DuPlessis, Robert S.

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Swarthmore College 
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History Faculty Works History 
7-1-2017 
Review Of "Selling Empire: India In The Making Of Britain And 
America, 1600–1830" By J. Eacott 
Robert S. DuPlessis 
Swarthmore College, rduples1@swarthmore.edu 
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 Part of the History Commons 
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Recommended Citation 
Robert S. DuPlessis. (2017). "Review Of "Selling Empire: India In The Making Of Britain And America, 
1600–1830" By J. Eacott". William And Mary Quarterly. Volume 74, Issue 3. 560-563. 
https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/496 
This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in 
History Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact 
myworks@swarthmore.edu. 
and England in the entire enterprise, as well as their
extensions and colonies in theNewWorld. It also ex-
plains the deep impact of Asian goods and people,
especially in Spanish and Portuguese America, where
repeated contact with “the East” was an integral
part of three centuries of history. Indeed, the cen-
tral role of the Acapulco-Mexico City-Veracruz route,
and the complexity of alternate and often illegal
routes and activities in Spanish-language sources,
might have been given more play in the book. The
book’s specific contribution is not only its attention
to that history, but also its inclusion of North Amer-
ican reception of Asian goods and artistic technolo-
gies.
Clara Bargellini
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Jonathan Eacott. Selling Empire: India in the Making
of Britain and America, 1600–1830. Published for
the Omohundro Institute of Early American His-
tory and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina, 2016. 472 pp.;
25 halftones, 7 figures, notes, index. $30.00 (pa-
per).
This is a book about storied empires, the figments
of the imperial imagination—“America the India”
and “India the place”—making and breaking worlds
around them. The book spans centuries, but the
story isn’t linear. It is a story, in fact, of a feedback
loop: a set of memes that travel through sinuous
and mazelike circuits, turning the dreams of em-
pires into nightmares. It wasn’t India, but the idea
of India—“in the grandest policies and close to skin
in the most intimate places” (4)—which drove the
British empire in America to become what it be-
came: a real-life version of the imaginary India that
Britons had envisioned in the seventeenth century.
The grand and intimate vision of India was a sus-
taining dream of progress; British imperialists kept
reaching for it every time they started to stumble,
and, strangely, it did stabilize them. The book, how-
ever, is not a progress narrative somuch as a century-
spanning shadow play of America the India and
India the place. Thefinal characters of this epic pan-
tomime are the missionaries who traveled to India
from a cotton-fueled nineteenth-century America—
trafficking as well as embodying Hakluyt’s dream
from centuries ago.
The book begins with the original dream, in
which Britain ruled America as a colony and traded
with an independent India. The dream, as we learn
in chapter 1, produced extravagant schemes to
make the cottons, silks, and spices grow in America
as they did in India. Could Virginia be a “second
India,” asked Thomas Abbay in his dedication to
John Smith’s 1612 Map of Virginia (14)? Readings
of Hakluyt, Purchas, and Middleton set the stage
for the “calico invasion” of the late seventeenth
century. The trading of calicoes in Africa and
America created both a fashion and an empire. It
also made British weavers, threatened by their In-
dian competitors, riot against “Calico madams.” The
Calico Acts (1700 and 1721) set in place a new dy-
namic, as Eacott explains in chapter 2. The second
act, which banned the sale as well as import of the
fabric in Britain, allowed the East India Company
to trade it to America. Combined with the com-
pany’s American monopoly, the prohibition of cal-
icoes in Britain produced an inflammatory situa-
tion, setting off new debates in the colonial moral
economy. It wasn’t just India that was changed by
these debates—in fact, as Eacott goes on to show,
the American Revolution sprang from them.
It is a strange omission of eighteenth-century
historiography that the period between the 1720s
and 1770s is rarely examined as a whole. The third
and fourth chapters of this book incorporate the
events that mark this extremely busy period into
a convincing timeline of a continuous arc of in-
traimperial legislative deliberations. The Calico Act
was a splendid addition to the imperial state’s reg-
ulatorymachine. TheBritish lawmakers yanked and
pulled at this chain for decades, tweaking the reg-
ulations in response to new pressures, constraints,
and events in the political timeline of empire and
the legislative timeline of the law in the period lead-
ing to the Seven Years War. Successful enforcement
was an imperial aesthetic. The justice that was served
had to be displayed as well. As elephant shows were
held in London and banyans banned at Harvard’s
commencement, the English Parliament went to
work writing laws which made the point that colo-
nies were subservient tometropolitan governments.
That by itself wouldn’t be so surprising if it wasn’t
for how “India the place” kept on turning into
“America the India.” From the place of calico in
the Sugar Act of 1764 to the parallels between the
Regulating Act and the Tea Act, both in 1773,
Eacott doesn’t miss a detail. Historians of India,
Britain, and America will have to engage with this
argument deeply, but so will scholars of legal his-
tory and the English Parliament in the eighteenth
century.
