were
widely reported in the press.
They're also featured
very prominently
in the visual culture of that year.
Particularly in graphic satire.
As an example here,
we have a print which
is supportive of Fox's India Bill.
We see Fox, he's holding
a peep box that
is a representation
of East India House.
As the legend tells us,
concealed within it
our diabolical murders
committed in India.
This idea is reinforced by three
figures on the top of the box.
An East India Company
employee brandishing
a Cutlass in one hand,
a kneeling Indian in
the other, and there
next to him, another
Indian, headless this
time, is offering gifts.
Prints that were more critical
of Fox's interventions tended
to characterise his conduct
as financially motivated.
A tussle between company and
crown for the very substantial
wealth that Asian trade and
revenue extraction could reap.
Here we see Fox rather
shiftily carrying
through a gateway surmounted
by a crown, a box
again, representing
East India House,
and falling out of it are
various bills and stocks.
The consequences of all this
were then revealed several
years later or commented upon
by other graphic satirists.
Here we see some
consequences of Pitts
legislation, Britannia burdened with
taxes, justice dropping her scales
and sword as she's
beaten by the Lord
Chancellor, Edward
Furlough, and William
Pitt rides sedately
on an ass that has
the face of Henry
Dundas, the president
of the company's Board of Control.
They're trampling over
bills with the words
rights, charters,
privileges on them.
Again, East India
House itself features
very prominently in this print.
There's a sign on the left
saying that it's to let
the present inhabitants having
to effectively, to downsize.
We'll have a quick look at this one.
Perhaps even more extensively he
commented on was the trial of Warren
Hastings leading to his eventual
acquittal seven years later in 1795.
This acquittal was
celebrated in a print that
was dedicated to the
East India Company.
Here we see Commerce
in a white dress.
She's attended by plenty,
she calls upon Britannia
who's flanked by
Liberty and Justice to
do honour to Hastings
who we're told is
the preserver of Britannia's
Empire in the East.
What we can see when we
return to Bacon's frieze
is that the new figures
that appear here,
the figures of Liberty,
Justice and Integrity,
alongside those more
conventional figures
of Commerce and Navigation
are perhaps a response
to issues that had
been raised and widely
debated in the years
surrounding the India
bills and act, and the
Trial of Hastings.
It perhaps recognises
the visibility of
old East India House
in graphic satires.
It attempts to
actively address those
criticisms through alternative
iconographies and counter narratives
on the facade of the
building itself.
Also, I want to just quickly
give you a sense of
what was inside the building
because it very much
supports that idea of
reform and trying to
rehabilitate the company
in the public imagination.
What's really interesting
is the The Sales
Room which is where all the selling
and bartering takes place
has its very ambitious
sculptural program
at the upper level.
There are niches incorporating
sculpted figures of key figures in
the East India
Company's history from
Robert Clive, through Cornwallis.
Nearly all of them are dressed
again in Roman costume.
From the early 19th century, the
company also had a museum in East
India House which was open to the
public for free one day a week.
It contains a really interesting
amalgamation of objects
from books and manuscripts,
miniature paintings, Hindu
sculpture, the textiles that
the company traded, and also
objects of what was called at
the time, objects of curiosity.
Things like the figure, Tipus'
Tiger which some of you might
be familiar with from the
Victoria and Albert Museum.
An object which was
acquired in 1799 at
the conclusion of the
Anglo-Mysore wars when
the the East India Company
looted the Summer
Palace of the the local
leader, Tipu Sultan.
There's a sense in which
these trading or these
objects of trade really
exists cheek-by-jowl with
objects that have a more
political nature that are
trophy objects taken after
victories, key victories.
In addition to the
museum, what I find
quite interesting is
the extent to which
the company was willing
to engage with
a more popular form
of visual culture.
While it's exhibiting works
or it's employees are
exhibiting works in the Royal
Academy and the Society
of artists, while this museum
attempts to disseminate
knowledge of India to
the London public.
They also participated in more
spectacular forms of entertainment.
The Egyptian Hall on
Piccadilly was built by
William Bullock in the
early 19th century.
