This excellent work continues a scholarly interest in the circulation of ideas by demonstrating how local particularities of Anglo-Indian mercantile exchange and settlement led to the creation of knowledge. Winterbottom argues that knowledge was “hybrid”, a term generally categorised here by “openness, collaborative work, collecting or prospecting, classification and circulation” (198). As she notes, the opposites of these terms, especially secret knowledge, were also essential categories of understanding in the period, but hybridity opens the world of information accumulation beyond the European metropole.
Winterbottom’s work fits with the general trend in corporate studies to emphasise the productive potential of the institution of the corporation and its effectiveness as a system of interlocking networks. Winterbottom goes further than the recent studies she cites (Stern and Ogborn most prominent among them) in thinking about the boundaries of the corporate world as porous and uncontrolled from the hierarchical centre of London.
Chapter 1 sets out some of the critical ideas via a microhistory of the life and voyages of Salomon (later Samuel) Baron. Winterbottom shows how Baron, a mixed-race son of Vietnamese and Dutch parents, utilised his position as a “hybrid” figure to carve out a career in the service of trading companies and Asian rulers. Winterbottom suggests a way of reading Baron’s life aligned with Greenblatt’s idea of “self-fashioning”. Winterbottom’s deployment of Greenblatt’s concept relies exclusively on the process of self-fashioning as producing “hypocrisy”, “deception” and “fantasy” (28–29); this is, I suggest, too pessimistic a reading of Greenblatt’s work, neglecting the subconscious or playful elements of self-fashioning. Nevertheless, Winterbottom is right to identify the usefulness of this (and similar) work for understanding the position and processes of the cultural go-between on whom Hybrid Knowledge focuses.
Baron’s self-representation in person and writing plays on his status as a hybrid: European enough to gain social status, but Asian enough to accumulate useful knowledge of trading systems, politics, and material culture. The ability of Baron, and men like him, to manage networks in Europe and Asia made knowledge collection not a leisure activity, but a fundamental part of “the struggle to control the knowledge of South and East Asia”. Winterbottom’s theoretical approach to archival work nuances and layers her study in exciting ways and offers a direction for further research into the lives of these passeurs culturels which goes beyond archival recovery.
The remaining chapters are a series of case studies to illustrate themes, and these demonstrate the rich and hybrid nature of the types of knowledge which are being collected and deployed, in categories such as bio-, ethno- or linguistic- prospecting.
Chapter 2 sets out the process by which languages got learned, and transmitted in textual form (both dictionaries of specific languages and universal grammars), highlighting the social character and specifics of a place revealed in these purportedly neutral texts.
Chapter 3 demonstrates how fleeting connections in Indian factories (that is, trading posts) led to new considerations of religious texts in translation, and consequently to the general principles of religion, reason, and faith. Winterbottom traces the connections between translators from Hindi, often a team effort, as in the significant case she discusses of John Marshall’s collaboration with the Brahmin Madhusudana and systems of European religious thought and government. These sorts of mutual efforts of English and Indian merchants generated a level of toleration and cross-cultural comfort in India which proved the basis for an increasingly tolerant religious policy in England.
Chapter 4 reconstructs the networks of medicinal and botanical knowledge of early Madras [Chennai] from the correspondence of East India Company surgeons with James Petiver in London. This chapter makes the argument that the “scientific revolution” in the collection and study of natural materials was “not confined to European capitals but also took place in colonial settlements and outposts” (113), since it successfully demonstrates the ways in which the acquisition of specimens and medicinal knowledge was the product of genuine collaboration, not assimilation.
Chapter 5 returns to manuscript circulation and natural history, outlining the circulation and value of natural history outside of Europe. It covers the intertextual relations between print and manuscript, merchant and scientist, as well as the tension between the use of knowledge in circulation and its value as a secret.
The final chapter shifts from the embodiment of knowledge in things (books, manuscripts, plants, scientific instruments) to its manifestation in people, particularly the movement of slaves and other forced labourers between EIC settlements. The “plantation” colonies to which slaves got sent, especially St. Helena and Bencoulen, became sites of horticultural experimentation, the results of which could be circulated throughout the Company’s possessions, not least through the “cultivation” of the slaves on the island to be distributors of natural knowledge.
In these thematic chapters, Winterbottom frequently shows the ways that local knowledge production integrates with the traditional history of corporate trade. For example, in her study of Bowrey’s Malay-English dictionary or his schemes for resettling the East African coastal forts, she shows how the acquisition of language and agricultural knowledge led to Bowrey’s vocal support for East India Company projects in the South Sea, eventually leading to the Bubble of 1720. These are valuable reminders of the play, and sometimes the tension, between the East India Company’s worlds in London and India.
There are occasionally slightly odd statements, such as the claim that the Royal Society received its charter “shortly after the EIC, in 1662” (15), even though the EIC was founded in 1600, or that John Milton was a “famous heretic” because of his call for religious toleration in Areopagitica (92). Apart from the fact that Areopagitica is not quite as tolerant as Winterbottom claims (not least for Catholics, whose work Milton explicitly suggests censoring), in the 1660s Milton was much more likely to be known to students at Christ’s, Cambridge as the “great divorcer” or as an author of Republican propaganda.
Overall, though, this is a rigorously researched book—notably in the tracing of variant editions and textual connections, often done in passing sentences which elide a substantial quantity of archive research. It makes a valuable contribution to many fields, especially corporate history, colonial or imperial history, and the history of science.
