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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The field of science and technology studies has long critiqued the idea that there is such a thing as a universal and singular "Science" that exists independently of human society, interpretation, and action. However, the multiple significant ways in which colonial legacies impact and shape this project have often remained out of sight at the edges of the discipline.
In this important book, Amit Prasad seeks to rectify this erasure, demonstrating that problematic idealized imaginaries of science, scientists, and the scientific realm can be traced back to the birth of "modern science" during European colonialism. Such visions of science and technology have undergirded the imagination of the West (and thus of its others), constructing hierarchies of technological innovation and scientific value, but also unexpectedly leaving society vulnerable to contemporary threats of misinformation and conspiracy theories, as has been strikingly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Far from being an indictment of STS, this rigorous book seeks to highlight such concerns to make STS engage more carefully with issues of colonialism and thus to enable readers to understand the rapidly changing global topography of science and technology today and into the future.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Notes
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Genealogies of Colonialism in Postcolonial Times
Science studies meets colonialism
Notes
1 COVID-19, Science versus Anti-Science, and the Colonial Present
Science in the web of misinformation and conspiracies
Tracing history of the present through misinformation and conspiracies
Situating the origin of COVID-19 and maintaining global order
Notes
2 Historicism without History: The Scientific Revolution, Reimagining the European Past, and Postcolonial Futures
Science, history, and Europe/the West
Butterfield, the Scientific Revolution, and reimagining of the European past
Joseph Needham: “The Man Who Loved China”
From Isis to Clio: unity of science, colonialism, and Orientalism
Notes
3 Colonialism and Euro-/West Centrism: Postcolonial Desires, Colonial Entrapments
In the “Parliament of Things,” whose voices/ inscriptions are getting recognized?
Portuguese voyages and reframing of the “Great Divide” between the West and the rest
Revisiting postcolonial science studies
Notes
Conclusion: Modern Science and European Colonialism: A Conversation with J. P. S. Uberoi and Bruno Latour
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Zara
Science Studies Meets Colonialism
Amit Prasad
polity
Copyright © Amit Prasad 2023
The right of Amit Prasad to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4443-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934667
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
Some years ago, during a colloquium on my first book, Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (Prasad 2014), the person commentating on the book suggested that perhaps I should have focused on aspects of caste and its relationship to scientific practices in India. I was surprised but also realized that it was not an unusual suggestion. I remembered, many years before that colloquium, when I was planning to go to the United States or the United Kingdom to do my PhD, I was twice a finalist for the Inlaks Scholarship and I was informed through one of my mentors that the selection committee liked my profile but they thought that I should work on a different project. My mentor laughed and said they need to get over wanting Indians to work only on caste and tribe. I was also reminded of a joke that some of my Indian-origin academic friends have shared at times – if we critique the West, how long does it take for a western scholar, particularly those of British origin, to remind us about caste hierarchies in India? Interestingly, just a few days before the above-mentioned colloquium, I had been told by one of my colleagues at my former academic home (when I was highlighting the impact of liberal white racism in the department) that being a foreigner I did not understand the racial context of the United States.
I mention my experience to situate the Orientalized entrenchments that are commonly, albeit inadvertently, envisioned for non-western scholars in academia. Suggestions like the one that I mention are reflective of “othering” that seeks to position non-western scholars in particular boxes that tie the expertise of the scholar to his/her/their identity. Let me clarify. It is not that we do not need to study the relationship of caste and scientific practices in India – I can bet the scientific institutions in India are still almost exclusively dominated by so-called upper-caste people (and those too largely male). I do not, however, discuss caste hierarchies in the practice of science in India in my earlier book. My aim was to problematize the international hierarchies in the invention, development, and marketing of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Specifically, I showed how, even though dualist hierarchies between the West and the non-West and across different nations bear on technoscientific research, yet one can map the genealogies of entangled exchanges that cut across these boundaries (Prasad 2014).
