The Eighteenth Century

This article discusses the centrality of the letter form in the conveyance of the "evidence of experience" from India to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. It examines the Letterbook of John Bruce, which preserves the correspondence between Bruce—the "official historiographer" of the East India Company hired in 1793—and various Company officials in India he was attempting to recruit for a project of revisionist imperial historiography. A study of the Letterbook as a record of the project's novelty for colonial bureaucrats unused to the relationship between historiography and the letter form as "evidence of experience," the article investigates the institutional, historical and theoretical conditions under which these epistolary texts get classified as literary, personal, or historical documents.