1600s
17th
18th
A01=Miles Ogborn
academic
Author_Miles Ogborn
bengal
britain
british
Category=KNTR
Category=NHTK
century
colonial
colonies
colonization
commerce
commercial
cultural
culture
discourse
eastern
empire
england
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
europe
european
far east
geography
historical
history
monopoly
power
print making
printer
printing
research
scholarly
sea
ship
success
trade
trading
travel
voyage
writing
written
Product details
- ISBN 9780226620411
- Weight: 624g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jun 2007
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, "Indian Ink" examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Miles Ogborn takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffee houses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, Ogborn argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word.
Navigating the juncture of imperial history and the history of the book, "Indian Ink" uncovers the intellectual and political legacies of early modern trade and empire and charts a new understanding of the geography of print culture.
Miles Ogborn is professor of geography at Queen Mary University of London.
