A University of Macau (UM) staffers first book has recently been published by the prestigious Cambridge University Press. UM Department of History assistant professor Joshua Ehrlich wrote The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge after researching dozens of archives across three continents over the course of a decade.
The book shows how the British East India Company – which Ehrlich calls the world’s most powerful but notorious corporation – “used knowledge to consolidate its commercial and political power.”
Harvard-educated Ehrlich approached his subject from “a history of ideas of knowledge” perspective, an excerpt from the book explains. He went beyond studies of orientalist and colonial knowledge to recover “a world of debate among the Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge.”
[See more: Ten must-read volumes of Macao]
Reviewers have described the book as “important”, “compelling”, “thought-provoking” and “as ambitious as it is meticulous.”
Rosane Rocher, a professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, described it as “required reading for historians of the East India Company, South Asia, and the British Empire.”
Ehrlich joined UM in 2018, the same year he earned his doctorate from Harvard University in the US. His research interests include the histories of knowledge, political thought, the British Empire, and South and Southeast Asia.
