Unmaking the East India Company by Tom Young

Unmaking the East India Company by Tom Young

Illuminates how new modes of artistic production in colonial India shaped the British state’s nationalisation of the East India Company, transforming the relationship between nation and empire   This pioneering book explores how art shaped the nationalisation of the East India Company between the loss of its primary monopoly in 1813 and its ultimate liquidation in 1858. Challenging the idea that parliament drove political reform, it argues instead that the Company’s political legitimacy was destabilised by novel modes of artistic production in colonial India. New artistic forms and practices—the result of new technologies like lithography and steam navigation, middle-class print formats like the periodical, the scrapbook and the literary annual, as well as the prevalence of amateur sketching among Company employees—reconfigured the colonial regime’s racial boundaries and techniques of governance. They flourished within transimperial networks, integrating middle-class societies with new political convictions and moral disciplines, and thereby eroding the aristocratic corporate cultures that had previously structured colonial authority in India.   Unmaking the East India Company contributes to a reassessment of British art as a global, corporate and intrinsically imperial phenomenon—highlighting the role of overlooked media, artistic styles and print formats in crafting those distinctions of power and identity that defined ‘Britishness’ across the world.   Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

“[A] pioneering book. . . Tom Young has risen to the challenge brilliantly. The book is lavishly illustrated and extremely well produced. . . . Every facet of this book is admirable.”—Charles Greig, Chowkidar

“Unmaking the East India Company is theoretically engaged but eminently readable and beautifully illustrated.”—John Mcaleer, H Soz Kult

Tom Young is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the History of Art Department at the University of Warwick.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781913107390
ISBN 10	1913107396
Title	Unmaking the East India Company
Author	Tom Young
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Year published	2023-06-13
Number of pages	255
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable