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This accessible cultural history explores 400 years of British imperial adventure in India, developing a coherent narrative through a wide range of colonial documents, from exhibition catalogues to memoirs and travelogues. It shows how these texts helped legitimize the moral ambiguities of colonial rule even as they helped the English fashion themselves.

• An engaging examination of European colonizers’ representations of native populations
• Analyzes colonial discourse through an impressive range of primary sources, including memoirs, letters, exhibition catalogues, administrative reports, and travelogues
• Surveys 400 years of India’s history, from the 16th century to the end of the British Empire
• Demonstrates how colonial discourses naturalized the racial and cultural differences between the English and the Indians, and controlled anxieties over these differences

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Drawing on a vast array of textual sources, this analysis of the discourse of colonialism tracks the many narratives and narrative strategies of imperial domination. Focusing on British involvement in India, the material collated for this revealing study includes travelogues, administrative reports, memoirs, letters, exhibition catalogues, anthropological tracts, parliamentary debates, and instruction manuals. It shows how subtle changes of emphasis reflect evolving colonial attitudes toward conquered territories, shifting from flights of the imagination to factual inquiry, to a narrative of exoticism and heterogeneity that safely compartmentalized colonial “otherness” via natural history, ethnography, and cartographies of disease.

The book adopts a thematic approach to elucidate the cultural myth-making at the height of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, focusing on law and order, landscape-planning, and domestication, and showing how dominance and political power were naturalized through awe-inspiring spectacles that humbled natives into obedience. This constructed colonial narrative helped legitimize imperial ambitions as charitable humanitarianism, rather than expose them as asset-stripping and economic manipulation. Finally, the narrative examines colonial aesthetics, arguing that disciplines like archaeology and art history situated Indian art and architecture within a colonial project of interpretation, ironically co-creating fresh notions of “Englishness” and English characters.

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Acknowledgments vii  
1 Introducing Colonial Discourse 1
 
2 Travel, Exploration, and ‘‘Discovery’’: From Imagination to Inquiry 12
 
Imagining Multiple Worlds: The Fantasy of ‘‘Discovery’’ 18
 
The Narrative Organization of Discovery 29
 
‘‘Inquiry’’ and the Documentation of the Others 41
 
Conclusion: ‘‘Discovery’’ and Wonder, ‘‘Contracted and Epitomized’’ 49
 
3 The Discourse of Difference: Constructing the Colonial Exotic 55
 
The Colony and Imperial Wealth 57
 
The Exotic in English Culture 59
 
The Colonial Exotic: Aesthetics, Science, and Difference 60
 
The Sentimental Exotic 62
 
The Scientific Exotic 79
 
Conclusion: From the Indian to the Colonial Exotic 95
 
4 Empire Management: From Domestication to Spectacle 104
 
The Domestication of Colonial Spaces 106
 
Administering Colonial Spaces 121
 
‘‘Raising the General Credit of the Empire’’: The Spectacle of Empire 140
 
Conclusion: Imperial Improvisation and the Spectacle 145
 
5 Civilizing the Empire: The Ideology of Moral and Material Progress 161
 
England’s Age of Improvement 164
 
Discipline and Improve 170
 
Imperial Lessons 174
 
The Salvific Colonial 178
 
Rescue, Reform, and Race 183
 
Conclusion: From Improvement to Self-Legitimization 194
 
6 Aesthetic Understanding: From Colonial English to Imperial Cosmopolitans 201
 
The Self-Fashioning of the Scholar-Colonial 204
 
Antiquarian Aesthetics and Colonial Authority 213
 
‘‘Consumption, Ingestion, and Decoration’’: Colonial Commodities 219
 
The ‘‘Empire City’’: Pageantry and Empire 226
 
Conclusion: From Colonial English to Imperial Cosmopolitan 229
 
References 235
 
Index 260

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