Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World

With this dazzling work Anna Winterbottom establishes herself as one of the leading historians of science, medicine and scholarship in cross-cultural perspective and points the way forward to global social histories of knowledge. Combining exquisite erudition with remarkable sensitivity to both the violence and contingency of colonial encounters, she transforms our understanding of the early English East India Company's South and East Asian entanglements, leading us beyond company archives out into the worlds of go-betweens and interlopers who trafficked in hybrid knowledge made by the very process of encounter. Through penetrating analysis of natural history, medicine, ethnography, comparative religion, linguistic studies and questions of race and slavery, Winterbottom illuminates the neglected origins of British Orientalism before the eighteenth century. This stunning debut announces a brilliant talent and makes major contributions to the study of science, medicine and scholarship, South and East Asia, and global early modernity.' - James Delbourgo, Rutgers University, USA

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.

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.