Francis Bacon's writings about scientific method introduced an unresolvable antinomy that characterizes all of the knowledge projects of Western modernity. This antimony, which sets up an uneasy relation between empirical data and universal or abstract theories, informs even the most basic epistemological unit of modern knowledge projects, which I have elsewhere called the modern fact. ¹ Even if this antinomy is inherent in all such projects, however, the relation between its two poles is not always balanced. In this essay, I want initially to examine one historical instance in which this balance was unsettled in favor of universalizing theory. In this section of the essay I argue, with Ranajit Guha, that the universalist knowledge project articulated by early nineteenth-century reformers and carried out most successfully in the slums of urban England met its limit in the colonial situation of British India. ² For English legislators who made decisions about British India, the data collected there was simply irrelevant to measures enacted to govern both the East India Company and the natives whose lives the company superintended. In the second part of the essay, I interrogate the theoretical tendency of my own argument. By paying attention to the ships that transported all of the paper, manufactured goods, and men necessary to govern British India in the early nineteenth century, I ask whether paying attention to the material practices associated with the recording, relocation, and reception of data can enable us to avoid simply repeating the universalizing ambition of abstract theory. In this part of the essay, I shift the emphasis from arts to transmission in order to make our "interpretational habits" more responsive to the effects of the materiality intrinsic to all incarnations of the Baconian project. ³

Legislation Without Information

     By 1833, when the renewal of the East India Company charter was scheduled for parliamentary review, reams of data had been collected about the territories that composed British India. Because of the central role played in British India by the military, and by sailors in particular, much of this data concerned the health of these men. Because of the importance of local taxes in financing the company after the Battle of Plassey, much of the data focused on revenue sources, like agricultural holdings and manufacturing concerns. Because religious differences were so critical to English attitudes about India, some of the data dealt with specific religious practices, like sati, the ritual practice of widows' self-sacrifice. Finally, because of the geographical distance that separated the British territories, not to mention the challenges posed to British rule by the subcontinent's unfamiliar terrain, much of the early data was topographical, geographical, or cartological. Despite the undeniable unevenness of this data—the geographical and revenue surveys lagged far behind their medical counterparts, for example, in both comprehensiveness and impartiality—the quantity of data available about British India indexed the considerable success of the East India Company's campaign to conquer what was eventually to become the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. ⁴

     The kind of data collected in British India in the first three decades of the nineteenth century conforms to the epistemological model preferred by the Whig reformers who sought to improve English urban conditions after 1830. These reformers, led by physicians and bureaucrats like James Philips Kay, Southwood Smith, and Edwin Chadwick, were determined to collect information about existing sanitary and housing conditions, often by visiting the slums themselves, and to compile statistical and narrative summaries of their findings that could convince legislators to enact sanitary laws. The documents composed by these men—including Kay's 1832 "Moral and Physical Conditions of the Working Classes...in Manchester" and Chadwick's 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain —number among the most influential pieces of English writing of the first half of the century. So influential were these and similar documents that they became the methodological and epistemological centerpieces of some of the century's most important institutions. Kay's pamphlet became the paradigm for the reports issued by the Manchester Statistical Society, and the Report on the Sanitary Commission became the norm for the studies generated by government agencies like the Health of Towns Commission and the Board of Health. ⁵ By mid-century, no English MP would have dared to introduce legislation that was not backed up by—or that could not lead to—an empirical survey that could yield the kind of statistical results these documents featured.

     Despite English legislators' insistence that data collection precede parliamentary action in the case of the English poor, however, and despite the similarities between the data sets available about English slums and British India, in the case of India legislation proceeded without reference to the existing data, without calls for collecting more information and apparently without concern about the discrepancy between the use of data in the English case and the total disregard of its Indian counterpart. Indeed, some of the most prominent Victorian advocates of Indian reform expressly insisted that the most reliable knowledge about this distant subcontinent could be produced not by the kind of eyewitness investigation that preceded legislation in England but by deductive or a priori reasoning, which proceeded from general principles about universal human nature. Three examples will suffice to demonstrate the prevalence of this position. The first two of my examples disagreed about the reason that abstract theory should trump empiricism; whereas James Mill offered an epistemological defense of deduction, Thomas Babington Macaulay preferred theoretical arguments for the sake of expediency. The third of my examples differed from the first two on the grounds of both method and politics; whereas Mill and, for different reasons, Macaulay advocated arguing from principle in the case of India, Archibald Alison explicitly insisted on making an empirical case, but not—as Macaulay did—because he advocated revising the principle of British rule. Instead, Alison supported continuing the commercial and administrative reign of the East India Company. Despite supporting empiricism, however, Alison was also willing to abandon this method when eyewitness reports ran counter to the theoretical positions he believed were universally true. For all of these men, who numbered among the first third of the century's most prominent English commentators on India, empirical evidence was either unnecessary or dispensable. For none of them, in other words, did it seem adequate or essential, as it did for nearly everyone in the case of domestic reform.

