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Book Review
Methods/Theory
| Sudipta Sen. Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India. New York: Routledge. 2002. Pp. xxxi, 216. $22.95.
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| This lively, ambitious, and intelligent book accomplishes what many studies of British India resist: the integration of the political and social histories of Britain and its subcontinental territories into a coherent if complex narrative. In the process, Sudipta Sen makes two further important contributions. First, he demonstrates that British historians can no longer afford to cordon off what happened "out there" from what happened "in here" if they wish to understand fully either the "Island Story's" allegedly autochthonous national culture or the motivations of British expatriate societies. Second, he challenges current scholarly emphasis on Indian institutions and practices in East India Company policies by showing the powerful impact that metropolitan ideas and routines had on the invention, extension, defense, and daily life of "British India." Sen's book thus provides an example of the "new imperial history" at its most substantive. |
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Extending the insights of Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer's seminal case for statebuilding as a form of cultural revolution (The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution [1985]), Sen explores how the processes of parliamentary sovereignty and state expansion extended a regime of political reasoning to encompass the momentous and quotidian aspects of British trade and rule in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century India. The East India Company was not an anomaly, he argues, but an extraterritorial apparatus of the British state, legitimated by ideologies of liberty and property and protected by chartered rights, that founded an indirect rule in defense of a commercial enterprise. The interpenetration of state formation at home and in the colony (although, according to constitutional historians, India was never a colony) meant that what may have appeared to be "novel or deviant aspects of colonial administration thrust upon it by the force of circumstance" were in fact "strikingly consistent with the overall paradigm of political culture in contemporary England" (p. 4). It owed much, above all, to the aggressive national imperialism and commercialism of the Georgian state. |
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Having provided a strong argument for the importance of the early years of British ascendancy in India (1770–1830) in establishing notions of a custodial and expatriate British sovereignty, Sen then turns to some of the social and cultural dimensions of this enterprise of civilization building. He is especially interested in the creation and maintenance of modes of historical and social distance that orchestrated relations between Britons and their indigenous charges. Here he combines archival research with a synthesis of recent literature on the problematics of identity, gender, and "race" in colonial settings. Sen interrogates eighteenth-century history and cartography for their complicity with British imperialism. History writing was "integral to the colonial administration" (p. 49), he argues, and central to the naturalization of narratives—for example, the antiquity and "effeminacy" of Hindu culture and the "despotism" of the Muslims—that justified British intercession. Mapmaking proved to be an equally politicized and inventive art, adopting an invasive perspective that both conveyed and masked the struggles for power underway on the subcontinent. Gender and "race" as modalities of power in colonial India are examined in two insightful chapters. The historic shifts in domesticity taking place in Britain between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century not only redefined the roles and affective lives of British men but intervened in the most intimate of relations among them, Indian women, and their children. Domestic ideology also became crucial to the ideological and legal maneuvers that transformed cultural difference into matters of "blood." In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the shift in company policy toward discouraging miscegenated alliances and removing the sons of "mixed blood" marriages from service in the civil and military departments became justified politically and socially by arguments about British degeneracy in tropical climes and the emboldening effect of British culture on traditionally suborned Indians. Through company policy, British law, natural history, and social life, the cultural and the corporeal were fused, and blood and civilization became "much the same thing" (p. 143). In this way, "the calibration of blood became of vital significance for the colonial order in India" (p. 143) and an insurmountable barrier for Eurasians and other indigenes. |
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