Data, Movement and Capital on the Bay of Bengal: ‘View in the Island of Narkondam’ by Robert Hyde Colebrooke (1787)

This article discusses how seascapes became an issue of datafication in the British East India Company’s campaign toward global economic hegemony in the later 18th century. It focuses on a series of expeditions launched by the Company to explore the Bay of Bengal in the 1780s and discusses the work of surveyors, hydrographers, draughtsmen and other kinds of (both human and machine) ‘sensors’ employed to investigate logistically important locations and passages. The reports from these expeditions demonstrate how all sorts of observational data – measurements, charts, pictures, verbal descriptions – came into an epistemically vital accord, which, as this article argues, also had a particular aesthetic dimension in plotting vectors of movement across a constantly shifting and, in those days, still largely unknown environment. Data-gathering practices meant here a process of sensorial ‘envelopment’, which would ideally harmonize the Company’s pursuit of economic gain with the affordances of the oceanic environment.