The East India Co. & the Politics of Knowledge – 2024.02.27

The Rui Cunha Foundation presents tomorrow, Tuesday, February 27th at 7:00pm, a conference on “The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge”, inserted in the History and Heritage Public Lectures’ series, an active partnership between FRC and USJ – University of Saint Joseph, Department of History and Heritage, Macau.

«The East India Company is remembered as the world’s most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world’s most enlightened one», the USJ informs.

Joshua Ehrlich, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau, will be the guest speaker at this lecture, as he moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge.

«He recovers a world of debate among the Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge» and «reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company’s ideology. He shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power», according to USJ.

Not only were these historical actors «highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics».

Joshua Ehrlich is an award-winning historian of Knowledge and Political Thought, with a focus on the East India Company and the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia. Currently Assistant Professor at University of Macau, he received his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Chicago.

The lecture will be held in English with 1 hour duration.

Admission is free.
Don’t miss it!
For Macau, Further and Higher!

[Show as slideshow]