(^164) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
and correspondence to and from Europe.^25 These records tell
therefore only the outside of the story. They are, however, rich and
suggestive—including a certain amount of indigenous material—and
have provided evidence for a lot of good history.
Why this asymmetry is an interesting question in cultural history.
The Indians were literate (though they lacked printing), and no
empire like the Moghul could operate without records and
correspondence. Nor could Indian merchants, active in international
trade, have done without similar aids to memory and
communication. Was there a problem of preservation? If so, how
have East India Company records survived in Madras, Bombay, and
Calcutta? Was there a crucial difference in forms of commercial
organization? Chartered companies depended on an elaborate
bureaucratic apparatus, and bureaucracy means paper. Perhaps the
problem is one of continuity and custodianship. The Indian political
units were ephemeral, and their papers with them. Perhaps they
should have written on clay tablets or stone.
One thing is clear: the Europeans of that day were already
interested in records. Mark here the difference between hieratically
literate and generally literate societies. The Europeans, for all the
analphabetism of the populace, were of the latter category. From
middling on up, they read, but also wrote and published—not only
the officials but private citizens. The nearest equivalents in the non-
European world would be the Japanese and the Jews. Europeans also
were passionately curious about other peoples and societies: the
overwhelming majority of travel accounts of that day were written by
and for them.
This curiosity quotient was an important and characteristic aspect
of European expansion and dominion. Whether deliberate or
unconscious (and it was both), it prepared the way for
reconnaissance and exploitation. In recent years, anticolonialist critics
have made much of the alleged misdeeds of Western curiosity,
putting scholars, spies, and diplomatic agents in the same knaves'
basket. The best known elaboration of these charges is Edward Said's
much-discussed Orientalism (1978). (More on this powerful and
influential book in chapter 24, pp. 415-18.) Insofar as the critique
holds that only insiders can know the truth about their societies, it is
wrong. Insofar as one uses this claim to discredit the work of
intellectual adversaries, it is polemical and antiscientific. But insofar
as it points to the instrumental value and power of information, for
good and for bad, it makes an important point.
nora
(Nora)
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