This project investigates changing patterns of knowledge resource management at the British East India Company. It covers the years between the Company’s takeover of Bengal in 1757 and the loss of its monopoly rights in 1833. At the beginning of the period, the Company generally depended upon individuals for the historical, linguistic, navigational, botanical, medical and other sciences upon which their operations depended. By the end of the period, the Company had taken over the direct management and production of many domains of colonial science. Along the way, the Company would become a key institution of science in London, establishing around 1800 a library, museum and two colleges in Britain. In this talk, I will first give an overview of the changing structure and geography of science under the Company. Out of this overview, the role that the East India Company played in shaping British science becomes clear, as does the debt that the organization of both modern states and modern sciences owe to the corporation as a form of governance. I will then consider the importance of this case for our understanding of the relationship between “state science” (or public science) and “corporate science” (or private science), and the fuzzy historical boundaries between these two orders of access.

Jessica Ratcliff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. She specializes in social and material approaches to the history of knowledge, with a focus on Britain and its former empire from the 17th through the 19th centuries. She has published or is working on research about Britain, colonial India (especially southern India), and Southeast Asia (especially Java and Singapore), on topics ranging from inventions and patents to positional astronomy to natural history. Professor Ratcliff is especially interested in studying how states and corporations have shaped the history of knowledge, and in the political economy of information. Her first book, The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain explores large-scale astronomical expeditions in the nineteenth century. It reconstructs Britain's attempt to measure the distance to the sun in 1874, and uses this case to show how the Admiralty and its colonial resources were central to the culture and practice of Victorian astronomy. Her current book project, Natural Monopoly: Science and Colonial Capitalism at the East India Company, is about the Honorable East India Company and its role in the growth of science in nineteenth-century Britain. The book traces out in detail the changing intellectual (or cultural-intellectual) property relations at the Company between 1757-1858. Focusing on the history of the Company’s library, museum and colleges in Britain, the project aims to provide an important historical context for broader questions about the relationship between “public” (i.e. state) science and “private” (i.e. corporate) science.