I discuss and problematize my experience neither to defend my earlier work nor to blunt possible critiques of this book, which also does not discuss the relationship between caste and scientific research in India. My concern is the opposite. My studies, like those of anyone else, are situated in my various intersectional social locations, namely caste, class, gender, non-western, postcolonial, and so on. I may not even be self-reflexively aware of the impact of these locations on my studies. Hence, critique is necessary. My claim is simply that the study of the relationship between caste hierarchy and scientific practice requires careful analysis, and it is not useful to see it as separate or separable from analysis of the relationship between science and colonialism. In the intellectual and lay discussions on science and on the role of scientists in India, we often slip into idealized nostalgia. For example, Shiv Viswanathan, a leading sociologist of science from India, wrote, “Science too added to the colours of nationalism making Indian science both nationalist and cosmopolitan.”1 The fact that this cosmopolitanism was and continues to be under male and “upper-caste” control is forgotten. Itty Abraham, who is more circumspect in highlighting the hierarchies within scientific research in India (Abraham 1998), as Abha Sur (2002) points out, misses the caste and associated social justice dimensions that have undergirded, and continue to undergird, the hierarchies in the scientific field in India.2 More broadly, Sur argues that the nationalist imagination, while it “strove to puncture the myth of British superiority … depended upon the creation of new myths and new heroes,” which in turn were inextricably tied to the existing “social and political configurations” in India, including that of caste hierarchies (Sur 1999: 48–9). Nevertheless, it is not straightforward to show the role of caste hierarchy in scientific practice because the discourse of modern science in India (and other non-western countries) is a derivative discourse and as such is inextricably tied to European colonialism and Euro-/West centrism. That simply means that we need more studies to investigate the complex configurations of science in different locales. This should also necessarily entail critiques of existing historical and sociological studies of sciences (including mine). Of course, critiques, like any other analysis, can remain complicit in colonial or other dominant discourses, in which case we need to expose that complicity. And if we come to the conclusion that “critique has run out of steam,” that simply means it is time for us to refuel critique, rather than abandoning critique altogether.
Notes
1.
https://www.thehindu.com/specials/independence-day-india-at-70/our-dolls-house-of-memory/article19491004.ece
, accessed March 2, 2022.
2.
Sur argues that “[i]t was not the whims of class ties and old boy networks, as Abraham contends, but rather the fundamental differences in class politics and interest that explain the systematic exclusion of Saha [well-known Indian scientist Meghnad Saha] from all positions of power in the planning and execution of science and technology in India” (Sur 2002: 105).
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I wish to thank Jonathan Skerrett of Polity Press for persisting with his interest in my writing this book and for providing support throughout the process. I was not sure of writing such a book. I thought there was not much to add to what has already been written on post/decolonial science studies. I must admit I was also anxious about critically engaging with some of the science and technology studies (STS) scholars whose work I not only admire, but who have been and continue to be my mentors. In fact, in my previous book, Imperial Technoscience (Prasad 2014), I barely discussed postcolonial science studies for the same reason. I still vividly remember Sandra Harding’s comment in one of the first STS workshops I had attended (which was at Virginia Tech) – “when we talk about science, they call it feminist squabbles, and when they do it, they call it criticism and growth of knowledge.” I am also personally aware of the deep commitment of Warwick Anderson in pursuing postcolonial science studies within the field of STS. Hence I thought if I engaged with postcolonial science studies, I would end up critiquing their positions and that may not be good for the field.
However, as I started writing this book, I also felt that not being able to highlight the problems with postcolonial science studies (and more broadly STS) was having a paralyzing impact on me. I was not happy with the way engagements with colonialism (and in a sense with globalization as well) were taking place within STS, and my response was to avoid participating in, for example, the 4S conferences. In that sense writing this book has been liberatory at a personal level. I must, nonetheless, clarify that my interest is not – as one reviewer of the book put it – “a root and branch unmasking of these more than minor vestiges of the colonial mindset within the dark heart of science studies.” I have written this book because I think it is now time for post/decolonial interventions within STS to move further or be abandoned; however, abandoning the post/decolonial debates within STS also runs the risk of critically jeopardizing STS interest in moving beyond its Euro-American-Australian backyard and becoming truly global.
I wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers whose comments, criticisms, and suggestions were extremely helpful. In particular, I cannot thank enough one of the reviewers who took immense care to point out even minor grammatical and analytical errors, including those in the footnotes. Even the reviewer who did not like the manuscript provided very useful suggestions and criticisms that helped me to more clearly articulate my concerns. The analysis presented in the book owes to the many discussions that I have had in the past with STS as well as non-STS scholars. If I have forgotten to cite some of these people’s work, I apologize in advance. I wish to especially thank Projit Mukharji, Alexandra Hofmänner, Dwaipan Banerjee, Bharat Venkat, Warwick Anderson, Banu Subramaniam, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, and Itty Abraham with who I was directly or indirectly intellectually engaging with the issue of colonialism and sciences while writing the book. I wish to particularly thank Itty Abraham, Dwaipan Banerjee, and Mary Macdonald for reading drafts of some of the chapters. I would also like to thank Karina Jákupsdóttir for her editorial support and Gail Ferguson for carefully copy-editing the book manuscript. Lastly, and most importantly, I wish to thank Srirupa and Zara for all their love and support.
