Interview: East India Company to Big Tech – how corporations think about knowledge

In recent years, the East India Company – which conquered and ruled large parts of India over the 18th and 19th centuries – has been compared to companies like Google and Meta. Both today’s Big Tech firms as well as the East India Company were profit-hungry corporations, not sovereign entities, that nevertheless had immense influence at a global scale and often wielded their powers in deeply exploitative ways.

But the similarities don’t end there, according to Joshua Ehrlich, Associate Professor at the University of Macau. In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Ehrlich argues that the way “technology giants…have committed themselves to the cause of knowledge…by encroaching on science, education and other spheres long deemed the preserve of states” raises questions that, in fact, are hardly new and were already being asked in the 18th century.

Ehrlich’s book takes a close look at how the East India Company thought about knowledge, both the amassing thereof as well as the manner in which it was subsequently spread. The book’s narrative captures consequential debates that took place within the company-state about how it ought to be using knowledge and examines the ways in which the East India Company’s stewardship of ideas, information, and education ended up being a “cornerstone of its legitimacy” that was often under attack both in India and in England.

CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Joshua Ehrlich, over email, about the book, differing ideas about how the East India Company should spread knowledge and why the company’s past might give us cues on how to hold today’s “knowledge corporations” accountable.

For those who haven’t had a chance to read the book, how would you summarise it? Is there an “elevator pitch” so to speak?

The East India Company is remembered today as the world’s most powerful – perhaps also most notorious – corporation. Yet for many of its advocates, from the 1770s to the 1850s, it was also the world’s most enlightened one. The book reveals how a commitment to the cause of knowledge became and remained surprisingly central to the Company’s ideology; how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of political and commercial power. It recovers a world of debate among the Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. And finally, it develops an approach that might also be usefully deployed in other contexts, which I call “the history of ideas of knowledge”.

How did you come to work on it? What turned your attention to the subject?

About 10 years ago, in the summer of 2013, while searching for a dissertation topic, I came across a pamphlet written by Jacques Pierre Brissot. Brissot was an aspiring man of letters who, in the early 1780s, was engaged in a project to establish a learned society in London. In this pamphlet – a prospectus for the society – he envisioned the Company as a partner in his endeavour, at least potentially a trader not only in material goods but also in intellectual ones. This intrigued me. Why, at a moment when the Company was conquering vast swathes of territory in India, did Brissot imagine it in still-mercantile terms? Why, when these conquests were drawing extensive criticism, did he envision the Company as an enlightened benefactor? I soon realised that Brissot did not conjure this image out of nowhere; he was getting it straight from the Company’s advocates. To explain this, I would need to revisit the Company’s ideology, its political-commercial union, and its engagements with knowledge.

Tell us a little bit about why you point out that this book is about the history of ideas of knowledge – and how that’s different from just studying knowledge, the Company, and so on?

The Company’s engagements with knowledge have been treated before – by cultural historians from the late 1960s, by postcolonial historians writing in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, and by historians of information starting with Christopher Bayly in 1995. But in one way or another, all these approaches focused on structures rather than ideas. They treated knowledge as a cultural formation, a project of control, or a tool of government. What they did not do is deal with the Company’s knowledge debates in their own terms, attending to the aims and utterances of participants. I call this approach “the history of ideas of knowledge” because it joins the methods of intellectual history and the concerns of the new history of knowledge. These fields have not interacted much, but, as I suggest in this book, they would benefit from doing so.

You draw quite direct connections between the debates of the time about the East India Company and its relationship with knowledge, and the questions we are asking today about companies – particularly Big Tech – and knowledge. Could you tell us about why you see these as similar debates, despite the time and vastly different nature of the entities?

It is important to recognise that the East India Company was not the same thing as a modern multinational corporation. It was a company-state, a distinctive early modern entity. Nonetheless, its involvement in politics and in arenas like education and scientific research did raise questions that resonate for us today. Now, too, is a moment of blurred lines between states and companies, with the “knowledge sector” a key site of corporate encroachment. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Company was the Google of two centuries ago (as some have said), but I do think its knowledge debates bear lessons for ours. To mention just one, they remind us that companies are not purely economic bodies but also political ones. Their need for legitimacy makes them accountable, at least to some extent, to outside constituencies. Thus, critics were more successful when they tried to hold the Company to its enlightened promises than when they simply denied outright the possibility of it meeting them. However, much as we may distrust companies today, we might do better to expect more rather than less from them.

The knowledge project was an important part of the legitimacy of the East India Company, especially as company-states started to become more anomalous. Is it too cynical to argue that this was all calculated whitewashing of the underlying exploitation? The book does show us varying degrees of belief in the ideal…

No doubt Company leaders and advocates espoused the cause of knowledge with varying degrees of sincerity – though it’s hard to read minds, especially those of the dead! Some probably believed in it, more or less, and others probably didn’t. But that’s the thing about ideology, understood minimally as a set of ideas used to legitimise political action: to some extent, it binds action. If you announce an ideology and act contrary to it, you lose legitimacy. So, my argument in the book is that the Company’s commitment to knowledge was largely for political purposes, but that in order to achieve those purposes, it had to be seen to live up to it. The Company’s engagements with knowledge were far from innocent, but they went beyond the merely instrumental or incidental.

