Anabob, Town and Country Magazine reminded its readers in 1771, ‘is a person who in the East-India Company’s service has by art, fraud, cruelty, and imposition obtained the fortune of an Asiatic prince and returned to England to display his folly and vanity and ambition’. Yet if the nabob’s bad deeds and bad morals made him reprehensible, then so too did his ignorance and philistinism: he was a ‘bad … scholar’ who, for all his pretensions, possessed but ‘a common education’ and a ‘confined’ and defective knowledge.