The Coming of Age of Imperialism (1772-1813), Part II
unable to complete his Digest, his vision of a humanitarian mission for the British--one in which the British would help "rescue" the Indian civilizations and reinvigorate the intellectual and cultural life of the various peoples--carried onwards. Not only did it find itself enshrined in the establishment of the College of Fort William, but it was also the basis for many of the Evangelical attacks on Orientalism after 1800.
Footnotes:
[1] Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India, (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 127.
[2] Sisir Kumar Das, Sahibs and Munshis, (Calcutta: Orion Publications, 1978), p. 1.
[3] Nabob was a term given to English merchants and traders who came to India seeking adventure and fortune. Many were from lower-middle class backgrounds and thus saw India as the only opportunity they had to become wealthy.
[4] V.B. Kulkarni, British Statesmen in India, (Calcutta: Orient Longmans, Ltd., 1961), pp. 28-9.
[5] Das, p. 2.
[6] Kulkarni, p. 25.
[7] David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengali Renaissance, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 17-18, quoting Warren Hastings, Memoirs of the Life of Right Honorable Warren Hastings, vol. 1, compiled by G.K. Gleig, (London: Richard Bentley, 1841), p. 215.
[8] Ibid., p. 18, quoting A.M. Davies, A Biography of Warren Hastings, (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1935), pp. 340-1.
[9] Das, p. 2.
[10] Kopf, pp. 18-20.
[11] Alexander Murray, ed., Sir William Jones, 1746-1794: A Commemoration, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 98.
[12] Kopf, p. 38.
[13] Sir William Jones, ed. by Garland Cannon, The Letters of Sir William Jones, vol. 2, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 794, Letter to Lord Cornwallis, 19 March 1788.
[14] Garland Cannon and Kevin R. Brine, ed., Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), p. 46. See also Kopf.
[15] Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Form of Knowledge, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 29.
[16] Jones, ed. by Cannon, p. 665, Letter to Sir William Pitt the Younger, 5 February 1785.
[17] Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 79.
[18] Jones, ed. by Cannon, p. 885, Letter to the Second Earl Spencer, 20 February 1791.
[19] Ronald Inden, Imagining India, (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwood, 1992), p. 46 and passim.
[20] Cannon, passim.
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