'In the Service of the Honourable East India Company': Politics and Identity in Dean Mahomet's Travels (1794)

The successful career of Dean Mahomet (1759-1851) as a migrant from India to Ireland (and later, England) has led to scholarly and popular interest in his work. His Travels through several parts of India in the Service of the Honourable East India Company (1794) published by subscription in Cork is reputedly the first English book by an Indian, and has been seen to counterbalance the many accounts of India by western travellers, and to assert, in autobiographical form, his identity as an Indian in 1790s Ireland. My paper analyses this text in relation to moral and economic criticisms of the East India Company in the eighteenth century, and in particular to legislation of 1793 which defined the role of the Company in Ireland’s trade with the east. These aspects of colonial politics involving Ireland and India as subject nations of Britain are shown to shape Mahomet’s discursive strategies and the complex identity produced in his text.

Commentary on Burnet v. Chetwood (1721)

Chancery case concerning the publication of a translation of a work protected under the Statute of Anne 1710. The decision established that the reproduction of works in translation was not unlawful under the 1710 Act. The decision is also significant, however, in relation to the court's inherent jurisdiction concerning the publication of works on grounds of public policy.
Drawing upon material in the National Archives the commentary explores the background to, and substance of, the decision as well as its relationship with current judicial practices in refusing the court's protection to copyright protected materials on the grounds that the content of the work is, for example, obscene, sexually immoral, defamatory, blasphemous or irreligious.