4 - Patterns of Accumulation

Summary

This chapter investigates the political and economic dimension of the accumulation of knowledge resources at India House after the foundation of the library-museum. The chapter begins by describing how the Company came to play a more direct role in the acquisition and management of knowledge resources for repositories in Britain. Between the opening of the library and museum and the Great Exhibition of 1851, survey collecting for the Company, and private collecting by Company surveyors, was a primary means by which the Company’s new institutions of knowledge management were enriched. Following in the wake of military campaigns, Company surveys during this period became closely tied to both cultural plundering and biogeographical collecting. Embedded in a series of ongoing conflicts over territory and trade, the making of these collections served as a means of further weakening rival states. Once back in London, these collections also would be crucial to the early development of the Company’s library-museum. During the same period, Crown support for the old monopoly was beginning to wobble. The last section of this chapter considers the place of knowledge accumulation and management in the tumultuous period around the charter debate of 1813, when many of the Company’s monopoly privileges would be annulled. During these debates, a key defense of the monopoly was for the directors to present the administration at India House as the most trustworthy, authoritative source of knowledge regarding Asia in Britain, and thus the institution most suited to controlling trade and exercising governance. Within the Company, however, confidence in the Company’s grasp of knowledge about Asia was far less absolute, and after the Company’s losses in the 1813 charter, new worries about the Company’s knowledge management practices would lead to even further efforts to centralize and better organize the stores of information accumulating at India House.