1 The Afterlife of Objects: Anglo-Indian Ivory Furniture in Britain By

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

The Afterlife of Objects:

Anglo-Indian Ivory Furniture in Britain

By Kate Smith

Please note that this case study was first published on blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah in July

2014. For citation advice, visit: http://blogs.uc.ac.uk/eicah/usingthewebsite.

The term ‘ivory’ describes the teeth or tusks of elephants and other mammals,

including the Asiatic and African boar, the Artic walrus, hippopotamus, warthog

and whale. Ivory is a dense material that can be carved, engraved, turned,

pierced and painted, and it has the strength and elasticity required for use both

as a solid material and a veneer. In the Indian context, hunters removed ivory

from the upper front tusks of the elephants found across the subcontinent, from

the foothills of the Himalayas to the southern tip of Ceylon.

This case study

explores the objects made from these tusks. It particularly focuses on the

furniture pieces, made by skilled craftsmen in the subcontinent during the

eighteenth century. Although Europe had a long tradition of ivory goods, often

made from African and Asian elephant ivory (which was imported to Europe in

greater quantities from the 1500s onwards), the skills Indian craftsmen used to

make ivory furniture presented European consumers with new and desirable

aesthetic options.

Ivory furniture can thus act as a lens through which to

examine how individuals in the modern period related to objects from the

subcontinent. More particularly, ivory furniture is useful in considering a

question central to The East India Company at Home project: were objects

purchased by East India Company (EIC) families understood as distinct from

those traded more generally by the EIC? If so, how? This analysis seeks to show

that although these objects were increasingly made to European forms,

contemporaries in Britain understood that ivory furniture represented a family’s

link to the subcontinent and more particularly signalled the gains of an EIC

career. Furthermore, it demonstrates that ivory furniture continued to act as a

prompt for retelling EIC family narratives long after the family members with

links to the Company had died. Like Company families, Company objects played

important roles in British cultural and social life. Like the families who bought,

collected and retained them, Company objects experienced complicated and

global biographies, which shaped British material cultures long after the initial

point of exchange.

The range of Indian ivory furniture found in the collections of British museums,

such as the V&A, as well as private collections, reflects eighteenth- and

Amin Jaffer, Luxury Goods from India: The Art of the Indian Cabinet-Maker (London: V&A

Publications, 2002), p. 125.

Kirsten A. Seaver, ‘Desirable teeth: the medieval trade in Artic and African ivory’, Journal of

Global History, 4:2 (2009), p. 276.

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nineteenth-century Britons’ widespread desire to possess these exotic luxury

goods. As Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall warn in the case of porcelain,

however, the survival of many items in museum collections should be treated

with caution and should not be understood as unproblematic evidence of

historical popularity.

Yet compared to better-known large-scale imports such as

porcelain and textiles, ivory furniture’s seeming ubiquity is noteworthy precisely

because the Company did not trade in it. In contrast to widely traded

commodities like textiles and porcelain, ivory furniture generally came to Britain

through individual purchases made by EIC servants while in India. Whereas men

and women in Britain could commission armorial porcelains, items of ivory

furniture tended to be purchased by families or individuals while in India or

when trading on the Indian coast. Given these modes of purchase, did British

men and women understand ivory furniture as distinctly different from widely

traded commodities?

Such questions can be answered through exploring the ivory furniture

purchased by a variety of families. From the Harrisons in the early eighteenth

century, to the Monros and Hastings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

century and from the Morrisons in the nineteenth century to the Kleinworts of

the twentieth century and the Peakes of the twenty-first. Inventories, auction

catalogues, correspondence, newspaper articles and sales reveal that all these

families have purchased or retained ivory furniture pieces. Through analysing

these sources it is possible to understand how and why ivory furniture came to

represent East India Company connections and histories in the eighteenth,

nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Methodological questions

In trying to understand the meanings applied to and possessed by these objects,

this study takes a different approach to that used in the Englefield House case

study, which used private correspondence to demonstrate how family members

used specific objects in their collections to express affection. It also examined

wills to show how family members bequeathed objects with EIC connections,

singling them out as important pieces and thus perhaps underlining links to the

subcontinent as significant. In contrast, this case study uses a range of sources

such as newspapers, sale catalogues, inventories, wills and correspondence to

show that while some EIC families used their ivory furniture to enact affective

practices, other processes of meaning making were also at work. More

particularly, this case study examines the extent to which individuals in wider

British culture used ivory furniture as a means of demonstrating and then

Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, ‘Global China: material culture and connections in

world history’, Journal of World History, 23:1 (2012), p. 5.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

exploring a family’s EIC connections. This analysis moves away from a single

family to ask, how was ivory furniture understood in British culture more

broadly? What did it mean in this domestic context?

In recent years historians of material culture have increasingly interrogated the

meanings that objects possessed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Through this work objects have come to be seen as potent signifiers of identities.

For imperial and global historians, new questions have been asked as to whether

objects represented distant geographical locations and cultures. In the case of

comestibles brought to Britain, for example, historian Troy Bickham has argued

that by the second half of the eighteenth century foodstuffs imported from

empire became ubiquitous in British households of all social groups. Highly

visual advertising forms such as trade cards along with text-based recipe books

affirmed a clear link between tobacco, tea, curry and empire.

For those

consuming it, tea was understood to have come from China. Despite greater

scholarly interest in commodities traded between Europe and Asia by state

monopolies such as the EIC, less is known about what objects that were

imported through other, more exclusive, routes came to mean in Britain. Tillman

Nechtman has argued that these objects were understood as deeply imperial: ‘a

means of narrating an imperial identity, of spanning the distance between

empire and nation’.

While it is possible to make this argument for remarkable

objects such as diamonds and dress, which were worn, gifted and scrutinised in

public spaces such as the court, it becomes more difficult to track reactions to

objects in domestic spaces.

Yet, as the East India Company at Home project has

sought to show, domestic objects and domestic spaces were and are important in

understanding how contemporaries confronted empire. To understand the

history and significance of these imperial objects, we need to study what they

went on to mean after their initial purchase, as they moved on into other families,

houses and institutions.

