Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge, political thought, the East India Company, the British Empire, and South and Southeast Asia. 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.

In his first book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), Ehrlich shows how a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company’s ideology. He reveals how, from the 1770s to 1850s, the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.

Ehrlich’s articles – on topics including the boundaries and boundedness of port cities, the making and unmaking of libraries through plunder, the crisis of liberal reform in India, and the origins of Indian print culture – have appeared in journals including Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, Modern Intellectual History, Global Intellectual History, History of European Ideas, Book History, Historical Research, and Journal of the Royal Historical Society.

• Ph.D., History, Harvard University, 2018
• M.A., History, Harvard University, 2013
• B.A. (Hons), History, University of Chicago, 2009

• Associate Scholar, Harvard University, 2019–
• Junior Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies (UM), 2023–2024
• Visiting Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), 2020

Book

• The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)
  • Reviews: Asian Review of Books, H-Soz-Kult, Times Literary Supplement

Edited Volume

• (With Ian Stewart,) New Perspectives on the Life and Worlds of Sir William Jones, special forum in Global Intellectual History (2023)

Articles

• “Subscription Publishing and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Indian Print Culture,” Book History (forthcoming)

• (With Ian Stewart,) Introduction, New Perspectives on the Life and Worlds of Sir William Jones, special forum in Global Intellectual History (2023)

• “William Jones and the Politics of Knowledge,” in New Perspectives on the Life and Worlds of Sir William Jones, special forum in Global Intellectual History (2023)

• “Straddling the Imperial Meridian: Warren Hastings as an Observer of Change in British India,” History of European Ideas, vol. 49, no. 6 (August 2023), 995–1013

• “The Meanings of a Port City Boundary: Calcutta’s Maratha Ditch, c. 1700–1950,” Past & Present, vol. 257, no. 1 (November 2022), pp. 168–208
  • Arnold Hirsch Award, Urban History Association, 2023

• “A Decade of Controversy: Sources on the Demarcation of Calcutta, 1784-94,” Historical Research, vol. 95, no. 269 (August 2022), pp. 471–480

• “New Lights on Raja Krishnachandra and Early Hindu-European Intellectual Exchange,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., vol. 31, no. 1 (January 2021), pp. 159–171

• “Anxiety, Chaos, and the Raj,” The Historical Journal, vol. 63, no. 2 (June 2020), pp. 777–787

• “Plunder and Prestige: Tipu Sultan’s Library and the Making of British India,” in Unpacking the Library, special section in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 3 (June 2020), pp. 478–492
  • Library History Essay Award, CILIP Library and Information History Group, 2021

• “Empire and Enlightenment in Three Letters from Sir William Jones to Governor-General John Macpherson,” The Historical Journal, vol. 62, no. 2 (June 2019), pp. 541–551

• “The Crisis of Liberal Reform in India: Public Opinion, Pyrotechnics, and the Charter Act of 1833,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 52, no. 6 (November 2018), pp. 2013–2055

• “William Robertson and Scientific Theism,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 10, no. 3 (November 2013), pp. 519–542

Essays

• “The Calcutta Pococurante Society: Public and Private in India’s Age of Reform,” Public Domain Review (August 2016)
  • Featured by The Paris Review, Scroll.in

Other

• Book reviews for Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Reviews in History, Sehepunkte

• Multi-Year Research Grants, University of Macau, 2022–2025
• Arnold Hirsch Award, Urban History Association, 2023
• Library History Essay Award, Library and Information History Group, 2021
• Startup Research Grant, University of Macau, 2018–2021
• Max Weber Fellowship, European University Institute, 2018–2019 (declined)
• Bernadotte E. Schmitt Research Grant, American Historical Association, 2018
• Jeffrey Cheah Travel Grant, Jeffrey Cheah Foundation, 2017
• Krupp Foundation Research Fellowship, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, 2015–2016
• Mughal Persian Language Scholarship, American Institute of Indian Studies, 2015
• Dissertation Travel Grant, North American Conference on British Studies, 2014–2015