     In the preface to his History of British India (1818), James Mill acknowledges that reams of data had already been collected about India, much of it by Parliament itself, but instead of citing this evidence or celebrating its existence, he found numerous reasons to fault or dismiss it. Data about India, Mill complained, was too copious and too scattered to be useful, and it also dealt with a region too heterogeneous to submit to orderly description by a single or multiple observers. Indeed, according to Mill, even the individuals who collected the available data acknowledged that first-hand experience did not yield knowledge in the case of India. To support this last argument, Mill cites one of the most important English officers in India, William Bentinck, Governor of Fort St. George and President of the Council at Madras (and future Governor General of India). "The result of my own observation, during my residence in India," Bentinck declares,

is, that the Europeans generally know little or nothing of the customs and manners of the Hindoos. We are all acquainted with some prominent marks and facts which all who run may read: but their manner of thinking; their domestic habits and ceremonies, in which circumstances a knowledge of the people consists is, I fear, in great part wanting to us. We understand very imperfectly their language. They, perhaps, know more of ours; but their knowledge is by no means sufficiently extensive to give a description of subjects not easily represented by the insulated words in daily use. We do not, we cannot associate with the natives. We cannot see them in their houses, and with their families. We are necessarily very much confined to our houses by the heat. All our wants and business, which would create a greater intercourse with the natives, is done for us; and we are in fact strangers in the land. ⁶

     Although this passage might simply express Bentinck's regret that the conditions of British rule impeded the collection of useful data, Mill used it to support an epistemological position that would have rendered any amount of empirical observation worthless. According to this position, no eyewitness account, no matter how intimate the conditions under which it was produced, could overcome the inherent limitations of the human senses or the "constitution of the human mind." This "constitution," which Mill considered to be universal, dictates that any observer, when bombarded by "an infinite number of objects," will fix his attention on details that confirm the impressions with which he began.

In a cursory survey, it is understood, that the mind, unable to attend to the whole of an infinite number of objects, attaches itself to a few; and overlooks the multitude that remain. But what, then, are the objects to which the mind, in such a situation, is in preference attracted? Those which fall in with the current of its own thoughts; those which accord with its former impressions; those which confirm its previous ideas. ["P," 1–2:xxiv–xxv]

To counteract this tendency, according to Mill, judicious observers should read books instead of looking around; and they should allow their thoughts to be directed not by what they see but by what they simply know: "the most profound knowledge of the laws of human nature, which is the end, as well as instrument, of every thing" ("P," 1–2:xxvii). It is this knowledge—a knowledge not of data but of principles—that Mill trusts to ensure that the progress of his thoughts and associations will not simply confirm his original assumptions, even though this is what happens in the case of others. In his final defense of method, Mill claims to be able to bracket out his own prejudices by repeatedly referring to indisputable truth and law.

Having placed before me the materials of Indian history in a state I believed, of greater fullness and completeness, than any preceding inquirer, I followed the course of my own thoughts in the judgments which I formed; not because I vainly imagined my thoughts more valuable than those of all other men, but because the sincere and determined pursuit of truth imposed this rigid law. It would not allow me to give for true the opinion of any man, till I had satisfied myself that it was true; still less to give the opinion of any man for true, when I had satisfied myself that it was not true. ["P," 1–2:xxxii]

     Thomas Babington Macaulay disputed James Mill's deductive method in an 1829 review of Mill's "Essay on Government." In this review, Macaulay was emphatic about the grounds of his disagreement with Mill: "Our objection to the Essay of Mr. Mill is fundamental. We believe that it is utterly impossible to deduce the science of government from the principles of human nature." ⁷ When he rose to address the House of Commons four years later, by contrast, Macaulay, who was spokesman for the government's Board of Control, took a different line. In the case of India, he insisted, the kind of data that would ideally produce the knowledge that legislators needed was simply unavailable. While Macaulay implicitly allowed for the possibilities both that eyewitnesses might have produced useful information and that the kind of knowledge such information might have yielded could have been desirable, he explicitly argued two different positions. He insisted that the requisite data did not exist and that the very nature of the company—whose officials would have been responsible for gathering most of the relevant information—militated against such data ever being collected. Indeed, Macaulay came very close to admitting that this data was unnecessary in the case of India because, as he put it, India was simply sui generis "a state which resembles no other in history, and which forms by itself a separate class of political phenomena." ⁸

     To grasp the significance of Macaulay's arguments we need to reconstruct some of the details of the debate that engaged Parliament in the summer of 1833. The issue before legislators in June and July of that year was whether the company's charter, which granted both a monopoly over trade with China and responsibility for administering British India, should be renewed. Macaulay's position was that the company's trading monopoly should be curtailed but its administrative function renewed. As part of the compromise solution that Macaulay presented, which would have opened the China trade to Lancaster cotton manufacturers and other private traders but protected the dividends of the company's shareholders, Macaulay also argued that legislators should stop trying to base their decision on an assessment of how much of the company's revenues (and its current debt) came from its commercial trade and how much came from its administrative and territorial activities. If such an assessment had been possible, it would presumably have been easy to decide whether English taxpayers might eventually become liable for the company's debts because it would have been possible to see whether the administrative activities (tax collection) paid for Indian rule. Macaulay insisted that no such differentiation was possible because the past activities of the company—not to mention its accounts—had inextricably mixed the two sources of revenue together.

