Arthur MacGregor’s Company Curiosities is an ambitious book. It seeks to give an overview of the collecting and related activity of the East India Company and its servants from the seventeenth century to the company’s final days in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny. No previous study has attempted this comprehensively. Not only is the whole range of collecting considered – live and dead specimens of animals and plants, antiquities and curios – but also the documentation of the sub-continent and its peoples, and the creation of museums, menageries and gardens both in India and in Britain.

The book begins with a brief yet helpful survey of the history of the East India Company, and then plunges right into collecting. The first field of study is the company’s naturalists, both botanists and zoologists. This leads naturally to illustrators and illustrations of India. There are some lovely examples of Indian artists’ work alongside that of the British, demonstrating their fruitful collaboration. Only a few of the names of these native artists are known to us. We then move to artistic representations of the Indian landscape and its monuments, antiquarian collecting and ‘emergent ethnography’.

The next major section concerns ‘India viewed from England’ and includes an interesting account of the company’s India Museum in London. MacGregor’s strengths as a historian of collecting are perhaps best displayed here. He describes the transformation of a cabinet of miscellaneous curiosities into an ‘economic museum’ in the age of the great, early international exhibitions in London, Paris, Dublin and Manchester. This era proved fatal to the company, however, which lost control of India in the wake of the Mutiny of 1857 and saw the dispersal of its museum collections. MacGregor then examines some of the collections, houses and gardens of nabobs who returned to Britain.

There is a final ‘Coda’ to the whole enterprise, which could perhaps have been longer and more developed in summing up what is otherwise a tour de force of assemblage and thematic exposition. The book lives up to its promise to examine the whole of the company’s collecting and ‘treat it as a single body of evidence for the immense impact of the … [Company] on the physical, cultural and economic landscape of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain’.

It is apparent that MacGregor finds much that is sympathetic in many of the individual East India men he considers, and in the approach of the company itself to its engagement with India. While no apologist for colonialism, he does occasionally contrast the more ‘authoritarian’ character of direct British rule after 1858 with the less systematic approach of the company, which in some senses found itself in control of much of India without having set out to do so. While at heart a business venture, the East India Company that emerges is an institution that was often remarkably tolerant of activity by its servants – activity that went beyond the purely commercial. Indeed, MacGregor suggests that its early collecting was incidental to trade, which only became an impetus for acquisitiveness much later, in the nineteenth century.

MacGregor’s book is strong on illustrative detail, and he obviously has a wealth of material at his disposal. There are great figures like Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of the London Zoo, and the great orientalist Sir William Jones; but also lesser actors like the marvellously named Captain Linnaeus Tripe, a pioneering topographical photographer. Happily, MacGregor does not get bogged down in the detail, deploying specific examples to good effect in thematic chapters and sections. In this, Company Curiosities may usefully be compared with another recent and similar study, James Delbourgo’s Collecting the World, an account of the acquisitions of Sir Hans Sloane and the genesis of the British Museum. Delbourgo goes chronologically, but cannot resist exhaustive (and rather exhausting) catalogues of the miscellaneous pieces accumulated by Sloane, to the detriment of a sense of Sloane the man and a broader picture of his collecting. In MacGregor’s book, brief vignettes of men like Tripe provide context, but they do not overwhelm with particularity.

MacGregor’s prose is lively and interesting. The book itself is well produced, with nearly 200 illustrations, many in colour (thanks, presumably, to a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art). For anyone who has struggled with the stinginess of some university presses about plates, this is refreshing – and a book about ‘things’ would be less effective without them.