Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge and political thought with interests in the British Empire, the East India Company, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean world. He is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Macau. He received his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Chicago.

Ehrlich’s first book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2023) reveals how the Company used its commitment to knowledge to justify its commercial and political power. It advances a new approach – the history of ideas of knowledge – to recover a world of debate among Indian and European thinkers on the political uses of knowledge. (For two interviews about the book, see here and here.)

Ehrlich’s other research – 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 – has appeared in journals including Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, and Modern Intellectual History.

Ehrlich welcomes applications from prospective PhD students who share any of the following research interests:

• Global History
• British Empire
• Indian Ocean World
• South and Southeast Asia
• East India Companies
• Intellectual History
• History of Political Thought
• History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
• History of Knowledge
• Book History

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

• Associate Professor, Department of History, UM, 2024–
• Assistant Professor, Department of History, UM, 2018–2024

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

Book

• The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)
  • Other editions: South Asia edition; Chinese translation (forthcoming 2025)
  • Reviews: American Historical Review, Asian Review of Books, Choice, The English Historical Review, Global Intellectual History, H-Soz-Kult, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Times Literary Supplement

Edited Volume

• (With Ian Stewart,) New Perspectives on the Life and Worlds of Sir William Jones, special issue, Global Intellectual History, vol. 10, no. 2 (February 2025)

Articles

• “William Jones and the Politics of Knowledge,” in New Perspectives on the Life and Worlds of Sir William Jones, special issue, Global Intellectual History, vol. 10, no. 2 (February 2025), pp. 118–122

• (With Ian Stewart,) Introduction, New Perspectives on the Life and Worlds of Sir William Jones, special issue, Global Intellectual History, vol. 10, no. 2 (February 2025), pp. 95–101

• “Subscription Publishing and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Indian Print Culture,” Book History, vol. 27, no. 1 (June 2024), pp. 32–50

• “The Enlightened Nabob,” History Today, vol. 74, no. 5 (May 2024), pp. 78–85

• “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, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 3 (June 2020), pp. 478–492
  • Library History Essay Award, 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

• “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

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

Other

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

• Excellence in Research Award, UM Faculty of Arts and Humanities, 2024
• Arnold Hirsch Award, Urban History Association, 2023
• Election as Fellow, Royal Historical Society, 2023
• Library History Essay Award, Library and Information History Group, 2021
• Election as Fellow, Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 2020

• Multi-Year Research Grants, University of Macau, 2022–2025
• 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