IntroductionGenealogies of Colonialism in Postcolonial Times
China is mounting a serious challenge to the United States for global leadership in technology and innovation … In fact, for the first time Chinese investment in R&D will surpass US investment next year.
Representative Robin Kelly, ranking member, Subcommittee on Information Technology, US Congress, 2019
East India Company returns after 135-year absence.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), August 13, 2010
On September 26, 2018, the second session of the hearing before the Subcommittee on Information Technology of the United States (US) House of Representatives started with the following statement by Representative Will Hurd, the Chairman of the Subcommittee: “For more than 40 years, the US has encouraged China to develop its own economy and take its place alongside the US as a central and responsible player on the world stage, but China does not want to join us. They want to replace us” (emphasis added).1 The hearing, which was unequivocally titled, “Countering China: Ensuring America Remains the World Leader in Advanced Technologies and Innovation,” is a testament to multilayered concerns in the United States, and more broadly in the western countries, about the rise of China as another global “superpower.”
The US Congress has not been alone in voicing such concerns. Technological competition between the United States and China has been widely reported in the media and extensively discussed by policy experts. In fact, “policy communities on all sides appear to agree that old-fashioned trade frictions are really just an appetizer ahead of the main course: a looming ‘technology war’” (Lim 2019: 8). In the United States, at a time when political division has guided dealing with even the COVID-19 pandemic, concern with China’s fast technological growth has brought together the Republicans and the Democrats, and “China has emerged as one of the few issues on which even Democrats agree that [former] President Trump had some valid points.”2 This rare bipartisanship in the US Congress was visible when “The United States Innovation and Competition Act,” also known as the “Endless Frontier Act,” was passed in the US Senate on June 8, 2021 with slightly more than a two-thirds majority.3 The White House in its statement on the passing of this Act in the Senate was categorical: “We are in a competition to win the twenty-first century, and the starting gun has gone off,” adding, “America must maintain its position as the most innovative and productive nation on Earth” (emphasis added).4
The attitude towards China’s technological growth has definitely changed in the last decade. In 2010, the Harvard Business Review, while stating that “almost unnoticed China has been moving towards a new stage of development … to a sophisticated high-tech” economy, had, for example, also noted: “Even as China moves up the ranks of economic superpowers, many discount these recent milestones. They don’t believe China will become richer than the US.”5 Four years later, in 2014, another article published in the Harvard Business Review, after posing the question “whether China has a good institutional framework for innovation,” had categorically stated, “our answer at present is no.” Indeed, as the title of the article made clear, the aim of the authors was to explain “Why China Can’t Innovate” (Abrami, Kirby, and McFarlan 2014).
A significant reason for the shift in attitude with regard to China is the concern that Representative Hurd had put at the hearing before the US House of Representatives: “They want to replace us.” Although concern with the “rise of China” may be understandable, at least in terms of geopolitical strategy, the language that is being used to describe that concern often reflects a colonial and racial genealogy. “You will not replace us” has, for example, become a rallying cry for white supremacist groups in European countries as well as in the United States, as was strikingly evident in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.6 However, the colonial genealogy often gets masked in the language of liberty, freedom, and democracy, and, ironically, the genealogical links of liberalism and empire are forgotten in the process (see, e.g., Mehta 1999).
A recent report of the National Bureau of Asian Research, while emphasizing that the “expectations and assumptions” regarding engagement with China “were widely shared on both sides of the aisle in American politics,” for example, quotes the former President George W. Bush: “Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy … Trade freely with China, and time is on our side” (as quoted in Boustany and Friedberg 2019: 4). This goal, according to the Report, was based on a long-cherished western and American principle “that trade promotes both national welfare and international understanding … and that the spread of democracy will eventually usher in an era of lasting world peace” (Boustany and Friedberg 2019: 5). The Report, thus, argues that the emerging crisis in the US–China relationship is because “whereas US leaders have historically been believers in liberal democracy and free-market capitalism, China’s rulers are adherents of what can be best described as ‘mercantilist Leninism’” (Boustany and Friedberg 2019: 7).
