The Emerging Western World Canon in the Mediterranean and India, c. 1750-1800

The Seven Years' War, the Battle of Plassey won against the Nawab of Bengal, the acquisition of the Bengal Diwani Rights and the Act of Regulating set the stage for the Second British Empire in Asia between 1756 and 1773. These events and the growing settlements had brought an ever-increasing number of soldiers to Bengal and the other factories of India. The French had largely lost the geopolitical game in Asia, but remained numerous in Pondichéry and even in Bengal (Chandannagar).

The cultural history of these major shifts in global power deserves more attention: an increase in the number of European libraries abroad is not surprising for either nation. But the British case is special: a very different form of high culture society was now established in Calcutta, with the first common law court of record ever established outside Britain, the Supreme Court. A long tradition and recent scholarship have largely clarified our ideas about how political-economic leaders like Warren Hastings and major scholars like William Jones supported and influenced the study of Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts and indigenous legal traditions at this moment. But the book also shows that at the same time, as Europe's population grew, a more standardized form of libraries and a Western reading culture emerged. With the arrival of more soldiers and company servants, a Western world canon began to form. This differed from the period up to 1750 in the Mediterranean and India, studied in the first volume Western Libraries and Reading, where a multiplicity of small libraries, individual in size and selection, prevailed. One of the first massive manifestations of this Western canon, with a particularly Franco-British character, can be traced in the serial documentation of post-mortem household inventories. The results of a first detailed analysis of the bestsellers of the late eighteenth century among Europeans in India until 1800 are surprising: A "world literature" in the ambiguous Goethean sense becomes visible, and almost no European medieval author survives (until nineteenth-century Romanticism). In today's world, a "Western canon" is usually criticized, debated, and decentered, and with good reason, but as a historical process, the impact of such an imported canon cannot be ignored. No one denies the strong dynamics of autonomous forms of print and reading culture now emerging simultaneously in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, and many other languages, sometimes hybridizing with British production. To some extent, however, it must also be acknowledged that British Bengal early on provided an immense space for this Western canon abroad, comparable ultimately only to the American East Coast.