Between Boston and Bombay: Cultural and Commercial Encounters of Yankees and Parsis, 1771–1865

Abstract

In Between Boston and Bombay, scholar of Zoroastrian religion Jenny Rose examines the relationship between two communities separated by vast distance but linked by commerce. Inspired by a visit to Massachusetts historical sites that featured surprising evidence of South Asian influence, Rose began investigating what early Americans knew of the Parsi community in Bombay (Mumbai) and, likewise, what Bombay Parsis knew of their contemporaries in northeastern North America. Her deeply researched book about the “trans-global circulation of goods, capital and ideas between these two cultures” (x) is packed with archival finds, though more diffuse in its findings.Rose focuses on the period between the American Revolution and the US Civil War, encapsulating the first era of sustained, direct contact between these communities. Throughout this era, Rose argues, Bombay Parsis were critical intermediaries for Americans in Asia, especially British India. But while the “long-lasting commercial alliances” between Americans and Bombay Parsis sometimes resulted in “bonds of friendship” (ix), decades of encounter did not challenge Americans’ ethnocentrism, though sometimes it provoked their empathy.Rose's main sources are American archives with records of US traders’ exploits. She supplements impressive dives into merchants’ papers with wide research in British and Indian government repositories and also surveys a variety of print sources from America and Asia. Rose is upfront about the limits of these materials: there is a “gender imbalance” (x) favoring men, and a dearth of Parsi perspectives on Americans (though Parsi voices are well represented on other topics). Even so, the archive she has assembled is broad, rich, and diverse, including mercantile correspondence, ledgers, diplomatic and missionary reports, journalistic accounts, ships logs, and diaries. She pairs these texts with attention to material culture: the oil paintings, “camel's hair” shawls, curled-toe shoes, ice houses, and ships that were the stuff of trade and the personal relationships that sustained it.Eager to let her material “speak for itself” (xii), Rose organizes Between Boston and Bombay chronologically. The first chapter lays out the “founding narratives” (1) of Bombay Parsis and New England puritans as peoples who migrated to secure their religious practice and find commercial opportunity—a resonance in mythology, she suggests, that Parsi brokers may have emphasized in pitches to American customers. Each subsequent chapter advances the narrative using a set of sources as entry points into fine-grained discussions of how Americans and Parsis met and interacted, both in person and through objects and texts. Though commerce always predominated, the types of Americans venturing to Bombay expanded over time: traders were joined by missionaries, journalists, tourists, and even a minstrelsy troupe. Americans’ main contacts within the Bombay Parsi community remained merchants throughout, however, with members of the Wadia family playing a particularly important role across decades. Reflecting this influence, appendices provide a generational listing of members of the Wadia family, as well as a transcription of a Bombay newspaper's account of a dakhma (a site for exposing the dead) and a useful glossary of key terms.Rose's broader findings are consistent with other recent work on Americans abroad in the early nineteenth century. Commerce predominated in foreign encounters, but cultural exchange, even if sustained, usually remained superficial, structured by Western racial hierarchies and European empires; on both sides parties usually stuck to pre-existing scripts. Partly responding to the scholarship's tendency to cast American-Parsi relationships primarily in terms of the opium trade, Rose is at pains to distinguish Americans’ trade at Bombay, and Indian trade more generally, from other lines of business—especially involving China. But trade was never simple or bilateral, and ventures rarely connected only two cities; these traffics were all deeply entangled from the start and only became more so over time. Rose's work suggests that members of both groups understood their encounters, operationally, as moments where individual relationships interlaced dynamic global trade networks—but sometimes still chose to represent them, symbolically, as sustained encounters between distinct, stable identity groups. Future researchers may profitably take up the question of why this was so and how effective the practice of sharing “founding narratives” actually was.More generally, Rose's research will be a useful guide for anyone plotting their own dives into the topics, people, and places she includes in her case studies. Those interested in exploring the personal networks that undergirded commercial and religious exchanges will find territory for further investigation well-mapped here; Rose's narrative and detailed bibliography will be especially useful for plotting new explorations into the manuscript sources in the US, London, and Mumbai archives she has surveyed. In Boston and Bombay Rose has revealed many new details about the early connections between Americans and Bombay Parsis; other scholars should take her up on the invitation to dig further into this rich and complex material.