The Atlantic World and India

Introduction

Growing interest in world, global, and what Subrahmanyam 2007 (cited under Portuguese) calls “connected histories” have increasingly led historians to query the permeable and imprecise boundaries of the Atlantic, and to consider its relationship with the rest of the world. As European ships, goods, people, and ideas were increasingly diffused around the world, jurisdictional boundaries failed to hew neatly to arbitrary divisions between the seas and oceans, while itinerants, merchants, and pirates alike similarly defined their own economic, political, and social worlds in the space between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. Though there is a long tradition of historiography that has understood the way Atlantic and Indian empires have comingled in the metropolitan markets of Europe, historians have also come to more direct connections between the Atlantic and India along the “webs” of empire (see Games 2008, cited under British: Imperial and Global Connections), from the earliest European efforts to find various maritime routes to Asia via the Atlantic through the diffusion of Spanish American silver in South Asian markets to the late 18th-century dumping of English East India Company tea into Boston Harbor. For some, the recognition of the interfluvial nature of the oceans has increasingly become the framework for a methodological critique of Atlantic history itself; for others, it has opened up a wealth of new subjects and possibilities for enhancing our understanding of the nature of the early modern Atlantic world. In this spirit, and given the somewhat diffuse nature of this particular subject, the emphasis in this bibliography is on a sampling of different perspectives and approaches that scholars have used to pursue the historical or historiographical relationships between the Atlantic world and South Asia, directly and often self-consciously, in whole or in part. It is also delimited quite specifically to the early modern Atlantic and India, though at times it inevitably hints at work on the Indian Ocean writ large as well as the great interest, particularly in economic history, in Atlantic empires and East Asia. As such, the list below is intended simply to suggest a variety of overlapping points of entry for scholars who are interested in exploring the various consequences for Atlantic history, when considering comparisons, connections, and ramifications of the worlds beyond its borders, and specifically with India.

Methodological Overviews

As no coherent field of study of “The Atlantic world and India” exists as such, some of the strongest and most comprehensive treatments of that subject have come in the form of conceptual and programmatic proposals. Canny 2003; Coclanis 2002; Games, et al. 2006; and Benton 2009 represent the ways in which these connections have been raised to varying degrees as a cautionary critique of the field of Atlantic history, often from the vantage of global or world history, while still (for some more than others) reinforcing the value of the Atlantic as a zone of study. Though brief in its proposal, Lawson 1986 suggests ways in which the concept of “Greater Britain” (articulated in Seeley 1883), which has formed one historiographical foundation of Atlantic historiography, could be extended to India, especially with regard to 18th-century British Parliamentary politics. Zagarri 2011 offers an historiographical review of recent efforts to connect early US history to India, while also suggesting fruitful avenues for future study. Lewis 1999 approaches the problem from a quite different perspective, showing in striking ways how the divisions among the seas and oceans are a consequence of modern conceptions of geographical space, rather than any reflection of the natural, human, or institutional histories that take place upon and between them. For further meditations on the subject, one could also see the various introductions and selected methodological essays found elsewhere in this bibliography, especially the introductions to Armitage and Subrahmanyam 2010 and Bowen, et al. 2012 (both cited under Collaborations), as well as Bowen’s article “Britain in the Indian Ocean Region and Beyond,” in Bowen, et al. 2012 (cited under Collaborations).

Benton, Lauren. “The British Atlantic in Global Context.” In The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. 2d ed. Edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 271–289. Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
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An addition to the second edition of this volume, this essay seeks to debunk many “common generalizations” about the divisions between early modern Atlantic enterprises and those elsewhere, especially in the Indian Ocean. Provides a brisk overview both of metropolitan connections—for example, investors and colonial promoters involved in various enterprises—as well as the global economic, political, and intellectual forces and processes that shaped both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.
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Canny, Nicholas. “Asia, the Atlantic and the Subjects of the British Monarchy.” In A Companion to Stuart Britain. Edited by Barry Coward, 45–66. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
DOI: 10.1002/9780470998908Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A survey of 17th-century overseas commerce and colonization in both British and global perspective. As in a number of Canny’s various other articles and essays on this issue (as in Greene and Morgan 2009, cited under Collaborations), makes a case for situating the overseas British experience in a global context, while still arguing for the value and coherence of Atlantic history.
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Coclanis, Peter A. “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History.” Journal of World History 13.1 (2002): 169–182.
DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2002.0005Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A provocative critique of Atlantic history focused particularly, though not exclusively, on Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn’s formulation of the field. Though it does not address South Asia specifically, the essay cites a variety of connections between the Atlantic and both territorial and maritime Eurasia in its call for “greater scholarly cosmopolitanism.” See also Coclanis’s essays in Games, et al. 2006 and Greene and Morgan 2009 (the latter cited under Collaborations).
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Games, Alison, Paul Mapp, Philip J. Stern, and Peter Coclanis. “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 63.4 (2006): 675–742.
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Forum in the leading journal of colonial American history that explores a variety of ways in which Atlantic history might be opened up to larger, continental, oceanic, and global perspectives.
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Lawson, Philip. “The Missing Link: The Imperial Dimension in Understanding Hanoverian Britain.” Historical Journal 29.3 (1986): 747–751.
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X00019014Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A brief but strong call-to-arms for recognizing the equal if not greater relevance of India issues in defining British Parliamentary politics in the later 18th century, when compared with Atlantic concerns and specifically the American Revolution. See also Lawson 1997 (cited under British: A Swing to the East?).
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Lewis, Martin W. “Dividing the Ocean Sea.” Geographical Review 89.2 (1999): 188–214.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1931-0846.1999.tb00213.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Historicizes the divisions among the oceans, identifying the four-ocean model as a product of 19th- and 20th-century geography and politics. Calls for new connections and perspectives on the relationship among the oceans by rethinking our received and perceived notions of the compartmentalization of oceanic space. Part of a special issue of the Geographical Review on “Oceans Connect,” many of the other essays in which are also germane to the subject of this bibliography.
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Seeley, J. R. The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures. London: Macmillan, 1883.
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Though Seeley himself saw the Atlantic and Indian imperial experiences as fundamentally distinct, his now famous call-to-arms that “the history of England” was to be found “not in England but in America and Asia” can serve as a starting point for investigating the connections between the two. Recovery of Seeley’s late-19th-century concept of “Greater Britain” has served for many as a theoretical foundation for exploring connections between empire and English history.
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Zagarri, Rosemarie. “The Significance of the ‘Global Turn’ for the Early American Republic: Globalization in the Age of Nation-Building.” Journal of the Early Republic 31.1 (2011): 1–37.
DOI: 10.1353/jer/2011.0014Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Looks at recent developments in the “Global Turn” in the field of early American history after the Revolution. Highlights three modes of connecting British India with the early Republic: movement of people, ideas, and things; missionary activity; and a comparative history of how early-19th-century British and American regimes treated the problem of race.
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Primary Sources

Though modern historiography has tended to cordon off the commercial and colonial history of the Atlantic from that of India, contemporary Europeans involved in overseas enterprises were quite aware of the manifold connections between the two. Any number of explorers, travelers, colonial officials, and even pirates and privateers, such as William Dampier (see Dampier 1697) and those whose work is collected in Mancall 2006, left behind publications and manuscripts documenting their encounters on both sides of the world. Others consumed, digested, and compiled such encounters without ever experiencing much beyond metropolitan Europe themselves (see Purchas 1625, Raynal 1770, and Grotius 2004). A glimpse of the coordination between Indian and Atlantic colonial ambitions can be seen in Sainsbury 1889–1939 (digital version available in Kupperman, et al. 2000), which though largely focused on the Americas reveals great, if periodic, interest in Indian affairs on the part of the English Board of Trade, Privy Council, Parliament, and monarchy.

Dampier, William. A New Voyage Round the World. London: James Knapton, 1697.
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Dampier—explorer, merchant, privateer, pirate—circumnavigated the globe three times, stopping at various points in the Atlantic, India, and elsewhere in Asia and Africa. Dampier’s descriptions engage topics in natural history, geography, ethnography, and politics across the late-17th-century world.
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Grotius, Hugo. The Free Sea. Translated by Richard Hakluyt. Edited by David Armitage. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004.
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Includes English colonial promoter Richard Hakluyt’s early 17th-century manuscript translation of Grotius’s Mare Liberum, the response from Grotius’s Scottish critic William Welwod, Grotius’s reply to Welwod, and a critical introduction. Though written in the context of Dutch conflicts with the Portuguese in the East Indies, Mare Liberum periodically engages problems in the Atlantic world, and it certainly came to influence global debates over maritime and international law.
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Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, John C. Appleby, and Mandy Banton. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial North America and the West Indies, 1574–1739. CD-ROM. London: Routledge, 2000.
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A digitized CD-ROM version of the State Papers Colonial. An online version is also available by subscription by ProQuest under the title Colonial State Papers, which also includes fully digitized images of documents in the UK National Archives CO 1 series.
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Mancall, Peter C., ed. Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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A collection of selected and extracted primary source travel narratives, documenting encounters on land and sea in the Atlantic, Africa, and Asia. Though largely focusing on Europeans, also includes some non-European perspectives both on Europe and elsewhere. A very useful source for undergraduate courses as well as a starting point for further research.
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Purchas, Samuel. Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgremes. 4 vols. London: William Stansby, 1625.
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Purchas’s Pilgrims, following in many ways the efforts of Richard Hakluyt, is a compendium of travel narratives that constructs a history of European overseas navigation, from biblical times to his contemporary world. The collection is valuable not only as a global corpus of European travel (to the extent Purchas’s editorial hand can be trusted) but as well as a primary source in itself, critical in reflecting and shaping early-17th-century British state- and empire-building at home, in the Atlantic, and in India.
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Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François. L’Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. Amsterdam, 1770.
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Perhaps best known for its critique of slavery and its role as an censored Enlightenment text (especially given interpolations in later editions from Diderot), Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes surveys and connects European enterprises in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.
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Sainsbury, W. Noel, ed. The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and the West Indies. 33 vols. London: Printed for H.M.S.O. by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889–1939.
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Though mainly calendaring materials in the papers of the Colonial Office series of the UK National Archives (formerly Public Record Office) relating to the Atlantic, these volumes contain a number of interesting routes through research into India-Atlantic connections, including piracy, transoceanic colonial schemes, commercial policy, and more. Kupperman, et al. 2000 provides a digitalized version.
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Collaborations