What can ivory objects brought back to Britain by East India Company families

tell us? To capture the meanings that such objects held in wider British culture, I

examine ivory furniture both in residence in particular houses and at moments

in which these goods moved and circulated. It is often in moments of movement

that objects emerge onto the historical record with their greatest force. In the

For more on these debates see Frank Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the future of history: things,

practices, and politics’, Journal of British Studies, 48:2 (2009), p. 288.

Troy Bickham, ‘Eating the empire: intersections of food, cookery and imperialism in eighteenth-

century Britain’, Past and Present, 198 (2008), p. 106.

Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2010), p.170.

For more on the importance of being seen to wear Indian goods in public see Tillman W.

Nechtman, ‘Nabobinas: luxury, gender, and the sexual politics of British imperialism in India in

the late eighteenth century, Journal of Women’s History, 18:4 (2006), pp. 8-30.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when people advertised objects for sale,

singled them out for inheritance, or valued them, they tended to describe and

arrange them, privileging certain components for inclusion or note. The texts

created to record exchange and circulation offer historians important evidence

through which to understand the meanings affixed to objects. Of course, these

texts are often steeped in particular conventions (the inventory, the sales

catalogue), which need to be fully understood and accounted for as shaping

forces, altering how descriptions and notes are shaped and written. Nevertheless,

these texts provide important sources for the question at hand.

My approach here is to examine three different types of movement

chronologically. First, I examine the purchase of ivory furniture by members of

the EIC elite, such as Edward Harrison, in the early eighteenth century. I

investigate why EIC officials bought ivory furniture by asking what the visual and

material qualities of such pieces might represent. I also explore the ways in

which families embedded these objects into their domestic spaces upon return

‘home’ to Britain. Where were they placed in houses? What were they

surrounded with? The second section of the case study explores how collections

purchased in the eighteenth century came to be dismantled and recirculated in

the nineteenth century, focusing on Warren Hastings and the sale of parts of his

ivory furniture collection in the mid-nineteenth century. I examine the ways in

which these goods were presented to interested parties and question how and

why newspaper writers used the marketing of Hastings’s house contents at

Daylesford’s to embark on further retellings of the Hastings myth. I end by

looking at non-EIC families who purchased Indian ivory furniture in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, asking what these objects might have meant

when circulated outside EIC networks. In following these avenues this case study

explores British public understandings of empire through ivory objects across

the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

1. Purchase

Figure 1. Balls Park, Hertfordshire.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

Edward Harrison (1674-1732) inherited Balls Park in Hertfordshire after the

death of his father Richard Harrison in 1726.

Prior to establishing himself at the

estate during the 1720s, Edward had worked in different capacities in the service

of the EIC. It is possible that he began his EIC career as purser upon the London

in the early 1690s. He certainly went on to captain EIC ships including the

Powderham Castle, which sailed to Borneo in the late 1690s and the Kent, which

he commanded on voyages to China in 1704-5 and 1706-10.

Towards the end of

1710, after completing his final voyage on the Kent, Harrison was appointed

Governor of Fort St George, Madras.

After completing his tenure as Governor in

1717 Harrison returned to England, where he continued to be involved with the

EIC and simultaneously established a career in Parliament. Between 1717 and

1722 he acted as MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis before going on to

represent Hertford between 1722 and 1726. After moving to Balls Park in 1726,

Harrison re-established himself once again within the Company by becoming

Deputy Chairman of the Court of Directors in 1728, Chairman in 1729 and

Deputy Chairman for a second time in 1731.

By the time of his death in 1732

Edward Harrison was deeply embedded in EIC life – he had travelled to places as

diverse as Macao and Batavia on Company business, he had led Company

operations in Madras and he had worked to govern the Company in London.

Edward Harrison’s EIC career is not visible only through Company records that

list orders from the Directors for copper, tea, green ginger, rhubarb, wrought

silks, raw silk and china.

For Harrison’s experiences of Asia and Eurasian trade

were (and are) also made materially manifest through the objects he returned

with and the wealth he acquired. Of particular interest here is the ivory furniture

he purchased while in India, most likely as Governor of Fort St George between

1711 and 1717. Ivory furniture acts an important signifier of Company

connections for historians because it is one of the few Asian goods that can be

identified in inventories. Because it was such a distinctive material, men writing

up probate records often included the descriptor ‘ivory’ when itemising these

objects.

In those cases where it is possible to trace a particular piece of ivory

furniture to a specific family, distinct craft traditions in different parts of the

Paul Sangster, Balls Park, Hertford (Caxton Hill, Hertford: Hertford Press, 1972), p. 3.

See Anthony Farrington, A Biographical Index of East India Company Maritime Service Officers,

1600-1834 (London: The British Library, 1999), p. 355; Anthony Farrington, Catalogue of East

India Company Ships’ Journals and Logs 1600-1834 (London: The British Library, 1999), p. 359

and 515.

Sir Charles Lawson, Memories of Madras (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1905).

George K. McGilvary, East India Patronage and the British State: The Scottish Elite and Politics in

the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008), p. 5.

British Library, India Office Records, ‘Order and instructions to Captain Edward Harrison,

Edward Herris and John Cooke, Supercargoes of the Kent, bound for Canton’, 1 December 1703,

IOR/E/3/95, ff. 83-86.

This is in contrast to ceramic goods, which are often difficult to identify with any clarity in

inventories, as ‘The Willow Pattern Case Study’ demonstrates.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

subcontinent mean that these wares also signal the Indian locations where their

owners lived and served. The craft traditions of the two main ivory carving

centres in the subcontinent, Vizagapatam near Madras and Murshidabad in

western Bengal, employed different techniques during the eighteenth century

and thus produced pieces that were visibly distinct. The pieces traced to Edward

Harrison, for example, confirm this trend. Produced in Vizagapatam, Edward

Harrison’s ivory furniture marks his tenure in the Madras presidency.

Figure 2. Armchair, Ivory, carved, pierced and partly gilded with a caned seat. Murshidabad, ca.

1785. 1075-1882 Victoria & Albert Museum. © Victoria & Albert Museum.

Before the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Mushidabad was an important centre of

ivory carving, primarily producing solid ivory pieces of furniture and decorative

items. After the Battle and as the British began to administer the diwani in the

Bengal region, ivory carvers in Murshidabad increasingly sought to make goods

that were desirable to Anglo-Indian consumers. Murshidabad workshops began

to produce chairs, candle stands and worktables. Particular skills in solid ivory

carving allowed these workshops to produce items with distinctive arms and

legs made of turned solid ivory (see figure 2). Amin Jaffer has argued that

Murshidabad ‘can now be recognised as most probably the source of most

surviving Anglo-Indian solid-ivory furniture.’