The discursive framing of the United States’ technological competition with China does not, however, unambiguously express racial, colonial, or western hierarchy. It commonly slips into the biopolitical template of colonial/racial stereotype that, as Homi Bhabha (1994) argued, is undergirded by ambivalence. The statement of Representative Hurd that I quoted earlier, for example, re-presents, to draw on Homi Bhabha, the ambivalent desire to constitute and contain China and Chinese people through the colonial discourse of mimicry – “to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English” (Bhabha 1994: 125). China was welcomed to develop and “take its place alongside the US,” but the boundary of this desired mimicry, just like the colonial times, could not be crossed – the mimic was always “not quite/not white.” However, at present, in the context of a radical shift in geopolitics and global economy, often, the non-western “others” are not content with “mimicry” of the West, hence the added anxiety, “they want to replace us.” The postcolonial/colonial discourse through which the US–China tech war is being framed has, thus, become doubly ambivalent. On the one hand, it reflects “projection and introjection, metaphoric [“narcissistic”] and metonymic [“aggressive”] strategies” (1994: 117) that guided the colonial discourse of mimicry and, on the other, it calls for the western “self” to stand against and catch up with the “other.” These ambivalent discursive strategies were evident at the hearing of the Subcommittee on Information Technology that I have been discussing and are also commonly articulated in a number of contexts and by a range of western actors.
Representative Hurd, while highlighting the efforts of China to “become the world leader in manufacturing,” for example, emphasized, “we cannot lose sight of the many abuses the oppressive Chinese government perpetuates on its citizens.” He goes on to claim that the “Communist Party that runs the Chinese government is an oppressive regime with an abysmal human rights record.” And he presents the contrast through the United States. “As Americans, we believe everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The earlier-expressed concern with reference to China’s “aim to modernize the Chinese economy” soon slips into a colonial desire for the Chinese people: “The millions of men, women, and children living under the oppressive Chinese regime in China deserve better from their government.” The very next sentence shifts to presenting “the East” as an impending threat – “Our nation faces a great challenge rising from the East.” A similar trope was also used by Herbert Butterfield to explain the impact of “Asiatics” on medieval Europe prior to the Scientific Revolution, as I show in chapter 2.7 At present, the temporal structure of this threat has shifted and is shown as directed not at the medieval past (“dark ages”) of Europe/the West but at its future.
Such postcolonial/colonial ambivalence is present even in more nuanced and critical analyses of technological competition between the United States and China. An article exploring the “legal regimes recently developed in both countries to wage the tech war,” for example, laments: “We fear that ironically, the rule of law necessary to maintain continued vibrancy in US high-tech sectors is being compromised by some of the very actions ostensibly taken to protect these sectors from malign foreign influence.” The footnote accompanying the above quote states, “China has managed thus far to develop economically without a robust rule of law” (Milhaupt and Callahan 2021). Such broad claims about the “rule of law” constitutes China as the stereotypical “other” – harking back to the old colonial trope of the non-West as the “zone of lawlessness” and the West as the “rule of law” (Benton 2010). Moreover, what is forgotten in the common European/western selfpresentation as the repository of the “rule of law” is an imperial genealogy of western understanding of law: “land appropriation [through various means including colonialism],” to which the Europeans later added “sea appropriations,” has been “the primeval act in founding law” (Schmitt 2006: 45). In the words of Achille Mbembe, “whenever Europe referred to the principle of liberty in relation to the World-outside, what was really meant was an absence of law and organized civil society, which authorized the free and unscrupulous use of force” (Mbembe 2017: 59).