The implications are truly astonishing. If the
East India Company as monstrous tyrant became
an American revolutionary trope, if the Hastings
Book Reviews 89
This content downloaded from 130.058.106.003 on January 15, 2020 10:39:46 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
trial was compared to Shay’s rebellion, it wasn’t be-
cause India was a distant comparison or locus of
imaginary solidarity: India, it seems, was inside
America. America was made up of stories about
India—maybe not entirely, but at a degree that
hasn’t been realized. The American dream was a
reversal, in its original form, of the British dream
of India. In this inverted ideological structure, fi-
nances were also significant. In any case, the crises
of the East India Company worked out really well
for America. For John Brown, the new situation
meant that he could “profit from an empire that
Americans had fought to leave by working with
Britons desirous of profiting off their own Asian
empire” (258).
As for Britain, it’s not as if it suffered. The inde-
pendence of the United States was excellent news
for British manufacturers. The trade that was lost
by the American Revolution was regained later by
industrialization. The British responded to the loss
of the colonies by emulating Indian cotton with
American raw materials. The rise of America as a
competitive force was accompanied by the resur-
gence, in the Board of Trade’s London proceed-
ings, of old debates from the 1680s. American in-
dependence brought missionaries to India. The
conversion of Indians to Christianity was not un-
related, as Eacott argues in the final chapter, to
the biggest conversion of all: “the conversion of
America into a cotton cultivating power, an India,
not in name, but in the raw material that it pro-
vided” (436).
Properly speaking, the book is an epic: four cen-
turies, four continents, comparative, global, and
interimperial. The book derives its power from its
methodological rigor, its interdisciplinary tool kit,
and its firm control over narrative form. All are nec-
essary in order for Eacott to find, as he does, in
pictures of hookahs and palanquins, the transfer
of imperial imaginaries from one continent and
century to another. But the triangulated fate of
continents wouldn’t appear with such clarity if it
wasn’t for Eacott’s unflinching attention to non-
events and strange omissions. “Notably,”heobserves,
“Congress did not create amonopoly company and
did not agree to significant incentives for Ameri-
can merchants to obtain India goods from India it-
self as opposed to from Europe” (275). By compar-
ing what happened to what didn’t, Eacott explains
the ironic reversals that marked the transition from
the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. “The
empire’s development,” he observes in the conclu-
sion, “did not always follow the path its schemers
expected, and yet it ultimately fulfilled most of
their big expectations” (443). The British empire
was a miracle of history—except for the fact that
it didn’t exactly make itself.
Selling Empire is a long book, but it has to be read
in order, from start to finish. It is not a book you
can dip into—you have to follow the argument as
it unfolds progressively so that the “systemwe create
with our ideas” appears in contrast to all the other
historical processes—lawmaking, mythmaking—that
it systematizes (443). The three empires in the title
of this book are spinning worlds inside each detail:
unremarked shifts in the percentage change of
drawbacks to be charged on calico in the Sugar
Act of 1764; the appearance in a simple phrase like
“variety of fashionable and high quality goods” of
the emerging aesthetic of the imperial supply chain;
Spanish overtures to the American revolutionaries,
offering to capture East India ships; and—decades
later—American ships during the Napoleonic wars
carrying silver in and out of India—under the pre-
tense of neutrality. It is through these details that
Selling Empire supplies the reader, in every paragraph
on every page, with a way of thinking between and
across the scales of historical experience. Not one
detail is insignificant.
Farid Azfar
Swarthmore College
Marguerite S. Shaffer and Phoebe S. K. Young,
eds. Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Poli-
tics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2015. 406 pp.; 54 black-and-white images, notes,
index. $55.00.
Americans often view nature and culture as sepa-
rate and opposing realms, with nature as a pristine,
timeless sanctuary from the human world. Yet this
belief emergedonly recently, in response toenviron-
mental transformations of the industrial revolution.
Many scholars have questioned this nature-culture
dichotomy by examining themyriad entanglements
betweennature and culture. In particular, they have
explored the ways that cultural constructions of na-
ture shape environmental use. Ironically, through
these studies thenature-culture dichotomyhas been
contested but also perpetuated. Nature always has a
material presence—despite cultural constructions
of nature, a material nature still exists, however per-
ceived. However, even the idea of the Anthropocene
as a geological period inwhichhumanactivities have
become akin to forces of nature assumes the exis-
tence of a preindustrial nature unaffected by human
actions.
90 Winterthur Portfolio 51:1
This content downloaded from 130.058.106.003 on January 15, 2020 10:39:46 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).