Given the time, research, and language (among other) skills necessary to undertake so broad a task as exposing the connections between the Atlantic world and India, one of the more common and successful ways in which scholars have tried to address this issue has been to collaborate: to bring together historians or works studying various of regions of the world in a given period, around a certain theme, or both, and drawing connections between the Atlantic and Asia, at times self-consciously and at others implicitly and inductively. Armitage and Subrahmanyam 2010 takes the late-18th-century concept of an “Age of Revolutions,” which is usually simply confined to isolated instances in Europe and the western Atlantic, to include examples from around the globe, including in India. Moore and van Nierop 1988 and Bowen, et al. 2012 offer pairs of historians on various themes, the former comparing Dutch and British empires, and the latter on the British Atlantic and British Asia. While Greene and Morgan 2009 largely deals with the Atlantic as such, several essays explore directly the theme of the Atlantic’s intersections with the wider world. Emmer and Gaastra 1986 focuses generally on the organization of European commerce and trade, a theme represented elsewhere in the bibliography. Nussbaum 2003 fixes on European global encounters in a particular moment, the “long” 18th century, as, to some extent, does Wilson 2004, which represents the approach of the “new imperial history”; both works focus to some extent on cultural, geographical, and literary questions. Russell-Wood 1999 integrates various studies that center on a somewhat more specific subject—colonial administration—but over a far broader sweep of time.

Armitage, David, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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Collection of essays exploring the extent to which the late 18th and early 19th centuries can be seen as a global age of revolutions, with chapters ranging from the colonial Atlantic to India in various European imperial contexts.
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Bowen, H. V., Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid, eds. Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds c. 1550–1850. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139096744Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Project that seeks to put the early modern Atlantic and Asia in dialogue with one another. Most essays pair historians from early Atlantic history with specialists in Asia, on a series of economic, political, legal, and social themes.
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Emmer, Pieter, and Femme Gaastra, eds. The Organization of Interoceanic Trade in European Expansion, 1450–1800. Aldershot, UK; and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1986.
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Chapters collectively focus on intersections of European Atlantic and Asian enterprises in the early modern period, with an emphasis on trade and commerce.
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Greene, Jack P. and Philip D. Morgan. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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An extremely helpful summary of the state of the Atlantic world literature in various national and regional contexts. Particularly pertinent to this bibliography are chapters 12 and 13, “Atlantic History and Global History” (Nicholas Canny) and “Beyond Atlantic History” (Peter Coclanis).
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Moore, Bob, and Henk van Nierop, eds. Colonial Empires Compared: Britain and the Netherlands, 1750–1850. Papers delivered to the Fourteenth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, 2000. Aldershot, UK; and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1988.
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Pairs of historians addressing 18th- and 19th-century British and Dutch imperial enterprises in Asia and the Atlantic, on themes such as diplomacy, maritime violence, commerce, finance, and state formation.
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Nussbaum, Felicity, ed. The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
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Collection of essays, some previously published or based on more extended monographs, from leading scholars exploring the nature of global history in the 18th century.
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Russell-Wood, A. J. R., ed. Local Government in European Overseas Empires, 1450–1800. Aldershot, UK; and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate/Variorum, 1999.
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Collection of previously published essays on local colonial administration and governance. Organized in Part One by national enterprises, and subsequently by themes such as law and policing, social governance, and the formation of elite and Creole populations in both Atlantic and Indian colonial enterprises.
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Wilson, Kathleen, ed. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
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An attempt to codify “the new imperial history.” Collection of scholars considering the ways in which British enterprise in the Atlantic, India, and the Pacific were intertwined with and shaped domestic politics, society, and culture.
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Journals

There is no journal dedicated in itself to the intersections between India and the Atlantic, though a number seem to have become increasingly willing venues for historians working on making such comparisons and connections. The Journal of the Early Republic and the William and Mary Quarterly approach the question from the perspective of early American history, while the Journal of British Studies and Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History focus on the British Empire, though in the field of Atlantic history these lines are often blurry, if not nonexistent. Readers will more commonly find articles relating to continental European colonial and commercial experiences in both India and the Atlantic in Itinerario and Outre-Mers, which focus (though hardly exclusively) on the Dutch and French, respectively. The Journal of World History, as the name implies, has a self-consciously global outlook, as does Terrae Incognitae, which concentrates more specifically on the history of exploration and geography.

Itinerario. 1977–.
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Published by Cambridge University Press and based in the Netherlands. Focuses on the history of early modern and modern European expansion and colonialism. Emphasizes both European and non-European perspectives. Associated with the US-based Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction.
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Journal of the Early Republic.
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Quarterly journal published for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR). Though often focused on US or Atlantic history, increasingly features work that reflects new research and interest in early American connections to India, China, and the Pacific.
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Journal of British Studies.
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Leading journal for the history of British studies in North America, which publishes a good deal of current research on the British empire in both the Atlantic and Asia, broadly speaking.
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Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 1972–.
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Focuses on the history of empire, and particularly the modern British Empire. Published quarterly by Routledge.
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Journal of World History. 1990–.
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Quarterly journal of the World History Association, based at the University of Hawai‘I Press. A leading forum for new research and methodological articles on history from a “global point of view.”
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Outre-Mers: Revue D’Histoire. 2001–.
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Publication of the Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer, beginning in 2001. Follows on the Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, published from 1959–2000, which itself was a continuation of Revue d’histoire des colonies, published from 1932–1958. Articles in French and English.
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Terrae Incognitae: The Journal for the History of Discoveries. 1969–.
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A semiannual journal published by the Society for the History of Discoveries. Focuses largely on the history of exploration and global encounters, with a wide chronological and geographical breadth.
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William and Mary Quarterly.
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Leading journal for early American history, published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Has taken a lead in publishing scholarship on the wider Atlantic world as well as routinely featuring articles, forums, and book reviews (such as Games, et al. 2006, cited under Methodological Overviews) on the Atlantic’s wider global context.
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The Indian Ocean World

Those interested in exploring the connections between the Atlantic world and India might find it worthwhile to start by familiarizing themselves with work on the Indian Ocean world itself. There are a number of methodological and historical comparisons that can be made among the ocean zones, with some deliberate points of comparison and connection. In turn, many of the very real geographical, environmental, economic, political, social, and other contrasts between the two world regions prove equally instructive for considering directions both fields might take. Vink 2007 provides an extremely helpful historiographical overview and critique of approaches to Indian Ocean historiography, prompted in part by the ways in which the Indian Ocean has tended (puzzlingly) to be left out of historical discussions of oceanic zones. Chaudhuri 1985 makes the point that the Indian Ocean was a coherent region for merchants and polities alike before the advent of European empire, while Bose 2006 investigates the consequences of those European empires for the Indian Ocean world—though both do quite clearly spill over their chronological categories and offer more extensive statements on the nature of the Indian Ocean as a space and zone of human activity. McPherson, et al. 2004 offers a one-stop shop for three classic books on Indian ocean history: those by Furber, which focuses on European maritime empires; Arasaratnam, which looks at the Indian Ocean specifically from the perspective of India; and McPherson, which, like Kearney 2004 and Pearson 2003, takes a longue durée view of the Indian Ocean, looking both at environmental and geographical structures as well as the evolution of human history across centuries if not millennia. Finally, Finamore 2004 and Steinberg 2001, like others in this list, as well as Lewis 1999 (cited under Methodological Overviews), offer theoretical interventions on the concepts of doing history on and around oceanic space. The works included here, quite obviously, can only necessarily serve as a starting point for a much larger and far more involved literature.

Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
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Multifaceted study of the Indian Ocean world, with a focus on the period of the rise of modern, particularly British, empire in India. Makes a number of interesting reflections on the connections with the Atlantic, both methodological (such as comparisons with Bernard Bailyn’s concept of the “Atlantic”) and historical (for example, 19th-century South Asian labor migration to Africa and the Caribbean).
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Chaudhuri, K. N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
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A history of the early modern Indian Ocean, with an emphasis on social and economic connections; offers periodic, but important, comparisons and connections with the Atlantic.
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Finamore, Daniel, ed. Maritime History as World History. Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2004.
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Though no one chapter focuses on India and the Atlantic per se, the essays collectively offer stimulating reflections on various ways to conceptualize connections on and among the oceans and maritime space.
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Kearney, Milo. The Indian Ocean in World History. New York: Routledge, 2004.
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As the title implies, situates the long span of history of the Indian Ocean in wider regional and global contexts, including its connections to the Atlantic, especially after the establishment of European empires in India and elsewhere in Asia.
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Pearson, Michael. The Indian Ocean. London: Routledge, 2003.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203414132Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Sweeping survey of the Indian Ocean world, from the “deep structure” of environmental and natural forces to the expansion of Muslim and European empires. Offers a number of important points of comparison and connection to the Atlantic.
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McPherson, Kenneth, Sinnappah Arasaratnam, and Holden Furber. Maritime India. Edited by Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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An extremely valuable reprint, with a critical introduction, of three central studies of the Indian Ocean world: Holden Furber’s Rival Empires of the Orient; Sinnappah Arasaratnam’s Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century; and Kenneth McPherson’s The Indian Ocean: A History of the People and the Sea.
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Steinberg, Philip E. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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Theoretical look at the ways in which we understand and manufacture ideas about seas and oceans, and particularly the notion of jurisdiction and political space. Deeply useful for considering the ways in which we have come to understand the division between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. See also Lewis 1999 (cited under Methodological Overviews).
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Vink, Markus P. M. “Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘New Thalassology.’” Journal of Global History 2.1 (2007): 41–62.
DOI: 10.1017/S1740022807002033Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A very useful survey of the evolution of the historiography of the Indian Ocean world, which also addresses its possibilities, challenges, and peculiar absence in some other methodological engagement with “oceanic” or “thalassological” histories. In places, offers engaging comparisons with Atlantic historiography.
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Colonial India

As in the section Indian Ocean World, the works listed here do not necessarily deal directly with the Atlantic world (though some do). However, they may serve as useful starting points for Atlantic historians interested in undertaking connections or comparisons to their own work. Each raises issues that clearly have resonance with similar concerns in the Atlantic. One should also see other titles cited in other categories throughout this bibliography. Stern 2011 explores the development of the English East India Company as a political body in the period before its territorial expansion in India, with attention to comparisons and connections with other European and Asian polities in the Atlantic and Indian worlds. Bowen 2008, Travers 2007, and Wilson 2008 all investigate the structural, legal, and ideological consequences of British territorial empire, while Peers 1995 serves as an excellent introduction to the military foundation for British India. Haudrère 1989 is an excellent starting point for understanding the contours of 18th-century French expansion in India, from which one can investigate a much wider literature on the subject. Similarly, Subrahmanyam 2012 offers a breathless introduction to various dimensions of Portuguese empire in Asia, while Prakash 1998 treats European, but particularly English and Dutch, ambitions, specifically in India prior to the expansion of British territorial empire.

Bowen, H. V. The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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Examination of the transformation in the East India Company’s administration and operations in the wake of the expansion of its territorial power. Offers observations throughout about the impact of Atlantic trade and economy on the structure and decisions of Company leadership in the period.
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Haudrère, Philippe. La Compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle. 4 vols. Paris: Librarie de l’Inde, 1989.
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Authoritative study of the growth and expansion of French interests in India in the 18th century.
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Peers, Douglas M. Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth-Century India. London: I. B. Tauris, 1995.
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A study of the East India Company’s army in the midst of territorial expansion and consolidation. Some may find interesting comparisons and contrasts with debates over “garrison government” in the Atlantic context.
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Prakash, Om. European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India. The New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521257589Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Extremely useful introduction to the history of European, particularly Dutch and English, commercial expansion in early modern India.
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Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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Argues that the East India Company’s 17th-century settlements in India were comparable in a number of ways to contemporary enterprises in the Atlantic. Also traces a number of connections between the East India Company and the Atlantic world, including piracy, intellectual exchange, and the East India Company’s attempt to create its own South Atlantic settlement at St. Helena.
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Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History. 2d ed. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
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Wide-ranging survey of Portuguese expansion in the Indian Ocean, situated in both European and Asian history. Also includes extensive bibliography as well as historiographical, methodological, and theoretical reflections.
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Travers, Robert. Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511497438Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Study that explores how 18th-century British officials grappled with their understanding of how to rule in Bengal in the aftermath of the acquisition of territorial and financial sovereignty in the mid-18th century. Investigates how Company officials conceived of a Mughal ancient constitution, analogous to the concept that underpinned British and Atlantic concepts of politics and law.
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Wilson, Jon E. The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
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Explores the ways in which British judges and administrators responded to the conditions of territorial expansion by creating laws and regulations that were increasingly abstract and removed from the traditions of customary jurisprudence. Drawing on Georg Simmel, argues that this gave birth to a regime that treated its subjects as “strangers,” thus relocating the birth of the modern state in the colonial rather than European context.
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Seafaring, Shipping, and Navigation

With the notable exception of short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to pioneer a “Northeast Passage” to Asia via Russia, Eurasian maritime trade with India, by definition, required passage in and through some part of the Atlantic ocean world. Knowledge of South Atlantic winds, currents, and navigational techniques were crucial as ships tramped down and around the African coast, touched at Brazil or the West Indies, or put in at South Atlantic ports of call such as the Cape of Good Hope or St. Helena. Itineraries were determined by a variety of factors, from geography and navigational knowledge to commercial, political, and security considerations. As Cook 2002 shows, the extent of hydrographical knowledge in the Atlantic affected the speed, safety, and nature of European shipping traveling via the Cape Route to Asia; in turn, Farrington, et al. 1998 demonstrates how the records kept by those ships—as documented in Farrington 1999—can serve as valuable sources for those interested in the environmental history of the Atlantic world. Bruijn and Gaastra 1993 offers surveys of the methods and history of shipping of various European Atlantic powers into Asia. Davis 1962 provides a broad but comprehensive survey of English early modern shipping, while Sutton 2010 and Parthesius 2010 study the maritime worlds of the East and Dutch India Companies, respectively. Brunsman 2013 focuses on the ways in which naval impressment shaped the 18th-century Atlantic world, a story in which the East India Company features prominently.

Brunsman, Denver. The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2013.
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Among many other things, offers analysis and examples of the larger role the English East India Company played in shaping the nature of and debates over impressment in the Atlantic maritime world in the 18th century.
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Bruijn, Jaap R. and Femme S. Gaastra, ed. Ships, Sailors, and Spices: East India Companies and their Shipping in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Amsterdam: NEHA, 1993.
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Comparative collection, largely focused on trade to the East Indies, but which touch on various aspects of navigation and maritime travel, which in many cases necessarily involved transit in and through the Atlantic.
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Cook, Andrew S. “Establishing the Sea Routes to India and China: Stages in the Development of Hydrographical Knowledge.” In Worlds of the East India Company. Edited by H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby, 119–136. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2002.
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Traces the evolution in exploration of and knowledge about East India Company routes to Asia, which included changing knowledge about navigation, currents, winds, and other features in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
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Davis, Ralph. The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: Macmillan, 1962.
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Masterly study the growth of early modern English shipping, with a great deal of detail and analysis on both Atlantic and India trades.
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Farrington, A. J. Catalogue of East India Company Ships’ Journals and Logs, 1600–1834. London: British Library, 1999.
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Comprehensive catalogue of English East India Company shipping, with references to archival logs, journals, and other accounts. Invaluable resource for anyone interested in studying European shipping through the Atlantic to Asia, and back.
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Farrington, A. J., S. Lubker, U. Radok, and S. Woodruff. “South Atlantic Winds and Weather During and Following the Little Ice Age: A Pilot Study of English East India Company (EEIC) Ship Logs.” Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics 67 (1998): 253–257.
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Longitudinal study of the times taken by English East India Company ships to travel from the Cape of Good Hope to St. Helena, in order to measure wind speed and other environmental factors in the early modern South Atlantic. Excellent example of the ways in which archival records often used primarily by scholars of India and Asia can serve as a resource for Atlantic studies. See Farrington 1999.
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Parthesius, Robert. Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: The Development of the Dutch East India Company Shipping Network in Asia, 1595–1660. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.5117/9789053565179Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Comprehensive and extremely useful quantitative and qualitative study of the early phases of Dutch shipping networks in the East Indies,
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Sutton, Jean. The East India Company’s Maritime Service, 1746–1834: Masters of the Eastern Seas. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2010.
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Authoritative study of the English East India Company’s maritime activity from the mid-18th century until the suspension of its functions as a merchant in the 1830s. An essential resource for anyone interested in the various ways East India ships interacted with the Atlantic, especially in conjunction with Parthesius 2010. See also Sutton’s Lords of the East: The East India Company and Its Ships, 1600–1874 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1981, reprinted 2000).
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Free and Forced Migration

The Atlantic world was in large part fashioned through the movement of people—through migration, indentured service, maritime labor, and, of course, slavery. Such networks were not unique, of course, and great insights can arise out of comparisons among these phenomena in regions of the world typically treated in isolation from one another. Moreover, the connections forged by European maritime empires in both the Atlantic and Asia increasingly drew people, voluntarily and not, into a much more connected world, and they were critical in establishing certain relationships between the Atlantic world and India. Gabaccia and Hoerder 2011 and Manning 2009 show the potential of global-scale comparative history of migration and family settlement, while Manning 1990 and Miller 2004 offer reflections on the frequently neglected ways in which African slavery connected with both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Platt 1969 shows the effect of the East India Company’s attempts to protect its jurisdictional rights in Asia on the trade in Madagascar slaves in the Atlantic, while Allen 2009 and Major 2012 (as well as Allen 2008, cited under French) situate Britain and the East India Company’s later 18th-century attitudes toward Indian slavery within the context of the far more well-known Atlantic debates. In turn, Kale 1998 reminds us that one consequence of abolition in the Atlantic was the dramatic rise of South Asian indentured migrant labor coming in greater and greater numbers directly into the Caribbean through the 19th century. Given the widespread nature of migration—and particularly servitude and slavery—in the European maritime and colonial world, one should also see the references cited in other sections of this bibliography, including Brunsman 2013 (cited under Seafaring, Shipping, and Navigation), Ward 2009 (cited under Dutch and Northern Europe), and Marshall 1986 (cited under A Swing to the East?).