The very fact that the rising competitiveness of China in high-end technologies is seen as a threat to the West is itself telling. LSE Ideas, the foreign policy think tank of the London School of Economics, for example, published a series of essays online that were titled “Protect, Constrain, Contest” to present “[a]pproaches for coordinated transatlantic economic and technological competition with China.” Peter Watkins, in the introduction to this series, starts his essay thus: “Over the past year, there has been a growing realization in the traditional ‘West’ – including the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom – of the challenge posed by China” (emphasis added). Similar framing of the China threat, as I show in chapter 1, has been frequently articulated in the context of the failure of the “traditional West” in the management of the COVID pandemic and China’s diplomacy to gain global influence. The COVID pandemic has indeed added urgency to “western” anxieties in relation to China and the non-West, as Watkins highlights: “The academic consensus in the early months of the pandemic was that it would accelerate existing geo-economic and geopolitical trends (including the shift in economic power from the ‘West’ to the Indo-Pacific).” The concern with China in particular, according to Watkins, is because China is “not simply an economic competitor,” even though it is “not yet a military challenge in the same way as Russia … during the Cold War.” He goes on to suggest “precautionary steps to protect the West’s own vital economic interests which may sit uneasily with a fundamentally free-market approach.”8
This coming together of the “traditional West” in the name of the “free market” in relation to China has another colonial genealogy – the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), which in China are portrayed as marking the start of China’s “century of humiliation” that ended with the Sino-Japanese war in 1945. The Office of the Historian of the United States Department of State calls “the First Opium War” and the Treaty of Wangxia, which was signed between the United States and China in 1844, as “the Opening of China” and lists it as one of the “Milestones in the History of US Foreign Relations.”9 Interestingly, the treaties that the western countries had signed after the defeat of China rarely mentioned opium – whose trade was forced on China – and resulted in a shift in favor of the western countries. In the forked colonial articulation of the treaties (that western countries imposed on the Chinese emperor) the sanitized language of protection of property and rights for free trade at the Chinese ports made opium only a spectral presence. The Treaty of Nanjing that was signed between Britain and China in 1842, for example, only mentions opium once, in Article IV of the Treaty: “The Emperor of China agrees to pay the sum of Six Millions of Dollars as the value of Opium which was delivered up at Canton in the month of March 1839, as a Ransom for the lives of Her Britannic Majesty’s Superintendent and Subjects, who had been imprisoned and threatened with death by the Chinese high Officers.”10
Although the implications of the “Century of Humiliation” are known in the policy circles of western countries, it remains “the most misunderstood and least discussed element” in relation to China (Billy Wireman, as quoted in Wang 2014a: 2). In 2011, a China analyst, for example, gave testimony before the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission Hearing on “China’s Narratives Regarding National Security Policy,” and she specifically focused on the “Century of Humiliation.” She went on to suggest that the “policymakers must assess the extent to which the founding narrative of the Century of Humiliation, and the values and aspirations derived from it, can be used today to persuade China’s leaders to move down an accommodating peaceful path.”11 Nonetheless, recent responses of many policymakers in the western countries, even while seeking “broader western relationship with China,” not only ignore any discussion of the history of colonialism that underlies the discourse of the “Century of Humiliation,” they often articulate the opposition to China through colonial tropes, albeit not in the older colonial language. Moreover, these responses commonly deploy the friend-versus-enemy dialectic that Carl Schmitt, a critic of liberal polity and a prominent ideologue of the Nazis, argued was the basis of the “political” (see also Mouffe 1997; Schmitt 2007).12 LSE Ideas, the foreign policy think tank of the London School of Economics, for example, presents the desired response of the “West” to China through the categories of “protect,” “constrain,” and “contest,” wherein contest is defined as follows “Sustaining the Western position in the face of the China challenge cannot be a purely defensive game.”13
Failure to engage with the genealogies of colonialism constrains not only the West but also China within the Orientalist “imaginative geography” that intensifies the difference and distance between the “self” and the “other” (Said 1979). The discourse of the “Century of Humiliation” is an illustrative example in this regard. Though the “national humiliation discourse” does “not receive much attention in Western analysis,” as William Callahan found to his surprise, “there are textbooks, novels, museums, songs, and parks devoted to commemorating national humiliation in China” (Callahan 2004: 199). Callahan goes on to “argue that the master narrative of modern Chinese history is the discourse of the century of national humiliation” (2004: 204). Indeed, as Zheng Wang has argued, “the discourse of national humiliation is an integral part of the construction of national identity and nation building” in China (Wang 2014a: 2) that, according to him, constitutes China’s “CMT (Chosenness–Myths–Trauma) complex.” Wang analyzes “the role of historical memory in China’s nation building” (Wang 2014b: 10) and shows how, since President Xi Jinping took office in 2012, “he [Jinping] has promoted the concept … [of] ‘the Chinese Dream’” “to realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation … [as] the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history” (Wang 2014a: 1). As a result, far from the commonly expressed concern in relation to Chinese citizens (that, for example, Representative Hurd expressed), it becomes “a puzzle for China watchers to try to understand why Chinese youths are increasingly nationalistic based on events that took place in [a] distant past” (Wang 2014b: 10). More broadly, because the historical/colonial context of the “Chinese Dream” is not known outside China, except “indirectly and tangentially,” we are left with “perception gaps” (Wang 2014a, 2014b) in dealing with perhaps the most important geopolitical issue of our time – a looming West-versus-China technology war.
