Urban Hellscapes: Milton’s Pandemonium and the Political Theology of the East India Company

Abstract

John Milton’s Pandemonium, the infernal capital built by Satan and his followers, presents a potent allegory for the East India Company’s (EIC)^[i] exploitative urbanization and economic dominance in 17th- and 18th-century South Asia. It’s grandiose, and yet morally bankrupt architecture mirrors the EIC’s transformation of Indian cities like Calcutta and Madras into hubs of imperial extraction, where wealth was accumulated through coerced labour, taxation, urban racialism and militarized trade. This paper demonstrates that both Pandemonium and the EIC’s colonial urban centres functioned as sites of oppressive governance, where dazzling facades concealed systemic violence and moral decay. Furthermore, the paper highlights how Milton’s critique of Satan’s tyrannical ambition prefigures the eventual collapse of the EIC, underscoring literature’s capacity to interrogate imperial capitalism. This analysis employs Roy’s Colonial Urbanism, combined with Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism, to investigate the conundrums. The study calls for further interdisciplinary explorations of early modern literature as a mirror to contemporary capitalist exploitation.