Dr Vicky Randall Updates on Research Progress

As many of you will know, I have been lucky enough to have had a period of research leave this year. Now I am back I thought I would give you a quick update on the work I have been doing. The project I am working on is focused on a working-class Scottish man called John Malcolm (1769-1833) who was sent to India to find a career at the age of 13 with very little education. From that point he rose through the ranks, becoming a Major-General, receiving a Knighthood, acting as the Governor of Bombay, and finally entering Parliament as MP for Launceston.

While aspects of Malcolm’s career, particularly his role in the British East India Company, are well documented, my research focuses on an area of his life that has been neglected. On three separate occasions Malcolm acted as envoy to Persia (Iran) – in 1800, 1808, and 1810. As fears escalated that either Russia or France would try to occupy Persia as a means of gaining access to British India, Malcolm’s missions to the Court of the Shah were diplomatically sensitive and highly significant.

In exploring the nature of Malcolm’s visits and his unlikely friendship with the Shah through his personal correspondence and diaries, I am most interested in the books that Malcolm published about his experiences. These proved to be much longer and more complex than I had anticipated (!) They include: Persia: a Poem (1814), a serious two-volume History of Persia (1815), and his more entertaining and personal Sketches of Persia (1827). In these works Malcolm is curious, learned, and sympathetic towards Persian people and culture. Interestingly he also includes Persian voices which explain and defend their country’s customs and offer critiques of the British way of life, Christianity, and British Imperialism. Malcolm’s works therefore help to complicate current understandings of Western representations of the East, which tend to assume that all European observers of the Orient were condescending and agents of colonialism.

There has been A LOT of material to work through, but I have now finished the research and I am preparing to write. I have ideas for two journal articles and a book – so it is a project that is going to keep me busy for a while. The first journal article will be titled, ‘‘A Government not two stages removed from barbarism’: Iranian political history in the work of Sir John Malcolm’. My second journal article will be titled “High Walls and Strong Doors’: Sir John Malcolm’s representation of Women in Persian Society’. The book is provisionally called Veils and Clouds: Encountering Iran in the Work of General Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833).