From The Overland Mail, 1948:
"So far as India is concerned the story of the mail service commences with the history of the Hon. East India Company, that famous trading corporation of seventeenth-century English Merchant Adventurers who in course of time secured India for the Empire, and in studying the career of Waghorn, a native of Kent, we should do well to bear in mind the observation of Charles Grey in his entertaining book "The Merchant Adventurers of London," that the mariners of the East India Company seem almost without exception to have hailed from Chatham, Deptford, Limehouse, Rotherhithe, Rochester and Wapping."
3 comments:
So the workers of the East India Company were from working class suburbs of English cities? I guess? I'm not totally sure what the take home message is of that quote.......
Exactly. It's like, how exactly is the second part of that sentence related to the first?
I think this is a pretty classic English historian of a certain age way to write... they are speaking to a very particular group of people who all know what they are talking about and those of us (yanks) who are on the outside have no clue what they mean but all of the others (old white dudes like themselves) get it because of course, Rotherham! Duh! We know exactly the sort who come from there! Older academics around Oxford will sometimes do this and it is ANNOYING. I used to think it meant I was lacking some vital piece of information by not knowing that when you reference a certain town there was obviously an Anglo-Saxon minster there based on placename but now I just think of it as a way of showing their rich white male privilege.
Speaking of Rotherham it is referenced in an Arctic Monkeys song and that is the only reason why I know where it is/have heard of it. :) "Y
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