Since the seminal publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), scholars have studied colonial epistemology not as a contribution to universal scientific understanding but rather as a function of power-knowledge: knowledge for the purpose of imposing and maintaining colonial authority and legitimacy. Consequently, the literature on empire often treats colonial knowledge as being almost exclusively generated from the top down through impersonal official surveys and commissions that engaged in very little meaningful intellectual exchange with the indigenous population.

Combatting the latter assumption, Carol Ann Boshier’s Forgotten Voices of the British Empire makes a remarkable contribution to the literature on the creation of colonial knowledge in the British Empire’s south Asian colonies. Boshier’s research identifies the heterogenous sources of colonial knowledge in India and Burma, arguing that it often emerged from the individual “scholarship, enterprise, and ingenuity” of ambitious British subjects rather than from the direct initiative of the authorities (xii). These intellectual entrepreneurs often defied colonial taboos on interacting with the so-called natives, allowing them to gain much more intimate information than official enterprises could. Far from pushing back against the postcolonial thesis on power-knowledge, Forgotten Voices provides it with further depth by demonstrating that, through their ability to operate in an unofficial capacity, these peripheral voices often provided the most crucial raw data that served to strengthen the mercantile, political, and cultural objectives of the colonial state. However, by operating outside of the colonial authorities’ sanction, the work of these scholars was often either co-opted or discarded by official channels of colonial knowledge production, thus rendering their contributions largely invisible outside of the archive. So, in the mold of the likes of David Arnold’s Colonizing the Body (1993), Boshier here makes a significant contribution to understanding the heterogeneous nature of colonial knowledge production.

Forgotten Voices primarily centers on six case studies of entrepreneurial British intellectuals that Boshier was able to extract from the archive. After a brief introduction that sets up the contours of the argument and provides a roadmap for the book, the first chapter, “Spheres of Knowledge,” sets the stage by offering a broad outline of how the East India Company (EIC) and the subsequent Government of India (GOI) engaged with various groups and institutions that acted as sources for new knowledge. Surrounding the case studies on either end, chapter 2, “Indigenous Informants and Go-Betweens,” and chapter 9, “The Last Word from the Women of the Empire,” identify the even-more-invisible contributors to the colonial episteme. Chapter 9 shows how, despite the suffocating limitations on the independence of colonial women, women such as Mildred Archer, Lady Maria Nugent, Emma Roberts, and Fanny Parkes were also active in British intellectual entrepreneurship in colonial India and Burma. Chapter 2 identifies just how much indigenous actors—pundits, interlocutors, translators, and, of course, the army of servants that accompanied British expeditions—contributed to colonial knowledge formation, even for the supposedly independent scholars examined in this book. The chapter also does great work in highlighting how these indigenous contributions meant that the scientific knowledge produced was not solely Eurocentric and that some valuable data could be gained from it, despite its otherwise overwhelming colonial bias.

The six case studies that make up the core of the book can be divided into three groups, indicating both the evolving ways that colonial knowledge production took place over time and how differences in class, race, and domicile affected scholarly credibility. The first group—represented by the Orientalists Francis Buchanan-Hamilton and Francis Whyte Ellis—marked a time during EIC rule when collaboration with indigenous elites was not just permitted but encouraged to gain better political, mercantile, and ecological knowledge about the nascent empire and its surroundings. Buchanan-Hamilton trailblazed south Asian botany while Whyte Ellis’s work was instrumental in the Dravidian Proof, which identified the common origin of the south Indian language families. The second group—represented by William Johnson and Dr. Clement Williams—operated after the shift to formal GOI rule in India after the 1857 Rebellion. As more explicit ideas of race and white supremacy became dominant, Johnson’s and Williams’s intimacy with the indigenous people generated official mistrust. The final group—represented by Frederick Marshman Bailey and J.P. Mills, India Civil Service—worked during a similar time period but were what was known as “the right sort,” educated in England and serving in an official capacity while nevertheless absconding for their scientific endeavors. As such, while both Johnson and Bailey gained crucial intelligence on central Asian polities during Britain and Russia’s Great Game, only Bailey’s contribution was considered untainted by British officials. Likewise, Williams’s time at King Mindon’s court at Ava in Burma and Mills’s ethnographic, proto-anthropological studies of the Naga both built British understanding of the peoples of Burma and northeast India, but Mills enjoyed official status while Williams ended his career in disgrace. The book concludes with a brief afterword that effectively synthesizes the contributions of these case studies in the broader context of colonial knowledge production.

My criticism mostly centers on framing. First, when thinking of “unremembered subjects” of empire (xi), one’s mind naturally goes to the colonized. While the book is about colonial science and therefore focuses on British protagonists, there is some dissonance in the idea of recovering lost voices of colonizers. Second, there are instances where the extractive and inherently violent nature of the scientific work carried out by colonizers could use more explicit critique. To Boshier’s credit, she does consistently emphasize the often nefarious motivations behind the knowledge gathered, but passages praising the protagonists’ genuine scientific contributions—such as, for example, making indigenous material culture available to the Western scientific community by shipping it to museums in the United Kingdom—could still be further problematized in the text.

Overall, I think it is quite appropriate that this review will be published in the Journal of British Studies. In Forgotten Voices, Boshier has produced a fine piece of work that will most directly appeal to scholars of Britain, British science and technology studies, and the production of knowledge in the British Empire. Forgotten Voices is well-researched, relies on robust (and understudied) archival evidence, and makes a strong, unique contribution to the literature on colonial knowledge production in British South and Southeast Asia.