The largest volume of historical data ever collected about India was made by a Scotsman in the 18th-19th century.
Colin Mackenzie (1754-1821), a Scottish army officer in the British East India Company, spent four decades in India, during which time he recorded local histories, rulers, topographies and an endless array of data – manuscripts, maps, coins, sketches, paintings and artefacts. It was a treasure trove for later historians and anthropologists.
Notably, Mackenzie made the first accurate map of South India’s geography and was the first Surveyor General of India. His topographical survey of over 40,000 square miles was unprecedented.
At a time when joining the East India Company meant making your money and returning a rich man; Mackenzie took an offbeat career path – and never returned to his place of birth.
He joined the Company as a Mathematician, entrusted with studying India’s ancient knowledge of mathematics – for use in a biography of a Lord whose ancestor invented the logarithm. For some years, Mackenzie worked on this – but when the Lord died, he found himself thirsting to know more about the ‘Orient’. A Lord named Seaworth saw to it that Mackenzie was enlisted with the EIC as an engineer in 1783. Mackenzie was 30 when he left.
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