Representing India : Indian Culture and Imperial Control in Eighteenth-Century British Orientalist Discourse

The publication of Edward Said's Orientalism stimulated renewed interest in the relationships between literary discourse and colonial politics.

It also reinforced the need to produce discriminating and nuanced readings of Orientalism and the production of Orientalist knowledge, and critics have reconsidered the role played by British Orientalists in the constructions of race and empire.

The discourses of race and colonialism were still in the process of formation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; colonial anxiety, imperial guilt, contradictions, real or imagined, between Enlightenment and Romanticist thinking, the clash of political and religious ideologies, event the simultaneous appearance of colonialist and anti-imperialist rhetoric in the same text all give a raw edge to the transitional nature of the colonial project in this period.

This set of reprinted books will represent central documents in the emergence of modern Indology.

These texts demonstrate how closely interwoven are the histories of Oriental scholarship and of British administrative policy contributions. The texts also present the Orientalist side of the argument concerning the government of India to balance and oppose the Utilitarian and Anglicist bias implicit in James Mill's History of British India .