Amin Jaffer, ‘Tipu Sultan, Warren Hastings and Queen Charlotte: the mythology and typology of

Anglo-Indian ivory furniture’, The Burlington Magazine, 141:1154 (1999), p. 277.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

Figure 3. Thomas Chippendale, The gentleman and cabinet maker’s director (1754), p. xiv. See full

publication at: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/DLDecArts.ChippGentCab. Note

particularly the central design and the interlocking nature of the back plat, which is replicated in

a different form in the ivory armchair in figure 2.

Murshidabad carvers produced furniture that readily conformed to European

styles. The circulation of print sources, such as Thomas Chippendale’s The

gentleman and cabinet maker’s director (1754) and George Heppelwhite’s The

cabinet maker and upholsterer’s guide (1788), containing European designs

facilitated this process (see figure 3). Information about European designs was

also transmitted to Indian workshops through the arrival of skilled furniture

makers from Europe. For example, Jaffer gives particular credit to the presence

of Charles Rose, a British furniture maker who was recorded as being in Bengal

from 1772 and was registered as an inhabitant in Murshidabad in 1793.

Jaffer, ‘Tipu Sultan, Warren Hastings and Queen Charlotte’, p. 278. BL IOR European

Inhabitants in Bengal, 0/5/26.

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Figure 4. Toilet glass, wood inlaid with ivory. Vizagapatam, 1730-40. 49-1905 Victoria & Albert

Museum. © Victoria & Albert Museum.

Much further south from Murshidabad, Vizagapatam on the Coromandel Coast

was also a key production site for ivory furniture. From the late seventeenth

century until the mid eighteenth century, Vizagapatam was especially known for

furniture that featured inlaid ivory work (see figure 4). As in Murshidabad,

artisans in this area increasingly used their ivory carving skills to produce

furniture in Western forms.

Between 1760 and 1780, Kamsali caste ivory

carvers in Vizagapatam began to use new techniques involving ivory veneer (see

figure 5). During this period ivory veneer gradually replaced ivory inlay as the

main form of production. It was constructed by attaching a thin layer of ivory, by

means of fixatives and rivets, to a wooden carcass. Decorative schemes appeared

on these veneers, created by engraving the ivory and then filling the created

spaces with black lac to create a monochrome design. While visiting Vizagapatam

Jaffer and Corrigan, Furniture from British India and Ceylon, p. 172.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

in 1801 with her mother and sister, Henrietta Clive witnessed the production of

these ivory furniture pieces. On 4 April 1801 Henrietta described to her father

watching monochrome ivory veneers being manufactured. She described how

‘We have seen the people inlaying the Ivory [with lac]’ and that ‘it appears very

simple’. Henrietta observed that ‘they draw the pattern...they intend with a

pencil and then cut it out slightly with a small piece of Iron, they afterwards put

hot Lac upon it, and when it is dry scrape it off and polish it, the Lac remains in

the marks made with the piece of Iron’.

Figure 5. Toilet glass, sandalwood, veneered with engraved ivory, with silver mounts.

Vizagapatam, 1790-1800. IS.31-1975 Victoria & Albert Museum. © Victoria & Albert Museum.

Switching to ivory veneer was an important change in aesthetic terms as it

allowed makers a greater degree of flexibility when designing decorative

schemes for furniture. Being able to implement a range of decorative schemes

became important in the later eighteenth century as carvers began to

incorporate increasingly elaborate figurative and architectural scenes into their

furniture items (see figure 6). Decorative ivory veneers proved a popular

innovation with consumers. Again the circulation of European prints was

important to the construction of these wares. Many of the veneer panels included

As cited in Mildred Archer, Christopher Rowell and Robert Skelton, Treasures from India: The

Clive Collection at Powis Castle (Great Britain: The Herbet Press, 1987), p. 84.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

scenes inspired by European prints, which became widely available on the

subcontinent in this period.

Figure 6. Detail from Cabinet, rosewood, inlaid and partly veneered with ivory, with silver

mounts. Vizagapatam, c. 1765. IS.289&A-1951 Victoria & Albert Museum.

As Henrietta Clive’s written description of ivory engraving for her father

demonstrates, in Britain, people became increasingly curious about the material

and the production techniques involved in making ivory furniture, workboxes,

chairs and cabinets. Some elite women, such as Margaret, second Duchess of

Portland (1715-85) and Mary Delany (1700-88) even took up ivory turning

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

themselves.

While a wider interest in ivory had emerged by the mid eighteenth

century, in the early decades of the period elite East India Company families,

such as the Harrison, were the dominant collectors of ivory furniture pieces.

On Edward Harrison’s death in 1732 appraisers compiled an inventory of

movable goods at Balls Park estate. Although Harrison had served as an MP in

the later years of his life, in constructing the inventory the unnamed appraiser

identified Harrison through his EIC career, as ‘the Honourable Edward Harrison

Esq deceased late-Governor of Fort St George at his seat Balls in the County of

Hertford’.

The inventory demonstrates that the Harrisons were keen collectors

of Indian (or Indian-inspired) textiles as well as of ivory furniture. Calico quilts

appear in many rooms, including the Nursery, Drawing Rooms, Mrs Harrisons

Room, the House Keeper’s Room and Brown Room. The presence of calico in

these rooms and not others marks both the rooms and the calicos as of less social

importance. In contract, those rooms specifically linked to Edward Harrison and

his wife, contained more valuable Indian textiles such as chintz (spelt ‘Chince’ in

the inventory).

Similarly the ivory objects owned by the Harrisons appear in

some of the house’s most public and socially important rooms. ‘The Governors

Bed Chamber’, for example, contained ‘a very curious India Book case inlaid with

Ivory’, while ‘The Long Galery [sic]’ included twelve ebony ‘China’ chairs inlaid

with ivory, as well as two similar elbow chairs and two couches.

