Introduction: From the East India Company to the West Indies and Beyond: The World of British Sculpture, c. 1757–1947

Abstract

The introduction to this special issue lays out the main historiographical and methodological interventions that the editor and contributors seek to make. It begins by pointing to the surprising marginalization of sculptural evidence in the history of empire and post-colonial theory, and by laying out the state of the field to this point, paying particular attention to the questions of ‘sculptural Orientalism’ and ‘sculpture in the circum-Atlantic world’. The introduction then provides a brief account of the development of the ‘British School’ across the period, and makes a polemical case for considering the period between c. 1757 and 1947 as a long nineteenth century, rather than a long eighteenth century, or a period of sustained para- or proto-modernism. The introduction concludes with a call for a more ‘ecological’ sculptural history in the period, alive both to the depiction of environments and flora and fauna outside the human and also to the currently ‘Darwinian’ character of the scholarly field, in which a logic of the survival of the fittest seems to underpin the interrelation of adjacent periods and scholars.