5 - Systematic Possession

Summary

The Company’s remarkable ability to control access to Asia, and to dominate the accumulation of information about Asia in Britain, had, by the 1830s, given Company science a prominent role in shaping the material culture of science in Britain. The Company’s influence was now exercised not only through restriction and protection but also through selectively opening access and sharing resources. The Company’s formal monopoly was gone, but Company science now operated within a different social configuration of access and exclusion: the narrow social networks of club-society cultures of science. This selective opening up also coincided, as Chapter 6 will make clear, with even more radical changes to the Company’s remaining monopoly rights and its sovereignty with respect to the Crown. In consequence, even within Britain, there was a growing debate and disagreement over the nature and scope of access to the Company’s library and museum, including accusations that the Company was maintaining an illegal knowledge monopoly.