Allen, Richard B. “Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic: Britain and the Abolition of Slave Trading in India and the Western Indian Ocean, 1770–1830.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 66.4 (2009): 873–894.
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Integrates history of East India Company expansion in Asia with movement to abolish the slave trade and expansion of empire in Asia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; also links East India Company abolitionism to its ambitions against the French in the Mascarene Islands. See also Allen 2008 (cited under French).
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Gabaccia, Donna R., and Dirk Hoerder, eds. Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2011.
DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004193161.i-552Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collaborative study of migration and settlement as a form of global interaction; though segregated in sections by oceanic region, essays offer various points of comparison and integration for thinking about connections and movements of people the modern world.
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Kale, Madhavi. Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
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A study of the unfree and bonded labor migration from India to the British West Indies in the wake of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1830s, which formed the foundation for the significant South Asian communities found throughout the Caribbean.
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Major, Andrea. Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.5949/UPO9781846317255Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Considers the role of slavery and measures to abolish it in British India in the context of the much more well-studied and documented history of abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery.
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Manning, Patrick. “Frontiers of Family Life: Early Modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds.” Modern Asian Studies 43.1 (2009): 315–333.
DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X07003332Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A study of global migration and the connections forged by families across the early modern Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds. A largely comparative study tracing patterns in common across discrete regions in Europe, the Atlantic, India, and East Africa, though with some observations about the interactions and intersections among those zones.
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Manning, Patrick. Slavery and African life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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In centering its story on Africa and integrating European, Asian, and African merchants and markets, shows how slavery and the slave trade from Africa stretched into both the Indian Ocean and Atlantic, as well as, of course, continental African markets.
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Miller, Joseph. “A Theme in Variations: A Historical Schema of Slaving in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Regions.” In The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. Edited by Gwyn Campbell, 166–189. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2004.
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An insightful comparison of the history and historiography of African slaving, with particular attention to the consequences for our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery when reinterpreted from an Indian Ocean perspective.
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Platt, Virginia Bever. “The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 26.4 (1969): 548–577.
DOI: 10.2307/1917131Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Classic study of the largely illicit late-17th- and early 18th-century British slave trade from Madagascar into the Atlantic. Though it does not deal with India itself directly, the article situates this Atlantic history of slaving and smuggling within the East India Company’s larger jurisdictional and commercial ambitions, as well as its role in shaping British Atlantic politics.
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Commerce, Commodities, and Finance

One point of clear comparison and connection between the Atlantic world and India can be found in the way both figured in European global commerce, commodity chains, and exchange. Moreover, the fact that the organization of such trade and settlement was to be found in companies and other forms of financial organization suggests there is a comparable and consistent history to be found in the role of “private” enterprise—merchants, corporations, companies, and the like—in shaping early European efforts in both India and the Atlantic. Andrews 1984 particularly emphasizes the role of early English companies and predation abroad, while Rabb 1967 and Scott 1910–1912 focus more on investment and organization of corporate enterprises at home. Chaudhuri 1978 offers a vision of the early English East India Company, both as a European joint-stock institution as well as affected by and affecting Indian Ocean markets. Blussé and Gaastra 1981 studies different company ventures, both comparatively and by national origin. Hancock 2002 investigates how a particular commodity, Portuguese Madeira wine, served to connect India with the Atlantic world, while Davis 1979 gives a comprehensive overview of British trade writ large, coordinated through Britain to both the Atlantic and Asia, in the later 18th and early 19th centuries.

Andrews, Kenneth R. Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
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Focuses on the role of commerce and nonstate enterprise in shaping early English expansion, in Europe, the Caribbean, and the East Indies.
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Blussé, Leonard, and Femme Gaastra, eds. Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companies during the Ancien Régime. Leiden, The Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 1981.
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Organized largely but not exclusively by national enterprise; contains a number of studies that link European Atlantic companies with their Asian, and in some cases specifically Indian, counterparts.
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Chaudhuri, K. N. The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
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A classic study of the growth of the English East India Company’s trade and its relationship to long-term structural shifts in the Indian Ocean world. Peppered throughout are helpful if brief references and observations regarding various commercial ties between the Company’s enterprise and the Atlantic world, such as the Company’s reliance on silver from Spanish America, or on the markets for Indian goods in West Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean.
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Davis, Ralph. The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1979.
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Extensive quantitative study of British overseas trade in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, encompassing both the Atlantic and India.
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Hancock, David. “‘An Undiscovered Ocean of Commerce Laid Open’: India, Wine and the Emerging Atlantic Economy, 1703–1813.” In Worlds of the East India Company. Edited by H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby, 153–168. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2002.
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Anticipating Hancock’s later extensive book-length study of the Atlantic Madeira trade, Oceans of Wine, this essay explores the ways in which commerce in wine connected India and the Atlantic in the 18th century.
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Rabb, Theodore K. Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England 1575–1630. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
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Extensive quantitative study of the social and political dimensions to investment that capitalized the efforts of early colonial ventures, particularly joint-stock companies like the Virginia, Levant, and East India Companies. Contains extremely valuable data on individuals and their investing patterns.
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Scott, W. R. The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720. 3 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1910–1912.
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Extensive study of the origins and progress of joint stock companies in Britain in the early modern period. Volume 1 provides an extremely comprehensive and informative historical narrative, tracing the beginnings of the joint-stock company in medieval law and commercial practices. Volume 2 covers overseas commercial and colonial companies in both the Atlantic and India Oceans, among other places.
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Mines, Metals, and Gems

One of the first places one can start in thinking about the connections forged between the Atlantic world and South Asia is through the circulation of money and precious metals. The flood of 16th-century Spanish American silver, largely from mines in Peru and Mexico, flooded into Asia both via the European reexport market and the Spanish Philippines. This in turn helped to provide European commercial enterprises in India, particularly the English and Dutch, with a ready supply of specie, which, as Chaudhuri 1978 (cited under Commerce, Commodities, and Finance) also shows, was in turn traded for a variety of Asian commodities, particularly calico and, later, tea. While a good deal of the economic literature has focused on the flow of American precious metals into China, some works—such as Attman 1986; Barrett 1990; Kindleberger 1989; Flynn, et al. 2003; Prakash 2001; and Richards 1983—reveal explicitly and implicitly the great importance of American silver and gold in shaping both South Asian economies and European trade and exchange with them, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries. Bowen 2010 offers a critical intervention, calculating the continued importance of silver exports from Britain to Asia in the period after Company territorial expansion, particularly by paying attention to both official Company transfers as well as those of private traders. Lane 2010 shows that this flow was not simply in specie, but in commoditized jewels as well, tracking the global spread of American emeralds into the Mughal Empire, among many other places.

Attman, Artur. American Bullion in the European World Trade, 1600–1800. Translated by Eva Green and Allan Green. Göteborg, Sweden: Kungl. Vetenskaps-och Vitterhets Samhället, 1986.
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Traces the flow of specie from the Spanish Atlantic empire in European markets, as well as the re-export trade, especially from the Netherlands, into Asia.
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Barrett, Ward. “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800.” In The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750. Edited by James D. Tracy, 224–254. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511563089Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Survey of accounts of early modern bullion flows, sensitive, like Attman 1986, to the relationship between American mines and the expansion of silver and gold exports to Asia, through European and Pacific markets.
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Bowen, H. V. “Bullion for Trade, War, and Debt-Relief: British Transfers of Silver to, around, and from Asia, 1760–1833.” Modern Asian Studies 44.3 (2010): 445–475.
DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X09004004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A thorough and careful analysis, arguing that exports of silver from Britain to Asia remained substantial even after (and perhaps owing to) East India Company territorial expansion in India. Offers a significant revision to the literature by attending to private as well as Company exports, while also acknowledging the continued importance of bullion flows from the Americas in this later period.
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Kindleberger, Charles P. Spenders and Hoarders: The World Distribution of Spanish American Silver, 1550–1750. Pasir Panjang, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989.
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Short essay that examines the global diffusion of silver from Spanish mines in colonial Latin America, perhaps most notably at Potosí and Mexico. Chapter 10 deals specifically with India.
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Lane, Kris. Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
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Tracks the global trade in emeralds from Spanish mines in South America across Europe, Africa, and Asia, but especially the early modern Muslim world, including Mughal India. Examines the consequences of this exchange for the history of early modern commerce, empires, labor, warfare, and global history.
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Flynn, Dennis O., Arturo Giráldez, and Richard von Glahn, eds. Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470–1800. Aldershot, UK; and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.
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Collection of essays tracing early modern flows of specie and precious metals in Europe, Asia, and the Atlantic. Contains a series of chapters that examine from various perspectives the connections between the mining boom in Spanish America and European commerce and expansion in India and elsewhere in Asia.
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Prakash, Om. “Global Precious Metal Flows and India, 1500–1750.” In Evolution of the World Economy: Precious Metals and India. Edited by John McGuire, Patrick Bertola, and Peter Reeves, 59–76. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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A discussion of the effect of the world economy in silver and gold on early modern India, from a scholar of South Asia whose publications include several other such studies of the role of bullion in brokering the European (particularly Dutch) encounter with Asia.
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Richards, J. F., ed. Precious Metals in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983.
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A collection of studies of the flow of bullion from markets in Europe, Asia, and the Atlantic, including several on the exportation of American silver and gold into various parts of Asia, including India.
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Exploration, Geography, and Science

From its very beginnings, European contact with the Atlantic was inextricably linked to commercial, political, and intellectual ambitions to explore and map the globe, and especially to find new routes between the Atlantic world and Asia. Certainly, as Ames 2008, Parry 1981, and Fernández-Armesto 2006 show, explorers hardly respected the arbitrary boundaries drawn between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Williams 2002 documents the enduring European attempts to discover a “Northwest Passage,” or a westward route to Asia via the North Atlantic. Drayton 2000, Gascoigne 2009, and Grove 1995 examine the global ramifications of early modern travel, cross-cultural encounter, and colonialism for the development of early modern and modern science, and vice versa. Taking the story into the 19th century, Arnold 2006 suggests that European, and particularly British, engagement with the natural world, necessarily in comparison with other places in the globe, shaped the expansion of empire in India. Interested readers should also see Subrahmanyam 2007 (cited under Portuguese), which details the origins and historiographical legacy of contact between the Portuguese Atlantic and India via the eastward Cape Route embodied in the person of Vasco da Gama.

