Dr Jessica Patterson
I am a historian British and South Asian intellectual culture and political thought, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. My work to date has placed a particular emphasis on the politics of enlightenment and empire. My interests cover the history of international law, the politics of sovereignty and conceptions of civilization. My first book, Religion, Enlightenment and Empire: British Interpretations of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century was published in 2021 with the Cambridge University Press series, Ideas in Context. In 2022 it won the Constance Blackwell Prize for the 'best first monograph in intellectual history'.
I joined the University of Cambridge in 2020 as a Lecturer in the History of Political Thought. Prior to this I held posts in Intellectual History, at Queen Mary, and the History of Political Thought, at King’s College London. I took my first degree in History, at the University of Cambridge, which I followed with an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History, (QMUL & UCL). Following this, my AHRC funded PhD was completed at the University of Manchester, where I was a President’s Doctoral Scholar.
My research concerns the intellectual history of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I'm particularly interested in religious, legal, philosophical, and political thought. My published work to date has focused on the Enlightenment and empire in India in the context of the East India Company. My monograph, Religion, Enlightenment and Empire: British Interpretations of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2021), looks at the production and reception of British constructions of Hinduism, both in relation to wider Enlightenment discourses, and the politics of empire. Taking a series of influential 'Company' writers, it traces the attachment of their work to contemporary debates about the nature of religion, as well as the ideologies and material politics of empire. My latest project concerns the relationship between Britain's turn to empire in India and radical political thought in the 1780s-1850s. I also work more broadly on the history of British imperial thought and ideas of empire into the twentieth century.
I lecture on the history of political thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, primarily for 'History of Political Thought c.1700-1890'. I also teach the history of international political thought on Part II, Paper 6, 'States Between States'. I supervise for the MPhil in World History, and the MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, particularly on topics that concern British enlightenment thought or the politics of empire in c.18th & c19th. For Politics I supervise the papers POL1 and POL2.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Religion, Enlightenment and Empire: British Interpretations of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, (Cambridge University Press, 2021). * Winner of the Constance Blackwell Prize for best first monograph in intellectual history in 2022.
“Forging Indian Religion: East India Company Servants and the Construction of ‘Gentoo’/‘Hindoo’ Scripture in the 1760s”, Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies, (2020).
"Enlightenment and Empire, Mughals and Marathas: The Religious History of India in the Work of Company Servant, Alexander Dow”, History of European Ideas, 45:7, (2019).
Review Essays
"Kapila’s Violent Fraternity", Global Intellectual History, 1–9 (2023).