India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxiii

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2. India in the American Imaginary: Indo-American Encounters, 1780s–1880s

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s

      • Rajender Kaur, Anupama Arora

      Pages 3-37

3. Transatlantic Imperial Circuits: Trade, Missionary Activity, and the British East India Company

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 39-39

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   2. An Eye for Prices, an Eye for Souls: American Merchants and Missionaries in the Indian Subcontinent, 1784–1838

      • Michael A. Verney

      Pages 41-74

   3. The Empire Comes Home: Thomas Law’s Mixed-Race Family in the Early American Republic

      • Rosemarie Zagarri

      Pages 75-108

4. The Imperial Imaginary: Indo-American Interactions in the Literary, Philosophical, and Political Sphere

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 109-109

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   2. Indo-American Encounters in Melville and Thoreau: Philosophy, Commerce, and Religious Dialogue

      • Brian Yothers

      Pages 111-140

   3. “Every India Mail”: The Lamplighter and the Prospect of U.S. Transoceanic (Postal) Empire, 1847–1854

      • Mark B. Kelley

      Pages 141-171

5. Imperial Publics: India in U.S. Reform Debates on Race, Slavery, and Labor

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 173-173

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   2. Cast in Print: The Indian Mutiny, Asiatic Racial Forms, and American Domesticity

      • Anirudra Thapa

      Pages 175-197

   3. India and U.S. Cultures of Reform: Caste as Keyword

      • Susan M. Ryan

      Pages 199-227

   4. “Considered a Citizen of the United States”: George DeGrasse, a South Asian in Early (African) America

      • Pratibha Kanakamedala

      Pages 229-243

6. Orientalist Imaginings: Royal India and American Fine Arts and Painting

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 245-245

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   2. “A Dazzle of Light”: Edwin Lord Weeks and Royal India

      • Romita Ray

      Pages 247-281

7. Back Matter

   Pages 283-292

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This book seeks to frame the “the idea of India” in the American imaginary within a transnational lens that is attentive to global flows of goods, people, and ideas within the circuits of imperial and maritime economies in nineteenth century America (roughly 1780s-1880s). This diverse and interdisciplinary volume – with essays by upcoming as well as established scholars – aims to add to an understanding of the fast changing terrain of economic, political, and cultural life in the US as it emerged from being a British colony to having imperial ambitions of its own on the global stage. The essays trace, variously, the evolution of the changing self-image of a nation embodying a surprisingly cosmopolitan sensibility, open to different cultural values and customs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to one that slowly adopted rigid and discriminatory racial and cultural attitudes spawned by the widespread missionary activities of the ABCFM and the fierce economic pulls and pushes of American mercantilism by the end of the nineteenth century. The different uses of India become a way of refining an American national identity.

• Orientalism Nineteenth-Century America
• Edwin Lord Weeks
• India and American Mercantilism
• Indo-American trade in the nineteenth century
• American missionaries in nineteenth-century India
• British East India Company
• Herman Melville
• American reaction to Indian Mutiny

“India in the American Imaginary reject monolithic explanation and provide diverse and new perspectives on how Europeans or Americans related to Indians and Indian culture and society. These images and interactions are contextualized in realms … thereby making them appealing to the interest of students and scholars in many disciplines.” (Tara Sethia, Journal of World History, Vol. 30 (4), December, 2019)

• University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, North Dartmouth, USA

  Anupama Arora

• William Paterson University of New Jersey, Wayne, USA

  Rajender Kaur

Anupama Arora is Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts, USA.

Rajender Kaur is Associate Professor of English at William Paterson University of New Jersey, USA, where she teaches courses in postcolonial, Asian American, British, and World literatures.

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