Far more than thousands of miles of land and sea separated Massachusetts and Bengal. To set sail from Boston to Calcutta in 1765 was to break British law and act outside its protection.Footnote ¹ The English East India Company, headquartered in London, maintained a monopoly over British trade with the East Indies, which were expansively defined as those regions of “Asia, Africa, and America” that lay between the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan.Footnote ² Nevertheless, Massachusetts and Bengal were increasingly juxtaposed and discussed in the same breath during the second half of the eighteenth century. They were both part of an entity that British commentators explicitly called the “British Empire.” If “the Empire” in early eighteenth-century Anglophone writing had typically alluded to the Holy Roman Empire, in succeeding decades, the concept of the “British Empire” began to gain traction.Footnote ³ In The Present State of the British Empire in Europe, America, Africa, and Asia, published in 1768, Oliver Goldsmith described the British Empire as “an empire perhaps more extensive, and perhaps more powerful, than any that has hitherto existed; even the great Roman Empire not excepted.”Footnote ⁴ Goldsmith’s confidence in the British Empire’s power was not shared by all his contemporaries. The skeptics included those who questioned the configuration of this sprawling global entity, especially the relationship among its constituent parts across the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

This article considers how British commentators argued about the relationship between North America and India or “the two Indies” as they were sometimes called before the eruption of the American Revolutionary War in Lexington and Concord in 1775.Footnote ⁵ There was much to argue about. Who would bear the burden of paying down the national debt accumulated during the Seven Years’ War? Who could trade with whom? How would the mobility of men, women, commodities, revenues, and money across vast distances be regulated? As they contemplated these questions, some commentators wondered aloud about how discontent in North America might impact British plans in South Asia. Indeed, the possibility of a revolutionary upheaval in North America animated discussions of the British Empire in South Asia well before the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In 1770, a pamphlet titled The Importance of the British Dominion in India Compared with that in America prophesized that “Britain will, one day, lose her dominion” over North America.Footnote ⁶ Two years later, Robert Clive, a long-standing servant of the English East India Company and eventually a member of Parliament, predicted the “Independency of America” and insisted that Britain ought to, therefore, devote more attention to its possessions in South Asia.Footnote ⁷ That the loss of British colonies in North America could be projected before it had actually transpired and serve as justification for increased investment in South Asia is deeply telling. It demonstrates that, contrary to the formulation of a “First British Empire” centered in the Atlantic until the American Revolutionary War and a “Second British Empire” centered in South Asia after 1783, British imperial projects across the two regions were pursued and debated simultaneously.Footnote ⁸

The ability to envision far flung territories within the same frame was a long time in the making. In the late seventeenth century, critics and defenders alike of the East India Company invoked both the East and West Indies in their accounts of England’s economy and that of its rivals such as the Dutch.Footnote ⁹ In the eighteenth century, the outbreak of increasingly global conflicts drew together disparate parts of the Indian and Atlantic oceans. During the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), the possibility that the English East India Company’s settlement of Madras would be restituted by the French in exchange for Cape Breton in North America welded together geopolitical calculations across two oceans.Footnote ¹⁰ War and peace in North America and Asia were no longer discrete events. The Treaty of Aix-le-Chapelle that brought the war to a close explicitly invoked the globality of the conflict, calling upon both the French and British to “restore and receive all which may have been conquered on each side in the East and West Indies.”Footnote ¹¹

Not only did European diplomats entertain the notion of exchanging territories located in very different parts of the world, but some Britons also argued in favor of replicating the institutional design of Atlantic colonies in the settlements of the East India Company. In 1754 a pamphleteer recommended that St. Helena, Bombay, and Madras be each “created into a separate Colony with a Governor appointed by his Majesty, to be assisted by a Council and Assembly, chosen by the People, as in America.”Footnote ¹² Such a transformation would, the pamphleteer contended, allow these settlements to become “as rich and as flourishing Colonies as Virginia or Jamaica.”Footnote ¹³ That such a proposal was articulated before what are now regarded as iconic British victories in South Asia at Plassey in 1757 or Buxar in 1764 may be read as hubris but also as evidence of how Britons perceived the mobility of imperial models across a sprawling empire.

