Eddy Kent's Corporate Character helps advance our understanding of a crucial figure of British colonial rule: the administrative man on the spot. Scholars have focused on the roles of utilitarianism, evangelicalism, liberalism, and other British intellectual exports in shaping Anglo-Indian attitudes toward imperial service in the nineteenth century. Kent argues that we also need to consider the corporate culture of the East India Company and how it disciplined the mind and habits of the typical company servant, a subject who often wielded plenipotentiary powers and whose unpredictable and famously corrupt agency the company's directors were always at pains to control. As new discourses about the possibility of a virtuous empire were elaborated in metropolitan Britain during the 1780s and 1790s, especially by Edmund Burke during the long impeachment trial of the East India Company's governor general, Warren Hastings, company directors began to engineer new systems that could address this agency crisis. Utilizing Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, Kent details the stamp of the corporation on the character of civil servants that resulted from their quotidian interactions with the organizational schemes designed to control them. In later chapters he argues that Anglo-Indian literature, focused primarily on corporate life, played its own significant role in shaping habitus within the company and within the administrative culture of the Raj that superseded it.

The middle three chapters form the crux of Kent's argument about the interoperation of Anglo-Indian literature, corporate culture, and the disciplinary regimes of the company. Together this ensemble of forces produced an “after-image” (173) of the corporation in the ethos of professionalism, duty, and self-sacrifice represented as the foundation of character for imperial civil servants in later nineteenth-century India and elsewhere. In chapter 2 Kent traces the invention of the concept of the “civil service” in the evolution of new systems of professional training at the company colleges of Fort William in Bengal and Haileybury in England. Kent recovers intriguing details about how company officials organized these panoptic spaces and sought to train company men to see themselves as statesmen of Burke's virtuous empire and as “instruments of a regulated system” (66). Further reforms followed in the effort to shape recruits for the machinery of colonial government. Thomas Babington Macaulay's competition exam, introduced in the 1850s, destroyed the patronage system whereby men with family connections or friends in the company had been chosen for company service. The exam would test industriousness and work ethic more than mastery of any subject in order to reveal the candidates most likely to embody the ideal of the self-sacrificing civil servant. In short, the test was designed to recruit company men who would be constantly critical of their own distance from this idealized image of service and yet most driven to reach that impossible self-perfection.

The rest of the book focuses on how corporate culture was reflected in literature that “assumed the mantle of the college in socializing Anglo-Indians into a specific set of habits” (122). Through close readings of William Delafield Arnold's Oakfield (1853) and George Otto Trevelyan's The Competition Wallah (1863), Kent ponders the overwhelming focus in Anglo-Indian literature on representing work and the character traits that would cause a person to rise or fall in the company. In the final two chapters, Kent explores postcompany literature, tracing the corporate ethos in Anglo-Indian novels during the British Raj of the later nineteenth century, especially through the work of Henry Stewart Cunningham, Sara Jeannette Duncan, and Rudyard Kipling. Duncan's Set in Authority (1906), written by a Canadian whose outsider position allows for a somewhat critical assessment of Anglo-Indian society, reveals the inner force of hegemonic corporate culture still driving the actions of postcompany civil servants who embrace “the virtuous empire as the supreme good” and accept “the system of administrative power as its legitimate worldly institution” (136). Likewise, Kent reads the most famous of all colonial novels, Kipling's Kim (1901), as a reworking of ideas about Anglo-Indian corporate culture and as a meditation on the ideal colonial servant: a subject in power whose agency has been restrained by the character-shaping systems of the virtuous empire.

In paying close attention to the company's institutions, Corporate Character offers a fresh vantage point from which to view a key social formation at the heart of colonial rule in the nineteenth century. One question that remains, however, concerns the nature of the structural transformation that occurred between the 1780s and 1850s. Kent describes this history as the straightforward transformation of a trading company into a governing agency. As Kent sees it, a colonial state emerged out of the institutional foundations of a corporation, though the new entity continued to be staffed by corporate-minded workers and to articulate a corporate culture. But this view of the earlier company as a trading enterprise in contrast to a governing agency has lately been challenged. Philip Stern in The Company State (2012) argues that the East India Company functioned as a state from its beginnings and followed early modern ideas about corporate sovereignty. It may be that there never was a time when the company was driven purely by commerce and uninterested in colonial rule. This would suggest that the after-image of corporate culture seen in later colonial governmentality already contained within it the trace of earlier discursive and disciplinary regimes rooted in long-standing experiments with state power. Even so, Kent makes a compelling case that the cultural material of the East India Company in its later years formed the crucial environment for shaping the attitudes, ambitions, and the cultivated practices of body and mind of the empire's civil servants.