James Talboys Wheeler

James Talboys Wheeler (Oxford, December 1824 – Ramsgate, 13 January 1897) was a bureaucrat-historian of the British Raj.

James Talboys Wheeler was born in Oxford 22 or 23 December 1824. His parents were James Luft Wheeler, who was a bookseller, and Anne Ophelia, whose father was the publisher and translatorDavid Alphonso Talboys and himself the son of a bookseller. James was privately educated and then attempted an unsuccessful career as a publisher and bookseller before venturing into authorship of student handbooks. He worked for Henry George Bohn as a sub-editor, between 1845 and 1847, and spent some time working as a clerk in the War Office during the Crimean War.

In 1858, he determined to develop his literary talents by becoming editor of the Madras Spectator in India. Later in that year he was appointed professor of moral and mental philosophy at Madras Presidency College, and during his four years in that position his interest in Hindu customs was piqued as a consequence of his contact with Indian students. He believed that the Europeans in India were largely ignorant of the Hindu perspective on family life.

Wheeler developed his interests to become, in the words of S. C. Mittal, a "bureaucrat-historian", of whom William Wilson Hunter and Alfred Comyn Lyall are other examples. In 1860, while still holding his chair at the College, he was employed by the Raj government in Madras, from which came his Madras in the Olden Time, a history based on government records that was published in 1861, and was based at least in part on columns previously published by the Indian Statesman. In the following year he moved to Calcutta as an Assistant Secretary in the Foreign Department, and in 1867 he was appointed Secretary to the Records Commission as an official appreciation of his works. While holding these two offices, he produced various summary reports relating to the history and politics of countries that bordered on British India for the government, and also some memoranda on topics such as vernacular literature and the amirs of Sindh that were well received. He also engaged himself, in his leisure time, with the compilation of his four-volume History of India, which was published between 1867 and 1881. This is sometimes described as a five-volume work: the last volume of the series was published in two parts.

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