Enfilade

From The East India Company at Home project:

Objects, Families, Homes: British Material Cultures in Global Contexts
University College London, 11–12 July 2014

Since 2011, The East India Company at Home project has focused on country houses—and the families and objects that inhabited them—to explore how British material culture developed in a global context during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The project’s goals have been twofold. First, we have sought to illuminate the broad-ranging ways in which the activities of the English East India Company shaped elite material cultures in Britain—and by doing so, shaped British identities in the Georgian and Victorian periods, and beyond. Second, we have sought to develop new ways of connecting diverse communities of historical researchers (archivists, curators, family historians, freelance historians, local historians, stately home volunteers and university-based historians) and in so doing to weave otherwise dispersed studies into a transnational material narrative. At the same time, by disseminating research findings through our website we have made them available on an open-access basis. The conference plans to encourage a range of speakers to present on these themes and discuss their wider significance.

Confirmed keynote speakers include Deborah Cohen, Professor of Modern British and European History at Northwestern University and author of Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (2006) and Family Secrets (2013), in dialogue with Marietta Crichton-Stuart, a descendant of the Marquess of Bute, who has researched how Margaret Bruce designed and furnished Falkland House in Fife in the 1830s and 1840s.

Members of the public are warmly welcomed to attend this event. Registration is accessible (until 30 June 2014) via the UCL online store.

The conference will take place in the Roberts Building on the Bloomsbury Campus of  University College London. A map giving directions to the Roberts Building can be found here. The building stands opposite Waterstones, Gower Street. The Roberts Building is a 5- to 10-minute walk from various underground stations including, Goodge Street, Euston, Euston Square, Russell Square and Tottenham Court Road.

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From the conference programme:

F R I D A Y ,  1 1  J U L Y  2 0 1 4

9.30  Registration

10.00  Welcome Remarks from Margot Finn, Principal Investigator, The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857

10.30  Session 1

Strand A: China and the ‘Chinese’ Style in British Houses
• Alexandra Loske (University of Sussex), ‘Chinese Landscapes in yellow etched in gold and highly varnished’: The influence of exportware and print culture on colour and ornament in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton
• Emile de Bruijn (National Trust) and Helen Clifford (UCL/University of Warwick), Past, Present and Future: The Chinese Wallpaper Project
• Clare Taylor (The Open University), Trading wallpaper: India paper and prints in the eighteenth-century home

Strand B: Buildings and Networks, Chair: Ellen Filor (UCL)
• Joanna Frew (University of Essex), ‘Inform me how I may become a useful member of the community at large’: Looking beyond the family
• Rosie Dias (University of Warwick), The British Country House in Colonial India
• Sylvia Shorto (American University, Beirut), Robert Smith’s ‘Truly Fair Palaces’ in India and in Europe

12.00  Lunch

13.00 Session 2

Strand A: Wales, Chair: Kate Smith (UCL)
• Diane James (University of Warwick), Welsh gardens
• Lowri Ann Rees (Bangor University), The nabob returned: the infiltration of East India Company men into Welsh landed society, c.1760–1840
• Joanna de Groot (University of York), Movement and materiality: traces of the transnational career of Harford Jones Brydges (1764–1847)

Strand B: Gender and Collecting, Chair: Kate Hill (University of Lincoln)
• Holly Shaffer (Yale), Publishing Indian Art between Suffolk and the Deccan
• Rosemary Raza (Independent scholar), Bringing India home: Early nineteenth-century British women and the understanding of India
• Catherine Eagleton (British Library), Collecting Asia at 32 Soho Square: Sarah Sophia Banks and her coins, tokens and medals

14.30  Coffee and tea

15.00  Session 3

Strand A: London Houses, Chair: Spike Sweeting (University of Warwick)
• David Veevers (University of Kent), The matriarchy of 45 Berkeley Square: gender, identity and imperial expansion in the late eighteenth century
• Harriet Richardson and Peter Guillery (Survey of London, UCL), At home in Cavendish Square and Harley Street: East India Company impact on eighteenth-century Marylebone
• George McGilvary ( Independent scholar), The Sulivans of India House

Strand B: Portraying India, Chair: Natasha Eaton (UCL)
• Viccy Coltman (University of Edinburgh), Portraiture and Empire: George Chinnery’s Gilbert Elliot, 1st Earl of Minto, 1812–13
• Jennifer van Schoor (Birkbeck), The Indian folds at Harewood House
• Bharti Parmar (Independent scholar and artist), Widow’s Weeds: Reflections on Black

16.30  Coffee and tea

17.00  Keynote Lecture
Deborah Cohen, Professor of Modern British and European History at Northwestern University and author of
Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (2006) and Family Secrets (2013) will be speaking in dialogue with Marietta Crichton-Stuart, a descendant of the Marquess of Bute, who has researched how Margaret Bruce designed and furnished Falkland House in Fife in the 1830s and 1840s.

18.30  Drinks reception

S A T U R D A Y ,  1 2  J U L Y  2 0 1 4

9.30  Session 1

Strand A: Loss and Looting, Chair: Meike Fellinger (University of Warwick)
• Lindsay Allen (KCL), Curious gifts of ancient substance
• Nigel Erskine (Australian National Maritime Museum), Passages to India: exploring Pacific pathways to Asia during Australia’s colonial period
• Rosie Llewellyn Jones (BACSA), Lost, stolen or strayed?: India artefacts in Britain
• Shaleen Wadhwana (India Photo Archive Foundation), Of Awadh, Oudh and Lucknow

Strand B: And so we go to Daylesford, Chair: Kevin Rogers
• Zirwat Chowdhury (Reed College), ‘Meanwhile’ at Daylesford…
• Elizabeth Lenckos (University of Chicago Graham School), ‘The House is fitted up with a degree of Taste & Magnificence seldom to be met with’: Daylesford, and the ‘nabobina’ Hastings’ ivory furniture collection
• Gillian Forrester (Yale Center for British Art), ‘Such a proof of Love and Duty’: Warren Hastings and the memorialization of India at Daylesford

11.00  Coffee and tea

11.30 Session 2

Strand A: Displaying Identity, Chair: Jane Hamlett (Royal Holloway, University of London)
• Deborah Sugg Ryan (Falmouth University), The elephant on the mantelpiece: the interwar suburban home and the detritus of empire
•  Britta Schilling (University of Cambridge), Grand designs: British homes in East Africa, 1850–1960
• Sarah Longair (British Museum), ‘The scene was brilliant and striking’: display and imperial identity in early colonial Zanzibar

Strand B: Daily Lives and Longings, Chair: Lucy Dow (UCL)
• Jean Sutton (Independent scholar), Distance, longing and return in the imperial family
•  Laura Humphreys (Queen Mark, University of London), World service: the foreign dimensions of domestic service in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century London
• Kate Smith (UCL), Imperial families: Women writing home in Georgian Britain

13.00  Lunch

14.00  Is the East India Company at home?
Presentations from Margot Finn, Helen Clifford, Kate Smith and Ellen Filor; followed by general discussion with panel and audience

16.00  Conference ends