Come to the East India Company at Home Study Day, Edinburgh

In January, I wrote about Warwick University's East India Company at Home project which will examine how luxury goods from Asia (mainly India) arrived in wealthy homes and their significance.

The project is holding a Study Day on Friday 7th September from 11.30am to 5pm at the University of Edinburgh Library.

The purpose of the event is to bring together academics, curators, heritage sector professionals, local and family historians who are interested in Scottish families, houses and objects with East India Company connections. The event is a follow-up to a study day they held at the British Library in London earlier this year although the focus is different.

The focus in Edinburgh will be on family history and literary sources (poems, stories, family letters and other manuscripts) and will also spend some time looking at the collection of manuscripts brought back by Company servants in order to consider how East India Company officials collected, read and exchanged books. It will also discuss the different ways in which East India Company officials and their families used ideas of family, home and the domestic space when navigating their imperial experiences.

The Study Day is free of charge and lunch will be provided. If you would like to go, email Ellen Filor (who is interested in East India Company family networks and identities in Roxburghshire between 1780 and 1857) at East.India.Company@warwick.ac.uk.

East India Company Family Networks and Identities in Roxburghshire

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 is a 3-year research project ending in August 2014 funded by the Leverhulme Trust, led by Professor Margot Finn of Warwick University.

The project will look at the routes by which Asian luxury goods (for example, ceramics, textiles, metal-ware, furniture and fine art) found their way into the homes of Britain’s governing elite in the Georgian and early Victorian periods, and examines
what these exotic objects meant in these domestic settings and in wider national and international contexts.

The project builds upon historical research produced by family and local historians, curators, academics and other researchers into a wider collaborative research project that illuminates Britain's global material culture from the eighteenth century
to the present.

Dr Helen Clifford will play a leading role in orchestrating the project’s engagement with local and family historians, working together with the project's full-time postdoctoral research fellow, Dr Kate Smith.

Ms Ellen Filor will be funded by the grant to complete a doctoral dissertation on East India Company family networks and identities in Roxburghshire (1780-1857) as an integral part of the larger research team.

Express your interest in the East India Company at Home project.