It is probable

that Harrison bequeathed some of his movable household goods to his only child

Etheldreda (commonly known as Audrey) (c.1708-1788), as an 1737 inventory

for her London home in Grovesnor Street notes that her personal room

contained ‘A Desk and book case inlay’d with Ivory’.

In 1723 Etheldreda married Charles Townshend (1700-1764) afterwards third

Viscount Townshend. While the relationship between Etheldreda and Charles

remained turbulent, the alliance instituted an important link between the East

India Company and the Townshend family. Such links were further consolidated

when Charles’s brother Augustus captained the East Indiaman Augusta.

On his

final voyage, destined for China, another Townshend, Roger (d.1759), the fifth

Stacey Sloboda, ‘Displaying materials: porcelain and natural history in the Duchess of

Portland’s museum’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 43:4 (2010), p. 464.

Raynham Hall Archive, ‘An Inventory and Appraism’, 15 December 1732, RAS H1/4/3. With

thanks to the Marquess Townshend's kindness in granting permission for information from the

Raynham Hall Archive to be cited.

‘An Inventory and Appraism’, 15 December 1732, RAS H1/4/3.

British Library, Townshend Papers, An Inventory of the Right Honorable the Lord Lynn's Goods

taken at His Lordships House in Littel Grosvenor Street this 11 day of July 1737, Ms. 41656, ff. 209-

10.

Anthony Farrington, A Biographical Index of East India Company Maritime Service Officers,

1600-1834 (London: The British Library, 1999), p. 793. He captained the Augusta on the

following voyages: 1738/9, 1741/2 and 1744/5.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

son of Etheldreda and Charles, joined Augustus and further consolidated the

family’s links to global trade. Before preparations to sail on the Augusta began,

Charles and Augustus worriedly wrote numerous letters, ensuring each other

that Roger was sufficiently kitted out for the voyage. Augustus advised that

around £200 would be required to see Roger set up on ship and during the

journey.

After setting sail in February 1745, Roger finally returned to Britain in

November 1749. He returned without his uncle who had died on board ship and

despite the Augusta being captured by the French as it tried to return home.

The difficulties Roger experienced might explain why on returning he was

distinctly keen to switch profession, hoping instead to join the army or navy.

Charles wanted Roger to remain in the Company, but remarked to his brother

that at least a change would mean that the family were no longer dependent on

the solicitations of the Court of Directors.

While the Townshend family’s

growing range of connections to the East India Company is made visible through

these professional concerns, Etheldra’s earlier connections to the Company

through her father and his links to the Coromandel Coast were manifest through

material possessions that were recognisably Indian. Ivory pieces were important

in marking particular connections to geographical locations within the

subcontinent. As noted in the Englefield Case Study, Richard Benyon (1698-

1774) who worked as Governor of Fort St George between 1735 and 1744

purchased a very similar bureau to that owned by Harrison (see figure 6).

with the textiles they purchased, these bureau cabinets linked these men and

their families to Madras and the Coromandel Coast. Unlike the textiles they

purchased, however, these valuable and highly valued cabinets remain as

testimony to such connections. They have been passed down through

generations and retain a strong sense of provenance.

Not all ivory furniture pieces, however, stayed within East India Company

families, East India Company servants also purchased them to be later gifted or

sold. Moreover, while it was the East India Company elite who predominantly

purchased ivory furniture in the early eighteenth century, in the later decades of

the period, those (slightly) lower down the social ladder were also able to

Raynham Hall Archive, ‘Letter from Augusta Townshend to Charles Townshend’, 24 December

1744, RAS B2/6.

Raynham Hall Archive, A Journal of a Voyage from London to China on Board the Augusta Kept

by Roger Townshend Anno Domini 1745, RAS H4/3.

Raynham Hall Archive, ‘Letter from Charles Townshend to a brother’, 5 December 1747, RAS

B2/6.

Kate Smith, ‘Inheriting India’ in ‘Englefield House, Berkshire: processes and practices’, The East

Indian Company at Home, 1757-1857’: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/englefield-house-

berkshire/englefield-house-case-study-inheriting-india/ (2013).

This strong sense of provenance can be seen in the marketing materials produced for the piece

during its sale in 2011. See http://www.christies.com/features/audio-an-anglo-indian-ivory-

inlaid-teak-ebony-and--1612-4.aspx.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

acquire such pieces. Evidence for the consumption of ivory furniture by those

below the Governor rank can be seen through the example of Captain James

Monro (1756-1806) who purchased a miniature cabinet with ivory veneers,

made in Vizagapatam in the second half of the eighteenth century. Because it

displays such an elaborate collection of ivory veneer sections, the piece can be

dated to the post-1760 period when the majority of Vizagapatam ivory

production shifted focus from ivory inlay work to ivory veneer (described above).

Figure 7. Miniature cabinet with ivory veneer. Vizagapatam, c.1770-1780.

Image courtesy of Bonhams.

In researching the miniature cabinet, furniture historian Elizabeth Jamieson

demonstrated how objects are sometimes able to allude to their histories.

the sandalwood top of the lower section of the cabinet Jamieson found an

inscription that reads ‘Out of No. 201 Houghton / Capt Monro’. The inscription

connects the cabinet to the East Indiaman, the Houghton. Between 1766 and

Many thanks to Elizabeth Jamieson MA (Freeland furniture historian) for allowing me to

include in this case study the research she completed for Bonhams.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

1789 James Monro was a member of the crew on every voyage that the Houghton

took. Monro, the third son of physician John Monro

, began his seafaring career

at the age of ten when he worked as a captain’s servant on the Houghton as it

travelled out to trade at Whampoa near Canton. After this early engagement with

shipping, Monro went on to work as midshipman and fifth mate on the Houghton

before completing a further voyage as fourth mate on the Osterley II.

At the age

of twenty Monro returned to the Houghton as second mate, a role he also

performed on the York before finally gaining command of the Houghton for the

first time in 1782. After this, James Monro captained the Houghton on three

further journeys to Asia.

Perhaps most significantly for this case study, on his

voyage to Bengal, as second mate on the Houghton, between 1777 and 1778

Monro stopped at Vizagapatam. The port had acted as an important English

trading post or ‘factory’ since 1668. After 1768, however, when the Northern

Circars came under the control of the English East India Company, Vizagapatam

increased in importance as a place of settlement and a lucrative port for

conducting Coromandel Coast trade in textiles.

