During the final decades of the eighteenth century, Calcutta’s “White Town” came alive each morning not only with the tolling of the church bells but with the clamour of auctioneers’ hammers and cries. For England’s expatriates—roughly one thousand East India Company servants and their families—these daily public outcries were indispensable. They supplied the very trappings of home: fine furniture, elegant porcelain, the latest London pamphlets and novels, British woollens and silks—all collectively termed “Europe goods.” In an alien climate and culture, auctions became the mechanism by which White Town repeatedly reinvented itself as a transplanted London enclave.
Most mornings, a European or Indian auctioneer—Williams & Lee, Yeates, Tulloh, Dring & Co., or one of the half-dozen others active by 1785—would mount his podium in the Old Court House, on Tank Square, or in a dedicated “Great Room.” He readied crates and tables groaning under cabinet-tables, upholstered sofas, Wedgewood teapots, glass decanters, chandeliers, sea-chests, and even writing desks stocked with quills, inkstands, and reams of English letter-paper. Patrons crowded in—Company officers in regimentals, young civil servants in frock coats, their wives in stays and fichus—each bidding to outfit their quarters with comforts denied by distance from home. South Asians too came, some as speculators, others simply curious, bidding for carriages, palanquins, or a prized volume of some English novel.
Advertisements in the Calcutta Gazette ensured no one missed the next sale. An August 1785 notice by Williams & Lee touted “just-imported” commodities like “British clothing, toiletries, watches, a choice collection of books, and Wedgewood’s black and painted teapots. Such notices underscored the auctions’ primary draw: novelty. Unlike static “Europe shops,” where stationary stocks grew stale, the hammer ensured turnover—and with it, the fantasy of living in an ever-renewing London.
For many Anglo-Indians, the impulse was as much social as domestic. To appear at auctions signalled genteel affluence and connection to metropolitan trends. One young clerk wrote home that he had secured a fine mahogany sideboard, imported but two seasons past, which set him above the rest at Lady Clive’s drawing-room. Others went simply to see and be seen: European and Indian elites alike gathered, elbow-to-elbow, as goods passed from hand to hand.
Yet the very abundance of sales carried dangers for White Town identity. Frequent mortality, sudden bankruptcies, and the Company’s economic downturns sent officers’ belongings to the block. A sudden death or insolvency meant every upholstered chair, every folio volume, went under the hammer—reminding Britons, one widow lamented, that England’s comforts are but fleeting in these parts. Mrs. Hastings herself, as she prepared to depart Bengal in 1785, laid her gilt mirrors, British brass candlesticks, and porcelain busts across the auction carpet, bidding farewell to her subcontinental household.
Moreover, the auctions’ egalitarian veneer belied a subtler flow of “Europe goods” beyond White Town. As South Asian merchants—Hindus, Armenians, and “Black Town” traders—picked over lots, they re-exported prized items into Indian markets. Palanquins and brass candlesticks, ball-gowns and fine prints, all migrated back across Chowringhee Road, dissolving the material boundary between white and black quarters. An astute observer noted that auctions threaten to eliminate material distinctions even as they underwrote a “British geography” in Calcutta.
Despite these tensions, the daily public outcry remained central to White Town life. It enabled residents to assert their Britishness in an alien world and to conjure London’s markets along the Hooghly’s banks. The auction hall was at once a marketplace, a theatre of status, and a forum of sociability—where the rituals of bidding, the clash of voices, and the sight of familiar goods recreated, however temporarily, the comforts and hierarchies of home. In this cadence of daily sales and re-sales, White Town affirmed itself as an appendage of Britain—its material culture its most potent alibi.
Source
Rasico, P. D. (2022). Auctions and the making of the Nabob in late eighteenth-century Calcutta and London. The Historical Journal, 65(2), 349-370.
Arup K. Chatterjee 