Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal (1772-85), patronized learning on a larger scale than any previous East India Company official. This chapter argues that he did so in an attempt to square the Company’s growing political footprint with its hybrid constitution. The Company’s conquest of Bengal from midcentury had stirred up arguments in Britain and India that a body of merchants could not, or should not, rule vast and populous territories. Hastings sympathized with such arguments, but he was bound by duty and circumstances to oppose them. “Conciliation” offered him a means to do so. This idea, derived from both European and Mughal sources, denoted a commercial style of politics based on accommodation and negotiation. In the context of scholarly patronage, it tapped into widespread positive associations between commerce and knowledge. Hastings maintained that patronizing European scholar-officials and Indian learned elites would conciliate opinion toward the Company state. If this hybrid entity was to last, he suggested, it must traffic not only in material goods but also in intellectual ones.

Attempts to alter the balance between the Company’s two characters would only intensify in the decade-and-a-half after Wellesley’s departure (1805–20). Ideas about knowledge would continue to feature in these attempts. The Charter Act of 1813 tied the Company’s patronage of scholars to its collection of land revenue. Scholar-officials and their Indian collaborators, meanwhile, tailored their intellectual projects to the aim of territorial expansion. Overall, such expansion was encouraging engagement with Indian society and raising the prospect of involvement in Indian education. The Court of Directors was slow to embrace this prospect. But by the 1820s, the need for new ideas about knowledge could not be ignored any longer.

Chapter 5 situates the work of Halhed in relation to the practical uses of orientalist knowledge when it comes to establishing the legitimacy of a British presence in India, while also tracing elements of both the religious heterodoxy and scepticism in his presentation of the Code of Gentoo Laws. It then turns to an account of his involvement in Company politics, and more particularly his support for Warren Hastings throughout the impeachment trial.

The fifth chapter reexamines boundaries, roads, and changing geographical epistemes in the context of the multiple categories of “trans-frontier men” that emerged in the late nineteenth century. These multiple categories–groups threatening the security of empire or those protecting it–reveal the anxieties and aspirations tied to the frontier and to the imperial policy surrounding it. Growing security concerns pushed imperial administrators to better define and “close” the frontier, in large part by restricting access to information about it.