New Books In South Asian Studies

The many penniless English servants of the East India Company who landed at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta in the eighteenth-century were not terribly interested in uplifting the natives. They were, however, very keen to enrich themselves. And, by wheeling and dealing in the markets and courts of the subcontinent, a good number of them did just that, going, as we say, from rags to riches. This class of imperial nouveau riche might have gone unnoticed if, like their successors in the Indian Civil Service, they had stayed in India and, at the end of their careers, returned to modest retirements in Cheltenham. But they did nothing of the sort. As Tillman Nechtman‘s new book Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2010) demonstrates, as often as not they waddled back to the British Isles dripping diamonds and proceeded to exchange their new found wealth for positions of power in the British socio-political system. The press dubbed them the “nabobs”