Picturing India

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The British engagement with India was an intensely visual one. Images of the subcontinent, produced by artists and travellers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heyday of the East India Company, reflect the role it played in Indian life. They mirror significant shifts in British policy and attitudes towards India. The Company's story is one of wealth, power, and the pursuit of profit. It changed what people in Europe ate, what they drank, and how they dressed. Ultimately, it laid the foundations of the British Raj. But few historians have considered the visual sources that survive and their implications for the link between images and empire, pictures and power.