The Seven Years’ War (1754–63) marked an intensification of cross-oceanic and intra-imperial connections in both material and intellectual terms. Bengal, Florida, Havana, and Manila were only some of the contested spaces “in the four parts of the world” that were mentioned in the Treaty of Paris in 1763.Footnote ¹⁴ Even before the treaty was concluded, a piece of graphic satire criticized the proposed repatriation of British conquests by depicting a coach carrying the English lion in the process of being detached from the several horses that had been drawing it (Figure 1).Footnote ¹⁵ Many of the horses were labeled after a place conquered from the French during the war. Consequently, a horse labeled Pondechery (Pondicherry) after the French establishment in southern India and another labeled America were featured next to each other, among other horses marked Germany, Guardeloup (Guadalupe), Martinico (Martinque), and Quebec. If such illustrations of the intimacies among faraway places seem subtle, political discourse about managing a global empire after 1763 was anything but. British military victories in South Asia and the East India Company’s acquisition of the Diwani or authority to collect revenues in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, from the Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, in 1765, sharpened debates about the Company’s monopoly and the fiscal architecture of the British state and empire as a whole. The simultaneity of the acquisition of the Diwani and the imposition of the Stamp Act of 1765 was not a coincidence. The Diwani and the Stamp Act were both products of a deliberate government effort to raise taxes and pay down the national debt.Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 1.

Detail from A Prophesy.  The Coach Overturn’d or the Fall of Mortimer (1762), depicting the various territories implicated in the Seven Years’ War, including Pondicherry in India and America, as the horses that were drawing the carriage of the British state, which appears to be breaking down and grinding to a halt. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

This broader imperial context did not escape James Otis, an increasingly vocal critic of the British state in Massachusetts, as he penned a scathing critique of postwar taxation policies in 1765. Otis asked why colonists in North America were being compelled to bear the brunt of such policies: “I cannot see why it would not be well enough to go a nabob hunting on this occasion. Why should not the great Mogul be obliged to contribute towards, if not to pay, the national debt, as some proposed? He is a Pagan, an East Indian, and of a dark complexion, which are full as good reasons for laying him under contribution, as any I have found abroad in the pamphlets and coffee house conferences, for taxing the colonists.”Footnote ¹⁷ Otis’s writing revealed one among a variety of ways in which Britons understood the politics of the East India Company’s long-standing negotiations with the Mughal emperor. Certainly, the precise details of the Diwani as it was finally settled in 1765 would not have been available to Otis on account of the months-long communication lag between Bengal and the Atlantic seaboard. Irrespective of delays, Otis heaped ridicule on British proposals for taxing North American colonies by raising the potential to draw more funds from South Asia, including by extorting the Mughal emperor himself. If Otis’s effort to connect the dots between North America and India seemed somewhat sarcastic, others were far more earnest. One pamphleteer suggested that the East India trade be laid open and that the East India Company be reimbursed for its lost monopoly by a payment of ten million pounds, with six being raised in Great Britain, and the remaining four “by Ireland, North America, and the West-India islands.”Footnote ¹⁸

Amid such discussions of trade and taxation in the late 1760s, the trope of the British state as a carriage drawn (or not) by horses reappeared. In The Machine to Go Without Asses, George III was seated atop the carriage of the British state and served by the “family compact” consisting of the rulers of various European states (Figure 2).Footnote ¹⁹ Meanwhile, crumpled in the foreground, lay the “asses” or the ministers who had failed to hold onto their appointments as protests against ministerial policy gathered steam across North America and Britain. Importantly, the wheels of the carriage, which almost hide in plain sight, were labelled Great Britain, Ireland, America, and India. Despite their divergent constitutional status and the sheer distance separating them, America and India were presented straightforwardly as moving parts of the same machine. But not everybody conceived of the relationship between the two as a cohesive and complementary one. Some actively contrasted them and made the case that one was more important than the other.

Figure 2.

