Transatlantic itinerants and hustlers: Reading the ‘connected histories’ of India and Atlantic worlds in Bartholomew Burges’s A Series of Indostan Letters (1790)

Abstract

ABSTRACT A reading of Bartholomew Burges’ Indostan Letters (1790), a little known early transatlantic text addressed to patrons both in Britain and America, goes far in illuminating the “connected histories” of India and the United States facilitated by the maritime circuits of the transatlantic. A remarkable travelogue, Indostan Letters foregrounds the triangulated relationship between India, the United States, and Britain which would come to exercise an outsize influence in the American imaginary in the early republic. Although, seemingly a rogue ex-colonial whose single-minded pursuit of self-promotion and riches shows a remarkable spirit of enterprise, Burges was not in fact an eccentric or anomalous figure. Cannily conversant with, and enmeshed in, local and global networks of trade, knowledge, and politics, Indostan Letters embodies a cultural sensibility and voice, at once worldly and naïve, brash and diplomatic, optimistic and opportunistic, that Crevecoeur identified as uniquely American.