Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Digitisaton of East India Company/ India Office records

On 08 February 2017 at 12:46 John Lubbock &lt;john.lubbock(a)wikimedia.org.uk&gt; wrote: There's quite a lot of interest in this subject also because of the BBC series Taboo, which paints the East India Company in a pretty bad light that is quite believable given what is known about them I think Taboo is great, at a graphic novel sort of level. People should know, though, that the East India Company was run by a board of 25 directors, rather than Jonathan Pryce doing a lot of swearing. Among interesting employees were John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Love Peacock. If anybody wants a somewhat long but illuminating read on them, I'd very much suggest the historian William Dalrymple's piece in the Graun <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders> from a couple of years ago. I don't know that Dalrymple is taken seriously as a historian. I recently enjoyed In the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles, by Nigel Barley, which complements Taboo in its own way. Personally, I do think that if possible we should look at the possibility of bringing this collection onto Wikimedia projects, but I don't think it would be an appropriate project for trying to work with the Indian Wikimedia chapter or with the Indian diaspora here. I do think we should look at how we could do that in future with subject matter which is less contentious though. For heavens sake, WP has the mechanisms for dealing with contentious subjects. Communications being what they were, until the invention of the telegraph, there was a big disjunction between what the Company could get done from London; and what actually went on in South and East Asia. And what UCL are working on for the West Indies, someone should attempt for the East Indies. Charles _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk