British Art and the East India Company By Geoff Quilley. The Boydell Press, 2020. 370pp. 23.4×15.6 cm. 102 colour illus. Hardback, £85.00/$125.00. ISBN: 978-1-78327-510-6. Ebook, £19.99/$24.99. ISBN: 9781760464097.

Abstract

Geoff Quilley ’ s British Art and the East India Company is a major new publication which analyses in thorough, scholarly detail the role of the British East India Company in the production and sponsor-ship of new, commercial art forms in late-eighteenth and early- to mid-nineteenth century British culture. The focus of the study, however, is certainly not narrow and Quilley ’ s research will be of substantial interest to all those who are interested in the cultural encounter between Britain and Asia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries much more widely, especially in terms of visual representation. The work contains extensive discussions of the interaction between British artists and their time spent in Asia, particularly and India and China, during this formative period of commerce and colonialism. Although there have been numerous prior studies of visual art in the period which have tackled the place and role of British artists in a global and colonial perspective, this is the first study to interrogate the ways in which certain more commercial kinds of British art were closely imbricated in the political and financial nexus created by the tangled policies and practices of the Company. Previously such studies have generally argued that the colonial process is contingent, fluid, revisionary and shifting in the face of the encounter with Indian