From Britain to India: Freemasonry as a Connective Force of Empire

Abstract

This article aims at exploring the role played by freemasonry in knitting Britain and its Indian empire closer together. It argues that masonic lodges played an instrumental role in facilitating the circulation of men, information, and ideas across the vast interconnected masonic network that came into being by the second half of the 18th century. As a form of sociability, the lodges also contributed to creating a familiar environment, a reservoir of Britishness, that would contribute to making the Briton feel at home, thus creating a social and cultural continuity between the mother country and the Indian Empire, and a degree of of inteconnectedness to the Anglo-Indian world. Studied as a transnational force linking the metropole to the colonial periphery, freemasonry brings together these two spaces within the same analytical frame.