Kelly, Hannah
(2024)
Conjecture, Orientalism and Empire: The
Writing and Reading of Alexander Walker,
1764-1831
PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.
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Text
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Abstract
This thesis biographizes the reading, private historical discourse and administrative writing of Alexander Walker of Bowland (1764-1831), a Scotsman who served as a soldier and diplomat in the East India Company’s (EIC) Bombay Army from 1780-1811. It examines Walker’s lifelong interest in Scottish Enlightenment histories, along with how his reading of ‘theoretical or conjectural history’ in particular shaped his experience of imperial military service and informed him in the construction of colonial policy. Popularised in Scotland during the long eighteenth century, conjectural history is known for its close association with ‘stadial theory’, a model of human social evolution which speculated that societies passed through three or four distinct stages during their progress from a ‘state of nature’ to civil society. Walker was versed in history through his education at St. Andrews University, and frequently wrote in the mode of conjectural history in a vast body of private, unpublished historical monographs and essays. He also adopted ideas from conjectural history in much of his surviving administrative writing, which includes voluminous letters, reports and memoranda. These materials survive in a collection named ‘The Walker of Bowland Papers’ in the National Library of Scotland (NLS), to which they were donated by Walker’s descendants in 1952. Recent studies by historians of reading have already begun triangulating the influence of conjectural history on individual Scottish encounters with India in the eighteenth century. In line with this scholarship, this thesis melds biography and discourse analysis to reconstruct the ways in which it was possible for individual imperialists in British India to interface – often simultaneously – with the languages of conjectural history and Orientalist governing ideology. Furthermore, by examining the ambivalences, contradictions and slippages that occur in the narratives emanating from Walker’s archive, this thesis contributes to debates over how to define the Enlightenment, especially regarding its relationship to constructions of racial difference and the discourses that emerged to justify British colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than interpreting the Enlightenment through its constitutive texts, I use Alexander Walker’s archive to demonstrate how conjectural history was one among the number of Enlightenment discourses which came to be involved in the daily practice of imperialism as mediums through which ideas of racial hierarchy were formulated. While Walker’s cultural activity did sometimes reflect strands of anti-colonialism, conjectural history nonetheless empowered him to meter out expansionist policy, as well as to rationalise his own participation in empire as a vehicle for the promotion of social progress.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures |
| Depositing User: | Symplectic Admin |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Sep 2024 15:36 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Feb 2025 02:46 |
| DOI: | 10.17638/03178665 |
| Supervisors: |
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| URI: | https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3178665 |
| Disclaimer: | The University of Liverpool is not responsible for content contained on other websites from links within repository metadata. Please contact us if you notice anything that appears incorrect or inappropriate. |
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