Assets which are commercial in form, may be territorial as respects the rights of property; assets which are territorial in form, may be territorial as respects the right of property. A chest of tea is not necessarily commercial property; it may have been bought out of the territorial revenue. A fort is not necessarily territorial property; it may stand on ground which the Company bought 100 years ago out of their commercial profits. [ PR, 19:508]

Given this situation, Macaulay suggested that legislators simply acknowledge the mixed nature of the company and see it as what it was—an anomaly, "a political monster of two natures" ( PR, 19:509)—that required an unorthodox response: the company should be allowed to continue its rule, and the shareholders' dividends should henceforth be paid from a fund based on its territorial revenue and guaranteed by the English government.

     In making his case, Macaulay was not only violating his own professed preference for empiricism over deduction. He was also simply ignoring data that actually did exist and that did make an effort to discriminate between commercial and administrative revenues. This data had been cited, in both summary and numerical forms, by James Silk Buckingham on the floor of the Commons on July 10, just before Macaulay rose to speak. Quoting the figures supplied by two financial experts, Mr. Rickards ("an experienced financier") and Mr. Wilkinson ("a professed accountant...a gentleman well known in the City of London"), Buckingham demonstrated that the company's debt stood at 24,934,208 pounds. Quoting Rickards again, Buckingham also demonstrated that the company had conducted "minute survey[s]" of Indian lands, which could have been used to distinguish territorial revenue from commercial profits; instead of using these surveys in order to quantify its territorial assets and debts, however, the company had conducted them to maximize the taxes it collected ( PR, 19:481–82, 484). Calling this "the most inquisitorial, harsh, and oppressive system of taxation that had ever been heard of under the sun," Buckingham denounced the government's proposal that "such incapables" as the company's officials had proved themselves to be (as traders and as governors) should be allowed to continue their administrative rule ( PR, 19:484, 483). Buckingham concluded his remarks with a strong rhetorical flourish: If, after seeing the evidence he had presented, his colleagues "persisted in handing over India for another twenty years to those who had ruled it so badly, and whose policy was stained with so much injustice and crime—on the heads of those who were parties to such a transfer, would fairly rest a portion of the guilt" ( PR, 19:491).

     When Macaulay spoke, he simply dismissed what Buckingham called evidence. "There is no evidence which would enable us to assign to each branch its proper share" of the debt, he flatly stated. Instead of defending this assertion with additional examples, Macaulay demanded that his colleagues begin anew. Furthermore, he insisted, legislators should admit what they all already knew: even if they wanted to consult the data that had been collected about India, they did not have the time, the energy, or the will to do so. Should Parliament want to "look...into Indian affairs as we look into British affairs....twenty-four hours a day and three hundred and sixty-five days a year would be too short a time to settle these matters," he asserted. Parliament does not have "the necessary knowledge" to make informed decisions about India, he concluded; "nor has it motives to acquire that knowledge" ( PR, 19:514). Finally, Macaulay concluded, if the Indian data were to exist—which it could not, given the nature of the company—and if Parliament were to have the time—which it did not —then Parliament still would not use it because this legislative body does not, and will never, represent the Indian people as it represents the English.

     The logic of Macaulay's arguments reveals that the conclusions he presented simply supported the assumptions with which he began. Because the "Empire is itself the strangest of all political anomalies," it must be governed by a company that is anomalous too—half commercial enterprise, half administrative instrument ( PR, 19:515). Because "no evidence exists," and because Parliament would not consult it even if it did, English legislators should simply accept the principle Macaulay and the Government laid before them: the East India Company should govern India but give up its China monopoly, company shareholders should be paid out of the continuing territorial revenues, and the British people should guarantee those dividends in the unlikely case that the territorial revenues did not yield an annual ¹⁰ percent on the company's shares. Ultimately, this was the compromise that Parliament and the company accepted—the former because reasoning from principles seemed easier than sorting through Buckingham's evidence, the latter because the guarantee of a 10 percent dividend was more attractive than continued struggle in the arena of the China trade. 9

     Macaulay's position did have opponents, especially outside of the House of Commons. Among these, one of the most outspoken was Archibald Alison, the prominent Tory jurist and historian, who supported continuing the company's monopoly over the China trade as well as its administrative and territorial activities in India. Alison was adamant, moreover, that the tactics Macaulay used to persuade his colleagues violated the method upon which Parliament ought to make decisions. Instead of the "shallow sophistical style of oratory" that Macaulay substituted for evidence, MPs ought to use the statistical returns and Government documents that Alison claimed would refute both the Whigs' pretense of impartiality and Macaulay's supposed commitment to empiricism. 10 In two long articles published just before and soon after the House debates, Alison presented five numerical tables that he claimed proved that the company relied on the China trade to support its administrative activities, and he argued forcefully that if the China monopoly were to be curtailed, the burden for the guaranteed dividends would fall on English taxpayers. ¹¹ Not only was Alison unsuccessful in derailing the legislators' eagerness to settle the India question, however, but when existing data threatened to contradict other assumptions he held to be universal—that slavery was natural, for example, and that oligarchical government was superior to democracy—he simply dropped his commitment to empiricism. Indeed, even from the nature of the tables he presented, we can see that figures functioned primarily as rhetorical devices in Alison's essays, not as evidence from which an undecided reader could reach an independent conclusion. Alison quotes individuals who had spent time in India and he gestures towards the authority of such eyewitness accounts, but his hatred of democracy and centralized government neither derive from nor require the polemical version of data that his primary source provides. ¹² In acknowledging that the testimony of an eyewitness is convenient but not essential, Alison obliquely admitted what Macaulay unequivocally stated: whatever data had been collected about India was incidental to legislators' decisions about the company, for everyone already knew everything they needed to know to make a legislative decision about a subcontinent they were never likely to see. ¹³

