This book examines the tremendous growth of the number of libraries and the development of Western reading cultures in eighteenth-century Asia. Between 1756 and 1773, the Seven Years' War, the Battle of Plassey, the British East India Company’s acquisition of Bengal Diwani Rights, and the Regulating Act set the stage for the Second British Empire in Asia. Although the French had largely lost the geopolitical game in Asia, they remained numerous in Pondichéry and Bengal. A very different form of high-culture society, including significant institutions such as the first common law court of record outside of Britain, the Supreme Court, was established. With the arrival of more soldiers and company servants, a Franco-British cultural canon began to form abroad, traceable in serial post-mortem household inventory documentation and a large amount of more standardized libraries. A detailed analysis of late eighteenth-century bestsellers among Europeans in India until approximately 1800 reveals the emergence of a "world literature" in the ambiguous Goethean sense.

Cornel Zwierlein has taught early modern history in Germany since 2001 at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (PhD and postdoctoral period) and Freie Universität Berlin (Heisenberg Fellowship), and he is teaching at the Ruhr University Bochum (habilitation rights). He has worked in cooperation with, and researched at, such institutions as Harvard and Yale Universities and the University of California, Berkeley, in the USA, and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, as well as in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and beyond.