It very much became a place
of resort for the quite
lowbrow, but lowbrow
popular entertainments.
It's 1826, an item that's
displayed there is
the Imperial State
Carriage and Throne that
is taken from the
emperor of Burma after
the conclusion of the
first Anglo-Burmese war.
This huge impressive
object is exhibited
with model elephant
positioned as if they
were pulling the
carriage, and it's also
accompanied by a very
extensive pamphlet that
explains to the visitor
the the making of
the object, the history
of it, how its acquired
by the British, the
political relationship
between the East India
Company and Burma.
I'm just going to conclude.
We got a very broad sense of
the visual culture surrounding
the East India Company in 18th
and early 19th century London.
I wanted to give you that
broad sense because it
was a very broad visual
culture and very prolific.
Compared with other European
East India Companies,
the extent to which the
British East India Company
engaged with image making
and with the dissemination
of such imagery was
really quite astonishing.
Professional artists as we've
seen exploited new opportunities
for patronage, and the works
that they produced flowed
into the metropolis partaking
of the new exhibition culture
that emerged in the second
half of the 18th century.
Amateur artists, many of them who
were employees of the East India
Company recorded their experiences
in pencil and in watercolour.
They established networks
with lithographers,
aquatinters, and print
publishers back in London.
The East India Company's
headquarters in Leadenhall
Street surpassed in
scale and in ambition
and in its sculptural
didacticism, the equivalent
buildings of other European
trading companies.
The expansion of the Company's
East India Museum, which
I should say, becomes
progressively larger and larger.
Particularly after the the
Great Exhibition of 1851.
It's then entirely
refitted and objects from
the Great Exhibition
installed there in.
The expansion of that museum offers
a really telling inversion of
the cliche of the modern museum
where one exits through the shop.
Here, the museum has effectively
been added to the shop.
A lot of this activity was couched
in the terms of enlightenment,
and then it's Victorians successor,
the ordering of
knowledge, but of course,
there is something also rather more
instrumental at work here as we've
seen in relation to
Bacon's sculpture
for the new East India House.
As we're finding out
today, international
trade is a complicated business.
It's not only tricky,
but it's intensely
political, and it's
often controversial
with an inherent power structure
operating between the
players involved.
The moment at which the
new East India House was
constructed, and the period
during which so much apparently
descriptive imagery of India was
produced by British artists,
it was very much an evolutionary
transitional moment.
It's certainly wasn't neat.
As that trading relationship
between Britain
and India began to shift
to a colonial one,
there wasn't much of a
clear sense of what
such a colonialism might
actually look like.
Perhaps Empire meant Empire in the
same way as Brexit means Brexit.
Which is to say that either
no one knows what the hell
it means or everyone has
their own version of it.
While Bacon's Pediment Frieze
for East India House literally
set in stone a conceptual formula
for a trading and political
relationship between Britain and
India in the aftermath of company
reform in the 1780s, the reality
was rather less definitive.
The 1851 Great Exhibitions
Indian Court, East India
House may have presented
trade and Empire as if they
were one and the same thing
with permutations of Britain's
relationship with India
had yet to be worked out.
In short, imagery of India
that could be encountered
in London in this period,
offered a stability
and a sense of resolution, but
certainly was not replicated
in the politics and
conception of Empire itself.
[applause]
Sarah: Thank You, Rosie.
That has to be one of the clearest
discussions and
introductions to the visual
cultures and political cultures of
the East India Company
I've ever heard.
I am enormously grateful to
you because it sorted out so
many parts of this multi-faceted
history of a company
making itself and the image
of itself and how its using
imagery and objects to
enter into public culture.
Using the surfaces of
buildings on the street
facing, the street to
make that image of itself
and its relationship with
the world or entering
people's homes to be
consumed in various ways.
I think you really
gave us a sense of
how the company is embedding itself
through visual and material culture
into British life in so many ways.
That was just very
powerfully imaged here
on the screen through
the prints as well.
I'm sure people have questions.
As with all the public lecture
courses, we want to leave plenty
of time for discussion and
clarification to ask questions.
