Hand-in-hand with the survey: surveying and the accumulation of knowledge capital at India House during the Napoleonic Wars

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, the material culture of British science was being transformed by an increasingly centralized colonial information order. Surveys conducted during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars were particularly important to the growth of the East India Company's new collections in London. In the wake of territorial gains, surveyors and their staff bought, plundered, collected and otherwise acquired a wide range of materials related to arts, sciences, history, natural history and literature. Focusing on survey collections formed in Ceylon, Mysore and Java between 1795 and 1820, this essay explores the place of the Company's culture of surveying and collecting within both Company science and wider shifts in the political economy of colonial collecting. Such shifts include changes in property claims, the growing clout of the Company's library and museum in London and, most importantly, the Napoleonic Wars. The wartime context enabled not only basic access to new materials but also cheap modes of collection and a motive to collect—or to value collections—driven by commercial and territorial competition.