UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how Scottish scholar-administrators helped make colonial knowledge in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century South Asia. It argues that this knowledge was not just Orientalist, but also technocratic, a term historians usually reserve for the work of twentieth-century bureaucratic experts. I argue that that, far from arising as a new imperial form of knowledge in the late Nineteenth Century, technocratic methodologies and tools of imperial rule had much older roots in the land and revenue surveys that took place during and after the Anglo-Mysore wars of the late Eighteenth Century. I look at the life and work of one such surveyor, a scholar-administrator named Francis Buchanan, to trace how he exported and manifested a peculiar form of knowledge and well as methodology from the provinces of the Scottish enlightenment to Bengal and the Deccan plateau. Buchanan’s surveys, investigating caste, religion, and land productivity, were technocratic because they were supposedly empirical, purposefully transferable, and – unlike the claims about some other forms of knowledge – admittedly instrumental for use by the Company state.

Furthermore, just as technocracy had earlier pre-Raj roots in the late Eighteenth-century, I argue that patronage had a long life well into the Nineteenth Century, working alongside more modern and meritocratic forms of bureaucratic governance. In fact, the needs of the old-fashioned patronage in the EIC was crucial in forging this early technocratic rule.