1. Outline of Argument
     Argument    Information Order    Orientalism    Edward Said    Refutation    Syncretism  

2. Intelligence and Conquest
     Early Modern India    British Intelligence    From Embodied to Institutionalized Knowledge    Useful Knowledge and Godly Society  

3. Failure on the Fringes
     Nepal    Burma    Northwest India  

4. Indian Nationalism
     The Indian Ecumene    The Rebellion of 1857    Emerging Nationalism  

5. References

Given the publication by CUP, there are certain to be reviews. Published reviews, in appropriate academic journals.

I get that, but this article is about a single book, which is why the citations are primarily from a single source (the book that's the subject of the article). As I noted in my previous comment, while I understand that drawing so heavily from one source can be problematic, in this case I believe that citations from separate sources would be unnecessary and redundant.

Schristenfeld (talk) 19:23, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 is a 1996 historical nonfiction book by Christopher Bayly. It attempts to explain the successes and failures of the British Empire in ruling India in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bayly argues that the British were able to successfully maintain their colony in India not because they were technologically or numerically superior to the Indian population, but because they found effective ways to gather and disseminate information.

Bayly also claims, however, that the British did not exclusively impose their own knowledge on their Indian subjects. Instead, he argues that British colonial officials adapted preexisting Indian systems of information-gathering to their own purposes. In addition, the book argues that the Indian population shaped colonial British knowledge as much as the British changed the Indian understanding of the world.

Outline of Argument

Argument

The book has two main purposes.

1.The first is to explain how the British Empire was able to colonize India and successfully maintain control there in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Bayly argues that this was possible not just because of British “military superiority, but also because they deployed a sophisticated intelligence system” in India.^[1] In fact, he claims that the British ability to gather intelligence and convey information to the Indian population was perhaps the most important factor in maintaining their hold on colonial India.^[2]

2. The second purpose of the book is to convey what both native Indian and colonial British knowledge looked like at the time. It also sets out to explain how the British changed the ways that Indians thought about the world, and vice versa.

Bayly argues that India had a thriving intellectual community in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that, in fact, the British were influenced by Indian ways of thinking roughly as much as they influenced native forms of thought. He also argues that British knowledge, particularly knowledge of India, was far from stable and fully formed at the time. The British thought that Indian knowledge contained some kind of universal truth, Bayly claims, so they did not think of Indians as fundamentally different from themselves, but rather studied and incorporated elements of Indian knowledge into their own, partial understanding of the region and the world.^[3]  

Information Order

The information order is a key element of Bayly’s argument. In essence, the information order of a society is its intellectual sphere. This includes both the general intellectual atmosphere (the things that a society is thinking about and the things that it knows) and the institutions that contribute to this atmosphere, such as universities, prominent thinkers, and other generators and diffusers of knowledge. In short, the information order refers to the general state of knowledge in a society and the things that are important in creating that state. Bayly argues that the information order is separate, though of course also related to, the economic and political elements of a society. In other words, he says that when you evaluate a society, you should examine its intellectual sphere and the systems of knowledge within it as their own entities, rather than thinking of knowledge as a byproduct of economics or politics.  

The information order is an important concept in Empire and Information because the book is essentially a study of the information order in colonial India between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Bayly says that the information order is "a heuristic device, or a field of investigation, which can be used to probe the organisation, values and limitations of past societies."^[4] This is essentially the goal of the book, which examines both the Indian information order and the ways in which the British were successful and unsuccessful at tapping into it.

Orientalism

Edward Said

Another crucial element of the book is the concept of Orientalism. Orientalism is the belief that Eastern (primarily Asian) cultures are stagnant, undeveloped, and simple. This patronizing belief is usually attributed to the West, meaning primarily Europe, and Orientalists generally conceive of the West as modern, developed, rational, and progressive.

Those who hold Orientalist beliefs tend to divide the world into distinct categories. They think that the diverse inhabitants and cultures of the East are all essentially the same because they share a common characteristic of backwardness or simplicity. This means that Orientalists think that the East and its inhabitants are fundamentally different from the West and its inhabitants, who all share the properties of modernity, refinement, and rationality, at least when compared to Eastern cultures. This belief can be used to justify Western domination or oppression of Eastern peoples, who are thought of by Orientalists as inherently different from and inferior to their Western counterparts and thus worthy of subjugation.

