Dr Tom Young, Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c. 1813-1858, 2023.
Berger Prize Winning Talk featuring Tom Young
Join us for a thought-provoking lecture on how art played a crucial role in shaping the nationalization of the East India Company between 1813 and 1858. Tom Young will examine how new artistic production in colonial India—driven by emerging technologies like lithography and steam navigation, as well as middle-class print formats such as periodicals, scrapbooks, and literary annuals—contributed to the destabilization of the Company’s political legitimacy. Young will also explore the influence of amateur sketching among Company employees and the broader impact of visual culture on British colonial governance.
Tom Young is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art Histories at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Prior to that, he was a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Warwick, the project curator of the British Museum’s exhibition Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution, a curator at Lakeland Arts, and a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2023, and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2024. His first book, Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c. 1813–1858, was published in June 2023 by the Paul Mellon Centre, Yale University Press. The book was awarded the 2024 Berger Prize and was shortlisted for the British in India Book Prize.
