Owning empire: The matter of India in the English -speaking world, 1730--1830.

Abstract

Goods and artifacts manufactured in and inspired by India mattered a great deal to consumers, merchants, industrialists, and governments in the long-eighteenth-century English-speaking world. Through a selective process of re-invention and assimilation of India goods, English-speaking people defined and redefined their economies, social structures, and identities, as well as their perceptions of India. This dissertation explains the far-reaching importance of decisions made by Britons, colonists, and Americans to assimilate the production and consumption of such India goods as cotton cloth and umbrellas into their local economies and societies, while they associated such other India goods as hookah pipes and palanquins with the East. It argues that by flexibly balancing economic, cultural, political and moral interests in place and across space, Britons made their empire powerful and enduring. Recovering the importance of India in the everyday lives of English-speakers in three distant cities, Calcutta, London, and Philadelphia, brings the complex process of cultural appropriation that led to a level of shared experience throughout the empire into focus. Britain's presence in India helped maintain this shared experience for decades after the formal independence of the Thirteen Colonies. Philadelphia merchants depended on the resources of the British empire in Calcutta, to bring to America, goods made popular in London. Yet men and women in each city did not always make the same decisions about which goods from India they would own and what that ownership would mean. Consumer preferences played out differently depending on systems of trade, geographies and methods of production, material advantages, marks of status, and political and moral meanings. Historians tend to see the British empire in the long eighteenth century as politically and legally fractured, yet dominated by an essentially British culture. Looking at the circulation and consumption of India goods in India, Britain, and America, reveals instead how the interactive, composite, and flexible nature of imperial trade and culture supported British strength. Beyond the eighteenth century, this work offers a new understanding of the multiple ways through which people in consumer societies use goods to connect the events of their daily lives with macro trends in economics, politics, and social construction.