Beyond Abstract Knowledge

     In a compelling analysis of Mill's History of British India, Ranajit Guha argues that Mill's neglect of the existing Indian data served an agenda that was more political than philosophical. To advance the "universalist project" associated with liberal reform, Guha proposes, Mill had to ignore the data that had been gathered about the subcontinent. "It was imperative...for Utilitarian discourse to create a void, since none was given. Accordingly, the author's textual strategy required that the ancient indigenous culture of the colonized should be demolished on intellectual and moral grounds, so that he [Mill] could then go on to posit his own system into that vacancy." ¹⁴ While the functionalist tendency of Guha's formulation may overstate the case, I concur with his general point, and I would extend it to Macaulay's and Alison's treatments of India as well. All three men occasionally or systematically ignored existing data about the subcontinent—whatever their stated reason for doing so—whenever that data did not support the theoretical and political assumptions with which they began.

     Two additional theoretical points can be adduced from Guha's formulation. First, the English neglect of existing Indian data reminds us that all data does not count as information, much less lead to the kind of knowledge that legislators required in equivalent English situations. For data to become information, it must be decontextualized and transmitted back to the source whose protocols inspired its collection. Yet, in the case of the early nineteenth-century Indian data, the process of decontextualization and transmission stripped the data of its usefulness because, when it was relocated in the highly political contexts of Mill's Utilitarianism and the post-Reform Parliament, it fell victim to the agendas that obtained in those contexts. This did not happen to the data collected about the English slums because this data was collected and presented within the same political context that governed the site of its reception; indeed, it was mandated and read by the very legislators who represented the boroughs that, in many cases, were diseased, dirty, and poor. This example shows us that even data collected and formulated according to the governing source's protocols about what will count as information and knowledge (empirical observation, statistical and narrative presentation) can fail to make the grade—simply because it violates other protocols, in this case, protocols that were epistemological (Mill's associationalism), political (the Government's Whig overall agenda, Alison's commitment to aristocratic rule), or administrative (Parliament's burdensome workload).

     The second point we can draw from nineteenth-century English lawmakers' neglect of the Indian data concerns a contradiction in the universalist knowledge project itself. According to the Baconian ideal, the entire globe and all of its inhabitants ought to be subject to empirical observation and, through taxonomical, numerical, or statistical representation, they ought to be translatable into useful information. Yet the example I have discussed reveals that the universalist ambition of this project has a limit: when data is inconvenient—when it is either too copious or too antithetical to prevailing assumptions (epistemological, political, or institutional)—investigators may abandon their claims about the universality of method in favor of claims about the universality of content. In this instance, using the Indian data, which had been collected by the method legislators endorsed in the English case, was less attractive than simply invoking cherished assumptions about free trade and racial superiority, even though the link between these assumptions and the available data was tenuous at best.

     This contradiction within the universalizing ambition of the liberal knowledge project has its counterpart in another contradiction, which is also illuminated by the 1833 renewal of the East India Company charter. This contradiction inheres in what Marx described as the universalizing tendency of capital—its tendency to expand itself by transforming the entire world into a market. The contradiction emerges when the expansion of trade and production intended to enlarge the world's markets begins to drive down the rate of profit these activities can yield, thus curtailing the very value of capital, which the expansion was intended to promote. ¹⁵ Both before and, especially, after the East India's monopoly over the China trade was abolished, the expansion of competition among Lancaster cotton manufacturers, company traders, and the so-called private traders both within and outside of the company rapidly drove down the profits that the India and China trades produced, thus making it increasingly difficult for anyone to make a profit manufacturing for these markets or shipping produce to and from them. ¹⁶ Supporting the end of the East India Company's monopoly over the China trade, then, as Macaulay did, meant supporting free trade (most narrowly, the interests of the Lancaster free trade interests; more generally, the free market ideology articulated by Adam Smith). This, in the long run, meant supporting a decrease in the rate of profits available to anyone who participated in the India/China trades.

     I think that these observations are illuminating, for they help us see beyond the terms in which the debate was conducted in the 1830s. Nevertheless, the level of abstraction at which I have formulated them threatens to repeat the universalizing tendency I have associated with Mill, Macaulay, Alison, and the universalizing liberal knowledge project more generally. In doing so, this mode of analysis may also repeat the tendency to ignore some kinds of available data, which do not readily rise to the level of information, much less knowledge, required for this kind of abstract analysis. In the remainder of this essay, I want to pursue some of this data, to see what else we can learn from it about the triangular trade that bound England, India, and China to each other in the early nineteenth century.

