Jessica Ratcliff, "Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain's Second Scientific Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2025))

New Books in South Asian Studies · Jul 28, 2025 · 1h 22m

In the book Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain’s Second Scientific Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2025), author Jessica Ratcliff traces the changing practices of knowledge accumulation and management at the British East India Company, focusing on the Company’s library, museum, and colleges in Britain. Although these institutions were in Britain, they were funded by taxes from British India and they housed, so it was argued, the “national” collections of British India. The book examines how these institutions emerged from the Company’s unique form of monopoly-based colonial…