Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World

Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World presents a new interpretation of the development of the English East India Company between 1660 and 1720. The book explores the connections between scholarship, patronage, diplomacy, trade, and colonial settlement in the early modern world. Links of patronage between cosmopolitan writers and collectors and scholars associated with the Royal Society of London and the universities are investigated. Winterbottom shows how innovative works of scholarship – covering natural history, ethnography, theology, linguistics, medicine, and agriculture - were created amid multi-directional struggles for supremacy in Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The role of non-elite actors including slaves in transferring knowledge and skills between settlements is explored in detail.

“The book focuses on the decades surrounding the turn of the eighteenth century… . Winterbottom handles this breadth of topics with great skill. Taken together, the chapters convey a much-needed picture of the geographically particularized modes of knowledge production under the East India Company umbrella. … The book is an excellent work of scholarship and a valuable addition to the growing literature on the culture and politics of knowledge production under the East India Company.” (Jessica Ratcliff, ISIS, Vol. 108 (4), December, 2017)“This outstanding book explores the gathering and transfer of useful knowledge between the shifting horizons of the East India Company’s Asian ‘world’ and Britain during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries … . Anna Winterbottom has produced a beautifully written, richly detailed, and well-structured monograph that is required reading for all those with an interest in the East India Company, as well as all students of global history in the early modern period.” (H. V. Bowen, Journal of Global History, Vol. 12 (2), July, 2017)“Winterbottom’s is chronological, exploring the activities of the London-based East India Company in its first century of existence. … Winterbottom’s meticulous research shines through in the facility with which she covers the diversity of topics discussed in the book. … The references and bibliography, which comprise a third of the book’s total length, will undoubtedly prove to be a rich mine of information for future scholars and students of the subject.” (John McAleer, Archives of Natural History, Vol. 43 (2), October, 2016)

Anna Winterbottom is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sussex, UK. She is co-editor of The East India Company and the Natural World and has published several journal articles and book chapters on topics related to the history of science and medicine, the Indian Ocean region, and colonial history.