     While there are many ways to restore data missing from this abstract analysis, constraints of space require me to restrict my observations to a single instance: the ships that literally transported everything between England, India, and China. While these ships occupied a prominent place in the imaginations of nineteenth-century Britons, whether or not they ever set foot on board an East Indiaman, legislators in Parliament rarely discussed the ships' material impact on the British Empire, except when the topic of maritime safety was the explicit concern. Despite this neglect, the ships played critical roles in the creation and maintenance of the British empire in India. Before the widespread use of steamships and before the establishment of telegraphic communication (both after the 1870s), the massive ships that ferried people, paper, and ideas to and from London and its Indian colonies not only closed a vast geographical distance but also opened a temporal gap that generated effects over and beyond the abstract principles legislators discussed in 1833. Between 1791 and 1834, the outward voyage from England to India could take as long as six months, and the trip home added three additional months; the "double voyage," from London to Bombay or Madras, and thence to China and home, often required eighteen months. ¹⁷ During this long duree, cargoes intended for a distant market could be looted or spoiled, individuals in hopes of making their fortunes could fall ill or die, and legislative or commercial mandates, drawn up in response to data once current, could simply fall into irrelevance, as they did when the conditions that had obtained at the time of composition no longer existed when the dictates were received.

     A brief survey of some of the material and representational implications of these events will suffice to convey the ways that transmission affected British India, that entity that English legislators typically debated in the abstract. Most simply, the dangers ships faced at sea rendered the communications they carried more fragile than the paper on which they were written. Thus the delay that distance inevitably imposed was compounded by the uncertainties associated with the ships themselves. Having had this point driven home by the burning of the Bengal, to which he had entrusted his previous communiqués, for example, one Mr. Peter Cherry took extra precautions in his subsequent attempts to write home: "I have now sent a letter to all of you by different ships and I hope at least one will survive," he explained in 1815. "My letters by the Fleet are divided between the Lady Castlereagh, the Phoenix, the Warren Hastings, and the Coldstream. " ¹⁸ Even when letters were not lost, the conditions in which they were composed and by which they were conveyed regularly undermined the function they were intended to serve. This was especially acute in the case of the East India Company before 1828, for before Lord Ellenborough instituted administrative reforms in India House, the format of communications from India, along with the method by which they were routinely dealt in Leadenhall Street, meant that almost no issue, whatever its importance, could be addressed expeditiously. Before 1828, the officials in the field submitted their reports in huge, general letters, which mixed trivial with important matters; India House's responses mimicked this form, answering the despatches point by point in paragraphs numbered according to the order of the original queries. According to C. H. Phillips, in India House, collecting and composing answers to field officers' queries could take from three to six months, and examinations of these drafts, first by the Board of Governors, then by the Committee of Correspondence, were rarely finished before an additional six months had passed. With the volume of correspondence growing exponentially every year and the Directors still employing only five examiners, who were responsible for preparing all drafts, the backlog of unanswered correspondence increased until it was common for officials in India to wait two and a half years for a response to a particular query. Even after Ellenborough's reforms took effect, official responses still required almost a year to make their way from India House to British India. Predictably, by the time the letters reached their destination, the orders they contained were often not relevant to situations that had changed in the interim. ¹⁹

     British India's dependence on ships also meant that the men who owned, commanded, and staffed these vessels were somehow part of the company and, as such, were affected by nearly every decision lawmakers took about the empire. Before 1731, the company built its own ships; in that year, the Court of Directors set a new precedent by granting the right to build and operate an East Indiaman to a private individual, Captain C. Rigby. By 1781, with the proprietors of the company complaining that they were in "a state of absolute subjugation to the Owners of shipping," the company began to move to a system of competition, granting the right to operate a company ship for six voyages to those who bid low or who enjoyed company patronage. ²⁰ This system continued until 1833, when Parliament's decision to revoke the China monopoly meant a dramatic curtailment of the number of ships the company needed; this, in turn, meant that the ships' officers traded in their right to work for compensation specified by the company. The problem was that, by 1833, the company's Maritime Service consisted of ships of two descriptions. "A part of these were the property of the company. The officers in these were appointed by the Directors, and rose according to seniority," as a contemporary explained. By contrast, "other ships employed in the company's service were the property of private parties, and were chartered by the company for a certain number of voyages. The officers of these ships were not appointed by the Court of Directors, and they did not rise by seniority, as in the company's own ships." The result was predictable: even though the company wanted to compensate everyone on an equal basis, the private owners argued that "these two branches of the Maritime Service were in many respects distinct, and that when the company ceased to be a commercial body, their respective claims to compensation would be widely different." ²¹ Officers on the private ships, in other words, thought that they deserved more compensation than the company's officers.

     The problem this example provides, of a single Maritime Service actually composed of two different kinds of entities, each of whom had distinct interests, was repeated at the level of the company itself. While legislators, along with most contemporaries, treated the East India Company as a single entity—a corporate body apparently so unified as to be regularly personified as John Company—in actuality, the company was composed of various individuals and interests, many of whom competed with each other. Thus, the company's shareholders—the Proprietors—constituted the voting body who (theoretically) governed the corporation (as long as an individual held the requisite number of shares to earn a vote); but the Court of Proprietors was overseen (and sometimes overruled) by the company's Court of Directors. After 1784, the Court of Directors was overseen by yet another administrative entity, the Board of Control, whose members were appointed by the Government and who (theoretically) did not have a direct (monetary) interest in the company. When the fate of the company's charter was debated in 1833, then, the interests of "the company" were represented on the floor of the Commons only indirectly, through quoted reports, while the interests of the government were represented explicitly by Macaulay.

