Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.2

c6.2

The authors of these documents came to India in various capacities: as military, medical and civilian servants of the European governments; as travellers, sometimes coming on their own, but more often sent by wealthy patrons or the newly established learned societies (like the Royal Societies of Paris and London; the Society of Arts in London, etc.); and some, like the Jesuits, came on behalf of the various Christian religious orders. According to the European scholarly canons of the time, all these were experts in their respective fields and were considered to be competent to report on what they observed or studied. Most of those, included here, spent a substantial part of their active lives in different parts of India.