Arnold, David. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006.
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A study of European engagements with the natural environment in India, and its relationship to the expansion of empire in the early 19th century; includes a great many examples and observations about the ways ideas about the “tropics” traveled globally, including from the Atlantic Americas and Africa.
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Ames, Glenn J. The Globe Encompassed: The Age of European Discovery, 1500 to 1700. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008.
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A short and accessible survey of early modern European exploration. Focuses both on individual explorers as well as wider forces that shaped European contact with the extra-European world in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
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Demonstrates a reciprocal relationship between the pursuit of scientific knowledge and empire-building, with a concentration on the later 18th century. Shows how the quest for “improvement” drove European, particularly British, encounters with the world from the Caribbean to India, while at the same time those areas were being reproduced and literally transplanted to metropolitan settings, through institutions such as botanical gardens.
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Gascoigne, John. “The Royal Society, Natural History and the Peoples of the ‘New World(s),’ 1660–1800.” British Journal for the History of Science 42.4 (2009): 539–562.
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087409002210Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines how the study of 17th- and 18th-century natural history and ethnology responded to increasing contact with and expansion into various parts of the globe. Shows how institutions, particularly the English Royal Society, integrated early modern European interest and expansion in India (among elsewhere in Asia) with the Atlantic into a common frame.
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Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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Locates the intellectual, political, and cultural roots of modern environmentalism in European colonialism, from India and the western Indian Ocean to the South Atlantic and Caribbean.
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Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
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Sweeping and ambitious study of exploration, beginning with prehistoric migrations to the modern world. Readers will find points of comparison and intersection between South Asia and the Atlantic at various points throughout the narrative presented here.
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Parry, J. H. The Age of Reconnaissance. Berkeley: University of California, 1981.
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Though its emphasis on concepts like “discovery” may have since come under critique, this book offers a foundation for understanding the origins and experience of European global exploration and expansion in the early modern period. Engages topics ranging from shipbuilding and navigation to cartography, and can serve as a useful introduction to Parry’s body of work on global colonial history.
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Williams, Glyn. Voyages of Delusion: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
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Documents the quixotic, often irrational, but nonetheless ongoing efforts of European explorers, navigators, merchants, and statesmen to discover a “Northwest Passage” to Asia, first via westward voyages through the north Atlantic, and subsequently, by the 18th century, eastward from the Pacific.
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Law, Sovereignty, and Political Thought

Scholars’ recent turn to explore the implications of global expansion on European political thought has inevitably led to a realization of the ways in which such thought accommodated growing European contact with the rest of the world. European overseas encounters, both with one another and with the inhabitants of the extra-European world, raised fundamental questions about jurisdiction, property, and sovereignty that shaped early discussions of the international order, as Armitage 2013, Keene 2002, and Tuck 2001 discuss. Muthu 2003 explores how Enlightenment thinkers reacted to and critiqued the expansion of empire in Asia and the Americas; for more on this period, see also Rothschild 2004 (cited under French) and Pitts 2005 (cited under A Swing to the East?). Through a variety of case studies drawn from both India and the Atlantic (among other places), Benton 2002 and Benton and Ross 2013 demonstrate how these various sites of European expansion created pluralistic legal regimes, which overlapped with local and other forms of European jurisprudence. Again drawing on examples in the Atlantic and India—and in the case of transoceanic piracy, the connections between them—Benton 2010 offers a thought-provoking discussion of the uneven geographies over which European sovereignty was projected in the early modern period, emphasizing the ways in which Europeans tried to establish control not over coherent territory but “vectors of sovereignty,” like mountain zones, rivers, and sea lanes. As with Benton 2002, this book establishes the connections between India and the Atlantic more implicitly, with its juxtaposition of various regionally specific studies, which collectively establish a global story. Like Benton 2010 and Keene 2002, Thomson 1994 addresses the ways in which piracy and other forms of nonstate violence helped to structure law and power in the European world overseas.

Armitage, David. The Foundations of Modern International Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
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A series of essays collectively detailing the evolution of the law of nations and international law, which in turn raise crucial questions about the place of both Asia and the Atlantic in shaping European political and international thought.
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Benton, Lauren. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Explores the transformation from the sorts of pluralistic legal regimes that characterized early modern colonialism to the more rigid, hierarchical notions of sovereignty associated with modern imperial rule. Tracks this transition through a series case studies, from the 16th-century Spanish empire in the Americas to 19th-century colonial India.
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Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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Reexamination of the nature of colonial legal geography, which argues provocatively and persuasively that European sovereignty in the extra-European world was almost always fragmented, uneven, and expressed over various and variable forms of maritime and territorial space.
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Benton, Lauren, and Richard Ross, eds. Legal Pluralism and Empires 1500–1850. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
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This collection of essays examines the pluralistic and layered forms of law and sovereignty that have characterized early modern and modern imperial formations.
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Keene, Edward. Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Taking to task Hedley Bull’s influential notion of a system of sovereign states existing in an “anarchical” international arena derived from conceptions of European statehood, this book argues that colonialism was crucial in shaping modern ideas about world and international order. Focusing a great deal of attention on the Dutch theorist Hugo Grotius, Keene situates modern ideas about sovereignty in the context of European encounters in India and the Atlantic.
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Muthu, Sankar. Enlightenment against Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
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A strongly argued exploration of the varieties of anti-imperial arguments that emerged from late-18th-century political thought. Shows that Enlightenment thinkers were engaging with contemporary problems of empire in both the Americas and India simultaneously.
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Thomson, Janice. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
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Considers the origins of the claims of sovereign states to authority over international law and violence in a world far more decentered, hybrid, and multiple in its structures of authority. Traces the history of figures like mercenaries, companies, and pirates in both the European and extra-European world, and the ultimately successful efforts of national, territorial states to establish legitimacy over patrolling and controlling those nonstate forms of power.
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Tuck, Richard. The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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Discussion of theories of just war, from the ancient world to the early modern period. Reveals the ways in which pivotal thinkers in those debates understood the international arena, and in many cases were driven by questions raised by European encounters with the extra-European world in the Americas and Indies.
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The Portuguese

The Portuguese were the earliest European colonial enterprise to connect India and the Atlantic world within a single imperial, and perhaps even conceptual system, the history and legacy of which are documented in the biography and history of Vasco da Gama found in Subrahmanyam 2007. Boxer 1969, Disney 2009, Newitt 2005, and Russell-Wood 1992 offer synthetic surveys of that system. Subrahmanyam 2007 provides insights into the ways in which Portuguese overseas enterprise was tied into the even more extensive Spanish empire in the Atlantic. Aulden 1996 focuses particularly in the role of the Jesuits in capitalizing upon and shaping Portuguese global expansion, while Brockey 2008 represents an example of a collaboration on a single theme in a single imperial and linguistic context, which brings into one frame Portuguese city building and governance in India, the Atlantic, and elsewhere.

Aulden, Dauril. The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.
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Survey of the global history of the Society of Jesus in the Portuguese world from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Traces this history from its beginnings in Portugal to the establishment of a vast network of monks and missionaries from Goa to Brazil.
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Boxer, Charles R. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825. London: Hutchinson, 1969.
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Breathless and engaging survey of Portuguese global expansion that has stood the test of time, deeply sensitive to the relationships among various zones of Portuguese influence, from Goa to Brazil. Reprinted in 1991 (Manchester, UK: Carcanet).
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Brockey, Liam Matthew, ed. Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Modern World. Farnham, UK; and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
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Studies of various urban histories in Portuguese colonial world, including Goa, Mozambique, Luanda, Macau, and others.
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Disney, A. R. A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire. Vol. 2, The Portuguese Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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A sweeping history of Portuguese global expansion in Africa, the Atlantic, and Asia, organized by geographic region.
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Newitt, M. D. D. A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400–1688. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
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A survey of exploration, expansion, and colonization that integrates Portuguese domestic history, global trade and settlement, and interimperial rivalry with Spain, England, and the Dutch particularly. Organized chronologically and intended for broad audiences.
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Russell-Wood, A. J. R. A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia, and America, 1415–1808. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1992.
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A thematic approach to global Portuguese expansion in the early modern period, which draws crucial connections among colonial activity in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
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Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640.” American Historical Review 112.5 (2007): 1359–1385.
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.112.5.1359Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores the surprisingly overlooked shared history of Iberian overseas expansion, particularly but not exclusively during the period of the union of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns.
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Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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Part biography, part history, part historiography, this book traces both the experience and afterlife of Vasco da Gama’s “discovery” of the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope in the late 15th century, quite literally linking the Atlantic to India. Subrahmanyam also puts da Gama’s accomplishments, failures, and legacy in context, including the experiences of contemporaries in the Atlantic world.
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The Dutch and Northern Europe

Following its successful revolt against and secession from the Spanish Netherlands, the newly independent United Provinces soon came to rival Iberian trade and settlement in both Indies. Although centered more in Southeast Asia and what is now Indonesia (and later at the Cape settlement in southern Africa) than in India, the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) did maintain significant trade, settlement, and influence in coastal South Asia from the 17th century. Though the VOC is often studied separately from its Atlantic counterpart, the more ill-fated West India Company (WIC), the two bodies were in fact integrated in many ways, not least in metropolitan society, culture, politics, and economy, as Adams 2007 and Brook 2008 reveal. Schmidt 2009 demonstrates how the sum of all this activity led to a developing global vision in this period, expressed in maps and geographical texts and spread throughout Europe. Boxer 1965 and Israel 1989 offer extremely useful overviews of the global dimensions of Dutch expansion over the early modern period. Bruijn 2009 gives a sense of the global experience of surgeons aboard the VOC maritime service, including in the Atlantic, while Ward 2009, though—given the scope of VOC activity in Asia—understandably focusing far less attention on India than on Indonesia, demonstrates the ways in which various networks that constituted the Dutch East India Company, including the forced movement of people, reached into the Atlantic, particularly via the colony at the Cape of Good Hope. Finally, Feldbaek 1981 offers an instructive counter-example, in a comparative study of the Atlantic and Asian ambitions of neighboring Denmark.

