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Managing Expertise: The Problem of Engineers in the English East India Company, 1668–1764

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2021

Tim Riding
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Abstract

This article challenges the assumption that the early modern engineer acted as a reliable agent for colonial authorities. Far from acting as trusted mediators between colony and metropole, experts could exacerbate tensions. The English East India Company knew this, and avoided engineers throughout its early history. This article considers the interplay between authorities in London and their subordinates in Bombay. The company's directors saw engineers as untrustworthy agents who increased expenditure and disrupted the company's system of consultative governance. For much of its early modern history, the company's fortifications and built environments relied on a knowledge network of informal expertise. Examining these experts-in-context reveals how expertise was managed and built environments maintained in colonial settings. When the company did turn to experts in the mid-eighteenth century, it struggled to utilise and incorporate them. This demonstrates that in some colonial contexts experts could be profoundly disruptive.

Keywords

East India CompanyBombayexpertiseengineersfortificationbuilt environment
Type
Article
Information
Itinerario , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , August 2021 , pp. 228 - 251
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

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References

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Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai [MSA].Google Scholar
Burnell, John. Bombay in the Days of Queen Anne. London: Hakluyt Society, 1933.Google Scholar
Forrest, George W. Selections from the Letters, Despatches and Other State Papers Preserved in the Bombay Secretariat, Home Series. 2 vols. Bombay: Government Central Press, 1887.Google Scholar
Foster, William. The English Factories in India, 1668–1669. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927.Google Scholar
Materials Towards a Statistical Account of the Town and Island of Bombay. 3 vols. Bombay: Government Central Press, 1893–4.Google Scholar
Ranganathan, Murali, ed. Govind Narayan's Mumbai: An Urban Biography from 1863. London: Anthem Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Records of Fort St. George: Despatches from England, 1681–1686. Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1916.Google Scholar
Records of Fort St. George: Diary and Consultation Book, 1702. Madras: Government Press, 1923.Google Scholar
Sainsbury, Ethel Bruce, ed. A Calendar of the Court Minutes etc. of the East India Company. 10 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907–35.Google Scholar
Ash, Eric H. The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Ash, Eric H. “Expertise and the Early Modern State.” Osiris 25 (2010): 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ash, Eric H. Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Ash, Eric H., et al. “Expertise: Practical Knowledge and the Early Modern State.” Osiris 25 (2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Jim. “The Mechanical Arts.” In The Cambridge History of Science, volume 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Park, Katharine and Daston, Lorraine, 673–695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Candiani, Vera S. Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, K. N. The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company: 1660–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, Timothy. “English Private Trade on the West Coast of India, c. 1680–1740.” Itinerario 38:2 (2014): 51–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hejeebu, Santhi. “Contract Enforcement in the English East India Company.” Journal of Economic History 65:2 (2005): 496–523.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Quentin. Military Architecture: The Art of Defence from Earliest Times to the Atlantic Wall, 2nd ed. Liphook, Hants: Beaufort Publishing, 1991.Google Scholar
Hughes, Thomas P. “Commentary.” In Science, Technology and Warfare: Proceedings of the Third Military History Symposium, ed. Wright, Monte D. and Paszek, Lawrence J., 69–74. Washington, D.C.: Air Force Historical Studies Office, 1970.Google Scholar
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. “The Love-Hate Relationship with Experts in the Early Modern Atlantic.” Early American Studies 9:2 (2011): 248–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luengo, Pedro. “Transcultural Fights: Fortification in Southeast Asian Seas during the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Early Modern History 23:1 (2019): 29–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luengo-Gutiérrez, Pedro, and Smith, Gene Allen, eds. From Colonies to Countries in the North Caribbean: Military Engineers in the Development of Cities and Territories. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.Google Scholar
Mahoney, Michael S. “Organizing Expertise: Engineering and Public Works under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, 1662–83.” Osiris 25:1 (2010): 149–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, Emily. “Building.” In The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550–1750, ed. Pettigrew, William A. and Veevers, David, 211–31. Leiden: Brill, 2019.Google Scholar
Maudlin, Daniel, and Herman, Bernard L., eds. Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places, and Material Culture, 1600–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Odegard, Erik. “Designing a New Fort on the Gold Coast: Johan Fredrik Trenks, the WIC, and the New Fort at Takoradi, 1774–1791.” Itinerario 40:3 (2016): 523–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ogborn, Miles. Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peers, Douglas M. India under Colonial Rule, 1700–1885. Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2006.Google Scholar
Pettigrew, William A., and Veevers, David, eds. The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550–1750. Leiden: Brill, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollak, Martha. Cities at War in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Rabier, Christelle, ed. Fields of Expertise: A Comparative History of Expert Procedures in Paris and London, 1600 to Present. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.Google Scholar
Riding, Tim. “‘Making Bombay Island’: Land Reclamation and Geographical Conceptions of Bombay, 1661–1728.” Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018): 27–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandes, E. W. C. The Military Engineer in India. London: The Institution of Royal Engineers, 1933.Google Scholar
Saunders, Andrew. Fortress Britain: Artillery Fortification in the British Isles and Ireland. Liphook, Hants: Beaufort Publishing, 1989.Google Scholar
Shammas, Carole, ed. Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment: Europeans, Asians, Settlers and Indigenous Societies. Leiden: Brill, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sivramkrishna, Sashi. “From Merchant to Merchant-Ruler: A Structure-Conduct-Performance Perspective of the East India Company's History, 1600–1765.” Business History 56:5 (2014): 789–815.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sudan, Rajani. The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veevers, David. “‘The Company as Their Lords and the Deputy as a Great Rajah’: Imperial Expansion and the English East India Company on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1685–1730.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41:5 (2013): 687–709.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walton, Steven A. “State Building through Building for the State: Foreign and Domestic Expertise in Tudor Fortification.” Osiris 25:1 (2010): 66–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winterbottom, Anna. Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.Google Scholar