Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T23:55:31.526Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

IRELAND, COLONIAL SCIENCE, AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTION OF BRITISH RULE IN INDIA, c. 1820–1870*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2009

BARRY CROSBIE
BARRY CROSBIE*
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland, Galway
*
National University of Ireland, Galwaybarrycrosbie@hotmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 963 - 987
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This article is based on research supported by a Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship provided by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences. The author is grateful to Professor C. A. Bayly, Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, and Dr Simon J. Potter for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References

1 See MacKenzie, John M., ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English worlds? A four-nation approach to the history of the British empire’, History Compass, 6 (2008), pp. 1244–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: a history of four nations (Cambridge, 1989).

3 See, for example, Keith Jeffery, ed., ‘An Irish empire’? Aspects of Ireland and the British empire (Manchester, 1996); Barry Crosbie, Irish imperial networks: migration, social communication and exchange in nineteenth-century India (Cambridge, forthcoming); John M. MacKenzie and Nigel R. Dalziel, eds., The Scots in South Africa: ethnicity, identity, gender and race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007); and Jones, Aled and Jones, Bill, ‘The Welsh world and the British empire, c. 1851–1939: an exploration’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31 (2003), pp. 57–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See, for example, T. M. Devine, Scotland's empire, 1600–1815 (London, 2003); and Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: career building, empire building and a Scottish school of thought on Indian governance (Akron, OH, 2001).

5 See Hopkins, A. G., ‘Back to the future: from national history to imperial history’, Past and Present, 164 (1999), pp. 198–243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: crown, community and conflict of cultures, 1470–1603 (Harlow, 1985).

7 David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and empire’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford history of the British empire: the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 494–521.

8 Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland before the famine, 1798–1848 (Dublin, 1972).

9 Keith Jeffery, ‘Introduction’, in Jeffery, ed., An Irish empire?, pp. 1–18.

10 C. A. Bayly, Imperial meridian: the British empire and the world, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), p. 12.

11 See, for example, Stephen Howe, Ireland and empire: colonial legacies in Irish history and culture (Oxford, 2000); Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford, 2004); Terrence McDonough, ed., Was Ireland a colony? Economics, politics and culture in nineteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2005).

12 See Burton, Antoinette, ‘Who needs the nation? Interrogating ‘British’ history', Journal of Historical Sociology, 10 (1997), pp. 227–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘When was Britain? Nostalgia for the nation at the end of the “American century”, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), pp. 359–74.

13 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in question: theory, knowledge, history (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, 2005), p. 18.

14 See, for example, Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992); and Catherine Hall, Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford, 2002).

15 A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in world history (London, 2002).

16 C. A. Bayly, The birth of the modern world, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA, and Oxford, 2004).

17 Ibid., pp. 1–21.

18 See Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and race: aryanism in the British empire (Basingstoke and New York, NY, 2002); and Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in contact: rethinking colonial encounters in world history (Durham, NC, 2005); Richard Drayton, Nature's government: science, imperial Britain and the ‘improvement’ of the world (New Haven, CT, and London, 2000).

19 Tony Ballantyne, ‘Empire, knowledge and culture: from proto-globalization to modern globalization’, in Hopkins, ed., Globalization in world history, pp. 115–40.

20 Ballantyne, Orientalism and race, p. 4.

21 Ibid., p. 3.

22 David Arnold, The new Cambridge history of India, iii. 5: Science, technology and medicine in colonial India (Cambridge, 2000), p. 1.

23 Kapil Raj, Relocating modern science: circulation and construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (London, 2007), p. 13.

24 David N. Livingstone, Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge (Chicago, IL, and London, 2003).

25 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

26 Asa Briggs, The age of improvement, 1783–1867 (London, 2000), pp. 17–30.

27 Andrew S. Cook, ‘Establishing the sea routes to India and China: stages in the development of hydrographical knowledge’, in H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby, eds., The worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge and New York, NY, 2002), pp. 119–37.

28 Thomas Bartlett, ‘“A weapon of war yet untried”: Irish Catholics and the armed forces of the crown, 1760–1830’, in T. G. Fraser and Keith Jeffery, eds., Men, women and war (Dublin, 1993), pp. 66–85.

29 Basalla, George, ‘The spread of western science’, Science, 156 (1967), pp. 611–22CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; see also Keith Jeffery, ‘The Irish military tradition and the British empire’, in Jeffery, ed., An Irish empire?, pp. 94–122.

30 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an empire: the geographical construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 2–3.

31 Ibid., p. 35.

32 C. A. Bayly, Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 6–9, 307–9.

33 Edney, Mapping an empire, p. 19.

34 Major Latham C. M. Blacker, A history of the family of Blacker of Carrickblacker in Ireland (Dublin, 1901).

35 See Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, ‘An Irish military tradition?’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, eds., A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–26.

