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

by Jonathan Eacott

Linking four continents over three centuries, Selling Empire demonstrates the centrality of India--both as an idea and a place--to the making of a global British imperial system. In the seventeenth century, Britain was economically, politically, and militarily weaker than India, but Britons increasingly made use of India's strengths to build their own empire in both America and Asia. Early English colonial promoters first envisioned America as a potential India, hoping that the nascent Atlantic colonies could produce Asian raw materials. When this vision failed to materialize, Britain's circulation of Indian manufactured goods--from umbrellas to cottons--to Africa, Europe, and America then established an empire of goods and the supposed good of empire.

Eacott recasts the British empire's chronology and geography by situating the development of consumer culture, the American Revolution, and British industrialization in the commercial intersections linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. From the seventeenth into the nineteenth century and beyond, the evolving networks, ideas, and fashions that bound India, Britain, and America shaped persisting global structures of economic and cultural interdependence.

Genres: India, History

455 pages, Hardcover

First published January 4, 2016

Reviews

[Emmanuel-francis · Rating 2 out of 5]

This absolute snore fest makes some important points which somewhat redeem it.

It is almost impossible to believe, 193 years after the book's terminal period, that Europeans were once capable of being awed by the wealth on display in foreign lands. Yet, it was precisely that feeling that dogged their initial encounter with India. That did not last, of course. It is precisely the process of changing impressions about India in the emerging Anglophone world that is this book's focus.

Achieving that involves a historical romp organised around different themes: trade wars, aesthetics, fears of corruption and conversion. With the exception of the last, I was consistently surprised at how much 16th-century Europeans could sound like radical Third Worlders. The more things change. . . I was also amazed to see modern outsourcing (and resulting calls for protectionism) already in effect. The difference is that India was then the global factory (one of two) and thus the oft-maligned Asian country.

A shorter version would have been superior. What I read often struck me more as a collection of thesis notes than a well-structured book.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eacott integrates an impressive amount of primary source documents into a cogent and approachable narrative.

As a World History teacher I appreciate Eacott's demonstration of how the Indian Ocean and Atlantic trade networks were connected, through London, in a "bowtie trade" in the 17th and 18th centuries. I learned a lot about the East India Company throughout the book, including the shifting balance from primarily trading to primarily governing with regard to India. Eacott also helpfully indentifies the 1810s as the transition period from British India as exporter to importer of cotton textiles. This is a key development in World History, that I will more easily be able to explain to my students. Moreover, Eacott helpfully embeds this story within an analysis of English and British colonialism.

I learned about selling empire through an episode of Ben Franklin's World text. It is well worth a listen.

[Courtney Misich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eacott has an interesting interpretation of using the India trade to connect the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. He develops the relationships between colonies themselves and with Britain. Eacott creates a convincing interpretation with great context of the America, India and Britain. Definitely recommend if your interested in the connections of the British empire