British East India Company

The British East India Company was a commercial enterprise whose presence in India, as Edward Said describes it, developed into a vehicle for British political and economic control. Its importance in this account lies not only in occupation: the Company also provided the institutional setting in which William Jones pursued scholarship, joined the study of Indian law to colonial administration, and helped make India a province of European learning.

Commercial Presence and Political Control

Portugal established the first European bases in India in the early sixteenth century. England’s activity there was essentially commercial for a long period, from 1600 to 1758, but European competition eventually turned commerce into political dominance. Britain and France fought in India from 1744 to 1748 and again from 1756 to 1763; by 1769, the British had emerged in practical economic and political control of the subcontinent. The Company’s role belongs to this broader transition from trading presence to occupying power.

Said contrasts the European attitude toward India with the fear attached to Islam. India did not present Europe with an indigenous threat; rather, the crumbling of native authority opened the country to rivalry among European powers and to direct political control. This enabled a proprietary European attitude toward the Indian Orient, but not accurate knowledge of it. The distinction matters: political access and claims of possession did not in themselves amount to understanding.

William Jones and Company Service

William Jones went to India in 1783 and took up a post with the Company. Upon arrival, he began a program of study that he described in “Objects of Enquiry During My Residence in Asia.” Its topics ranged from Hindu and Muslim laws and the politics and geography of Hindustan to Bengal’s government, Indian medicine and natural products, Asian poetry and music, and India’s trade, manufacture, agriculture, and commerce. In a letter to Lord Althorp dated August 17, 1787, Jones stated his ambition to know India better than any other European. Said identifies in that ambition an early form of the later claim to superior European knowledge of the Orient.

Jones’s Company appointment joined scholarly inquiry to an administrative institution. Said presents this combination as central to the history of Orientalism: Jones was not simply a scholar observing India from outside the machinery of rule. His service placed him within a political order that could use acquired knowledge to govern, while his learning helped convert the region’s languages, laws, customs, and histories into objects of European study.

Law, Scholarship, and Administration

The Company’s governing context is especially visible in the treatment of Indian law. Seven years before Jones arrived, Warren Hastings had decided that Indians should be governed according to their own laws. The project depended on translation and specialist knowledge: the Sanskrit legal code was then available for practical use only in Persian translation, and no Englishman knew Sanskrit well enough to consult its original texts. Company official Charles Wilkins mastered Sanskrit and began translating the Institutes of Manu; Jones soon assisted him. Wilkins was also the first translator of the Bhagavad-Gita.

In January 1784, Jones convened the first meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, intended to serve India as the Royal Society served England. As the society’s first president and as a magistrate, he acquired what Said calls effective knowledge of the Orient and its peoples. The pairing of magistracy and scholarship gives the Company episode its institutional significance: to learn, compare, and codify were also ways of making a diverse society administratively comprehensible. Jones’s stated impulse to gather the Orient into a complete digest of laws, figures, customs, and works exemplifies how knowledge could reduce variety to categories useful to European understanding and rule.

Place in Said’s Argument

The Company’s history illustrates a larger argument about the relation between European knowledge and power. India’s political subordination did not follow from an objective understanding already achieved; instead, control and access helped create the conditions in which European scholarship could define and organize its subject. The Company’s commercial origins, its political ascendancy, and Jones’s official and scholarly work therefore appear as connected parts of a history in which learning and administration were intertwined.

Said’s wider discussion warns that such representations can displace the histories of the peoples they claim to describe. In his account of the Description de l'Égypte, for example, a European record is shown supplanting Egyptian history with a narrative that presents the region through European categories. The Company material supplies a related Indian context: colonial institutions could facilitate the collection and classification of knowledge while leaving a gap between proprietary confidence and accurate understanding. The Company thus matters to the article not as a fully narrated corporate biography, but as a concrete link between commercial expansion, political control, and the making of Orientalist knowledge.