The Emerging Western World Canon in the Mediterranean and India, c. 17501800

The aforementioned global power shifts had a further impact on the British Empire and its representatives abroad. For example, the Austrian War of Succession and the Seven Years War had brought an ever-growing number of soldiers to Bombay, Madras, and Bengal. The Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the Act of Regulating in 1773 led to the establishment of a very different form of High Cultural Society in Calcutta and beyond, especially with the first Common Law Court of record ever established beyond Great Britain, the Supreme Court. Recent scholarship has largely clarified our ideas about how the Company leaders, like Warren Hastings, and cultural leaders, such as William Jones, influenced the study of Persianate and Sanskrit manuscripts and legal traditions. This book, however, shows that, due to the growing European population, a sort-of early mass culture of more standardized libraries (and of a Western reading culture) was also emerging at the same time. Through the coming of more soldiers and Company servants (with their own small libraries), a Western world canon began to form. One of its first massive manifestations with a particular French-British character can be traced from the serial documentation of post-mortem household inventories. The results of a first closer analysis of late 18th-century bestsellers among Europeans are surprising: World literature, in its ambiguous Goethean sense, becomes visible, and nearly no European medieval authors persist. In our present world, a Western Canon is mostly criticized, discussed, de-centered with good reasons, but canonization as cultural process as such merits nevertheless an empirical historical analysis.