Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail 1784-1860.

• Author: Gordon, Leonard A.
• Position: Book Review

Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail 1784-1860. By SUSAN S. BEAN. Salem, Mass.: PEABODY ESSEX MUSEUM; Ahmedabad: MAPIN PUBLISHING PVT. 2001. Pp. 288, plates. $40.

As the South Asian community in the United States has grown, so has the interest in the history of American connections to India. Numerous works on post-independence India and Pakistan in their relations to the United States have appeared through the last decades, but less attention has been lavished on the earlier decades of the American-South Asian relationship.

Therefore, we are most fortunate now to have Susan S. Bean's long-awaited book dealing with the earlier period. Whatever scholarly reservations are made below, I want to say at the outset that this is a beautiful and valuable book which I had great pleasure in reading. Reading here must also include looking, because it is filled with stunningly reproduced photographs of all manner of objects, drawings, paintings, life-size figures, etc., to be found mainly but not only in the Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, of which Ms. Bean is the curator.

The author explains that she wanted to "zoom in" and "zoom out" and give us an opportunity to taste, read, savor the artifacts of the late eighteenth century and first half and more of the nineteenth century. She has tried to do this through the use of numerous illustrations, but also by alternating historical chapters with selections from the journals of her "Yankee merchant mariners." At least half the volume is taken up with these selections. Though a few are dry details of voyages and trading, others, particularly those by William A. Rogers and Edwin Blood, present as vivid pictures of nineteenth-century Bombay and Calcutta as one will ever find in American writing.

By "Yankee India," Bean means in large part the trading expeditions carried on mainly from Salem and Boston during her chosen period. Since these two ports more than New York or Philadelphia were home to the India trade this makes sense. She does her best to tie the American-India trade into economic and political developments in the United States and India to understand how the trade changed so much over time. In the earlier decades India was a source of finished textiles, but by the end of the period India was a supplier of raw cotton, linseed oil, indigo, and hides rather than the fine textiles that earlier traders sought. What intervened, of course, was the...