The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857

Prof. Margot Finn of Warwick University has been in touch with FIBIS asking if any of our members would be interested in participating in The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 project

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 is a 3-year research project (beginning in September 2011 and ending in August 2014) funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project is one of the many externally-funded research programmes developed under the aegis of Warwick University ‘s Global History & Culture Centre (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc).

This new project is led by Margot Finn, a professor of modern British History at Warwick. Dr Helen Clifford will play a leading role in orchestrating the project ‘s engagement with local and family historians, working together with the project’s full-time postdoctoral research fellow, Dr Kate Smith. Ms Ellen Filor will be funded by the grant to complete a doctoral dissertation on East India Company family networks and identities in Roxburghshire, Scotland (c. 1780-1857) as an integral part of the larger research team.

The project seeks to enhance historical understanding of the form and function of British country house culture by situating changes in elite domestic interiors within wider global contexts. Specifically, it explores the regional, national and imperial routes by which Asian luxury goods – ceramics, textiles, metal-ware, furniture, fine art and the like – found their way into the homes of Britain ‘s governing elite in the Georgian and early Victorian periods, and examines what these exotic objects meant in these domestic settings and in wider national and international contexts. The project builds upon recent developments in the study of consumer culture, gender studies, globalisation, and material culture.

The project also capitalises upon the recent explosion of historical research conducted by community-based family historians.  The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 seeks to integrate the findings produced by family and local historians, curators, academics and other researchers into a wider collaborative research project that illuminates Britain’s global material culture from the eighteenth century to the present.

Please click here to download a short leaflet about  The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 project.

To register your interest in contributing to the project, please complete the online form. Alternatively, please download and complete a Word version of the ‘Join Us Form‘and send it  either by email to  [email protected] or by post to:

Professor Margot Finn History Department University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL UK