Religion, Enlightenment and Empire

"In the middle of the eighteenth century finding themselves with privileged access to Indian languages and advisors, British East India Company servants became instrumental in delivering ideas about Indian religion to European audiences. This book is about the religion they decided to present, the intellectual frameworks that shaped their presentation of it, and some of the ramifications it had for enlightenment thought, Company policy and contemporary ideas of empire. This book charts the history of European interpretations of Hinduism from early modern travel accounts to the emergence of comparative approaches to the study of world religions in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Following this it offers an overview of the long history of the Company's policies on religion, as well as some of the significant turning points in the Company's political status and in its institutional approach to research on Indian languages, history and religion"--

Jessica Patterson is Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of enlightenment and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published work in History of European Ideas and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.