Early American history has clearly taken its “global turn,” and it seems to have taken it sharply, as exhibited by the recent work of Rosemary Zagarri, Nicholas Canny, Peter Coclanis, Lauren Benton, and Alison Games. However, as scholars continue to test the limits of the Atlantic both at its confluence with the Indian Ocean to the East and its continuities through transcontinental ambitions to the West, all too often, this turn seems to presuppose a dilemma between ocean and world akin to the conflict between ocean and nation once posed by Atlantic history itself. One of the many refreshing things about James Fichter’s ambitious book is the way in which it navigates this fork in the road by treating its subject, the early American East Indies trade, as simultaneously both a transatlantic and a global phenomenon. So Great a Proffit traces the impact of this trade on late colonial America and the early United States. In so doing, however, it zealously figures Asia as central to a range of familiar and critical narratives: the ideological foundations of American Revolution, the political economy of the post-Revolutionary Anglophone Atlantic world, and even the fate of the so-called second British empire, from which those American colonists had ostensibly recently wrested themselves.

Given its subject, this book begins where one might expect: with the well-known story of how financial stresses of the English East India Company’s rapidly expanding territorial empire, great debts, and glutted China trade found a remedy in American tax policy. For Fichter, however, the “party” in Boston that followed in 1773, as well as less celebrated responses elsewhere in the colonies, signaled an unsung ideological foundation to the ensuing revolution. It was, we are reminded, no coincidence that 1776 was also the year of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and the revolution was part of a fundamental controversy raging across the Atlantic over political economy. As the American colonists put the tea back in liberty, they thus liberated themselves not merely from the despotism of monarchy but also from the tyranny of monopoly, and that of the East India Company specifically. That debate, of course, did not end with the revolution. Yet despite controversies over the Bank of the United States and even a failed proposal for a European-style American East India Company, “free trade”—that is, antimonopolism—nonetheless succeeded in becoming the guiding sentiment of the early Republic. Freed of the ideological and legal strictures of the Company’s Empire in India, Americans could now pursue transhemispheric commerce and both the carrying and the country trade with abandon.

However, if revolution made an American East Indies trade possible, it did not ensure it would be profitable. This, Fichter notes, was accomplished by Britain’s war with France. Emboldened by neutrality, unhindered by the rigidity of their European brethren, and empowered by specific provisions of the Jay Treaty allowing unfettered access to British Indian markets, American commercial and financial entrepreneurs in Asia flourished. For Fichter, this had manifold and serious ramifications. Wealth raised in the East Indies via the carrying trade and trafficking in goods fed a range of other early American entrepreneurial enterprises, giving birth to America’s first “millionaire” class and its first generation of venture capitalists, like Israel Thorndike and John Jacob Astor. Moreover, the success of American trade in India became a persuasive argument against the English East India Company’s commercial monopoly in India, its example showcased particularly in the debates over the Company’s charter renewal in 1813. As the (former) empire struck back, it thus laid the groundwork for the elimination of the Company’s monopoly and ultimately its commercial functions altogether and the sorts of domestic and imperial reforms that by the 1830s precipitated a British empire of “free trade” (251). Globally, it was the foundation for a modern Western capitalist enterprise that was “more meritocratic and less prebendal on both sides of the Atlantic” (279) and thus an “Anglo-American” alliance of capital that was crucial in shifting the capital’s center of gravity to the “global North,” what is often understood, especially after Kenneth Pomeranz, as the “great divergence” (5).

Breathless, determined, and engaging, this book will almost certainly prompt debate. It exhibits an impressive archival and methodological range, shifting constantly among the epistolary and journalistic, the statistical and econometric, the biographical and prosopographical. Its ambit is also equally broad. In here, one will find stories not just about tea but also sandalwood, opium, fur, and, of course, silver and accounts of American trade not just in Boston Harbor but the Columbia River, Canton, Calcutta, Ceylon, Cape Town, the Caribbean and many points between. In so doing, it offers a number of bold and provocative theses. In the vein of Cain and Hopkins, So Great a Proffit seeks to put commercial and financial, rather than industrial, profit at the center of the birth of both modern capitalism and empire; it also prompts one to consider the ways in which the East Indies informed early American history, the extent to which transatlantic relationships endured across the revolution, and how older, Atlantic stories integrated with the new westward-looking transcontinental ambitions of the United States. This book even seeks to put the new American republic at the center of the changing British political economy and, thus, the changing nature of the British empire in India. On this last point, it is worth mentioning that some readers will inevitably wonder whether the American East Indies trade ultimately ought to be considered so pervasive and transformative, both as a commercial enterprise and as an idea, to create a sufficient rather than necessary cause for the transformation of British India. After all, the impulses to build a strong imperial center among figures like Henry and Robert Dundas, whose Smithian economic ideals are well detailed here, were influenced by a variety of interlocking ideological, political, pragmatic, and personal factors, particularly in their approach to India; likewise, the outcome of the 1813 debates, and thus the footing for the East India Company, depended upon a range of controversial questions, including land tenure and revenue policy, warfare and expansion, the propriety of evangelical missionary activity, and the puzzling and transforming nature of British state sovereignty in India. Of course, the new United States was dealing with many of the same concerns: the extent and propriety of continental and overseas empire, the nature of property in newly acquired territories and jurisdiction and sovereignty over both settlers and indigenous peoples, and even burgeoning missionary activity abroad (not least in India). Following this book’s lead, one could thus imagine all of these factors as part of an early nineteenth-century “Anglo-American” moment, which set the stage for the development of these two modern states and empires; however, as Fichter himself puts it in his closing lines about the growth of nineteenth-century capitalism, perhaps we simply must regard this as “another story” (288).