What do modern-day behemoths like Google have in common with the East India Company?

For Joshua Ehrlich, the answer lies in how such companies have justified themselves as promoters of knowledge. When they established Google in the late 1990s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin declared it their mission “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

More than two centuries ago, the East India Company (sans search engines and AI) used very similar language while defending itself against its critics. The Company argued that it was not just a commercial concern. Rather, as Ehrlich tells us, it “made the support of knowledge a cornerstone of its legitimacy”.

Ehrlich, associate professor of history at the University of Macau, joins Past Imperfect to discuss his recent book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge. Ehrlich presents a rich portrait of how scholars and scholarship played explicit political roles during the Company Raj. Simply put, colonial officials believed that patronising learned Indians and Britons would make their jobs easier. Through a policy of “conciliation,” the Company forged alliances with learned Indians and Britons while countering accusations of philistinism.

The main architect of conciliation, as Ehrlich explains, was Warren Hastings. A deeply controversial character in his times, Hastings was governor of Bengal when the Company had a positively infamous reputation. British critics excoriated the India-returned “nabobs” who bought up parliamentary........

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