This chapter describes the wider political and economic changes that enabled foreigners, and particularly the British, to increasingly access and engage with the existing world of collecting, education and the sciences on the subcontinent. The result would be a slowing of the growth of resources in Indian centers such as Seringapatam and an acceleration of the growth of individual European-owned collections. The chapter begins by exploring changes in the patterns of accumulation that accompanied the conquest of Bengal. Here, I focus on the early careers of several Company servants who would eventually bring significant collections to Britain: Robert Orme, Alexander Dalrymple and Charles Wilkins. Each of these individuals would play an important role in the establishment of Company science back in Britain. And each, in their modes and methods of acquiring collections of knowledge resources from Asia, illustrate the debt that the growth of British resources would owe, in this period, to two major factors: wartime conventions of looting and plundering, and (in consequence of the wartime upheaval) deepening social and political interaction between foreigners and local scholars and educators. While foreigners in India had always collected, both wartime plundering and the Company’s new position relative to the Mughal Empire would open up many new avenues of access for Britons intent on acquiring manuscripts, curiosities and other knowledge resources. But the large collections that were beginning to be brought back to London would remain, for now, part of the private trade, destined for personal collections or sale by individuals. The final section of this chapter follows the Company’s first steps toward moving from contracted-out to Company-owned science, which began with institutional changes on the subcontinent in the wake of the major land reforms in the 1790s.

This considers the impact of systemic critiques of war, developed in the period of the American and French Revolutions, upon the work of two novelists. Samuel Jackson Pratts Emma Corbett, written during – and in opposition to – the American War of Independence, describes a young Engish heroines growing awareness of the role of property relations in supporting martial ideals and causing wars, and her conversion to a form of pacifism. Charlotte Smiths The Old Manor House, written in the early years of the French Revolution, describes a British soldier fighting in the American War of Independence, who comes to question the purpose and causes of the war, including the chivalric values of the ruling class. Both novels show how war exposes the selfish foundations of ordinary social life. While Jackson Pratts heroine escapes compromise through death, Smiths hero inherits the estate of the woman whose aristocratic values he despises.

The confrontation of the foreign was a key aspect of the theatrical culture of eighteenth-century British culture. The performances of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comic opera The Duenna (1775) in Kingston, Jamaica, and his comedy The School for Scandal (1777) in Calcutta, Bengal, enabled residents to embrace both the love of alterity and the longing for home that were each endemic to colonial life, as the comic figures of the Jew and the nabob and the forlorn figure of the enslaved child suggested that Britishness and otherness were not far removed from each other, as theatrical performance in circulation began to sketch in more similarities than differences dividing us from them.