Adams, Julia. The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
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An insightful study of the role of family, and particularly the heads of families, in shaping early modern European state formation. Argues for the crucial role of corporations and overseas commerce, particularly that of the Dutch East and West India Companies, in shaping that history.
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Boxer, Charles R. The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800. London: Hutchinson, 1965.
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Traces the origins of Dutch overseas expansion from the revolt against Spain through the 18th century, and particularly its success in the carrying trade. Emphasizes Dutch engagement, competition, and interaction with other European and non-European powers.
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Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. London: Profile Books, 2008.
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Unique exploration of 17th-century “globalization” via analysis of the paintings of Johannes Vermeer, and with a particular interest in Dutch global trade and colonization. Though not primarily or even largely about India per se, this book offers a wide survey of points-of-access to East-West connections, including cartography, slavery, circulation of silver, and global commerce.
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Bruijn, Iris. Ship’s Surgeons of the Dutch East India Company: Commerce and the Progress of Medicine in the Eighteenth Century. Leiden, The Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.5117/9789087280512Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Interesting study of the medical service of the Dutch East India Company. While focused on Asia writ large, contains several indications of the global experience of these surgeons, including in the West Indies and Africa.
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Feldbaek, Ole. “The Organization and Structure of the Danish East India, West India, and Guinea Companies in the 17th and 18th centuries.” In Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companies during the Ancien Régime. Edited by Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra, 131–158. Leiden, The Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 1981.
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A rare English-language study of early modern Danish global expansion, which compares its corporate and colonial enterprises in India, Africa, and the Atlantic.
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Israel, Jonathan. Dutch Primacy in World Trade 1585–1740. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
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An examination of the rise of Dutch dominance of early modern European trade in global perspective. Connects war-making, commerce, and carrying trade in Europe, India (particularly Ceylon), Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.
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Schmidt, Benjamin. “Geography Unbound: Boundaries and the Exotic World in the Early Enlightenment.” In Boundaries and Their Meanings in the History of the Netherlands. Edited by Benjamin Kaplan, Marybeth Carlson, and Laura Cruz, 35–62. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2009.
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Study of the political and cultural consequences of Dutch efforts to map the globe beginning in the late 17th century. Includes a great many examples of early modern cartography and geography that bridged the East and West Indies, either implicitly or explicitly. See also Schmidt in Nussbaum 2003 (cited under Collaborations).
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Ward, Kerry. Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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Study of the Dutch East India Company as a series of various forms of overlapping networks, concentrating particularly on the way in labor, particularly unfree labor such as slaves and convicts, were transported throughout that system.
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The French

Although there had been abortive attempts at East India Companies earlier, by the second half of the 17th century, French ambitions in Asia had come to compete with those of their European rivals. Particularly under Louis XIV and his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Indian trade and settlement became a fundamental part of economic and political policy, as Ames 1996 (as well as Boulle, in Blussé and Gaastra 1981, cited under Commerce, Commodities, and Finance) shows, as well as for natural history and science, according to Bourguet and Bonneuil 1999. In many ways the French seemed to have a greater tendency than their European brethren to imagine the East and West Indies as connected, and to organize their trade and colonial enterprises accordingly; such was certainly part of the vision of John Law, the Scottish political economist turned French minister, whose attempts, detailed in Neal 2012, to consolidate French Indian and Atlantic ventures under one company contributed to the infamous Mississippi Bubble of 1719. Such connections can also be personified in particular individuals, as evidenced by the case study found in Cullen 2000, or in particular trades as well, such as the slave trade, detailed in Allen 2008. By the middle of the 18th century, as its Atlantic empire was expanding, France was also increasingly committed to expansion in India, as detailed extensively in Haudrère 1989 (cited under Colonial India). Indeed, the French had by then become the English East India Company’s main rival in both the Atlantic and Indian maritime worlds, reaching a climax during the war of the Austrian succession and particularly the Seven Years’ War (see Baugh 2011, cited under Swing to the East?). As a consequence, India continued to be integrated into French culture and colonial imagination alongside the Atlantic, informing political and economic thought, as argued in Rothschild 2004 and Stuurman 2007 (and also evidenced in Raynal 1770, cited under Primary Sources, though, as Marsh and Frith 2011 demonstrates, French “failure” in those contests as well as elsewhere in the colonial world had long-term effects on politics, culture, and society.

Allen, Richard B. “The Constant Demand of the French: The Mascarene Slave Trade and the Worlds of the Indian Ocean and Atlantic during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Journal of African History 49.1 (2008): 43–72.
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853707003295Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Though not necessarily about South Asia per se, a very interesting study of slaving voyages in Mauritius and Réunion, which shows the great extent to which the Atlantic slave trade was tied not only to West Africa, but to the western Indian Ocean as well as various sources of investment and capital.
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Ames, Glenn. Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996.
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Documents the political economy and politics behind Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s intensive efforts to expand the French presence and trade in the East Indies. Shows how such efforts were integrated into economic theory as well as geostrategic rivalry in the period.
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Bourguet, Marie-Noëlle, and Christophe Bonneuil. “De l’inventiare du monde a la mise en valeur du globe: botanique et colonisation.” Revue Francaise d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 86 (1999): 5–38.
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Traces the relationship between botany and global colonization and expansion, from its origins in 17th-century France to European-wide efforts by the 18th century, which stretched from the western Atlantic to India.
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Cullen, Louis M. “Irish Businessman and French Courtier: The Career of Thomas Sutton, Compte de Clonard, c. 1722–1782.” In The Early Modern Atlantic Economy. Edited by John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan, 86–104. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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Case study of the Irish investor Thomas Sutton, whose global financial interests included trade (via France) to India, slaving from Africa, and plantations in French Saint-Domingue and Guyana.
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Marsh, Kate, and Nicola Frith, eds. France’s Lost Empires: Fragmentation, Nostalgia, and La Fracture Coloniale. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011.
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Thoughtful collection of essays considering the ways in which French colonial nostalgia in both the Atlantic and India, as well as North Africa, has shaped modern French culture and politics. Offers interesting reflections on the role of colonial “failure” in shaping postcolonial metropolitan discourse. Interested readers should also see Marsh’s India in the French Imagination: Peripheral Voices, 1754–1815 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009).
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Neal, Larry. “I Am Not Master of Events”: The Speculations of John Law and Lord Londonderry in the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
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An account of the twin financial crises that marked the intersection of financial speculation, politics, and colonial trade and expansion in the early 18th century. Both French and British enterprises—especially Law’s Mississippi scheme—revealed the great potential and perils of the European enthusiasm for global expansion in the early 18th century.
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Rothschild, Emma. “Global Commerce and the Question of Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Provinces.” Modern Intellectual History 1.1 (2004): 3–25.
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Details the intense interest late-18th-century political economists in France and England took in global commerce and colonization, which tied together the European East India Companies as well as various aspects of Atlantic trade in their economic and political theory and policy.
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Stuurman, Siep. “Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism in the Enlightenment: Anquetil Duperron on India and America.” Journal of the History of Ideas 68.2 (2007): 255–278.
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Examines the work of a relatively obscure Orientalist philosophe, whose travels and reading about both India and North America shaped his ideas and writings.
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The British

Owing not in small part to the teleology of British expansion in India, as well as the wealth of Anglophone scholarship on the English colonies in North America and the West Indies, some of the most concerted recent effort to connect India with the Atlantic world is to be found in the context of work on the British Empire. Well-known as a latecomer to the European scramble for overseas commerce and colonial plantation, the British Isles nonetheless could be argued to have forged the most intense and enduring connections between South Asia and the Atlantic world. In some cases, the literature comprehends a moment of global expansion in regional terms, treating each zone as a separate but contemporary part of a wider phenomenon. More recently, works such as Colley 2007 and Games 2008 (both cited under Imperial and Global Connections) have begun to trace the global connections forged by early modern Britons overseas, while others continue to show the ways in which British colonial officials in London increasingly comprehended the relationship between their American and Indian empires as a critical feature of colonial authority (from different perspectives, though, as seen in Marshall 2005, cited under A Swing to the East?, and Ritchie 1986, cited under East India Company and Colonial America). Others, like the English East India Company and projectors of the Scottish “Darien” Company (Company of Scotland), conceived self-consciously of ways to capitalize upon Britain’s Atlantic world in their attempts to secure profits and political autonomy in India. In turn, American colonists clearly understood that they were part of a wider imperial system, a role that did not always sit comfortably with their own commercial and political ambitions.

