This article explores the history of the first century of Calcutta’s existence, from a straggling village of mud-huts in 1690 to the second most-important city of the British Empire at the end of the eighteenth century. During the same period, Calcutta also emerged as a world-renowned center of scientific knowledge making in botany, geology, geodesy, map-making, geography, history, linguistics, and ethnology. Calcutta thus provides an excellent case study for the co-construction of knowledge and urbanity in the early-modern context of globalization. As a contact zone between different ethnic, professional, and religious communities, each with their specific knowledge practices, this article shows that it is through the legal management of difference in this cosmopolitan context that new knowledge is produced in this city. It thus seeks to deparochialize the current focus on cosmopolitanism and early-modern knowledge formation from the European and North Atlantic worlds.