Commissioned survey
Open-knowledge reference entry
A commissioned survey is a kind of archaeological and social survey performed in return for money or goods. Typically, these surveys were conducted in the pre-colonial Era, as part of the Age of European Enlightenment to study territories before colonization. They would usually extend to significant and detailed efforts by trading companies to study institutions of indigenous communities as a precursor to colonial powers exerting colonial supremacy. An example would be when soldiers of the East India Company were paid fees to study exotic lands, customs, cultures, and literatures of the colonized world. The end product of a commissioned survey would usually be a report or book in a European language, which could form a basis for law making by colonial powers.
References
Edney, Matthew H "Bringing India to Hand: Mapping an Empire, Denying Space." In Felicity Nussbaum (ed.): The Global Eighteenth Century, pp 65-78 and 334–36. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003; reprinted in paperback, 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Commissioned survey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.