     But John Company was an entity fissured in still more ways. In the everyday operations of the company, in the crucible of every voyage—the contents and proceeds of which were "the East India Company," and even "British India," in a very real sense—the interests of "the company" (its shareholders and directors) competed with the interests of the individuals who commanded and staffed the ships. For almost every one of the individuals who composed the company's Maritime Service, whether he manned a company ship or a private ship chartered for a particular voyage, conducted some personal business alongside the company's official activities. The nominal pay, even for a ship's commander, was small (and an individual typically had to purchase the right of command), but each commander (and nearly every officer as well) was allowed to supplement his wages by private trading. Thus, every officer was allotted a specific amount of space in which he could transport goods for private sale in his ports of call. By the end of the eighteenth century, company rules stipulated that one hundred tons of each ship's carriage be allotted to private trade on the voyage out and sixty tons on the return voyage; of this, the commander was generally granted half. On voyages between ports in the East, moreover, two-fifths of a ship's tonnage was granted as an indulgence to the commander, and, if the company did not need the other three-fifths, the officers could bid for the right to fill—or sell to third parties—the vacant space. ²² One sailor, angry at the company's desire to retire all of its officers at the same rate in 1833, pointed out that a commander routinely made five to six thousand pounds profit from a voyage; on the double voyage that extended to China, a commander could reap as much as ten thousand or even twelve thousand pounds. ²³

     While such opportunities were sanctioned by the company, of course, official permission and precise allotments did not prevent opportunistic officers from taking advantage of the company and packing their own (or third parties') goods in space they were not supposed to use. ²⁴ Pilfering and petty theft were also routine, especially among sailors below the rank of officer, many of whom understandably did not think that their interests coincided with those of the company. According to one modern historian, for example, sailors on one eighteenth-century ship removed all of the iron cleats (used for fastening rope) in order to exchange them for sex with metal-starved (but sexually generous) Tahitians. ²⁵ Speaking more generally, another modern historian reckons that all East Indiamen were

riddled with graft....Boats often slipped alongside in the dead of night to take off a choice assortment of goods smuggled by captain, mates, or purser, on their own behalf or that of someone else. Ships would be ostensibly blown off their course to take refuge in some Irish harbor where the agents of a Cork or Belfast firm would covertly do a bit of business with their captains. ²⁶

     One consequence of the internal divisions within John Company is that any commercial records company officials produced—and historians can now use—must be incomplete. Even when exact counts of numbers of cubic feet allotted to each officer were kept, and even if dozens of company clerks routinely catalogued every item the ships officially transported, these records are bound to be inexact—simply because in the long passages to and from the East unlisted cargo so easily made its way on or off the ships, and goods painstakingly recorded so frequently went missing. Before 1833, the company did not even attempt to distinguish between the India and China trades, moreover, and this inevitably meant that a substantial part of the profit-generating activity—smuggling opium from India to China—necessarily eluded official records.

     It is also important to recognize that the East Indiamen were neither simply sites of attrition or loss nor vehicles that rendered some communications obsolete. For the ships—and the temporal dimension they inscribed in the everyday workings of empire—were also sites of production. Most simply, perhaps, they produced employment opportunities for individuals who sometimes could not find work on land, either because their families had no connections or because the individuals had criminal records. While the pay for a common seaman was low, the frequency of petty theft and the permeability of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate uses of the ship's space and goods made ships productive sites for the smallest form of quasi-legitimate entrepreneurship—quasi-legitimate because looking the other way allowed ship owners to keep the sailors' wages low. Such entrepreneurship also occurred on a grander, and more legitimate, scale, of course, as officers learned to calibrate their English purchases to the uncertain and changing markets in the distant East. In transactions such as the following, ordinary Englishmen learned and perfected the finer points of speculation and how to adjust to unexpected market conditions: In 1778, when Charles Chisholme arrived in Calcutta with his investment of a large pack of hunting dogs and 150 pipes of Madeira, he found the wine so plentiful that it was selling at sixty percent below prime but the dogs so desirable that he could use the demand for them to offset the devaluation of the wine. To take advantage of the situation, "he instructed his purser to give notice that any person taking four pipes at three hundred rupees a pipe would be entitled to two couple of hounds at the market price." By this shrewd business decision, he disposed of both the wine and the hounds at a one hundred percent profit. ²⁷

     Beyond opportunities for individuals, the East Indiamen also produced miniature societies, which, because they existed beyond the laws of any nation, required their own codes of civility, their own standards of justice, and their own criteria for just punishment. ²⁸ These societies were almost inevitably multilingual and probably tolerated a variety of sexual activities; each one also mixed classes and races in unusually close proximity and in conditions that required cooperation if everyone was to survive. ²⁹ Even more than eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English utopian communities and prisons, the East Indiamen constituted genuine alternatives to an England increasingly characterized by rapid industrialization, the concentration of populations in urban areas, and a new form of social stratification based on money rather than the ownership of land.

