Commentary on Joshua Ehrlich’s The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge

Joshua Ehrlich's The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge sets out an impressive, nuanced argument about the relationship between companies, states, and knowledge. In this short contribution, I raise some questions about the origins of trading companies' engagements with knowledge-making practices. Although Ehrlich offers a compelling narrative about the history of the EICs and their agents' attitudes towards knowledge, it is slightly more difficult to assess the book's contribution to the history of ideas. This is in large part because it seems to me difficult to say very much about what Ehrlich calls the 'concept of knowledge', if its content is largely put to one side.