Here Monro would have been

able to see a range of ivory furniture pieces at first hand, perhaps encouraging

him to purchase a piece later on when he became captain. As captain Monro

would have been well placed to purchase pieces such as this (and to transport

them back to Britain). With their popularity growing in late eighteenth-century

Britain, such pieces would have proved a sound investment for private trade.

James Monro’s letters demonstrate that he purchased smaller items such as

ceramics and furniture while on voyage, for gifting and sale once he returned to

England. Writing to his elder brother Charles as he sailed from China to St Helena

in November 1785, James described how he had managed to purchase some

Chinese table and tea sets, as well as some small chairs.

He generously offered

Charles and his new wife first refusal on his bountiful supplies.

Like other East

India Company men studied in the East India Company at Home project (for

example, William Gamul Farmer or Henry Russell of Swallowfield Park), James

Monro appears to have depended upon his brother for support and

Jonathan Andrews, ‘Monro, John (1715–1791)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford

University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18976,

accessed 21 May 2014].

Anthony Farrington, A Biographical Index of East India Company Maritime Service Officers,

1600-1834 (London: The British Library, 1999), p. 552.

Farrington, A Biographical Index of East India Company Maritime Service Officers, p. 552.

Jaffer and Corrigan, Furniture from British India and Ceylon, p. 172.

Elizabeth Jamieson mentions this letter in the research she completed on the cabinet for

Bonhams. London Metropolitan Archives, ‘Letter written by James Monro to his brother Charles’,

22 November 1785, Acc/1063/034.

In the letter James uses the advertising convention of ‘&c, &c, &c’ to note the range of items he

has at his disposal. For more on this convention see Kate Smith, Material Goods, Moving Hands:

Perceiving Production in England, 1700-1830 (Forthcoming with Manchester University Press), p.

62.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

information.

Even when in England, but away from the centre of news and

markets in London, James requested Charles to complete payments and order

clothes on his behalf.

After James’s death in 1806, Charles continued to play an

important role in the life of his family. James’s wife Caroline (d. 1848) outlived

him and Charles took responsibility for her and the remaining children. For

instance, a letter from 1811 suggests that Charles was actively involved in

managing the family’s financial affairs, particularly those of James’s daughters.

He carefully ensured that household goods such as furniture were turned into

investments such as an ‘Old South Sea Ann’ty’ and kept distinct from the ‘Estate’.

After Caroline’s death it was these items and not the ‘Estate’ that would have

been allotted to her daughters and Charles realised that they would ‘not be

generally divisible’ or financially useful.

If the Vizagapatam cabinet remained in

the family rather than being sold when James returned from India, it may well

have been unsentimentally sent to market to provide for his daughters and their

future life.

These ivory objects, bearing materials from the subcontinent and

Africa, produced through the enactment of highly-skilled Indian craftsmanship to

European designs, remained valuable and desirable commodities. Their links to

the subcontinent through the EIC were part of their allure. Moreover, they often

experienced an afterlife linked to, but independent of, their East India Company

history. The next section of this case study considers that afterlife and examines

what it might reveal about what these objects meant in late eighteenth- and early

nineteenth-century Britain.

2. Sale

Throughout the late eighteenth century Warren Hastings (1732-1818) and his

wife Marian (1744-1837) held an important place in Britons’ imaginings of

empire. The press and the public used the Hastings as an important conduit

This close relationship appears to be the case as a selection of letters between the two

brothers survives in the archives of the London Metropolitan Archive. The survival of these

letters suggests they were valued, but it might also be misleading in terms of the wider network

James Monro established and used while working as a captain for the East India Company. See

London Metropolitan Archive, Letters written by James Monro to his brother Charles

ACC/1063/014-043 (1775-1790). Many thanks to Elizabeth Jamieson for the reference to these

letters.

London Metropolitan Archives, ‘Letter written by James Monro to Charles Monro’, 31 January

1780, ACC/1063/015.

London Metropolitan Archives, ‘Letter written to Mrs Caroline Monro from her brother-in-law

Charles Monro’, 14 January 1811, ACC/1063/121.

For more on the inheritance of household goods by women see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,

‘Hannah Barnard’s cupboard: female property and identity in eighteenth-century New England’,

in Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel and Fredrika J. Teute, Through a glass darkly: reflections on

personal identity in early America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,

1997), pp. 238-273; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the

Creation of An American Myth (Vintage Books: New York, 2002).

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

through which to understand empire broadly and Britain’s relationship to the

subcontinent more particularly. They did so in three key ways: first, through

Hastings’ career, second, through his marriage to Marian and finally, through his

estate – Daylesford.

Figure 8. ‘Warren Hastings (1732-1818), Governor-General of Fort William, Bengal, 1774-85’,

George Romney, 1795. © British Library Board, F1.

Warren Hastings’ career path mirrored Britain’s increasingly imperial role in the

subcontinent and ended with his promotion to serve as the first Governor

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

General of India in 1772. Hastings joined the East India Company in 1750 after

his guardian Joseph Creswicke secured him a writership in Calcutta. Twenty-two

years later in 1772, Hastings rose to the position of Governor General. Although

in many ways successful, his long tenure as Governor (thirteen years in total)

was also marked by war and accusations of corruption.

As Britain’s control of

the American colonies became weaker during the course of the Wars of

Independence, the British public’s interest in India increased. When Hastings

resigned in 1785 and returned to Britain, his impeachment and trial (1787-95)

had a ready audience.

At the same time, as Tillman Nechtman has shown, interest in Hastings’ personal

life further consolidated and shaped the public’s desire to understand the nature

of Britain’s empire.

Warren Hastings first met Marian von Imhoff (née Anna

Maria Apollonia Chapuset) while sailing to India in 1769. At the end of the

journey Marian went with her husband to Calcutta, while Hastings went to

Madras to take up the post of second-in-council at Fort St George. Once

appointed Governor in 1772, Hastings moved to Calcutta, the seat of the

Company’s government, where Marian and her husband Baron Carl von Imhoff

remained resident. In 1773 Marian remained in India when the Baron returned

to Europe. Her husband divorced Marian in 1776, and a year later she married

Hastings. Their marriage underlined how the social rules structuring life in the

metropole were worryingly indistinct once abroad.