What was “conciliation?” How did it come about as an idea and a strategy?

In 1772, the Company’s Court of Directors sent out a new Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, and ordered him to stabilise their government there. The Company had conquered Bengal in the 1750s-60s but struggled to govern – it was blamed for a major famine – and even to collect a steady revenue. Hastings was faced with hostile powerholders in both Britain and India who questioned whether a trading company could rule large and populous territories. To win them over, he turned to European scholar-officials and Indian scholarly elites (maulvis and pandits). By patronising such scholars, he argued, the Company would “conciliate” not only them but also the rulers and political classes with whom they had influence. “Conciliation” as a concept was rooted in British political thought and Enlightenment notions of commerce as a vehicle for spreading knowledge; it also seems to have owed a debt to the Indian concept of sul-i-kuhl, associated with the Mughal emperor Akbar. The idea remained influential among Company leaders for much of the next six decades.

Do you see something unique in the approach of the EIC to conciliation, versus the cultivating of elites either by previous rulers in India, or indeed the Empire (and other empires) elsewhere?

There was nothing unique in a ruler (or a corporation) trying to win over elites, or even in doing so by supporting scholarship. The East India Company may simply have taken this strategy further than others because of the intense challenges it faced in justifying its hybrid commercial-political character, as well as because of its particular opportunities and resources. I hope others will take up this question and write histories of ideas of knowledge in other contexts. It would be fascinating to compare the EIC’s politics of knowledge with that of other companies, states, and of course company-states.

To what extent was conciliation aimed at critics and observers of the EIC in the UK, versus a tactic to win and maintain power in India? What did the debates over the tactic in the UK tell us?

For Hastings, the British and Indian political arenas were both important. The East India Company was vulnerable and needed elite allies in both places. Some scholarly projects, like the founding of the Calcutta Madrasa, even had the potential to resonate simultaneously with both audiences. Debates over Hastings’ “system” of conciliation began in earnest in Britain once Hastings returned in 1785 and continued off-and-on for the next half-century. Most of all, perhaps, they tell us that the politics of knowledge is not a new subject but rather one on which historical actors themselves have been highly articulate.

Why did conciliation come to be seen as being in competition with the idea of mass education, rather than two different tactics in a broader strategy?

Indeed, when debates over education were raging in the 1820s and early 1830s, some officials and their Indian allies saw conciliation and mass education as complementary. For them, educating the masses in the long term required “conciliating” Indian scholarly elites in the short term at least. The argument was that the Company still needed these elites as middlemen; it was new to government, strapped for resources, and out of touch with the population. But other officials and Indian reformers disagreed. For them, middlemen (if needed) should be drawn from a mix of social classes – the better to reach all of them and undo the maulvis’ and pandits’ supposed monopoly on learning.

You talk of the thought of an “alliance” between the Company and India’s “national clergy” in line with what took place in Europe. Can you explain that analogy a bit further, and how the Company might have been thinking about this?

This was an intriguing remark made in 1813 by the Sanskritist Charles Wilkins and echoed by his patron Warren Hastings. In remarks on the Charter Act of that year, both men urged the Company to engage with Brahman pandits, but on these pandits’ own terms, and not to disturb India’s social hierarchy. They suggested that pandits were something like priests in Europe and might play a similar role in supporting the state – a fascinating idea! – though it doesn’t seem to have gone any further.

What do we misunderstand about the Company and its approach to knowledge in these years? What are the misconceptions that you find yourself having to frequently correct?

Historians have alternately seen the Company’s engagements with knowledge as noble and enlightened, as hollow and meaningless, or as intensely practical – part of a project of control. They have tended to pay more attention to generalities of culture and structure than to individual aims and utterances. If we take seriously these aims and utterances, however, if we examine what the Company’s officials and interlocutors said about what they were doing and why, we get a different answer. The Company committed itself deeply to knowledge but not because it was noble, nor merely for practical reasons (though these played some role); it did so primarily because it was politically embattled and desperately needed to shore up its legitimacy. Supplying knowledge was a public good to which the Company believed it could lay claim.

What are you working on next?

I have two main projects at the moment. One argues that the globalisation of print happened much earlier than we think: in the 18th century. It uses untapped sources to show how print spread through colonial port cities and was taken up and used in significant ways by non-European audiences. The other traces the history of the most important political institution most people have never heard of: the durbar. Not only did the durbar spread far and wide and last for hundreds of years (it still exists in some places today), in South Asia, in particular, it was a crucial site for negotiation, contestation, and resistance among different layers of a complex polity.

What three works would you recommend for anyone who is interested in this subject?

There is a lot of excellent work being done now on the Company and knowledge. I heartily recommend Anna Winterbottom’s Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (2015) and Jessica Patterson’s Religion, Enlightenment and Empire: British Interpretations of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (2021). I am also eagerly anticipating Jessica Ratcliff’s Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain’s Second Scientific Revolution (2025).

Joshua Ehrlich is an Associate Professor at the University of Macau and the author of The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2023).

Rohan Venkat is the Managing Editor for India in Transition.

This article was first published in India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.