1. Sir William Jones, Letters, ed. Garland Cannon, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), ‘To 2nd Earl Spencer’, 4–30 August 1787, vol. 2, p. 749. Page numbers for subsequent citations are given in the text.
2. Sir William Jones, Poems, consisting chiefly of translations from the Asiatick Languages. To Which are Added, Two Essays, I. On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations. II. On the Arts, commonly called Imitative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1772), p. 217.
3. Studies of Jones and Orientalism that broadly follow the approach inaugurated by Said include Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient (London: Macmillan, 1986); Ronald Inden, Imagining India (London: Hurst, 1990); Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj; Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge; and Chatterjee, Representations of India. Studies that take a more critical view of this approach include Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992); MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts; and Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (London: Prometheus Books, 2007).
4. Jones, Letters, vol. 2, p. 642, p. 615. Jones’s Dialogue was distributed by the Society for Constitutional Information and became the subject of a sedition trial when William Shipley, Dean of St Asaph and Jones’s future brother-in-law, republished it as The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Gentleman and a Farmer in 1783. On the inconsistency in Jones’s political views regarding India, see S.N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); R.K. Kaul, Studies in Sir William Jones: An Interpreter of Oriental Literature (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1995); and Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–1800 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 193–4.
5. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (London: Meridian, 1945), p. 266.