Imperial and Global Connections

One of the most productive ways in which historians have been able to see the links between India and the Atlantic world has been through those contemporaries that linked them together through travel, exploration, and migration. Rowse 1955 represents a much larger, metropolitan-centered literature on the question of global expansion, while also offering a useful overview to the Elizabethan age of “projects,” with a certain degree of emphasis on both commerce and adventure. Cain and Hopkins 2002, drawing on a long line of imperial theorists and historians, such Hobson, Schmupeter, Robinson and Gallagher, and others, offers a different view of global empire coordinated from the center in a later period, one driven by economic and financial concerns, and held together by common cultural norms of “gentility.” From a different perspective, Mancke 2002 explores early modern global expansion divided along the lines of oceanic and territorial enterprises, each with its different if intersecting chronologies, and an emphasis on the relationship between state and “private” actors. In a more comparative vein, Colley 2002 focuses on the theme of Britons taken captive in the empire, in both Atlantic and Indian contexts. Colley 2007, Games 2008, Ogborn 2008, and Rothschild 2011, each in a different way, investigate the implications of early modern explorers, globetrotters, and colonial officials who connected India with the Atlantic (as well as the Mediterranean and Pacific worlds), through networks both centered in Britain as well as ones that, by connecting parts of the world directly, question the traditional definitions of “center” and “periphery.”

Cain, P. J. and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism 1688–2000. London: Longman, 2002.
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A sweeping study of the modern British Empire that locates its roots in “gentlemanly capitalism” and the efforts of financial interests in Britain, particularly London, to coordinate the development of both formal and informal empire in the Atlantic, India, and elsewhere.
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Colley, Linda. Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002.
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A study of Britons held captive in colonial contexts, divided into three sections, organized both regionally and chronologically: late-17th-century Tangier, mid-18th century North America, and late-18th-century India.
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Colley, Linda. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History. London: Harper, 2007.
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Traces the unusual global life of Elizabeth Marsh (a character found in Colley 2002) and her family connections, beginning in the West Indies and culminating in India. An example of biographical or microhistorical approaches to exploring the variety of connections between India and the Atlantic world.
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Games, Alison. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion 1560–1660. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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Examines the global experiences of a range of explorers, clerics, merchants, colonial administrators, and others in the early modern British Empire. Argues that the era before the mid-17th century was marked by a form of global “cosmopolitanism,” in which English travelers accommodated, if sometimes uneasily, to the political, social, and cultural circumstances in which they found themselves. Provides many examples of individual and institutional connections between India, Africa, and the western Atlantic.
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Mancke, Elizabeth. “Negotiating an Empire: Britain and Its Overseas Peripheries, c. 1550–1780.” In Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820. Edited by Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, 235–265. New York and London: Routledge, 2002.
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Reframes the nature of the early modern British Empire by considering its divisions not chronologically or geographically, but by the distinctions between oceanic and territorial forms of empire, as well as the degree of connections of overseas “peripheries” to metropolitan control and integration.
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Ogborn, Miles. Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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Biographical and historical vignettes of more than forty people who together constituted the global British Empire in the early modern period. Taken as a whole, the volume raises a number of comparisons between India and the Atlantic world, while a few of the individuals studied forged such connections in themselves.
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Rothschild, Emma. The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
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Tracks the global sinews of the Johnstone family through the 18th-century British Empire, exemplifying the extended connections between India, the West Indies, and North America. Accompanied by an online resource that maps the travels of people found in this book and maps the connections among them.
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Rowse, A. L. The Expansion of Elizabethan England. New York: St. Martin’s, 1955.
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Classic study of the fervor for overseas expansion in late-16th-century England, from Ireland and war with Spain at home to global oceanic expansion. Traces origins of English exploration, commerce, and settlement in North America, Caribbean, and India, among various other points around the globe.
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The Company of Scotland

In 1695, as a direct response to the exclusion of Scottish investors and traders from the trade of the two English East India Companies, the Scottish Parliament chartered the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies. The company had both local and global commercial ambitions, but it is now most well known for its one attempt at colonial plantation: New Caledonia in the “Darien” country on the isthmus of Panama. The very conception of this colony was to undercut English and Dutch trade via the Cape Route by linking the western Atlantic world to India and China trades. Violently opposed by the Spanish and undermined by lack of support in England, the so-called Darien Company failed soon after it started. The reasons for its failure and its relationship to the ensuing union of England and Scotland were variable and have been debated, as can be seen by the different interpretations offered in Gallup-Diaz 2005, Prebble 1968, and Watt 2007. Insh 1932 remains one of the most authoritative studies of the venture, and the most sensitive to the original Asian ambitions of the company. Armitage 1995 offers strong evidence for taking seriously the conceptual foundations for the company and its colonial ambitions in the Atlantic, while Mackillop 2005 details the consequences of its failure on Scottish participation in Asian commerce into the mid-18th century.

Armitage, David. “The Scottish Vision of Empire: Intellectual Origins of the Darien Venture.” In A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707. Edited by John Robertson, 97–118. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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Important rehabilitation of the arguments and ideological foundations for the Scottish Company’s colonial project of a maritime empire, in response to many previous interpretations that dismissed the venture as “a frivolous and desperate episode.” Focuses a good deal of attention on the arguments for the enterprise by the political theorist and economist Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, among others.
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Gallup-Diaz, Ignacio J. The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién, 1640–1750. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
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Wider history of European and indigenous interimperial conflict in Panama, that situates the Scottish venture—and its failure—in its local rather than exclusively European context. See pp. 77–84. First published 1999.
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Insh, G. P. The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies. London: Charles Scribner, 1932.
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Classic and closely researched study of the company, from its origins to its demise. Still remains one of the accounts most closely attuned to the company’s ambitions in both the Atlantic and Asia.
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Mackillop, Andrew. “Accessing Empire: Scotland, Europe, Britain, and the Asia Trade, 1695–c. 1750.” Itinerario 29.3 (2005): 7–30.
DOI: 10.1017/S0165115300010457Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Situates Darien venture in larger context of Scottish ambitions for colonial and imperial trade. Revises commonly held notion that the failure of the colony, coupled with the concomitant Anglo-Scottish Union, drove Scots exclusively into the British Empire, and particularly East India Company service. Offers alternative narrative, tracing continued Scottish engagement with other European enterprises, particularly the Dutch. Compare with Colley 1992 (cited under A Swing to the East?).
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Prebble, John. The Darien Disaster. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968.
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Narrative account of the Darien project, placing great emphasis on its dramatic failure in its particularly domestic and Atlantic dimensions.
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Watt, Douglas. The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations. Edinburgh: Luath, 2007.
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Significant revision to the account offered in Prebble 1968, this book explores Darien with an emphasis on the financial and commercial aspects of the venture. Also offers useful complication of relationship between the Darien failure and the Anglo-Scottish Union that followed.
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The East India Company and Colonial America

As the only legal agent for Britain’s contact with Asia, the English East India Company helped define much of the connection between India and the Atlantic world. Perhaps most well known was the glut of East India Company tea into the late-18th-century American market that led to protests, as Carp 2010 shows, in Boston and elsewhere in the early 1770s; Eacott 2012 demonstrates an extensive prehistory to this more famous moment in the early 18th century. Bowen 2002 shows that the intellectual and political effects of Indian empire on American revolutionary sentiment went well beyond objections to taxes on tea; readers interested in other forms of transoceanic exchange should also see Hancock 2002 (cited under Commerce, Commodities, and Finance), on the ways in which the Madeira wine trade integrated India into the Atlantic. Ritchie 1986 explores the ramifications of political pressure exerted on both the “old” and “new” English East India Companies in western India for the expansion of English anti-piracy regimes in the Atlantic, and particularly the dogged pursuit and execution of Captain William Kidd, themes touched upon as well in Benton 2010 (cited under Law, Sovereignty, and Political Thought) and Stern 2011 (cited under Colonial India). Nightingale 2008 contrasts British settlement in America and India, specifically New York and Madras, while Wilson 2011, though not dealing as directly with India itself, offers a suggestive argument for continuity in colonial practices in Sumatra, St. Helena, and Jamaica. Readers interested in taking this subject further will also find works pertinent to this theme throughout the bibliography, especially below, under A Swing to the East? and United States

Carp, Benjamin L. Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
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Revisits the history of the “Boston Tea Party” in global perspective, connecting the protest and events in Boston harbor to the 18th-century history of, among other things, Chinese tea plantations, the rise of the East India Company’s empire in India, the economic and political controversy over the tea trade in Britain, the sugar trade and plantation slavery in the West Indies.
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Bowen, H. V. “Perceptions from the Periphery: Colonial American Views of Britain’s Asiatic Empire, 1756–1783.” In Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820. Edited by Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, 283–300. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Examines the reactions of British North American colonists, in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, to East India Company expansion in India. Traces gradually growing hostility among Americans to Indian empire and attempts to distance themselves from it, especially after the tea crisis from 1767–1773.
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Eacott, Jonathan P. “Making an Imperial Compromise: The Calico Acts, the Atlantic Colonies, and the Structure of the British Empire.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 69.4 (2012): 731–762.
DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.69.4.0731Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the implications of the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721, and East India Company trade in Asia and politics in Britain, on shaping a consumer market in Asian goods in British colonial America. Connects these early-18th-century controversies over the use of the American colonies to underwrite East India Company commerce to the later, more famous conflicts over tea importation in the later 18th century.
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Nightingale, Carl. “Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York.” American Historical Review 113.1 (2008): 48–71.
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.1.48Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Specific case study, contrasting the disparate ways in which urban space constructed racial and religious boundaries in late-17th-century colonial Madras and New York. Concludes that regimes envisioned the settlement of colonial subjects not according to any one central preconceived notion of urban development but rather in reaction to local geography, contingent circumstances, and divergent colonial ambitions and influences. A helpful prelude to Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
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Ritchie, Robert C. Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
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Tracks the late-17th-century evolution of Captain William Kidd of New York from “privateer” to “pirate” in the Indian Ocean, in the context of shifting imperial ambitions in Britain as well as local and regional politics in Atlantic colonies and in Western India.
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Wilson, Kathleen. “Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers.” American Historical Review 116.5 (2011): 1294–1322.
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.116.5.1294Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Compares the practices of British governance and state-making in 18th-century Sumatra, St. Helena, and Jamaica. Though focusing self-consciously on “frontiers” of empire rather than connections between South Asia and the Atlantic per se, Wilson reveals striking similarities in the strategies of local rule, particularly in concerns with control over population and social, family, and sexual regulation.
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A Swing to the East?