Review Of  Selling Empire: India In The Making Of Britain And America, 1600–1830  By J. Eacott

Swarthmore College Works History Faculty Works History 7-1-2017 Review Of "Selling Empire: India In The Making Of Britain And America, 1600–1830" By J. Eacott Robert S. DuPlessis Swarthmore College, rduples1@swarthmore.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history  Part of the History Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Robert S. DuPlessis. (2017). "Review Of "Selling Empire: India In The Making Of Britain And America, 1600–1830" By J. Eacott". William And Mary Quarterly. Volume 74, Issue 3. 560-563. https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/496 This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. and England in the entire enterprise, as well as theirextensions and colonies in theNewWorld. It also ex-plains the deep impact of Asian goods and people,especially in Spanish and Portuguese America, whererepeated contact with “the East” was an integralpart of three centuries of history. Indeed, the cen-tral role of the Acapulco-Mexico City-Veracruz route,and the complexity of alternate and often illegalroutes and activities in Spanish-language sources,might have been given more play in the book. Thebook’s specific contribution is not only its attentionto that history, but also its inclusion of North Amer-ican reception of Asian goods and artistic technolo-gies.Clara BargelliniUniversidad Nacional Autónoma de MéxicoJonathan Eacott. Selling Empire: India in the Makingof Britain and America, 1600–1830. Published forthe Omohundro Institute of Early American His-tory and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. ChapelHill: University of North Carolina, 2016. 472 pp.;25 halftones, 7 figures, notes, index. $30.00 (pa-per).This is a book about storied empires, the figmentsof the imperial imagination—“America the India”and “India the place”—making and breaking worldsaround them. The book spans centuries, but thestory isn’t linear. It is a story, in fact, of a feedbackloop: a set of memes that travel through sinuousand mazelike circuits, turning the dreams of em-pires into nightmares. It wasn’t India, but the ideaof India—“in the grandest policies and close to skinin the most intimate places” (4)—which drove theBritish empire in America to become what it be-came: a real-life version of the imaginary India thatBritons had envisioned in the seventeenth century.The grand and intimate vision of India was a sus-taining dream of progress; British imperialists keptreaching for it every time they started to stumble,and, strangely, it did stabilize them. The book, how-ever, is not a progress narrative somuch as a century-spanning shadow play of America the India andIndia the place. Thefinal characters of this epic pan-tomime are the missionaries who traveled to Indiafrom a cotton-fueled nineteenth-century America—trafficking as well as embodying Hakluyt’s dreamfrom centuries ago.The book begins with the original dream, inwhich Britain ruled America as a colony and tradedwith an independent India. The dream, as we learnin chapter 1, produced extravagant schemes tomake the cottons, silks, and spices grow in Americaas they did in India. Could Virginia be a “secondIndia,” asked Thomas Abbay in his dedication toJohn Smith’s 1612 Map of Virginia (14)? Readingsof Hakluyt, Purchas, and Middleton set the stagefor the “calico invasion” of the late seventeenthcentury. The trading of calicoes in Africa andAmerica created both a fashion and an empire. Italso made British weavers, threatened by their In-dian competitors, riot against “Calico madams.” TheCalico Acts (1700 and 1721) set in place a new dy-namic, as Eacott explains in chapter 2. The secondact, which banned the sale as well as import of thefabric in Britain, allowed the East India Companyto trade it to America. Combined with the com-pany’s American monopoly, the prohibition of cal-icoes in Britain produced an inflammatory situa-tion, setting off new debates in the colonial moraleconomy. It wasn’t just India that was changed bythese debates—in fact, as Eacott goes on to show,the American Revolution sprang from them.It is a strange omission of eighteenth-centuryhistoriography that the period between the 1720sand 1770s is rarely examined as a whole. The thirdand fourth chapters of this book incorporate theevents that mark this extremely busy period intoa convincing timeline of a continuous arc of in-traimperial legislative deliberations. The Calico Actwas a splendid addition to the imperial state’s reg-ulatorymachine. TheBritish lawmakers yanked andpulled at this chain for decades, tweaking the reg-ulations in response to new pressures, constraints,and events in the political timeline of empire andthe legislative timeline of the law in the period lead-ing to the Seven Years War. Successful enforcementwas an imperial aesthetic. The justice that was servedhad to be displayed as well. As elephant shows wereheld in London and banyans banned at Harvard’scommencement, the English Parliament went towork writing laws which made the point that colo-nies were subservient tometropolitan governments.That by itself wouldn’t be so surprising if it wasn’tfor how “India the place” kept on turning into“America the India.” From the place of calico inthe Sugar Act of 1764 to the parallels between theRegulating Act and the Tea Act, both in 1773,Eacott doesn’t miss a detail. Historians of India,Britain, and America will have to engage with thisargument deeply, but so will scholars of legal his-tory and the English Parliament in the eighteenthcentury.The