Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal (1772-85), patronized learning on a larger scale than any previous East India Company official. This chapter argues that he did so in an attempt to square the Company’s growing political footprint with its hybrid constitution. The Company’s conquest of Bengal from midcentury had stirred up arguments in Britain and India that a body of merchants could not, or should not, rule vast and populous territories. Hastings sympathized with such arguments, but he was bound by duty and circumstances to oppose them. “Conciliation” offered him a means to do so. This idea, derived from both European and Mughal sources, denoted a commercial style of politics based on accommodation and negotiation. In the context of scholarly patronage, it tapped into widespread positive associations between commerce and knowledge. Hastings maintained that patronizing European scholar-officials and Indian learned elites would conciliate opinion toward the Company state. If this hybrid entity was to last, he suggested, it must traffic not only in material goods but also in intellectual ones.

Attempts to alter the balance between the Company’s two characters would only intensify in the decade-and-a-half after Wellesley’s departure (1805–20). Ideas about knowledge would continue to feature in these attempts. The Charter Act of 1813 tied the Company’s patronage of scholars to its collection of land revenue. Scholar-officials and their Indian collaborators, meanwhile, tailored their intellectual projects to the aim of territorial expansion. Overall, such expansion was encouraging engagement with Indian society and raising the prospect of involvement in Indian education. The Court of Directors was slow to embrace this prospect. But by the 1820s, the need for new ideas about knowledge could not be ignored any longer.

Unlike late nineteenth-century nostalgists, modern readers are unlikely to conclude that the Company was an enlightened promoter of knowledge. Still, those concerned with the present relations among companies, states, and knowledge might learn much from the earlier debates in which it was involved.

In the decade after Warren Hastings’ departure (1785–98), his idea of conciliation encountered new and formidable opposition. He relied on the idea in his defense against impeachment in parliament, but his principal accuser, Edmund Burke, identified it with corruption. Conciliation also acquired a bad name in India, where Hastings’ acting replacement, John Macpherson, made it the watchword of his scandalous administration. Hence, it fell to Lord Cornwallis to rid the idea of its unsavoriness, as part of his attempt to restore metropolitan faith in the Company state. The governor-general’s alliance with Sir William Jones helped in this regard. In the 1790s, pressure on the Company state and on the idea of conciliation abated. Yet this was to be a temporary reprieve. Soon, both would be challenged afresh by the governor-generalship of Lord Wellesley.

In the 1820s–30s, the question of “native education” generated sprawling debates involving all three Company presidencies. At issue now was not whether the Company could or should secure extensive territory but instead whether, having done so, it could or should govern it. Throughout the period, officials debated the balance to be struck in education policy between conciliation and mass education. This question was briefly conflated with issues of language, leading to the so-called Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. For a fleeting moment in the 1830s, English education appeared to have prevailed. The more lasting impact of the controversy, however, was the end of conciliation and the triumph of mass education in Company ideology.

This chapter centers on the controversy between Lord Wellesley (1798–1805) and the Company’s Court of Directors over the College of Fort William. It shows that this controversy turned fundamentally on the danger Wellesley’s pet project posed to the Company state. The college served to aggrandize the governor-general at the directors’ expense and to establish his own legitimacy with multiple audiences. It would do this not through conciliation but through the projection of an image of grandeur consonant with a kingly territorial sovereignty. In a sign of the threat posed by Wellesley’s ideas, the directors continued to fear them long after his departure. Ongoing disputes over books, natural history, and scholar-officials suggested that his “revolution” was far from finished.

The East India Company is remembered as the world’s most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s, it was also the world’s most enlightened one. As Joshua Ehrlich reveals in this original account, a commitment to the cause of knowledge was integral to the Company’s ideology. Ehrlich shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company—just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.