Artists and Empire in India's Eighteenth Century

This seminar addresses Europe's aesthetic encounter with South Asia in the age of mercantile imperialism and colonial expansion in the long 18th century. It unravels how artists operated within a complex network of Enlightenment-era exploration, maritime commerce, and the growing military dominance of trading corporations such as the British and French East India Companies. The seminar examines how images underpinned Europe's paternalistic quest for knowing India, fostering a teleology of decline of the Mughal State through the lens of cultural and geographic determinism. It will further unpack the ways in which local artists resisted and reframed these prerogatives. Landscape views, natural history drawings, and genre portraits depicting castes and occupations will be assessed not only as documentary accounts of Indian life and landscape, its history, laws, and religions - but as indices of commerce, collecting, fashion, dispossession, and violence. Topics will cover the dialogue of aesthetic theories between Europe and India through the idea of Company Painting - a postcolonial term that sits squarely within the nexus of commerce and colonialism in India's 18th century.