The Discovery of English Wants: Dearth and Plenty in Early Modern Anglo-Indian Exchanges

Abstract

English experiences of late-Elizabethan economic crises coincided with national ambition to engage in global trade, marking a shift in the discourse of “needs” and “wants” in the English commonwealth. English travelers and traders documented in different modes of writing the topography, climate, food resources, markets, and roadways of Mughal India to better understand local abundance, needs, and wants. Travel through food insecure regions in India, interaction with local inhabitants, and encounters with famine created hybrid chorographic modes: forms of writing about travel and place within English environments were adapted and applied to Indian regions. By examining the writings of four lesser-known travelers to India in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this article argues that English understandings of nationhood, population, and commonwealth were informed by attempts to comprehend, inhabit, and write the complex, contingent spaces of other populations and their needs, wants, and crises, as well as those of Britain. The English commonwealth was thus reimagined in the context of the wider demographics of plural populations.