Currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received a PhD and MA from Harvard University and a BA from the University of Chicago.
Ehrlich applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge finds the East India Company riven by internal conflict over -- of all things -- a college. It discusses the moment in 1801 when the Company's directors in London realize that the College of Fort William, recently founded by the Governor-General of Bengal, Richard Wellesley, is a vehicle for Wellesley's aggrandizement at the expense of the Company's constitution and their own authority.Follow Joshua Ehrlich on Twitter.
The page captures an important moment in the overall narrative but perhaps not one that would be intelligible out of context. The clash between the directors and Wellesley is one of the major "knowledge debates" in the book, but a reader would probably need to read more of the chapter to understand it. The page does reflect the main theme of the book: the politics of knowledge. And it happens to mark almost the exact midpoint of the main text. It is also worth noting that the directors' realization about Wellesley is a turning point: from that moment, they begin to lose their enthusiasm for scholarly patronage.
Whereas since the 1770s, the Company had patronized scholars as a way to "conciliate" political classes in India and Britain, Wellesley's challenge, among other factors, led it to abandon this idea. By the 1820s, the directors and other Company leaders had settled on another idea: demonstrating the Company's good government to publics in both places through the construction of a system of mass education.
--Marshal Zeringue
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