Handsome Anglo Indian Large Scale Ebony And Quill Box, Circa 1880.

Further readings and sources:

1. English power expanded throughout India in the 1800s. India was very much an outpost of the mighty British Empire. Tales of life in India fascinated the British public, exotic Indian scenes appeared in books and art published in London.

   A Timeline of India in the 1800s; The British Raj Defined India Throughout the 1800s https://www.thoughtco.com/timeline-of-india-in-the-1800s-1774016 ↩

2. The production in India of Western-style furniture (mainly British) and its use by the British and some Indians. The cultural history told is a complex one, of objects Western in form but Indian in materials and techniques. The furniture and furnishings were also Indian in ornamentation, but, as Amin Jaffer points out, “the decoration itself was designed to appeal to European consumers and was thus as far away from traditional Indian vocabularies of ornament as the forms were from traditional Indian furniture. In this respect, Anglo- Indian furniture of this period, 1799-1914 was exotic both in the eyes of the people who produced it and those who used it”

   Kirkham, P. (2002). ‘Review of Furniture from British India and Ceylon: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum, by A. Jaffer‘. Studies in the Decorative Arts, 10(1), 150–151. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40662997 ↩