The Machine to Go Without Asses (1769) depicts the carriage of the British state with George III seated on it being held up by wheels that are labeled Great Britain, Ireland, America, and India. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

In 1770, the author of The Importance of the British Dominion in India Compared with that in America emphatically declared that Britain’s possessions in South Asia were far more advantageous to Britain than those in North America. This would have come as a surprise to James Otis and others in North America who had responded to increased taxation by reminding British politicians of the contributions made by the colonists both to the British war effort as well as to the British economy at large. The anonymous author of this comparative account, meanwhile, hoped to convince his compatriots that Britain’s acquisitions in the subcontinent were not “an adventitious excrescence” nor “an encumbering burden unadvisedly taken up.”Footnote ²⁰ He proposed three metrics by which India and North America could be compared: the political and economic value of the dominion, the stability of the dominion, and the expenditure required to maintain dominion.Footnote ²¹ On each count, the pamphleteer found North America wanting.

Not only were the manufactures of Britain and North America much too similar but the latter drained Britain’s population while also being difficult and costly to govern. “America hangs like a wasting disease on the strength of Britain,” he announced.Footnote ²² By contrast, India, especially the province of Bengal, not only produced commodities that were uncommon and highly desirable in Britain and other parts of Europe, but was also distinguished by its docile and far from rebellious population. Much as the climatic differences between Britain and India had ensured diversity in their respective manufactures, so had it made India’s “inhabitants languid, effeminate and soft.”Footnote ²³ While British colonists in North America were cast as “haughty and insolent” and “by all means affecting independence,” Bengal was celebrated for being inhabited by “an ingenious, industrious and frugal people possessing the knowledge of arts and manufactures whereby they furnish an active commerce superior to that of most countries.”Footnote ²⁴ Most importantly, and quite unlike North America, “Bengal plants and sows, she manufactures and trades, not for herself but for Britain” so much so that Bengal had become “effectually and intimately annexed and united to Britain as if it was a part of herself.”Footnote ²⁵ It was all the more necessary, the pamphleteer concluded, for Britain to “attend as minutely to the interest and concerns” of India “as to her own.”Footnote ²⁶

There was much that contemporary readers of The Importance of the British Dominion in India would have found counterintuitive. After all, as the author himself acknowledged, India was so far away from Britain, separated by a six-month long voyage at the very least.Footnote ²⁷ Besides, despite the author’s emphasis on the docility of the locals, anybody who read a newspaper in Britain during the 1760s would have been aware of the frequency of conflict with multiple South Asian states, from the Marathas to Mysore. At the same time, the protests and embargos that had proliferated in the North American colonies due to the Stamp Act in 1765 and then the Townshend Duties would have made predictions of American independence sound reasonably plausible. Subsequent publications reiterated the conclusions offered in The Importance of the British Dominion in India while also providing concrete proposals for how the governance of India ought to be transformed.Footnote ²⁸ The trope of South Asians’ docility also reappeared in a 1773 pamphlet in which the author declared that if North America was difficult to govern because of “the indomitably obstinate spirit of the subjects,” India possessed the “most valuable qualification of a dependent dominion” because of the people’s “passive or submissive disposition, and incapacity of resisting the power of government.”Footnote ²⁹

A very different picture emerged from Robert Clive’s musings on the future of the British Empire in 1772. Instead of offering a rosy account of wealth and stability in the subcontinent, Clive began by enumerating the many problems confronting Britain in India: the financial troubles of the East India Company, an outdated charter, four disunited presidencies or administrative agencies across the Indian Ocean, and a lack of substantial support from the British state itself.Footnote ³⁰ Unlike some pamphleteers and politicians such as Charles James Fox and Henry Dundas who held forth on “East India affairs” by reading widely on the subject without ever having stepped foot in the subcontinent, Clive’s perspective was shaped by long years of service across the three subcontinental presidencies of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras since the 1740s. Clive’s often firsthand knowledge of India did not, however, prevent him from thinking about India in relation to North America. Like many other Britons of his time, Clive thought the empire—both the British and the French—whole.Footnote ³¹ In order to make the case for greater support and thus “render our Possessions in India permanent,” Clive surveyed the evolution of the French Empire across both the Atlantic and Indian oceans as well as the state of affairs in Britain’s North American colonies.

