“The Place of Knowledge at India House”

Jessica Ratcliff (Cornell University and Yale-NUS College)

Since the late-seventeenth century, India House on Leadenhall Street in the City of London had been the center of the East India Company’s European world. Around the corner from the Royal Exchange and abutting Company warehouses and a large tannery market, India House contained the apartments and offices of Company directors and administrators. It was where shareholders met and tea and textiles were auctioned. It was also where a sprawling collection of books, papers, maps, charts, globes, specimens and other information from across Asia and the Middle East steadily accumulated. By 1800 a library and museum had formed within India House. The museum functioned both as the central archive for the Company and as a semi-public resource, with limited access granted to non-shareholders. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the East India Company’s library and museum would grow to contain one of the largest collections of information on Asia in Europe. What was the place of this virtual Asia within the worlds of the East India Company? In this paper, I explore how this question was answered by three generations of library-curators: Charles Wilkins (1749-1836), Thomas Horsfield (1773-1859) and John Forbes Watson (1827-1892). I argue that it was in their conceptions of different ‘publics’ that their visions were most distinctive. I also suggest that the shifting place of knowledge at India House was part of a broader process in which a new idea of ‘public science’ was taking shape.

“The World to be Found in De Morgan’s Library”

Joan Richards (Brown University)

In 1839, two babies were born on Gower St in London. The father of one was Augustus De Morgan, Professor of Mathematics at University College London. The father of the other was Charles Darwin, fresh from his circumnavigation of the globe. Both men were Cambridge educated and, at the time their sons were born, deeply engaged with the London scientific community. Yet they lived in two different worlds. When Darwin was at Cambridge, he went tramping through the fens in search of beetles and birds. In contrast, when he was an undergraduate De Morgan would go “foraging for relaxation” among the books of the Trinity College Library. After Cambridge, Darwin constructed his understanding of the world from the specimens he had collected on his voyage; De Morgan built his from the equally far-flung set of books he had collected for his personal library. Darwin surely spent as much time in his home library as De Morgan did in his, but his world was only weakly described in books. In De Morgan’s books, however, was to be found a vivid world of meaning. There was nothing arbitrary about either the books or the words contained in De Morgan's library and he spent decades examining, manipulating, and re-ordering them to fit the world-historical narrative of which they were individual representatives. Following De Morgan into his library will take us to a world of reason as richly diverse, fundamentally ordered and real as Darwin's.

“The Search for Sanskrit Mathematical Works: Networks of British Indologists and Mathematicians (1780-1840)”

Dhruy Raina (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

The foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal marks a landmark in the institutionalization of modern science in South Asia and the networks associated with the Society as well as its journal, JASB were central to the South Asian region history of sciences. Associated with the foundation of the Society and its career were a group of scholar administrators whose writings were central to the inauguration of British Indology, as well as to the history of `Indian’ mathematics. Between 1780 and 1840 a group of Indologists that included Samuel Davis, Ruben Burrow, Henry Colebrooke, Edward Strachey and John Taylor set the turf for the history of `Indian’ mathematics. The Scottish mathematician John Playfair responded to this work and inadvertently set out a research agenda comprising a sequential search for families of manuscripts, including the search for the `origins of an Indian geometry’. This not only entailed a procedure for translating and interpreting texts, but of establishing trust with local scholarly communities and translators. This paper reviews texts from this period that subsequently played a role in shaping the `canon of Indian mathematics’. More importantly, it argues that the histories produced within the network of British Indologists were valorized through the associated networks of British mathematicians that included George Peacock, Augustus De Morgan and George Boole. Through these networks, the Indian mathematical tradition was constructed as an algebraic one and a set of texts that constituted its canon was established.

“Artisanal Mathematicians and Provincial Libraries”

Kevin Lambert (California State University Fullerton)

In this paper, I will explore the importance of two provincial libraries for the development of Victorian mathematics. The first is a subscription library, Bromley House, which was established in 1816. The Nottingham subscription library is well known in the history mathematics because of George Green, a miller, who began to subscribe to the library in 1823 and who would eventually publish An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism, a foundational work in mathematical physics. The second library is the Lincoln Mechanics Institute Library, founded in 1833, and which would provide resources for George Boole, the some of a shoemaker, to become a leading Victorian mathematician. Examination of the libraries, the books they contained, and the roles of influential members such as local baronet, Sir Edward Bromhead, who helped mentor the talents of both Green and Boole, will show the important role the material environment plays in the development of mathematicians. In particular I will use the example of Boole to show how some English mathematicians in this period practiced a kind of mathematics that depended upon the investigation of operations performed on what might be understood as virtual objects. These objects could be mathematical symbols, such as d/dx or forms of textual reasoning such as the syllogism. The virtual reality these objects might be said to occupy was contained in books available from libraries or circulated between members of the local learned community.