implications are truly astonishing. If theEast India Company as monstrous tyrant becamean American revolutionary trope, if the HastingsBook Reviews 89This content downloaded from 130.058.106.003 on January 15, 2020 10:39:46 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).trial was compared to Shay’s rebellion, it wasn’t be-cause India was a distant comparison or locus ofimaginary solidarity: India, it seems, was insideAmerica. America was made up of stories aboutIndia—maybe not entirely, but at a degree thathasn’t been realized. The American dream was areversal, in its original form, of the British dreamof India. In this inverted ideological structure, fi-nances were also significant. In any case, the crisesof the East India Company worked out really wellfor America. For John Brown, the new situationmeant that he could “profit from an empire thatAmericans had fought to leave by working withBritons desirous of profiting off their own Asianempire” (258).As for Britain, it’s not as if it suffered. The inde-pendence of the United States was excellent newsfor British manufacturers. The trade that was lostby the American Revolution was regained later byindustrialization. The British responded to the lossof the colonies by emulating Indian cotton withAmerican raw materials. The rise of America as acompetitive force was accompanied by the resur-gence, in the Board of Trade’s London proceed-ings, of old debates from the 1680s. American in-dependence brought missionaries to India. Theconversion of Indians to Christianity was not un-related, as Eacott argues in the final chapter, tothe biggest conversion of all: “the conversion ofAmerica into a cotton cultivating power, an India,not in name, but in the raw material that it pro-vided” (436).Properly speaking, the book is an epic: four cen-turies, four continents, comparative, global, andinterimperial. The book derives its power from itsmethodological rigor, its interdisciplinary tool kit,and its firm control over narrative form. All are nec-essary in order for Eacott to find, as he does, inpictures of hookahs and palanquins, the transferof imperial imaginaries from one continent andcentury to another. But the triangulated fate ofcontinents wouldn’t appear with such clarity if itwasn’t for Eacott’s unflinching attention to non-events and strange omissions. “Notably,”heobserves,“Congress did not create amonopoly company anddid not agree to significant incentives for Ameri-can merchants to obtain India goods from India it-self as opposed to from Europe” (275). By compar-ing what happened to what didn’t, Eacott explainsthe ironic reversals that marked the transition fromthe eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. “Theempire’s development,” he observes in the conclu-sion, “did not always follow the path its schemersexpected, and yet it ultimately fulfilled most oftheir big expectations” (443). The British empirewas a miracle of history—except for the fact thatit didn’t exactly make itself.Selling Empire is a long book, but it has to be readin order, from start to finish. It is not a book youcan dip into—you have to follow the argument asit unfolds progressively so that the “systemwe createwith our ideas” appears in contrast to all the otherhistorical processes—lawmaking, mythmaking—thatit systematizes (443). The three empires in the titleof this book are spinning worlds inside each detail:unremarked shifts in the percentage change ofdrawbacks to be charged on calico in the SugarAct of 1764; the appearance in a simple phrase like“variety of fashionable and high quality goods” ofthe emerging aesthetic of the imperial supply chain;Spanish overtures to the American revolutionaries,offering to capture East India ships; and—decadeslater—American ships during the Napoleonic warscarrying silver in and out of India—under the pre-tense of neutrality. It is through these details thatSelling Empire supplies the reader, in every paragraphon every page, with a way of thinking between andacross the scales of historical experience. Not onedetail is insignificant.Farid AzfarSwarthmore CollegeMarguerite S. Shaffer and Phoebe S. K. Young,eds. Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Poli-tics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2015. 406 pp.; 54 black-and-white images, notes,index. $55.00.Americans often view nature and culture as sepa-rate and opposing realms, with nature as a pristine,timeless sanctuary from the human world. Yet thisbelief emergedonly recently, in response toenviron-mental transformations of the industrial revolution.Many scholars have questioned this nature-culturedichotomy by examining themyriad entanglementsbetweennature and culture. In particular, they haveexplored the ways that cultural constructions of na-ture shape environmental use. Ironically, throughthese studies thenature-culture dichotomyhas beencontested but also perpetuated. Nature always has amaterial presence—despite cultural constructionsof nature, a material nature still exists, however per-ceived. However, even the idea of the Anthropoceneas a geological period inwhichhumanactivities havebecome akin to forces of nature assumes the exis-tence of a preindustrial nature unaffected by humanactions.90 Winterthur Portfolio 51:1This content downloaded from 130.058.106.003 on January 15, 2020 10:39:46 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).

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Review Of Selling Empire: India In The Making Of Britain And America, 1600–1830 By J. Eacott

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