Second Cities in the Circuits of Empire:

Second Cities in the Circuits of Empire: Calcutta, Glasgow, and the Nineteenth-Century Legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment creates a network of scholars in India and Britain, as well as Canada, Europe, and Australia, to study these links. Over three years of seminars and workshops, the network will forward an ambitious program of study based on the relationship between colonial Calcutta and Glasgow, both fortuitously known as the ‘second city of empire’. This project will investigate archives in the UK and India, showing how exchanges between these cities and between Scotland and Bengal functioned in the wider circuits of empire. Cooperating institutions are Glasgow University, the Centre for Studies Social Sciences, Kolkata,  Presidency University, Kolkata.

This project is funded by a generous grant from the British Academy, for which we are very grateful.We are also grateful for funding for international participants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, thanks to Professor Daniel White, University of Toronto; and to the Australian Research Council, thanks to Professor Deirdre Coleman, University of Melbourne.

Old Fort Playhouse and Holwell’s Monument, Calcutta by William Daniell. Aquatint, 1786.