One of the most longstanding and historiographically influential links between India and the Atlantic can be found in historians’ continual attempts to grapple with the nature of the transformations in the British Empire in the 18th century. The global nature of the Seven Years’ War and the great revenue demands that followed from it, the near simultaneous British acquisition of Quebec and the East India Company’s expansion in Bengal, and of course the disruptions occasioned by the American Revolution inevitably put India and the Atlantic into a single frame, at least from the perspective of British policymakers. Harlow 1952–1964 posited that this period defined a transition between a first and second British empire, marked by a “swing to the east” in imperial concerns and policy. Marshall 2005 offers a critical revision to that concept, suggesting a more coherent and single imperial policy that diverged more from contingent circumstances on the ground than any central design. Marshall 1986 approaches the question from a different angle, posing the dilemma as to why the Atlantic slave trade was rendered anathema to British politicians and the public at the very same time as Indian empire was becoming acceptable. But for one essay, Lawson 1997 does not address connections between India and the Atlantic as directly, but it reveals the dynamism of this moment for British engagement with both, especially from the perspective of Parliamentary politics and with an eye toward Britain’s expanding holdings in Quebec. Baugh 2011 details the military and geostrategic history of the war itself. Colley 1992 suggests that the idea of “Britishness,” particularly as a form of anti-French and anti-Catholic identity, was forged in part through empire-building and conflict in both the Atlantic and India by the second half of the 18th century; while Colley focuses a good deal of attention on the ways in which it was the shift to empire in India that integrated Scots into the “Britain,” Crosbie 2012 explores the ways in which Irish involvement in empire also can be traced to the dislocations and transformations of the post-1757 world. Looking at these issues as a problem of the history of political thought, Pitts 2005 examines the significant evolutions in European thinking about empire that followed from those shifts in imperial formation in the later 18th century.

Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
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Now classic argument that the making of British identity in the 18th and early 19th century pivoted on conflicts with the Catholic French, culminating in the Seven Years’ and Napoleonic wars, as well as on the increasing involvement of Scottish and Irish British subjects in imperial ventures, particularly in India.
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Crosbie, Barry. Irish Imperial Networks: Migration, Social Communication and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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A study of the manifold 19th-century connections between Ireland and India, arguing that the “turning point” in Ireland’s involvement in the British Empire followed from the repercussions of the Seven Years’ War in India, the Atlantic, and Ireland itself.
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Baugh, D. A. The Global Seven Years War 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest. New York: Pearson, 2011.
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Commanding study of the global reach of the military and political dimensions of the Seven Years’ War on land and sea, including a variety of theaters in Bengal, southern India, and around the Atlantic world.
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Harlow, Vincent T. The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1952–1964.
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Classic study of the transformation of the British empire in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. Establishes the now well-worn thesis of a “swing to the east” in British imperial policy, turning away from its “first” empire of the Atlantic toward a “second,” territorial one in India.
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Lawson, Philip. A Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas Expansion, 1660–1800. Edited by David Cannadine. Aldershot, UK; and Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1997.
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Though no individual piece treats the intersection of India and the Americas per se, the volume (and Lawson’s body of work) in itself is an argument for the ways in which concerns over Asia and the Atlantic—such as the conquest of Quebec and Bengal, or the issue of tea importation and consumption—intersected in the late 18th century, particularly in British Parliamentary politics. Includes reprint of Lawson 1986 (cited under Methodological Overviews).
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Marshall, P. J. The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c. 1750–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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Examines the critical transition in the British Empire, in the period marked both by the expansion of British territorial rule in India and the crisis in the Atlantic empire that culminated in the American Revolution. Argues that the two were deeply connected, especially in the strategies and policies of officials in Britain, though inevitably diverged due to local circumstances and contingencies.
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Marshall, P. J. “The Moral Swing to the East: British Humanitarianism, India, and the West Indies.” In East India Company Studies: Papers Presented to Professor Sir Cyril Philips. Edited by Kenneth Ballhatchet and John Harrison, 69–96. Hong Kong: Asian Research Service, 1986.
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Thought-provoking comparison of the near-simultaneous debates over the abolition of the slave trade and the morality of the expansion of British rule in India.
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Pitts, Jennifer. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
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Engages the transformation in British and French thinking about empire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with reference to a variety of colonial contexts, including the persistence of the British Caribbean and Indian empires.
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The United States

The connections between India and the rebelling British colonies in North America did not cease with their departure from the British Empire, though the establishment of an independent United States could obviously not help but transform the constitutional, ideological, economic, and political nature of that relationship. Following a short-lived attempt by some in the early American republic to create their own East India Company, traders and firms in the United States scrambled to take part in the lucrative trade to Asia. There is much excellent work that has focused on China, but given the scope of this bibliography this work has not been cited here. As Bhagat 1970, Fichter 2010, and Furber 1938 show, however, there was great interest in undermining or capitalizing upon the English East India Company’s trade and establishing direct American commerce in India. Bean 2001 reveals the cultural consequences of that trade, as a variety of Indian objects made their way back to the United States, especially to the East India Marine Museum, which later became the Peabody Essex Museum. Jasanoff 2011 shows how American “loyalists” during and after the Revolution dispersed along the sinews of the British Empire, including into British India, while Marshall 2012 details the evolving political relationship between those who stayed—that is, the new United States—and the wider British Empire. Fawcett 1937 offers some provocative suggestions to help explain a puzzling if curious quandary: the uncanny similarity between the East India Company’s jack and the Grand Union flag, using the incident to propose a greater affinity between the American rebels and the East India Company than one might assume. The Revolution also did not stop Americans from paying close attention to the British Empire, as Gray 2008 reveals in a study of the rhetoric of antislavery debates in the United States.

Bhagat, G. Americans in India, 1784–1860. New York: New York University Press, 1970.
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Study of US trade and exchange with India, with a particular focus on the early Republic. Makes a strong argument for considering the India-American connection alongside the more common study of US trade with China in the 19th century.
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Bean, Susan. Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail, 1784–1860. Essex, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001.
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Study of New England merchants, supercargoes, and ship captains trading to India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Also traces the cultural impact of this commerce, as these traders and mariners brought back any number of Indian “curiosities,” which became the foundation for the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts.
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Fawcett, Charles. “The Striped Flag of the East India Company and its Connexion with the American ‘Stars and Stripes.’” The Mariner’s Mirror 23.4 (1937): 449–476.
DOI: 10.1080/00253359.1937.10657258Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A quirky article from one of the most authoritative early-20th-century historians of the East India Company. Investigates the uncanny resemblance between the East India Company’s jack—a British Union flag in the canton, with a field of stripes alternating white and red—and the Grand Union flag, the first flag approved by the Continental Congress.
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Fichter, James R. So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
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Tracks American ambitions for trade in the East Indies, largely after it was severed from the British East India trade by the American Revolution. Suggests not only that the East Indies became a source of great wealth for the new American Republic, but that the intellectual and commercial pressures applied by US traders in the Indian Ocean and Pacific shaped British policy toward the East India Company’s monopoly in the beginning of the 19th century.
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Furber, Holden. “The Beginnings of American Trade with India, 1784–1812.” New England Quarterly 11.2 (June 1938): 235–265.
DOI: 10.2307/360708Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Details the American attempts to break into the India trade soon after independence, as well as the reactions and policy (to the extent such existed) of the East India Company. Suggests, in contrast with Fichter 2010 and others, that Britons in India more-or-less welcomed American traders and did not necessarily regard them as foreigners.
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Gray, Elizabeth Kelly. “Whisper to Him the Word ‘India’: Trans-Atlantic Critics and American Slavery, 1830–1860.” Journal of the Early Republic 28.3 (Fall 2008): 379–406.
DOI: 10.1353/jer.0.0023Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Documents the large role India figured in American debates over slavery in the years prior to the American Civil War. Shows how both pro- and antislavery campaigns tried to mobilize examples from the British Empire in India in service of their arguments.
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Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
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Traces the global peregrinations of American colonists who remained loyal to the British Crown in the aftermath of the American Revolution, some of whom found their way to India and into the service of the East India Company in South Asia.
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Marshall, P. J. Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199640355.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Documents the contours of the political relationship between the American early Republic and the wider British Empire, arguing that despite the dislocations and disruptions wrought by the American Revolution, the political, commercial, and cultural ties and contacts between the United States and the British Empire endured—even as Britain was itself expanding into a new territorial empire in India. Can be read as a sequel of sorts to Marshall 2005 (cited under A Swing to the East?).
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