I will open the floor
and see if anyone wants
to ask Rosie anything
while she's here.
Come out, just jump in.
Audience 1: Thank you so
much for that, Rosie.
I was really struck by
some of these comparisons
you were making right
towards the end.
Of course the obvious
thing that came straight
to mind was say, things
like the Google Cultural
Institute where we have
another imperial structure
which is also entering
into the cultural realm.
One of the issues
with Google has been
what people can see
when they search.
Again, thinking about what what
people can see, what India they
see is in some ways being control
by the East India Company.
My question really was
how much of that control
could they exercise and
what were their means?
For example, the amateur artists
or even the professional artists,
could you sort of paint us a
picture of what other avenues
there could be of people accessing
or consuming a visual India
other than what was controlled
by the East India Company?
Rosie: That's a really
excellent question.
I think it's fair to say that
much of the visual culture was
controlled by the
East India Company,
but not necessarily directly.
There were occasions when
that control was direct.
There are certain artists,
and William Hodges is one
of them, who are patronised
directly by the company.
Either they produced landscape
paintings or particularly in
this era of war in the during
Anglo-Mysore wars, for example.
Artists are commissioned
to Robert Home
is commissioned to
accompany Cornwallis
on his military escapades and to
produce history paintings which are
sent back to Britain, but of course,
company patronage was not simply
the official company
patronage, but it
also was exerted
through individuals.
We saw General Robert
Barker who commissioned
portraits for their own consumption.
We have these amateur
artists who are professionally
working under the remit of
East India Company, but
these publications
are produced within
a space of leisure.
To the extent to which that can
actually be demarcated off their
own steam, but really, because
the company controlled who went
to India effectively, it did have
a lot of direct and indirect
control over the image of India
that was presented back in London.
Audience 1: What about the
images that were perhaps being
developed by the Dutch or the
French or the Portuguese?
Were they finding circulation
back in Britain?
Rosie: It's really interesting
as far as I can ascertain.
Is that there simply
isn't the scale of
artistic production
in relation to those
colonial endeavours
that they're at wars
with the British East India Company.
If we take the the
Dutch, for example.
At one point, they
send a lot of artists
to Dutch Brazil, but Asia is not-
that's really because
of the interest
of the governor who was overseeing
the Brazilian colony,
but in terms of
Asia, there isn't that concentrated
visual production that we get with
the British East India Company.
That's true with other European
trading companies as well.
Sarah: It's interesting to
see how that image though
breaks down under the
scrutiny of the satirist.
How political satire
and prints are used
to really break down
this image of this
India Company in ways
of these prints are
still so funny and
biting, aren't they?
The satire is biting.
Rosie: I think what's
also interesting
about those is the extent to which
the company is so acutely aware of
them and wants to deal with those
criticisms and the way in which you
see, a lot of those
figures that appear
in the allegorical
prints like Britannia
or figures of Liberty, and Justice.
How they eventually end up on that
pediment in in East India House.
Sarah: Yes. Really interesting.
Audience 2: What's the mission
of the East India Company?
Was it ever explicitly stated that
this was a civilizing mission?
In the imagery, it is,
I know it the Raj it
was, but they weren't
converting people.
Rosie: The company was
very much against
missionaries going out to Hindu
in the way that they had done under
the Dutch and the Portuguese.
They managed to hold that off for
a period of time, but there's
a lot of pressure within Britain
from evangelical groups,
and eventually from the state itself
to send out missionaries to India
in the second decade of the
19th century, that does happen.
There is not forcible
conversion, but--
Audience 2: [?] to
administering justice?
Are there any courts?
Rosie: Yes, absolutely.
They are, but in the 18th
century under the governorship
of Warren Hastings, it's
very much law that's
administered not in the
same forms as British
law, but Hastings is very
concerned to understand
ancient Indian laws and
to establish or continue
a system of justice
that it's not about
the installation of a British
system of justice, but
something much deeper rooted
in the Hindu culture.