I have discussed the looming West-versus-China technology war to show how mapping of the genealogies of colonialism allows us to better understand the history of the present. To situate European colonialism simply in the distant past is to ignore that individuals as well as societies/nations are discursively constituted and imagined through historical experiences. My concern, similar to that of Michel Foucault, is “not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present” but to explore how the genealogies of the past continue to “animate the present” (Foucault 1977a: 146). I follow Foucault’s genealogical approach, which instead of seeking an origin (e.g., colonial origin of present-day events) or attempting to “restore an unbroken continuity” to the past (Foucault 1977a) seeks “to show ‘descent’ and ‘emergence’ and how the contingencies of these continue to shape the present” (Garland 2014: 371).14
The term “emergence” implies contingency and openendedness and has been commonly used in the field of science and technology studies or STS (see, e.g., Pickering 1995).15 My use of the term retains STS concern with contingency but is deployed in the Foucauldian sense to argue that “[e]mergence is … produced through a particular stage of forces” (Foucault 1977a: 148–9). That is to say, “entities do not exist in-themselves … they exist … as functions of other relations” (Wilson 1995: 160), and their particular articulations are historically contingent. As such, the “different points of emergence” are not simply successive configurations of identical meaning,” i.e., repetitions of the past; rather, they represent “substitutions, displacements, disguised conquests, and systematic reversals” that reconfigure the remnants of the past (Foucault 1977a: 151). This book explores the role of European colonialism in animating and constituting the present similarly. Genealogies of colonialism, if we are willing to look closely, are evident in a wide number of contexts and practices across the globe, albeit their articulations are different and often also ambivalent and contradictory.
The second quote at the start of this introductory chapter – “East India Company returns after 135-year absence” – is another reflection of such an ambivalent and contradictory articulation. The East India Company, as we know, not only colonized most of India before India was brought under the British crown in 1858, but was also the central actor in the production of opium (in India) and its sale (in China) that led to the Opium Wars and shifted the trade imbalance of western countries with China. After the Opium Wars with China and the 1857 revolt in India, the East India Company became dysfunctional for all practical purposes.
The East India Company has a unique place in global history because its activities in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries not only overlapped with the interests of the British nation-state, the Company was a partner in British commercial and war efforts that established Britain as the largest and most powerful colonial power. In the words of Edmund Burke, who played a pivotal role in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of Bengal after the East India Company’s takeover, the Company was “a state in the guise of a merchant” (as quoted in Dalrymple 2019: 3). “By 1805 the Company’s three Indian armies numbered almost 200,000 men and they were increasingly maintained, via subsidiary alliances, at the expense of Indian rulers such as the Nawab Vizier of Awadh” (Bowen 2006: 47). These Company troops were commonly deployed by Britain for its ever-growing colonial wars. For example, in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, “Company troops and ships were sent to Ceylon (1795), Malacca and the Moluccas (1795), the Cape (1795 and 1806), Egypt (1801), Mauritius (1810), and Java (1811)” (2006: 47). The Company, along with troops and financial support, also provided resources from India for British war efforts, e.g., saltpeter and food grains. The role of the East India Company was recognized even by the Royal Society that elected Lord Clive, who had done no scientific research in India or Britain, as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1768 “as a reward for his exploits in India” (Home 2002: 313; emphasis added).16
The imaginary and historiography of the East India Company, in a sense, has mimicked the vicissitudes of empire’s role in defining British identity that continues to the present. On the one hand, the East India Company is still hailed as “one of the world’s greatest trading companies” (Ferguson 2002: 15) and, on the other, the Company’s role in the “subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia” has been described as “the supreme act of corporate violence in the world” (Dalrymple 2019: xxvii). Even the critiques of the East India Company have remained complicit with the “imagining” of the role of the British Empire. As Nicholas Dirks showed, the critiques of the East India company that were presented, for example, at the time of the impeachment of Warren Hastings (which included those by Edmund Burke, who I quoted earlier), served the purpose of deflecting “the scandal of empire” and recasting the British Empire’s role as a civilizing mission (Dirks 2006).