36 G. S. Sardesai ed., Poona residency correspondence, 5, Poona Affairs, 1801–1810 (Bombay, 1940), pp. i–xvi.

37 Valentine Blacker, Memoir of the operations of the British army in India during the Mahratta war of 1817, 1818 and 1819 (London, 1821), xix.

38 See C. A. Bayly, Indian society and the making of the British empire (Cambridge, 1988), p. 80; and Bayly, Imperial meridian, p. 106.

39 A. J. Arbuthnot, ‘Blacker, Valentine (1778–1823)’, Rev. James Lunt, Oxford dictionary of national biography (Oxford, 2004).

40 Valentine Blacker to William Casement, 11 Aug. 1824, British Military Consultations (BMC) 23 Sept. 1824, 126, P/30/60, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library, London (hereafter OIOC, BL), F/4/836 22401, fos. 35–231, is a copy of Blacker's letter to the Court of Directors with all enclosures; the letter's text was printed as an appendix to Andrew Scott Waugh, ‘Report and statements on the operations and expense of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India’, Parliamentary Papers, 1851 (219) 41: 875–936, 899–902.

41 Edney, Mapping an empire, p. 28.

42 See J. H. Andrews, A paper landscape: the ordnance survey in nineteenth-century Ireland (Oxford, 1975).

43 ‘Report from the select committee on the survey and valuation of Ireland’, Parliamentary Papers, HC 445 (1824), viii.

44 Gillian M. Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey: history, culture and memory (Dublin, 2004), ch. 1 passim.

45 Ian J. Barrow, Mapping history, drawing territory: British mapping in India, c. 1756–1905 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 2–3.

46 See, for example, J. T. Leerson, Remembrance and imagination: patterns in the historical and literary representation of Ireland in the nineteenth century (Cork, 1996), p. 103.

47 ‘Memoir of Major-General Thomas Colby’, Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 12 (1852–3), p. 132.

48 Thomas Colby, ed., Ordnance Survey of the county of Londonderry, volume the first: memoir of the city and northwestern liberties of Londonderry, parish of Templemore (Dublin, 1837).

49 Ibid., pp. 7–8.

50 Ibid., p. 8.

51 For an example of a civilian assistant's account of his experiences working on the Ordnance Survey, see W. Clare, ed., A young Irishman's diary, 1836–1847: being extracts from the early journal of John Keegan (Dublin, 1928), pp. 13, 23.

52 Lt. Thomas Larcom, Heads of inquiry (1832): copy in Larcom papers, National Library of Ireland (hereafter NLI), MS 7550.

53 For an example of O'Donovan and O'Curry's antiquarian research while working on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, see John O'Donovan, The antiquities of County Clare: letters containing information relative to the antiquities of the County of Clare collected during the progress of the Ordnance Survey in 1839; and letters and extracts relative to ancient territories in Thomond, 1841 (Ennis, 2003).

54 ‘Copy of table of contents to the instructions for the Ordnance Survey memoir of Ireland, showing the subjects embraced in the inquiry, and the order of their arrangements, by Captain Larcom, Royal Engineers’, in Report of the commissioner appointed to inquire into the facts relating to the Ordnance memoir of Ireland, Parliamentary Papers, HC 527 (1844), xxx, 87.

55 Thomas Larcom to George Petrie, 8 Dec. 1837, Larcom papers, NLI, MS 7564.

56 Lieutenant Denison to Thomas Larcom, 18 Jan., 20 Apr. 1838, Larcom papers, NLI, MS 7548.

57 Larcom, Heads of inquiry.

58 Edney, Mapping an empire, p. 28.

59 Court of Directors to Bentinck, 26 Sept. 1827, OIOC, BL, E/4/730, fos. 2–3.

60 See Edney, Mapping an empire, p. 246.

61 Everest, George, ‘On the compensation measuring apparatus of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India’, Asiatic Researches, 19 (1833), pp. 189–214Google Scholar, at pp. 208–9; Everest, An account of the measurement of two sections of the meridional arc of India (2 vols., London, 1847); Everest, Account of the operations of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (24 vols., Dehra Dun: Survey of India, 1870–1910), pp. 1–16, at p. 1.

62 George Everest, ‘Memoir containing an account of some leading features of the Irish survey, and a comparison of the same with the system pursued in India’, 20 Oct. 1829, OIOC, BL, L/MIL/5/402/205, fos. 297–317.

63 Ibid., fo. 297.

64 Ibid.

65 For a full account of the history and organization of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, see Andrews, A paper landscape.

66 Everest, ‘Account’, OIOC, BL, L/MIL/3/402 205, fo. 317.

67 W. P. Jervis, Thomas Best Jervis, Lt. Col., Christian soldier, geographer, and friend of India, 1796–1857: a centenary tribute (London, 1898).

