Sumit Guha: It was from awareness of this danger that, as Indrani Chatterjee was the first to show, the East India Company assiduously sought to limit the development a local power elite with any genealogical depth. This was intended to preempt any consequent claim to the \u201crights of Englishmen\u201d that had just been forcefully raised in North America. The children of mixed European and Indian parentage were therefore turned into a socially inferior class of Eurasians, excluded from power. As early as 1786, the Company forbade the children of \u201cnative women\u201d from traveling to England, after discovering that the Indian-born John Turing, \u201cdark as his mother,\u201d had done so and secured a cadet\u2019s appointment in the Army. Two decades later, a \u201cmulatto\u201d candidate secured an appointment only by paying a young Englishman to impersonate him at the interview. Although disavowed progeny were increasingly excluded from the Army and higher civil service, some Eurasians were in found jobs in other state employment into the 1830s. But the official policies toward them derived from a well-established, generalized contempt for those of mixed descent. As early as 1786, Surgeon Richard Wilson, in proposing the creation of a charity school to raise such children as loyal Protestants, remarked that it \u201chath long been a severe and unanswerable Reproach from the Natives of this Country that Britons, above all other Nations, have neglected and despised their progeny.\u201d<\/p>\n
If efforts at social integration had succeeded despite such attitudes, British India might have developed into a casta-ranked society like the Spanish Americas. But the need to win the support of the indigenous clerical classes, as well as the fear of promoting a Creole elite like the treacherous Americans, led the East India Company onto a different track. More here<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sumit Guha: It was from awareness of this danger that, as Indrani Chatterjee was the first to show, the East India Company assiduously sought to limit the development a local power elite with any genealogical depth. This was intended to preempt any consequent claim to the \u201crights of Englishmen\u201d that had just been forcefully raised … Continue reading Did the British Empire depend on separating Parents and Children?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14159"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14160,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14159\/revisions\/14160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}