     Finally, it was as an active—arguably, as the most active—component of the emergent money economy that the East Indiamen played their most productive role. For the very temporal expanse that frustrated swift and accurate communication, cost lives, and encouraged entrepreneurship both large and small also created monetary value. The time required to cross the seas could generate value wildly in excess of the profits actual commodities could yield because of the magic of bills of exchange—written promises to pay, at some specified future date and with interest, debts incurred at the point of issue. Sometimes, these bills stayed put while the cargo they sponsored (and which underwrote them as security) made their perilous way across the waters. Sometimes the bills themselves traveled, as interest-bearing stand-ins for the riches that Indian nabobs could not otherwise transport safely to England or as the company's promises to pay salaries, bonuses, or dividends that commerce would eventually (presumably) yield. And sometimes the bills changed hands in the country of issue or receipt, as individuals used them to raise more capital on debts whose repayment the bills delayed. One example will serve to suggest how these ubiquitous credit instruments created value out of the time required for ships to cross the ocean or simply for bills to mature.

The India trade has been one huge system of credit. If goods were bought in Manchester, by a house in London, they were paid for by bills at six months' date; and, as soon as shipped, an advance was obtained again by a bill at six months for a large part of the first cost, by the consignee, who, again, in his turn, not infrequently drew upon the house in India, against the bills of lading when transmitted. The shipper and the consignee were thus both put in possession of funds, months before they actually paid for the goods; and, very commonly, these bills were renewed at maturity on pretence of affording time for the returns in a "long trade." Moreover, losses by such a trade, instead of leading to its contraction, led directly to its increase. The poorer men became, the greater need they had to purchase, in order to make up, by new advances, the capital they had lost on the past adventures. Purchases thus became, not a question of supply and demand, but the most important part of the finance operations of a firm labouring under difficulties.

     But this is only one side of the picture. What took place in reference to the export of goods at home, was taking place in the purchase and shipment of produce abroad. Houses in India, who had credit to pass their bills, were purchasers of sugar, indigo, silk, or cotton,—not because the prices advanced from London by the last overland mail promised a profit on the prices current in India, but because former drafts upon the London house would soon fall due, and must be provided for. What way so simple as to purchase a cargo of sugar, pay for it in bills upon the London house at ten months' date, transmit the shipping documents by the overland mail; and, in less than two months, the goods on the high seas, or perhaps not yet passed the mouth of the Hoogly, were pawned in Lombard Street,—putting the London house in funds eight months before the drafts against those goods fell due. ³⁰

     In making the time it took to travel from England to India and back a central part of the finances of empire, the East Indiamen also, ironically, further pushed capitalism toward the contradiction Marx described. For, as the yield of finance capital, in the forms of credit and speculative or investment capital, gradually began to outstrip the profits that manufacturing and transporting commodities had once supplied, the dynamic internal to capitalism also shifted, from simply enlarging markets overseas and improving the productive capacities of home industries like textiles to making money from money. As this shift accelerated during the course of the nineteenth century in the wake of free trade (and the curtailment of the company monopoly), English capitalists increasingly prospered as world financiers—until, that is, the 1870s combination of competition from international trade and decreased opportunities for profitable overseas investment began to erode the empire from outside and from within. ³¹

Conclusion

     Attention to the East Indiamen should remind us that the arts of transmission do not simply facilitate the communication of ideas or information. Insofar as transmission has a material dimension—and it always does—it inevitably produces effects that exceed, and sometimes undermine, the communicative function that transmissions are designed to serve. Even a friend's email message, that apparently disembodied sequence of lights, requires miles of wiring and colossal mainframe computers; and such messages can also host unwanted viruses (or open the electronic door to spam). The example of the East Indiamen should also help us remember two further points: significance—or value—is not exclusively a product of information; and what converts data into useful knowledge—or into information, for that matter—is not simply conformity to prevailing epistemological protocols. Value can be a side effect of the transmission of information; in this case, it was the result of the necessary but opportunistic geographic transfer of funds in the form of bills of exchange that hitched a ride, as it were, on John Company's ships. The India data the ships did ferry, meanwhile, washed up on the shoals of politics in England, where it was simply dispersed, neglected, or filed away for someone else's later use.

     The example of the East Indiamen is not intended to undermine our efforts to derive abstract or general principles from empirical data. With it, I want simply to caution us against forgetting that modern knowledge projects, however they are organized or conducted, always take place in temporal and spatial settings that yield part of each one's effects—if for no other reason than that traversing time and space requires some material vessel. Material vessels always leave some trace, even if our modern interpretational habits typically track at too high a level of abstraction to give them their due.

Critical Inquiry 30 (Autumn 2004)

© 2004 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/04/3004–0010$10.00. All rights reserved.

     1. See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998).

     2. "The universalist project...hurtled itself against an insuperable barrier in colonialism" (Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India [Cambridge, Mass.], p. 19).

     3. In the thesis statement of Materialities of Communication, K. Ludwig Peiffer states that the editors were "looking for underlying constraints whose technological, material, procedural, and performative potentials have been all too easily swallowed up by interpretational habits" (K. Ludwig Peiffer, "The Materiality of Communication," in Materialities of Communication, trans. William Whebrey, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Peiffer [Stanford, Calif., 1994], p. 12).