68 Edney, Mapping an empire, pp. 281–2.

69 Everest, ‘Account’, OIOC, BL, L/MIL/3/402 205, fo. 298.

70 Jane E. Insley, ‘“Instruments of a very beautiful class”: George Everest in Europe, 1825–1830’, in Colonel Sir George Everest CB FRS: proceedings of the bicentenary conference at the Royal Geographical Society, 8 November 1990 (London, 1990), pp. 23–30.

71 Everest, ‘Account’, OIOC, BL, L/MIL/3/402 205, fo. 298.

72 See Cook, S. B., ‘The Irish raj: social origins and careers of Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service, 1855–1914’, Journal of Social History, 20 (1987), pp. 507–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

73 Dewey, Clive, ‘The education of a ruling caste: the Indian Civil Service in the era of competitive examination’, English Historical Review, 88 (1973), pp. 262–85Google Scholar.

74 Cook, ‘The Irish raj’, pp. 509–10.

75 R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College, Dublin, 1592–1952: an academic history (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 233–4.

76 Gordon L. Herries Davies, North from the Hook: 150 years of the Geological Survey of Ireland (Dublin, 1995), p. 31.

77 Sangwan, Satpal, ‘Reodering the earth: the emergence of geology as a scientific discipline in colonial India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 31 (1994), p. 297CrossRefGoogle Scholar; T. Oldham, Annual report of the superintendent of the Geological Survey of India and the Museum of Geology (Calcutta, 1860), p. 5.

78 Thomas Oldham to Sir Andrew Ramsay, d. Calcutta, 19 Apr. 1851, Imperial College London Archives (hereafter ICLA), KGA/RAMSAY/8/610/82.

79 Oldham, Annual report, p. 5.

80 L. L. Fermor, First twenty-five years of the Geological Survey of India (Calcutta, 1976), p. 42.

81 R. D. Oldham, A bibliography of Indian geology: being a list of books and papers, relating to the geology of British India and adjoining countries (Calcutta, 1888).

82 Deepak Kumar, Science and the raj, 1857–1905 (Delhi, 1997), pp. 44–5.

83 Fox, C. S., ‘The Geological Survey of India’, Nature, 160 (1947), pp. 889–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 McDowell and Webb, Trinity College, Dublin, pp. 1–15.

85 See McWilliams, Patrick, ‘Cartography and utilitarianism versus culture: Thomas Colby of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland’, Éire-Ireland, 43 (2008), pp. 183–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

86 Colby to Larcom, 26 Dec. 1842, Larcom papers, NLI, MS 7553.

87 Dewey, Clive, ‘Images of the village community: a study in Anglo-Indian ideology’, Modern Asian Studies, 6 (1972), p. 306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 See Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley, Political economy and colonial Ireland: the propagation and ideological function of economic discourse in the nineteenth century (London, 1992).

89 Dewey, Clive, ‘Celtic agrarian legislation and the Celtic Revival: historicist implications of Gladstone's Irish and Scottish land acts, 1870–1886’, Past and Present, 64 (1974), pp. 30–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

90 S. B. Cook, Imperial affinities: nineteenth-century analogies and exchanges between India and Ireland (New Delhi and London, 1993).

91 For an example of a career of an Irishman in the Indian Civil Service, see Barry Crosbie, ‘“L'enfant terrible of the I. C. S.”: C. J. O'Donnell and the British administration of Bengal, 1870–1882’, in Keith Jeffery and Robert Blyth, eds., The British empire and its contested pasts (Dublin, 2009), pp. 115–35.

92 Oldham to Ramsay, d. Gorey, Co. Wexford, 26 Apr. 1847, letters to Sir Andrew Ramsay (1846–48), ICLA, KGA/RAMSAY/8/610/18.

93 Thomas Oldham, ‘Preliminary notice on the coal and iron of Talcheer in the tributary mehals of Cuttack’, in Memoirs of the Geological Survey of India, i (Calcutta, 1859), p. 10.

94 Ibid., p. 12.

95 See Annual report of the superintendent of the Geological Survey of India and the Museum of Economic Geology (London, 1858–9).

96 For a detailed account of the politics behind meteorite collecting in India during the 1860s and 1870s, see Savithri Preetha Nair, ‘Science and the politics of colonial collecting: the case of Indian meteorites, 1856–1870’, British Journal for the History of Science, 39 (2006), pp. 97–119.

97 Ibid., p. 97.

98 Oldham, A bibliography of Indian geology.

99 See Geological Survey of India, Catalogue of the meteorites in the Museum of the Geological Survey of India (Calcutta, 1866).

100 R. W. Home and S. G. Kohlstedt, eds., International science and national scientific identity: Australia between Britain and America (Dordrecht, Boston, MA, and London, 1991), p. 3.

101 Lester, A., ‘Imperial circuits and networks: geographies of the British empire’, History Compass, 4 (2006), pp. 124–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 Crosbie, Barry, ‘Networks of empire: linkage and reciprocity in nineteenth-century Irish and Indian History’, History Compass, 7 (2009), pp. 993–1007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar