TALKMeet the AuthorーーJoshua Ehrlich, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge

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OUTLINE

This event welcomes Joshua Ehrlich as the guest and discusses his book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this book, Ehrlich shows how a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company’s ideology. He reveals how, from the 1770s to 1850s, the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.

Online link (Zoom)

Hosted by MICCS in cooperation with Research Unit 13, Institute for Study of Humanities and Social Sciences, Doshisha University.

BIO

Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge, political thought, the East India Company, the British Empire, and South and Southeast Asia. Currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received a PhD and MA from Harvard University and a BA from the University of Chicago.
(cited from the personal web page of University of Macau)

CONTACT

MIZUTANI Satoshi (Doshisha University, Faculty of Global and Regional Studies)
mizutanis0606@gmail.com