This is an important book for anyone who is curious about alternative ways of understanding the nineteenth-century history of the British empire, particularly in colonial India. Unmaking the East India Company is a detailed examination of popular printed images that are associated with the Company’s cacophonic final five decades. The visual spectacle that was reproduced in lithographs through literary annuals, periodicals, and scrapbooks has been sidelined by art historians in favour of studies of oil painting, sculpture, and architecture. Tom Young’s aim is to establish the place of this material within the art historical record whilst showing how it can help to decolonise studies of British art and imperial history.
If you are expecting this book to precisely classify its subject, then you are in for a surprise. It is impossible to treat these ignored artworks with taxonomic precision because of the nature of their production. The book successfully groups them into four roughly chronological chapters, each of which focuses on different circumstances of patronage that determined their subject matter, artistic formats, styles, and genres. This allows the author to identify the different social, political, and moral positions that fuelled colonial authority in India. These positions, which are often contradictory, fed into the numerous attitudes towards empire to which Britain’s middle classes subscribed. The different modes of art-making that are described in the four chapters of the book provide a new way in which to understand how the East India Company was ‘unmade’.
Chapter one focuses on the unique lithographic press that Charles D’Oyly established at Patna in the late 1820s. At that time, lithography was a revolutionary new technology. Unlike previous print methods, which required expensive equipment and fussy climactic conditions, a lithographic press could be set up anywhere, making it accessible to amateurs who were far away from Britain. D’Oyly and his circle, which included women and Indians, printed and circulated images of their lives that reached throughout India and beyond. Under the name of ‘The Behar School of Athens’, their lithographs connected them with London’s political contours, yet completely ignored the presence of opium in their daily lives. They romanticised India’s landscape, printing images of the wilderness that lay beyond their settlements that were clustered on the banks of the Ganges—the superhighway that connected them to Calcutta. Their output, entitled ‘Proceedings of the Behar School of Athens’, ceased publication in the 1830s and is now a striking visual example of how one bored community that was based far away from England styled itself as a bourgeoisie.
The next chapter offers a more general examination of how lithography spread colonial knowledge about India. Photographic technologies and the Great Exhibition of 1851 are usually regarded as the launch pads of this visual knowledge, but Young shows how lithography impacted colonial thinking before the mid-nineteenth century. He makes his case by examining representations of Indian social groups that were made by John and Justinian Gantz, as well as by Charles D’Oyly. He brings to the foreground the racial prejudices and whitewashing of rural poverty that these lithographs promoted and which shaped ideas in Britain about racial difference. Acceptance of these race-based beliefs facilitated the justification of practices that mistreated non-Europeans. This in turn perpetuated and helped to justify other racist actions. India’s people and resources were subsumed into a trans-imperial worldview of free trade and utilitarian reform. This led to increasingly invasive attempts to categorise and reform the Indian population.
Through the lithographic portraits of Colesworthy Grant, the third chapter connects colonial society with middle-class culture following the creation of the 1833 Charter Act, which abolished the East India Company’s trade monopoly. Grant produced two books of portraits. One, entitled A Series of Miscellaneous Heads, is a survey of Indian men of different religions and ranks that has a distinctly phrenological feel to it. The other, called Lithographic Sketches of the Public Characters of Calcutta, is a group of signed portraits of European men that are linked with the received views of British middle-class masculinity. Through these two different books, Grant’s work clearly separates the men who were in charge of the British imperial state from their Indian subjects. It exemplifies how lithographic printing shaped the foundation upon which the colonial state, and the trans-imperial middle classes that upheld it, were supported.
The final chapter of the book is about images of war and warriors throughout the East India Company’s penultimate 20 years, during the rule of Queen Victoria. Beginning with portraits that were connected with the Anglo-Sikh wars and mainly created by Indian artists, it shows how the Victorian Raj reinvented South Asia’s imperial past. This reinvention allowed Britain’s monarchy to integrate its role into colonial rule, facilitating the Company’s ‘unmaking’. It then goes on to examine lithographs and paintings from Afghanistan and Sindh from the 1840s and 1850s. These were two prominent battlefields of the British in South Asia. This period was a time of constant warfare, yet, in Britain, it was celebrated as a peaceful time during which the colonial state was an important global force for good within a violent world. The self-perception that Britain was a rational nation that was morally bound to manage the ‘other’ relied on the popular reportage in which these images appeared. Colonials placed their faith in visual spectacle, allowing printed images to shape their vision of imperial sovereignty during a time of perpetual warfare.
Like the social media of today, the images that are covered in this book represent the numerous chaotic inner thoughts that raged through different middle-class minds. The progression of the four chapters of the book helps to bring some order to this chaos. It begins with the microcosmic world of Charles D’Oyly’s lithographs, showing how one community represented itself at a specific place and time. In the final chapter, the book focuses on a macrocosmic stew of images, showing how pictures of warriors and warfare plugged into Britain’s grand belief in a benevolent empire. It is helpful that the book begins with a detailed examination of one bourgeoisie in a small corner of the empire and ends by considering Britain’s middle-class imaginings of that empire.
This book will be extremely helpful to art historians who are keen to decolonise their discipline. More generally, this study of popular print culture is helpful to anyone who is interested in new ways of examining Britain’s imperial history. By showing how printed artworks influenced popular definitions of ‘Britishness’, Young has made an important contribution that throws these important yet overlooked images in our faces. It is a strong and important work that tackles the many-headed media machine of the nineteenth century, showing how deeply intertwined lithography was within the social, political, and moral attitudes of imperial Britain.