     4. On the medical surveys, see David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 23–28. The revenue surveys and the geographical surveys, which were first stages toward a general atlas of India, are discussed in Peter Penner, The Patronage Bureaucracy in North India (Delhi, 1986), pp. 49–56, and Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1990), esp. chaps. 1 and 10. On the campaign against sati, see C. H. Phillips, introduction to The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, Governor-General of India 1828–1835 (Oxford, 1977), 1:xxvi–xxviii. The best general discussions of the state of data about British India, the modes by which it was collected, and the factors that impeded this collection are C. A. Bayly, "Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India," Modern Asian Studies 27 (1993): 3–43 and Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1834 (Cambridge, 1996).

     5. I discuss the genre of these documents, which I call anatomical realism, in Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995), pp. 73–97.

     6. Quoted in James Mill, "Preface of the Editor," History of British India (1818; New York, 1968), 1–2:xxix–xxx; hereafter abbreviated as "P."

     7. Macaulay, "Mill's Essay on Government," in Utilitarian Logic and Politics: James Mill's "Essay on Government" and Macaulay's Critique and the Ensuing Debate, ed. Jack Lively and John Rees (Oxford, 1978), p. 124.

     8. Hansard's Parliamentary Reports (10 Jul. 1833, Commons), 19:536; hereafter abbreviated as PR.

     9. For a discussion of the company's directors' willingness to accept the curtailment of their commercial autonomy, see C. H. Phillips, The East India Company, 1784–1834 (1940; Manchester, 1961), pp. 291–93.

     10. Archibald Alison, "The First Session of the Reformed Parliament," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 34 (November 1833): 785, 781.

     11. See Alison, "The East India Question," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 33 (May 1833): 776–803 and "The First Session of the Reformed Parliament," pp. 776–804.

     12. This source was a pamphlet by William Sinclair, "A Brief Inquiry into the State and Prospects of India. By an Eye-Witness in the Military Service of the Company" (Edinburgh, 1833).

     13. Alison states that the benefits of the company "might have been inferred, a priori, from the facts of its steady progress and long continuance; but it is doubly satisfactory to have it established by the united authority of theory and experience" (Alison, "East India Question," p. 780).

     14. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, p. 78.

     15.

The contradiction, to put it in a very general way, consists in that the capitalist mode of production involves a tendency towards absolute development of the productive forces...regardless of the social conditions under which capitalist production takes place; while, on the other hand, its aim is to preserve the value of existing capital and promote its self-expansion (i.e. to promote an ever more rapid growth of this value)....It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and closing point, the motive and purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa....The means—unconditional development of the productive forces of society—comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of capital. [If the] capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world-market, [it] is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this...historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production. [Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, quoted in Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London, 1994), p. 220]

     16. The greatest exception to this generalization in terms of a product was opium, which continued to be a profitable export from India to China. This trade was illegal, however, so the opium profits do not figure in reliable records about the Eastern market.

     17. This estimate comes from Henry Wise, Analysis of a Hundred East India Voyages (cited in Jean Sutton, The Lords of the East: The East India Company and Its Ships, 1600–1874 [London, 2000], p. 94).

     18. Quoted in Sir Evan Cotton, East Indiamen: The East India Company's Maritime Service, ed. Sir Charles Fawcett (London, 1949), p. 121.

     19. See Phillips, East India Company, pp. 264–68.

     20. One glimpse of the stakes contemporaries saw in this competition is provided by a company document entitled "Copy of Two Reports from the Court of Directors to the General Court, Respecting the Shipping Concerns of the Company, which are to be laid before the General Court, appointed to be held on Wednesday, next, the 17th of February. With a Letter from Thomas Henchman, Esq. To William Devaynes, Esq.; Late Chairman of the East India Company, on the Subject of the Company's Shipping. To Which is Annexed, the Substance of a Speech Delivered by Rande Jackson. Esq., in Support of a Resolution of the Honourable the Court of Directors, for Conducting the Shipping Concerns of the Company on the Principles of Fair and Open Competition." This is a privately printed (company) document, "To be had gratis by every qualified Proprietor, on application to J. Debrett, Picadilly; and T. Chapman, Fleet-Street" (1796; in possession of the Cambridge University Library, Rare Books Collection).

     21. The East-India Company and the Maritime Service (London, 1834), p. 10.

     22. See Cotton, East Indiamen, p. 44.

     23. See The East India Company and the Maritime Service, pp. 20–21. Writing in 1949, Cotton places the profits even higher, citing 8,000 to 10,000 pounds as common for the single voyage and 18,000 pounds for the coveted double-voyage; see Cotton, East Indiamen, p. 37.

    24. For a discussion of the use and abuse of "privilege" trade, see Holden Furber, John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 277–85.

     25. See Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 125–26.

     26. Furber, John Company, p. 283.

     27. Cotton, East Indiamen, p. 35.

     28. In his ethnographic reconstruction of the codes that governed behavior on an eighteenth-century schooner, Dening usefully reminds us that, even though a ship was a total environment, a captain could not exercise discipline on board without negotiations and the unspoken recognition that sailors had the right to depart from rules at certain times and in special circumstances; see Dening, Mr. Bligh's Bad Language, pp. 113–56.

     29. For a discussion of the racial and linguistic diversity aboard ships, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000). On shipboard sexual relations, see Barry R. Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1995), and William Huddard, Unpathed Waters: Account of the Life and Times of Joseph Huddart, FRS (London, 1989), p. 49.

     30. Quoted in W. T. C. King, History of the London Discount Market (London, 1936), pp. 135–36.