The concept of Orientalism was formally introduced by Edward Said in his 1978 book, Orientalism. Said argues that Orientalism was always at the core of European studies of Eastern cultures and nations.^[5] In addition, he claims that Orientalism helped to justify European colonialism, as the belief that non-European peoples were both inherently different from and inferior to Europeans drove Western efforts to gain both intellectual and political authority over the East.^[6] This idea was seized upon by some of Said's followers, who argued even more vehemently that interactions between Western and Eastern cultures have consistently been characterized by Orientalism.^[7]

Refutation

Syncretism

The book's main evidence for its argument against Orientalism in colonial India is the syncretism, or mixing of ideas, that took place between the British and the Indian population. Bayly highlights an exchange of ideas in a number of areas, including astronomy and medicine. For example, many British officials attempted to teach astronomy by combining Copernican theories with Indian Siddanthic and Puranic ideas.^[10] The book argues that the fact that the British were willing to mix together European and Indian ideas in this way means that the colonizers thought that native theories had some common ground and could be reconciled with their own. Medicine in colonial India was characterized by the same kind of syncretism. Many British officials studied and relied on Indian medical knowledge because they thought that Indian knowledge might be connected in some way to the ancients and could contain some kind of universal truth.^[11] This mostly meant that the British combed through Indian texts through Indian texts for references to “wondrous drugs known to the ancients,” but they also often used contemporary Indian medical techniques as well.^[11] This practice became especially common after outbreaks of bubonic plague and cholera in the early nineteenth century. When British medical techniques did not help with the outbreaks, a large number of colonial officials started using Indian methods instead.^[12] Bayly argues that this exchange of medical ideas between the British and Indian populations meant that the British did not think of Indian knowledge as fundamentally different from their own, and they certainly did not only view it with scorn.

Bayly readily acknowledges that many British colonial officials did think of Indians as inherently different from and inferior to Europeans. Nonetheless, his core argument is that this belief was not at the center of British attempts to understand Indian culture and that the two societies still engaged in a notable exchange of ideas despite some British scorn for Indian knowledge. As Bayly puts it, "European knowledge may have been hegemonic, but it was never absolute" in colonial India, and "the positing of a radical 'other'" was not the "basic intellectual tool of colonial rule."^[3]

Intelligence and Conquest

Early Modern India

Empire and Information shows that India already had an advanced and complex system of information gathering in place before the British arrived. Beginning around 1200 AD, the Mughal Empire had begun to establish an intense system of surveillance in India, primarily using official political reporting, a postal system, and a network of runners to gather and share information.^[13] Newswriters also played an important role in this system, collecting, collating, and passing on information. The head newswriter was particularly important, as he was tasked with passing on information to the Mughal emperor.^[14] At the local level, police officials, magistrates, clerics, and other lower-level officials were responsible for collecting as much information as possible, which was then passed upwards through the system.^[15] They also communicated decrees and other information from the emperor to local audiences.^[15] Many other figures, including nobles, physicians, astrologers, and traveling holy men also gathered and fed information into this expansive system.^[16] Overall, these sources of information each formed a part of a wide-ranging scheme of information gathering that the emperor and other nobles used for revenue extraction, keeping tabs on political developments, spreading decrees, and formulating understandings of the people of India, all long before the arrival of the British.

British Intelligence

The book points out that the British system of intelligence gathering in colonial India looked very similar to the Mughal set-up and argues that this is largely because the British took over many of the elements of the preexisting system and adapted them to their own purposes when they took control of India, initially through the East India Company in the mid-eighteenth century. Bayly says that the postal and runner systems that had originated under the Mughals were incredibly useful to the British; he calls them the "arteries of British India."^[17] The runners passed on information gathered by a large network of "intelligence communities" within Indian society, primarily composed of officials in royal households and dedicated, full-time running-spies employed by colonial officials.^[18] Newswriters, who worked within the various royal courts of India and published newsletters about the social and political events they witnessed, were also crucial to the British project of information gathering.^[19] The British also found a number of informants in elite members of Indian society, often nobles, who gathered and passed on information to the British and East India Company leadership.^[20] These sources of information accumulated and passed on knowledge to British colonial officials as part of a far-reaching and fairly effective system that allowed the British to make generally productive use of the networks already in place by the mid-eighteenth century. However, Bayly also argues that, although the British were quite good at gathering high-level political and social news through these networks, their information gathering was largely superficial, in the sense that it did not allow them to understand the sentiments and traditions of lower-level Indian society - he says that the shift from embodied to institutionalized knowledge was largely responsible for this.

