Enfilade

From Boydell & Brewer:

Geoff Quilley, British Art and the East India Company (Martlesham, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2020), 370 pages, ISBN: 9781783275106, $120.

This book examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a new ‘school’ of British art was in its formative stages with the foundation of exhibiting societies and the Royal Academy in 1768. It focuses on the Company’s patronage, promotion and uses of art, both in Britain and in India and the Far East, and how the Company and its trade with the East were represented visually, through maritime imagery, landscape, genre painting, and printmaking. It also considers how, for artists such as William Hodges and Arthur William Devis, the East India Company, and its provision of a wealthy market in British India, provided opportunities for career advancement, through alignment with Company commercial principles. In this light, the book’s main concern is to address the conflicted and ambiguous nature of art produced in the service of a corporation that was the ‘scandal of empire’ for most of its existence and how this has shaped and distorted our understanding of the history of British art in relation to the concomitant rise of Britain as a self-consciously commercial and maritime nation, whose prosperity relied upon global expansion, increasing colonialism and the development of mercantile organisations.

Geoff Quilley is Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex, specializing in the relation of British and western visual culture to empire and global expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was previously Curator of Fine Art at the National Maritime Museum, London, and has written and edited numerous books, including Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain, 1768–1829 (Yale University Press 2011).

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Corporate Patronage and Company Artists
‘That Extensive Commerce’: The Maritime Image of the East India Company
Travels in India: Landscape and Colonial Patronage
Networks of Knowledge, Power, and Cultural Exchange
The Cries of India: Colonial Power, Classification, and the Diffusion of Knowledge
By Way of China
Collecting India
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Oxford UP:

Alexander Mikaberidze, The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 960 Pages, ISBN: 978-0199951062, $40.

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the places most closely associated with the era of the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous conflict affect the world beyond Europe? The immensity of the fighting waged by France against England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and the immediate consequences of the tremors that spread throughout the world.

In this ambitious and far-ranging work, Alexander Mikaberidze argues that the Napoleonic Wars can only be fully understood in an international perspective. France struggled for dominance not only on the plains of Europe but also in the Americas, West and South Africa, Ottoman Empire, Iran, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Taking specific regions in turn, Mikaberidze discusses major political-military events around the world and situates geopolitical decision-making within its long- and short-term contexts. From the British expeditions to Argentina and South Africa to the Franco-Russian maneuvering in the Ottoman Empire, the effects of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars would shape international affairs well into the next century. In Egypt, the wars led to the rise of Mehmed Ali and the emergence of a powerful state; in North America, the period transformed and enlarged the newly established United States; and in South America, the Spanish colonial empire witnessed the start of national-liberation movements that ultimately ended imperial control.

Skillfully narrated and deeply researched, here at last is the global history of the period, one that expands our view of the Napoleonic Wars and their role in laying the foundations of the modern world.

Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of European History at Louisiana State University at Shreveport, where he is also Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair for the Curatorship of the James Smith Noel Collection. He is the author of several books, including The Burning of Moscow: Napoleon’s Trial by Fire 1812 and The Battle of Borodino: Napoleon versus Kutuzov.

C O N T E N T S

1  The Revolutionary Prelude
2  The Eighteenth-Century International Order
3  The War of the First Coalition, 1792–97
4  The Making of ‘La Grande Nation’, 1797–1802
5  The Second Coalition War and the Origins of the ‘Great Game’
6  The Rites of Peace, 1801–02
7  The Road to War, 1802–03
8  The Rupture, 1803
9  The Elephant Against the Whale: France and Britain at War, 1803–1804
10  The Emperor’s Conquest, 1805–07
11  ‘War through Other Means’: Europe and the Continental System
12  The Struggle for Portugal and Spain, 1807–12
13  The Grand Empire, 1807–12
14  The Emperor’s Last Triumph
15  The Northern Question, 1807–11
16  ‘An Empire Besieged’: The Ottomans and the Napoleonic Wars
17  The Qajar Connection: Iran and the European Powers, 1804–14
18  Britain’s Expeditionary Warfare, 1805–10
19  Britain’s Eastern Empire, 1800–15
20  The Western Question? Struggle for the Americas, 1808–15
21  The Turning Point, 1812
22  The Fall of the French Empire
23  The War and Peace, 1814–1815
24  The Aftermath of the Great War

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index