When the couple returned

to Britain in 1785, Marian was subject to further criticism because she both wore

and distributed the fruits of empire. She supposedly appeared at court decked

out in diamonds and offered up rich and elaborate gifts to the Royal family –

including ivory armchairs from Murshidabad. Critics, such as Fanny Burney,

feared that Marian would undermine the morality of court, bringing it under the

influence of empire and imperial riches.

The Hastings’ country house, Daylesford, also acted as important part of the

family’s myth. During his trial, for example, the press used Hastings’ purchase of

Daylesford variously as a means to reaffirm his morality and immorality. The

Hastings family had been linked to the Daylesford estate since the thirteenth

century, but as they came to experience reduced circumstances during the early

years of the eighteenth century, the lands were sold off. Both Hastings’ father and

grandfather continued to live near the estate and Warren Hastings’ desire to re-

acquire it and re-establish the family fortune acted as a compelling part of his life

P. J. Marshall, ‘Hastings, Warren (1732–1818)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford

University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12587,

accessed 19 May 2014]

Nechtman, ‘Nabobinas’, pp. 8-30.

Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 197.

Nechtman, Nabobs, p. 190.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

narrative. As the trial wound on, writers explored Hastings’ desire and motives

for different ends. For example, articles in both the St James’s Chronicle or the

British Evening Post and the World discussed his purchase of Daylesford in terms

of his family’s long attachment to the estate. An anonymous letter published in

the St James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post on 29 September 1785 (after

Hastings had returned to England) noted that although Hastings had been linked

to several houses, he never had any intention of purchasing anything other than

Daylesford.

The writer went on to the note that Daylesford had been in the

possession of his family from ‘1281 to 1715’ and that in reacquiring it Hastings

sought to return to the status of ‘respectable Country Gentleman’.

Similarly a

biographical sketch published in the World at the height of his trial in 1792 noted

that Hastings’ grandfather had been forced to sell the Daylesford estate, ‘which

had been possessed by the family of Mr Hastings from 1280 to 1715’.

In contrast to using Daylesford to make claims regarding the respectability and

longevity of the Hastings family, other publications used Daylesford (and more

particularly its rebuilding) to suggest Hastings’ duplicity. On 6 October 1795

(long after the final acquittal), for example, rather than take pity on Hastings and

the high costs he incurred as a result of the lengthy trial, The Morning Post and

Fashionable World took umbrage at the Indian profits he was seen to retain. They

particularly noted the money Hastings had spent on ornamenting his gardens. Its

writer quipped that ‘To throw away [£]50,000 in making Shrubberies and Gravel

Walks is an unquestionable proof of poverty.’ It further asked ‘When a man

throws away [£]90,000 in merely ornamenting the grounds about his Country

House, what may we calculate his whole fortune to be?’

By examining how the Hastings family were described in the press and other

print forms, it is possible to understand the role that objects, such as ivory

furniture, played in consolidating links that others perceived as existing between

individuals and empire. That Daylesford was an important site through which

the public could discuss Hastings (and by implication empire) becomes doubly

apparent during its sale in the 1850s. In this instance, ivory furniture was of

particular importance in providing signifiers that clearly linked Hastings to

empire.

The sale of Daylesford in the early 1850s and the subsequent sale of its contents

in August 1853 attracted the attention of newspapers across Britain. Such was

the perceived public interest in these events that following the sale, on 10

The Hastings landed at Plymouth on 13 June 1785.

St James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post (London), 29 September 1785.

World, (London) 16 July 1792.

Morning Post and Fashionable World (London) 6 October 1795.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

September 1853 the Oxford Journal republished an article that had appeared in

The Times, which proposed that:

It is scarcely possible to read this announcement of the sale of Daylesford

without emotion – so much of hope and feeling had been bound up with

the trees and pastures of that pleasant spot … Well did he [Hastings] keep

his word [to reclaim Daylesford] … He did purchase the estate – he did

build upon it a mansion suitable for the Inhabitants of an English country

gentleman.

Why was the Daylesford sale such an important event? Cynthia Wall has drawn

our attention to the importance of understanding auctions and house sales as

‘dismantlings’. For Wall ‘The auction is the site for the disassembling of one

instance of the existing world and the promise of the reconstruction of a new

one.’

As The Times article reprinted in the Oxford Journal demonstrates, the

attention that the sale of Daylesford and its contents attracted, focused

specifically on the house’s relationship to Warren and Marian Hastings rather

than its most recent owner (Marian’s son by her first marriage) Charles von

Imhoff or its purchaser, a finance man called Mr Grisewood.

The catalogue and

its later dissemination constructed and consolidated this focus. It too primarily

understood Daylesford House as ‘The Seat of the late Right Hon. Warren

Hastings’, while the sale itself was framed as occurring ‘By orders of the

Executors of the late Mrs Hastings’.

Playing to the connection between Warren

and Marian Hastings and Daylesford, the frontispiece of the sale catalogue hints

at the end of such connections and the dismantling of their lives. Its wording

suggests that overspending on ‘valuable’ and ‘costly’ items from Asia, the

Caribbean and Europe (as well as their deaths) has led to the end of Daylesford

and its present chaotic state.

Even in the 1850s, as his house and contents were sold, Warren Hastings’

connection to empire remained the key frame through which he was understood.

Such connections were, I argue, significantly underlined through material

manifestations of empire – such as ivory furniture. In its first few lines, the

frontispiece to the Daylesford sale catalogue highlighted the ivory furniture

belonging to the Hastings. It described itself as ‘A catalogue of the valuable

contents of the mansion embracing a unique & costly drawing room suite of solid

ivory, finely carved and gilt, and finished in the Richest Style of Oriental

Oxford Journal, 10 September 1853.

Cynthia Wall, ‘The English auction: narratives of dismantlings’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31:1

(1997), p. 3.

Information regarding Mr Grisewood taken from the Dundee Courier, 14 September 1853.

Catalogue of the valuable contents of Daylesford House, Worcestershire, the seat of the late Right

Hon. Warren Hastings (London: J. Davy and Sons, 1853).

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

Magnificence, comprising Two beautifully formed Sofas, Nine Chairs, Two

Ottomans, a Table, and a pair of Screens’.

