Béatrice Veyrassat’s book «De l’attirance à l’expérience de l’Inde» traces the biography of Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier (1741-1795), an aristocrat from Lausanne, who spent three decades from the late 1750s to the late 1780s in the Indian subcontinent. She paints a chiaroscuro portrait of an ambitious and opportunistic man: He was military officer, engineer, and administrator in the English East India Company, who later shifted camps and entered the service of Indian rulers, including Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. He adopted a hybrid lifestyle and become a patron of local painters and an avid collector of Indian religious manuscripts.
In his review, Harald Fischer-Tiné (Zurich) places Veyrassat’s biography in the current state of research, discusses how available sources are used, and recommends the book «for historians interested in global perspectives on Swiss history as well as for scholars of the British Empire, European orientalism, and 18th century South Asia».
The full review of the book is available online on infoclio.ch and HSozKult.
Harald Fischer-Tiné: Rezension zu: Veyrassat, Béatrice: De l’attirance à l’expérience de l’Inde. Un Vaudois à la marge du colonialisme anglais, Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier (1741-1795), Neuchâtel 2022, in: infoclio.ch, 06.09.2023, https://www.infoclio.ch/de/rez?rid=131822>.