From Embodied to Institutionalized Knowledge

Bayly claims that around the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British began to gather and spread information in India in more systematic ways. This shift, he argues, marked a transition from embodied knowledge (knowledge that was gathered and interpreted by people such as newswriters) to institutionalized knowledge (knowledge gathered and interpreted by institutions such as the state). The book identifies two major institutions that took over the role of information gatherers as the century progressed: the revenue collection system and the army. Bayly says that revenue collection was perhaps the foremost way for the British to "know" rural Indian society, but of course it relied on statistics with little attention paid to social trends and individuals.^[21] The army was also increasingly a source of institutionalized knowledge in the nineteenth century, as it became increasingly bureaucratic and collected more and more information from the native specialists that worked in and with it.^[22]

Bayly argues that the shift towards institutionalized knowledge only made the British less knowledgeable about the desires and norms of the Indian population. As he puts it, the British "were better at picking up warnings about insurrections than understanding the inner workings of Indian institutions."^[23] He says that British information gathering increasingly focused on understanding large-scale, quantifiable trends throughout the nineteenth century and largely disregarded information about local-level events.^[24] This meant that "so much of Indian experience, philosophy and sensibility remained outside the purview of the rulers."^[25] In other words, Bayly argues that as the British began to prioritize statistical, political, and economic information, they lost touch with the values and desires of the Indian people.

Useful Knowledge and Godly Society

Bayly argues that efforts to create a "godly society" in India through missionary work, which went along with the focus on useful knowledge, provoked a negative reaction among the Indian population.^[31] These objections were able to spread more easily through the increasing number of print publications, and the campaign for useful knowledge and godly society thus created Indian intellectual communities built around their criticisms of British information diffusion.^[32] In other words, British efforts to civilize Indian society provoked protests from the Indian population, which was able to use the growing number of print publications to circulate its complaints.

Failure on the Fringes

To support his argument that intelligence was crucial to the colonial success of the British in India, Bayly highlights three instances in which the British failed or suffered setbacks in their efforts to dominate other regions in South Asia. He claims that the inability to gather information effectively was the cause of these failures.

Nepal

In the early nineteenth Century, the British went to war with Ghurka Nepal. Despite the military superiority of the British, Nepal was fairly successful in its efforts to repel them. and it was able to maintain its independence throughout the colonial period.^[33] Bayly argues that the British failed because they lacked accurate or useful information about the Nepalese and the terrain of their region. Nepal was not connected to the Indian systems of postage, runners, and newswriters, and very few British expeditions had been made into the region.^[34] Bayly claims that, as a result, the British were hindered in two significant ways. Firstly, they had difficulty moving troops in Nepal because they did not possess accurate intelligence on the complications of fighting in Nepal's hills and mountains.^[35] Second, the British attempted to mount a propaganda campaign based on their belief that the Nepalis were savages, in hopes of convincing non-elite Gurkhas to defect.^[36] This assessment, however, was based on early missionary accounts, which overlooked the advancement and homogeneity of Nepalese society, and as such the propaganda campaign was a resounding failure.^[37] Ultimately, Bayly argues that the British military campaign against Nepal failed because of these shortages of accurate intelligence.

Burma

The British war against Burma, also in the early nineteenth century, was marked by a similar shortage of information, although the outcome was more favorable for the British. In the early stages of the conflict, which the British fought largely to secure India's borders, the colonialists knew very little about Burmese society. They incorrectly believed that the Burmese had a low level of general knowledge and underestimated the homogeneous nature and centralized leadership of Burma.^[38] Driven by a lack of intelligence, the British initially attacked Rangoon, believing that this would cripple the Burmese leadership, but the Burmese forces simply withdrew, drawing the British further into the dangerous interior of the region.^[39] Even later, a year into the war, British sources complained that they were unable to establish diplomatic relations with the Burmese or even to obtain accurate translations of Burmese writing.^[40] Bayly argues that these challenges were the product of the shortage of British information about Burmese society. Nonetheless, the British eventually defeated Burma, occupying the regions and replacing Burmese institutions.^[41] However, Bayly argues that they were helped by the information networks that they established in the area throughout the war, which largely consisted of non-Burmese ethnic groups.^[42]