Sarah: I was also, just to
extend a discussion into
contemporary culture, I am
sure I'm not alone in being
a fan of taboo for various
reasons which we don't
need to go into here, but
that was just a really,
it's an interesting way to
see the East India Company
come into contemporary
drama and being used as
this site of I guess a
display of the exotic, but
very much woven again
into this idea of London.
A dark side of London,
the taboos that
are brought with
contact with the east.
It was just to see that being
worked through in drama, and I
don't know whether you saw
that and whether it resonated.
Rosie: I've never been.
Sarah: Rosie, got you.
Go and buy the box set now.
The threat.
Did anyone else see that?
I'm not alone, am I?
I think imagining, and
of course, that was
a very theatrical
depiction of Thameside
London and its docks and its trading
history, but did sort
of you can imagine
those intersections with again,
the production company
using these prints, using
this visual culture to try and weave
their own imaginary
18th century London?
That's quite an
interesting connection.
Mark.
Mark: Rosie, I was
struck by your focus on
the the John Bacon's
sculptural scheme to start
thinking about how that
operates, an observation
that operates so high
above the street.
It's so hard to see.
I know you're right.
I'm sure it does get
obviously as you show, it
get reproduced in graphic
form and so on, but it
will have been to some
extent, known by quite a few
people through its graphic
translation, but it
made me think about the
ways in which that pediment
and its imagery speaks for
all the other pediments
and the other images
across the tops of London
and across the tops of
its public buildings.
That's really the dialogue it's
operating on at one level, at least.
A dialogue that takes place
between that pediment, the one
that's above the Royal Academy
or the British Museum.
It would be really
interesting to situate
it in relation to a
citywide organization
of sculpture that
happens you hundred
feet up as it were across the city.
If you concerted into that imagery,
into all those networks of sculpture
and sculptural facades, I wonder
what would come out of it and what
and how it would be in dialogue with
an in contradiction to the other
kinds of pediment that
you get scattered
across the city at this time?
Rosie: That's a very
interesting point.
This is a period when
some of the great
commercial institutions
are being built.
The Bank of England
it's being rebuilt.
One of the slides I had which I
skipped over due to time was
a comparison with another commercial
institution, the Royal exchange.
What really strikes me
with this comparison
is the legibility and
the straightforwardness
of East India House compared to
the block structure of
the Royal exchange.
The way one's eyes focused into
that pediment and the sculptures
are legible, perhaps in a way that
they haven't been in the past.
Audience 4: Building off of Mark's
question about the pediments
as you see, we saw in your
discussion of the sculpture.
They're very much
imbued with meaning.
I'm just curious how the
average person walking on
the street would have responded
to such a powerful message.
Rosie: There's not a great deal
of writing about the pediment.
Something that I have
detected in some of the--
Generally the writings are
within tours of London.
It's perhaps a slight
confusion particularly around
the image of the king which
is very strange, not
so much because he's in
Roman dress but because
he actually doesn't look
like George the third.
A lot of people found
that confusing.
I wonder why that is.
Why Bacon's image
of George the third
doesn't really look
like George the third.
Perhaps it's because this is
supposed to have some permanence.
It's supposed to perhaps
be a less literal
representation of the
king so it can then
serve over subsequent
decades, maybe even
centuries of which of
course, it doesn't.
Sarah: Well, I think we've reached
the end of our allotted
time to get there.
Thank you again for such a
really rich, multi-object paper.
You've taken us into so many spaces
in which to think
about the entangled
political and visual
cultures between
Russian and South
Asia at this moment.
There were so many connections with
that Matt and I was
saying last week.
I can tell already that this
is going to really connect
with Sandra Kemp's paper next
week as well, when she's
thinking about John Lockwood
Kipling and the development
of art schools and institutional
pedagogic practices.
Artistic practice operating across
networks of institutions and empire.
Each week we're building
different narratives, different
stories about how to think
through this relationship.
Thank you again Rosie.
That was an absolutely
fantastic paper and lecture.
Lots to think about.
We can keep talking next week.
I hope you will all come
back and join us again.
Let's thank Rosie one more time.
[applause]
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