Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830

Abstract

The terrain covered by Jonathan Eacott in the meticulously detailed Selling Empire enhances our understanding of how India was configured in the American imagination and economy, though he also seeks to place India within the global British imperial system. The backdrop to his book is furnished by a more enhanced conception of the Atlantic world and a newfound interest in Indian Ocean studies, in addition to the stimulus of what are called “interconnected histories.” Scholars of Britain's possessions in America have seldom been concerned with the second British Empire, of which India, in the clichéd phrase, was the crown jewel; likewise, studies of British India have generally been written with indifference to what was transpiring in Britain's empire in North America. Curiously, the two figures who have on occasion surfaced in attempts to write an integrated narrative are missing from Eacott's study: Elihu Yale, who amassed a fortune as the governor of Madras (1684–1692) before he was dismissed on charges of venality and went on to become the benefactor of a college that would eventually take his name; and Lord Cornwallis, who, putting it cynically, seems to have been rewarded for his surrender to George Washington at Yorktown (1781) with the governor-generalship of India (1786–1793).