Ivory furniture, brought from the

subcontinent, was the first type of object that any potential purchaser was asked

to consider. Inside the catalogue ivory furniture was further highlighted, this

time through the use of typographical techniques, rather than hierarchical

positioning. Other pieces of furniture in the Daylesford collection were described

through a standardised font of the same point size. In contrast, bolding,

capitalizing and italicizing marked out the ivory furniture pieces as distinctive,

important and (it could be assumed) valuable – here there were important

things to see that required special billing. In employing typographical strategies

to emphasise certain goods, the catalogue reimagined the sale as spectacle and

show.

For instance the catalogue listed the drawing room contents as:

A SOFA OF SOLID IVORY, in the richest style of Oriental magnificence,

superbly carved and richly gilt, the elbows finished with tiger heads, stuff

seat and two bolsters, covered en-suite with curtains, and extra Indian

dimity cases – 6 ft. 6 long

THE COMPANION COUCH

A PAIR OF ELBOW CHAIRS, IN SOLID IVORY, of corresponding style, and

of equal magnificence with sofas

A PAIR OF DITTO

ONE DITTO

ONE DITTO (damaged)

A SOLID IVORY TABLE, of elegant form, on shaped legs, beautifully carved

and gilt, fitted with two drawers with silver locks and handles, and covered

with fine green cloth, edged with silver lace

A SQUARE FOOT OTTOMAN, OF SOLID IVORY, gilt, stuffed and covered

en-suite with sofas

A DITTO

A PAIR OF CARVED IVORY ORIENTAL OFFICIAL STAFFS (5ft. long),

ornamented with silver gilt bands and wire, mounted in ebonized and gilt

frames and silk mounts to form fire screens, and white Indian dimity

covers

Despite little significance being placed on the material qualities of other items, in

promoting the ivory objects, the catalogue was at pains to highlight the

importance of ‘solid ivory’ furniture. In nineteenth-century Britain, as

Catalogue of the valuable contents of Daylesford House, Worcestershire, the seat of the late Right

Hon. Warren Hastings (London: J. Davy and Sons, 1853).

Barbara Benedict, ‘Encounters with the object: advertisements, time, and literary discourse in

the early eighteenth century thing poem’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40:2 (2007), p. 196.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

understandings of ‘veneer’ shifted from skilled practice to false and cheap

rendering, claims of ‘solid ivory’ would have been quickly understood as holding

higher value.

As noted earlier, underlining this quality might have also made

certain purchasers aware that these items were likely to have come from a

particular part of the subcontinent – Murshidabad. For those with an

understanding of the subcontinent, the catalogue provided grounds on which to

establish a connoisseurial engagement with the auctioned items.

While the catalogue imagined the ivory furniture within the expected space of

the drawing room, it also destabilized the idea of a domestic setting by listing out

the pieces. As with other auction catalogues, lists here also create a productive

tension between the idea of plenty (something for everyone) and exclusivity

(particular objects are of special import). At the same time, by using the

convention of newspaper articles, which artlessly itemised many goods, auction

catalogues underlined that these objects were for sale and could sell

themselves.

Rearranging the items for sale both by randomising their location

in the lists and giving importance to some over others, the Daylesford catalogue

reordered the Hastings’ possessions and allowed them to be reimagined within

other homes and lives.

Alongside the dismantling Hastings’ home, articles appearing in newspapers

across Britain in 1853 used the event to re-examine Hastings’ life and legacy.

Central to these re-examinations was (perhaps inevitably) Hastings’ imperial

career. The importance of imperial connections in shaping what Daylesford (and

Hastings) was and meant, was further confirmed through the way in which the

objects were arranged for sale. The subcontinent loomed large in the contents

sale, through the presence of a collection of ivory furniture. It was this and not

the mahogany and satin-wood furniture that received top billing. As such this

example reminds us of the important role furniture played in representing the

subcontinent and Britain’s imperial ambitions there.

The sale of the contents of Daylesford also reminds us that by the nineteenth

century an active market arose that enabled the recirculation of goods originally

linked to East India Company families in the eighteenth century. The dismantling

of collections, such as that belonging to the Hastings family, also offered up an

occasion upon which to dismantle their family narrative. Yet as the Hastings

example shows, it also reified the Hastings drama, allowing others to purchase

pieces understood as important to the imperial story. Chief amongst these, as the

Peter Betjeman, ‘Craft and the limits of skill: handicraft revivalism and the problem of

technique’, Journal of Design History, 21:2 (2008), p. 189.

Benedict, ‘Encounters with the object’, p. 198.

Wall, ‘The English auction’, p. 14.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

sale catalogue promised, was the ivory furniture largely bought from skilled

craftsmen in Murshidabad. What happened to pieces such as these as they

entered new settings and new narratives? How were they presented an

understood? What position did they hold?

3. Recirculation

Figure 9. Basildon Park, Berkshire.

By studying examples of ivory furniture situated in British country houses in the

nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we can begin to understand the

changing positions that objects such as these held for contemporaries. This

section of the case study examines ivory furniture pieces held in two specific

collections – Basildon Park, Berkshire in the nineteenth and early twentieth

century and Sezincote, Gloucestershire in the mid-twentieth century. Both these

collections were (and are, in the case Sezincote) situated in country houses that

were significantly rebuilt in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as

a result of East India Company money. Both sites have East India Company

narratives to reclaim and explore, making them productive comparative

examples. I will first explore a pair of ivory chairs owned by the Morrison family

in the nineteenth century and then briefly contrast these purchases with those

made by the Sir Cyril and Lady Kleinwort in the 1940s. Is it possible to recover

the intention of these individuals in purchasing these items? What were the

narratives told by these pieces? What did they mean and what purposes did their

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

purchase enable or allow? What histories are revealed by the long afterlives of

imperial objects?

James Morrison purchased Basildon Park in the late 1830s. Originally built by

East India Company servant Francis Sykes in 1776, the mansion and estate at

Basildon passed to Sykes’s son and then soon after his grandson Sir Francis (3

baronet), who was just four years of age when he inherited. Mismanagement

during his minority and the fulfilment of the expensive tastes of the 3

Baronet

and his wife meant that the family duly fell into serious financial difficulties. The

estate was put up for sale in 1829 and after much negotiation was finally sold to

James Morrison in 1838. Morrison made his wealth not through the EIC, but

rather through a textile trading business based in London. His financial successes

allowed him to also establish a career as a Member of Parliament and accumulate

a large and prestigious art collection, which he housed at Basildon Park.

