Past Imperfect Episode 27: Joshua Ehrlich on the East India Company’s politics of knowledge

Past Imperfect Episode 27 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Joshua Ehrlich, Associate Professor of History at the University of Macau and the author of The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge. Google has one thing in common with the East India Company: it sees itself as not just a business but a promoter of knowledge. In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, Ehrlich explains why colonial officials like Warren Hastings and Lord Wellesley set up schools and promoted scholarship. They saw an explicit political value in such projects. By being a patron of knowledge, the Company could “conciliate” key constituencies in India and Britain and fend off accusations of philistinism. Company officials began by forging alliances with learned elites and scholar-administrators. By the 1820s, however, some British colonial administrators were experimenting with something far more revolutionary: mass education.