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This book traces how the English language emerged from the nineteenth century as not only an imperial and bureaucratic language but also as a global one. It highlights the role of Thomas Babington Macaulay and his 'Minutes' in this journey and his lasting impact on the English language and English studies. This work recovers the contexts of those interventions and assesses their far-reaching effects in India, in Great Britain, and in the United States. It explores a variety of themes including the early modern quest for a universal language; the European quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns; the young Macaulay's precocious preference for the Moderns (despite his continuing infatuation with the Ancients); and Macaulay's more mature advocacy of a modern (English) rather than a classical literary curriculum. Further, it registers the ambivalent force of English, a "second language," on the development of Indian identity and culture; and it documents Macaulay's role in shaping the contested concept of "meritocracy," in England, in the United States, and in India.
The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, English studies, colonialism and imperialism, and South Asian studies.
List of contents
Chapter 1 After Latin
Chapter 2 1813, 1833
Chapter 3 Texts and Contexts of "The Government of India"
Chapter 4 Constructing Macaulay's Minute
Chapter 5 Apocrypha
Chapter 6 Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education: Trinity College Manuscript, Annotated
Chapter 7 Bentinck's Resolution and Vernacular Education
Chapter 8 Reading and Writing the Law
Chapter 9 Downward Filtration
Chapter 10 College English in India: The First Textbook
Chapter 11 Examining English
Chapter 12 The First Competition Wallahs
Chapter 13 Macaulay and Meritocracy
Chapter 14 Global Language
About the author
Michael Hancher is professor emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota. He has published research about Victorian writers and artists (R. Browning, Macaulay, Dickens, Carroll, Tenniel, Hunt, Millais); about intention and interpretation, speech-act theory, pragmatics, and the law; and about the history and rationale of pictorial illustration in dictionaries. Recent publications include
The Tenniel Illustrations to the "Alice" Books (2nd ed., 2019); "Seeing and Tagging Things in Pictures" (2021); and "Illustrations in Dictionaries" (2024).
