Project Details
Projekt
Urban Xenocracy as Interactive Statebuilding: Madras 1639-1746
Applicant
Professor Dr. André Johannes Krischer
Subject Area
Early Modern History
Modern and Contemporary History
Modern and Contemporary History
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465372539
The project will examine Fort St. George/Madraspatnam (today: Chennai) as an urban space of xenocracy in the 17th and early 18th centuries. At first glance, Madras appears as a prime example of colonial xenocracy under conditions of cultural distance: English factors of the East India Company (EIC) built the fortress-like Fort St. George (hereafter: FSG) next to the fishing village of Madraspatnam on the southeastern coast of India in 1639, out of which grew a large city that from the mid-eighteenth century formed one of the pillars of the British Empire in India, an undoubtedly "increasingly racialized state" (BALACHANDRAN 2008b). Forms of 'othering' stretched back to the 17th century. A particularly clear expression of this was the division of the city into an English White Town and a Tamil-dominated Black Town, which was already so designated around 1700. However, the TP is linked to recent research that emphasizes transcultural dimensions and the agency of local actors in the early period of Madras (1639-1746) and problematizes the pre-dating of racist categories, pointing instead to a "multiplicity of early modern concepts of human difference" (NIGHTINGALE 2008: 51). The project will therefore identify specific early modern categories of difference in the administrative language of FSG and examine them in terms of their changes and practical consequences. Xenocracy is understood here as a mutual learning process: The non-English urban population learned to use the institutions and procedures of English factorial administration for their own purposes. They brought their manifold inheritance, debt, business, and ritual conflicts to court and formulated their concerns in petitions: Alms could be requested through these media, as could the construction of new quarters for certain castes or artisan groups. The English factorial administration (presidency), in turn, learned to understand and behave as a city-wide authority in the face of the factual and explicit demand for government, also in a public-symbolic way. We will examine how these learning processes were linked to forms of reciprocal, xenotypical othering, in which contexts these forms were mobilized or did not play a role, which distinctions were thus invoked, solidified, or liquefied again. An integrative approach will be adopted by understanding Madras as a pre-modern urban space of communication and resonance.
DFG Programme
Research Units
