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.

About the Author
Jonathan Eacott is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.

Reviews
A work of extraordinary scope based upon a remarkable amount of archival and library research. . . . Reveal[s] fresh ways of thinking about the growth of the international economy, as well as the interconnected histories of Britain, India, and the United States."" - Journal of Interdisciplinary History



Book Information
ISBN 9781469636177
Author Jonathan Eacott
Format Paperback
Page Count 472
Imprint The University of North Carolina Press
Publisher The University of North Carolina Press
Weight(grams) 670g