Although the East India Company has continued to have spectral and real presence in a wide variety of ways, the revival of the East India Company is nevertheless puzzling.17 The revival becomes all the more puzzling when we come to know that the East India Company was bought by an Indian businessman, Sanjiv Mehta, for this purpose.18 In 2005, Mehta, who had “set up business in London in the 1980s, “bought the entire company, which gave him the rights to trade using its name, and its coat of arms as a trademark.”19 The Guardian’s report on this acquisition, from which I quoted above, was written by an Indian freelance journalist (Vidhi Doshi, who published the report from Mumbai) and titled: “How the East India Company Became a Weapon to Challenge UK’s Colonial Past.” It is not that Mehta did not know about the East India Company’s history. He had “learned about it as a schoolboy in newly independent India” and his family, as Mehta shared with the reporter, “had fought alongside Gandhi for India’s independence.” Moreover, from 2003, when he decided to buy the East India Company, Mehta spent several years “every weekend and spare hour studying the company’s history in the British Library and archive of the Victoria and Albert Museum” to know more about the Company’s history. “His studies,” the Guardian report elaborates, “inspired trips around the world.” Mehta shared with the reporter that he “wanted to go everywhere that the East India Company had ever set foot.”20
How are we to read and interpret the acquisition of the East India Company by an Indian businessman? Is Mehta’s acquisition, as the Guardian report claims, “a weapon to challenge UK’s colonial past”? Mehta, according to a BBC report, “dismissed fears that the reappearance of a company long associated with colonialism would open old wounds.”21 He claimed: “It’s a disproportionate joy, [I have received] more than 15,000 emails [of support] from various Indians across India, even from Barbados to Fiji to Canada to Boston.”22 The East India Company in its new avatar, which is as a luxury brand, far from challenging the British colonial past, celebrates the Company’s colonial achievements. Mehta’s “The East India Company” describes itself thus: “When you hear our name you may already have a sense of who we are. Deep within the world’s sub-consciousness is an awareness of the East India Company, powerful pictures of who we are” (emphasis added).23 The description goes on: “The East India Company made a wide range of elusive, exclusive and exotic ingredients familiar, affordable and available to the world … Today we continue to develop and market unique and innovative products that breathe life into the history of The Company” (emphasis added).
Rather than challenging British colonialism and the plunder and destruction of India by the old East India Company, the Mehta-owned Company extols the imperial power and whitewashes colonial appropriations through the language of making available “elusive, exclusive and exotic ingredients.” The description of the Company’s philosophy states, “Over three hundred years ago, the East India Company’s pioneering merchants were the leading traders of luxury goods of their time, forging trade routes across the tumultuous oceans between the East and the West.”24 It adds: “Today, we continue to stand for quality and innovation in each and every area of trade” (emphasis added). In a section titled “Pioneering Spirit,” a photo of a British/ European woman using a hand telescope standing next to a British/European man, who is sitting, both possibly looking into the horizon of the “exotic” lands that were colonized by the British/Europeans, accompanies the following statement: “At the heart of it all, we are adventurous, honourable merchants; traversing the oceans to forge new connections, to set up trading relationships, to discover the exotic and elusive.”25
In short, Mehta’s East India Company mimics the imperial/colonial image of the older East India Company. If there could be any doubt about that, it is dispelled in another description on the Company’s website that is accompanied with the images of the old East India Company ships sailing in the ocean and is titled “Legacy”:
Over the centuries The East India Company unleashed great forces and its activities changed the tastes and thinking. Its officers were adventurers and merchants. They set sail in a spirit of expansion to establish new trading routes and factories, to discover and bring back new products and to break down the barriers of the world, driven by passion, determination and enthusiasm.26
The description goes on to praise the historical role of the Company and then briefly adds: “However, some of the original Company’s and Officers’ actions, whilst at the time widely considered by society to be acceptable consequences of growth and commerce, today of course are rightly viewed in a very different light.” The web description passingly mentions the slave trade before ending with the following words that celebrate the genealogical link of the present Company with its past (colonial) history: “Today, the values and behaviours of the modern reinvented company and brand retain the pioneering spirit and curiosity of the original Company men, but in other ways are completely the opposite to those of the past.”27
