讲座信息

2023年11月30日上午10:10 - 12:00

北大一教303

腾讯会议：278-773-531

会议密码：884835

本讲摘要

In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), Joshua Ehrlich shows how a commitment to knowledge was integral to the East India Company’s ideology. He reveals how, from the 1770s to 1850s, the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach:the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.

主讲人：Joshua Ehrlich， 澳门大学助理教授

主持人：雷震，北京大学科学技术与医学史系助理教授

主讲人介绍

Joshua Ehrlich is a prize-winning historian of knowledge, political thought, the British Empire, and South and Southeast Asia. Currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Chicago. Ehrlich's first book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, shows how the world's most powerful corporation used its commitment to knowledge to justify its commercial and political power. Articles by Ehrlich have appeared in journals including Global Intellectual History, Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, and Modern Intellectual History.