Northwest India

In the early nineteenth century, the British turned their attention to the northwest region of India, which was relatively unknown to them at the time. After 1830, they began to develop a serious commercial and diplomatic interest and influence in the area. In the interim, though, their knowledge of northwest India and Afghanistan was lacking, even defective. The absence of large states in the area until the beginning of the nineteenth century had meant that there was no central system to gather and diffuse information, and thus there were no networks that the British could tap into.^[43] As such, they had to rely on information gathered by individual travelers, which was largely inaccurate. Bayly says that this lack of information led the British to incorrectly believe that Ranjit Singh, the eventual leader of the Sikh Empire in northwest India, was unpopular with the people in the region, who desired British rule.^[43] This belief turned out to be completely unfounded, and Singh was able to rapidly consolidate a Sikh state in the northwest. As such, the book highlights the case of northwest India to demonstrate that the British relied on information networks in colonized areas, and when none were available to co-opt, they were plagued by a shortage of useful intelligence.

Indian Nationalism

The Indian Ecumene

The "Indian ecumene" is essentially the name that Bayly gives to the Indian information order in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and he also uses it to refer to the cultural and political debates that were common within Indian society throughout this period. Bayly argues that the Indian ecumene was notable for two things: the flexible nature of authority within it and the vehemence and coherence of its debates. He claims that, although the various religions that were important in shaping Indian intellectual activity at the time appear to have had strict laws associated with them, there was actually a fair amount of room for free thought.^[44] For example, although Islamic Law appears extremely strict, Bayly argues that it allowed for personal judgment and its laws were changed over time by the shifting interpretations of law scholars.^[45] Indeed, the book claims that the Indian ecumene was characterized by lively and intellectual debates. Bayly says that intellectual matters, particularly religious topics, were heavily debated in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century India, and that Indians engaged Christian missionaries in the same kind of spirited debate when they began to arrive.^[46] Also, he highlights the many forms of intellectual expression within Indian society that predated British occupation and continued to be produced under the colonial system, such as literary biographies, poetry, and theater.^[47] This intellectual sphere was not limited to elites, Bayly also argues, as artisans and ordinary people could participate as well.^[48]

Overall, Bayly makes the case that Indian society during early British colonialism was characterized by a thriving intellectual sphere, vigorous debates, and a considerable freedom of thought and expression.

The Rebellion of 1857

In 1857, a series of mutinies among the sepoys, the Indian soldiers in the British East India Company's army, led to a widespread uprising against British authority in India. Although he does not spend much time on the specifics of the rebellion, Bayly makes four key claims about it. First, he argues that the British were caught off guard because their increasingly institutionalized intelligence system had not warned them of growing Indian discontent.^[49] Second, he asserts that the uprising was aided by the modern system of communication and information diffusion that the British had put in place, specifically the postage system and increased number of print publications, both of which were used to incite the rebellion.^[50] As he remarks, "the rebels and their supporters...were by no means hostile to the new modes of communication, if only they could maintain control of them."^[51] Third, he argues that the revolt was not an uprising of some old Indian order, but rather a modern conflict over control of the press, posts, print, and opinions.^[52] Finally, Bayly claims that the uprising shook British confidence in India, both because the communities that they believed had benefitted most from colonialism were some of the first to revolt and because they had been so unable to predict the rebellion.^[53]

Overall, Bayly argues that the Rebellion of 1857 revealed the shortcomings of the British project of information gathering in India, demonstrating that the focus on institutionalized knowledge and statistics had left the British unaware of the sentiments of the Indian population as a whole.

Emerging Nationalism

Throughout the book, Bayly argues that Indian nationalism started to form in the thriving Indian ecumene well before the emergence of the true Indian nationalist movement. He says in Chapter Five that the "Indian nationalism of the later nineteenth century needs a longer perspective."^[54] In Chapter 6, Bayly briefly argues that "the basis for a sophisticated political opposition [to British colonial rule] existed...as many as sixty years before formal nationalist politics began."^[55] Overall, his argument is that the later emergence of a unified nationalist movement should have been no surprise to the British, because Indian thinkers were already engaging in spirited debates and had formed a wide network of social communication well before the nineteenth century. In other words, Bayly claims that the Indian ecumene, with its cross-class communication and thriving atmosphere of debate, was a breeding ground for nationalist sentiment.

References

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