The East India Company, the Company’s Museum, and the Political Economy of Natural History in the Early Nineteenth Century.

Abstract

At the turn of the nineteenth century, at its headquarters in the City of London, the Honourable East India Company established a new museum and library. By midcentury this museum would contain one of Europe’s most extensive collections of the natural history, arts, and sciences of Asia. This essay uses the early history of the company’s museum, focusing in particular on its natural history collections, to explore the material relationship between scientific practice and the imperial political economy. Much of the collections had been gathered in the wake of military campaigns, trade missions, or administrative surveys. Once specimens and reports arrived in Leadenhall Street and passed through the museum storage areas, this plunder would become the stuff of science, going on to feed the growth of disciplines, societies, and projects in Britain and beyond. In this way, the East India Company was integral to the information and communication infrastructures within which many sciences then operated. Collections-based disciplines and societies flourished in this period; their growth, it is argued, was coextensive with administrative and political economic change at institutions like the East India Company. The essay first explores the company’s practices and patterns of collecting and then considers the consequences of this accumulation for aspects of scientific practice—particularly the growth of scientific societies—in both London and Calcutta.