Financial difficulties had meant that the original Sykes house designed by John

Carr remained incomplete. In 1839 Morrison employed architect J. B. Papworth

and his team of builders to begin working on the mansion at Basildon. Within the

grounds Morrison wished to create a home for his extensive family as well as

space in which to display his growing collection of art and furniture.

Already

established as a keen collector of art, Morrison continued to acquire new pieces.

Alongside Papworth, Morrison created the interiors and extended his collections

at Basildon in collaboration with a range of dealers including Peter Norton,

Robert Hume and William Buchanan (1777-1864).

While different rooms often

concentrated on the display of particular parts of his painting collection, such as

Morrison’s collection of Dutch paintings in the green room, other more

recognisable ‘themes’ were also developed within the interior scheme. For

example, Papworth imagined that the family breakfast room would become a

Chinese room. He soon changed his mind, however, and settled on an Indian

room. Nevertheless, when Morrison died in 1857, the room was described as

Chinese rather than Indian and included both ‘Chinese’ and ‘Japan’ wares,

suggesting either at Papworth’s continued indecision or the continued fluidity of

terms such as ‘Indian’ and ‘Chinese’ in nineteenth-century Britain.

On James Morrison’s death in 1857 the house passed to his eldest son Charles

and was inhabited by Charles’s sister Ellen. On Charles’s death in 1909 the house

passed to his son Archie. In straitened circumstances the house was sold in 1929

and was purchased and lovingly restored by Lord and Lady Iliffe in the 1950s.

Before the sale of the estate itself, Archie Morrison sold its furniture collection in

Caroline Dakers, A Genius for Money: Business, Art and the Morrisons (New Haven and London:

Yale University Press, 2011), p. 170.

Dakers, A Genius for Money, p. 184.

Dakers, A Genius for Money, p. 192.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

1920. Amongst other items, the furniture sale catalogue demonstrates that the

Morrison family owned a pair of ivory chairs (see figure 10). The chairs do not

appear in the 1859 inventory of Basildon Park or the Morrison’s London house

in Harley Street.

It seems likely therefore, that Charles or Archie purchased

them on the English or European market. Their intention in purchasing them is

unclear – did they buy them to reference the earlier connections of Basildon to

the East India Company? Did they purchase them because they had become a de

rigour piece within British country houses? Did he purchase them because in the

late nineteenth century they once again became fashionable?

Figure 10. Lots 769 and 769a. Two chairs, wooden frames veneered with ivory engraved in floral

designs and borders. 1760-80. India.

The Morrison family’s intention in purchasing these intricately designed goods

appears opaque in the historical record. In contrast the Kleinwort’s intention is

perhaps more available. As Jan Sibthorpe’s work on Sezincote has shown, in the

mid-twentieth century the Kleinwort family worked to restore Sezincote to its

nineteenth-century splendour, reinvigorating its Indian elements and features.

As part of this renovation, Lady Kleinwort purchased a set of six sandalwood

chairs, veneered with ivory, highlighted with black lac and gilt, with cane seats at

auction in the 1940s. As with the Morrison pieces, the veneering on the chairs

suggests that they were made in Vizagapatam in the 1770s. Displayed in the

house they did and do reaffirm Sezincote’s early nineteenth-century connections

to India. These objects then managed to retain a sense of connection to the

subcontinent over a period of around 170 years.

Many thanks to Caroline Dakers for her help in ascertaining this.

Antique and Modern English and Continental Furniture, 1920 October 26 – November 3 (London:

Waring & Gillow Ltd, 1920). 608.AF.0189 (Sales Catalogue). Victoria and Albert Museum.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

Figure 11. Chair, sandalwood with ivory veneer, black lac and gilt, cane seats, maker unknown,

This example underlines the ways in which ivory furniture could continue to

hold its East India Company connections, in more potent ways than other objects,

such as armorial porcelain or textiles. Moreover these pieces continue to hold

and exemplify such connections to the present day. In recent years when ivory

furniture pieces have come onto the market, their provenance and thus their

links to an East India Company past through reference to a particular individual,

have been distinctly highlighted. When the bureau cabinet featured at the

beginning of this case study came onto the market in 2011, the auction house

selling the piece Christie’s highlighted its links to the East India Company

generally and Edward Harrison more particularly.

See http://www.christies.com/features/audio-an-anglo-indian-ivory-inlaid-teak-ebony-and--

1612-4.aspx. Such provenance is also helpful in showing that the piece was sold and transported

prior to the regulation of the ivory trade.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 – UCL History

Conclusion

As in the case of the Englefield case study, this study has found that ivory objects

were important to EIC families. Bequeathed between generations, families

valued ivory inlaid cabinets both in monetary and emotional terms – as pieces

that acted significant material reminders of their connection to the subcontinent.

When families did not bequeath objects but rather placed them on the open

market, the items similarly experienced important afterlives. When marketing

ivory furniture, retailers and auctioneers often explicitly linked these pieces to

their East India Company origins, naming the family or individual who initially

brought them from the subcontinent. Similarly, when families publicly gifted

ivory furniture to important individuals at court, publicity focusing on their East

India Company origins further consolidated these links. In doing so, such

individuals and firms ensured that objects continued to act as ‘souvenirs’,

representing their place of origin.

They played important roles in consolidating

the narratives of empire constructed by and about particular families,

particularly in the case of the ivory furniture possessed by Marian and Warren

Hastings. The materiality of these objects significantly aided the construction of

their narratives, as it spoke directly to particular regions, through the veneering

techniques of Vizagapatam and the solid ivory turning technologies of

Murshidabad. At the same time, ivory itself was recognisably ‘Indian’ as

European furniture using large amounts of ivory furniture was distinctly rare.

Uncovering these histories and links is important in demonstrating the ways in

which objects from the subcontinent acted as sites upon which and through

which contemporaries recognised that familial links to the East India Company

and empire. Despite being made to European designs, these pieces often resisted

naturalisation and remained linked to the narratives of empire that families and

other individuals constructed. Becoming entangled in different forms of meaning

making, these objects came to embody empire.

Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection

(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 135.