Returning to the events of the Seven Years’ War, Clive wrote that it was quite likely that “France when she lost Canada and ceded New Orleans to Spain, gave up all thoughts of America.”Footnote ³² Furthermore, Clive prognosticated that “the Americans will be sooner or later master of all the Spanish Possessions.”Footnote ³³ If what Clive meant by “Americans” was not immediately clear, he then added that Britain would be fortunate if Spain “would see her danger in ours” and not “expedite the Independency of America” by entering into another conflict with Britain.Footnote ³⁴ Having insisted that French ambitions in North America had been laid to rest and that it was only a matter of time before the “Americans” pursued independence at the expense of both the British and the Spanish, Clive then announced that France would commit itself to “conquest in the East Indies.”Footnote ³⁵ Consequently, it was all the more necessary to guard against French expansion in the region and the threat posed by French allies such as Hyder Ali of Mysore, whom Clive described as “the ladder by which the French will attain the summit of their ambition in India.”Footnote ³⁶ Clive’s geopolitical calculations tied together the British takeover of French territories such as Quebec, the growing restlessness and anger of the “Americans,” and the formidable alliance between France and Mysore in South Asia. His conclusion was stark: the British state ought to pour far more money and men into preserving India.

Clive was dead by 1774 and did not live to see the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and the “Americans” in 1775, nor the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. As it happened, both the French and Hyder Ali played a decisive role in the conflict across South Asia and North America. In 1780, Hyder Ali launched a devastating attack on British forces, further complicating what was already a war with many fronts. In June 1781, The Pennsylvania Packet announced that Hyder Ali—“an Indian king” — had captured Pondicherry from the British and restored the settlement to the French.Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, the same extract noted that the British naval squadron in the East Indies was now smaller than the French fleet due to the losses it had sustained. The diminishing size of the British navy mattered profoundly to the American war effort, so much so that celebrations upon the surrender of Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781 featured toasts to “the great and heroic Hyder Alli” who had “been raised up by Providence to avenge the numberless cruelties perpetrated by the English on his unoffending countrymen, and to check the insolence and reduce the power of Britain in the East Indies.”Footnote ³⁸

In the midst of war, Britons found the time to speculate about how the looming threat of American independence would shape British projects in South Asia. Alexander Dalrymple, a defender of the East India Company’s autonomy, asked “if America is independent, what becomes of the trade to the East-Indies? Confined at present to London, would not even your own merchants trade under American colors?”Footnote ³⁹ While Dalrymple worried that the Company’s monopoly would be rendered meaningless, another enthused that “the defection of our American Colonies” would allow India to become the preeminent supplier of the “staple commodities of tobacco, rice, sugar and indigo” to Britain and Europe.Footnote ⁴⁰ Even after the Treaty of Paris confirmed American independence in 1783, the loss of the thirteen colonies continued to be a part of British discourse about the future of South Asia. Whether one supported the reform of the East India Company or its abolition, the example of North America weighed heavily. In debates over Charles James Fox’s East India bills, a critic warned Britons of the possibility that “the same spirit and measures which have lost one part of the British dominions, should sever India also from this country.”Footnote ⁴¹ Meanwhile, in the new United States, George Washington and his correspondents stayed abreast of shifts in Britain’s “East India” policies and the hostilities unfolding between British forces and those of the state of Mysore.Footnote ⁴²

The facts of geography, the mediating role of the East India Company, and the absence of large numbers of British settlers in South Asia did not make the subcontinent a peripheral place in the British imperial imagination. Britons never mindlessly consumed commodities such as tea and cottons drawn from the Indian Ocean. Rather, they began to see increasingly how projects of war, taxation, and commerce in one part of the world could variously complement, undermine, and intersect with those in another. Even before it had fully erupted, the American Revolution inflected how Britons thought about India. By the same token, conceptions of India’s economy and its inhabitants also transformed how Britons spoke of North America. In debating the many possible futures of the British Empire in the 1760s and early 1770s, Britons linked together North America and India.