Elephants and Ice
Do democratic states bring about greater social and economic equality among their citizens? Modern India embraced universal suffrage from the moment it was free of British imperial rule in 1947 — a historical rarity in the West — and yet Indian citizens are far from realizing equality today. The United States, the first British colony to gain independence, continues to struggle with intolerance and the consequences of growing inequality in the twenty-first century.
From Boston Brahmins to Mohandas Gandhi, from Hollywood to Bollywood, Nico Slate’s Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India traces the continuous transmission of democratic ideas between two former colonies of the British Empire. Gandhian nonviolence lay at the heart of the American civil rights movement. Key Indian freedom fighters sharpened their political thought while studying and working in the United States. And the Indian American community fought its own battle for civil rights. Here is a brief excerpt looking at the earliest commerce between India and the United States in the 18th Century.
The first elephant to set foot in America left Calcutta on December 3, 1795. Her ship, appropriately called America, also carried a New Englander named Nathaniel Hathorne. Nathaniel’s son would add a “w” to his father’s name, penning The Scarlet Letter as Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nathaniel senior was more a sailor than a writer. Fortunately for posterity, however, he did like to keep a journal. He noted when the crew “took on board several pumpkins and cabbages, some fresh fish for ship’s use, and greens for the elephant.” Lest that final detail go unnoticed, he added in large letters, “ELEPHANT ON BOARD.”
The captain of the America, Jacob Crowninshield, had four brothers. All five Crowninshield boys plied the busy shipping lanes between India and New England. The Crowninshields were one of several prominent families to make fortunes in the India trade. Their ships ferried a range of goods — from raw sugar to fine calico cloth. No one had yet tried to bring an elephant, however. Even in a family of adventurous sailors, Jacob Crowninshield was a maverick. Writing home from India in November 1795, he reported, “We take home a fine young elephant two years old.” He bragged that the elephant was “almost as large as a very large ox.” Every day, the young elephant grew bigger still, as did the captain’s ambition. “It will be a great thing,” young Crowninshield proclaimed, “to carry the first elephant to America.”
It would also prove quite lucrative. Crowninshield paid $450 for the elephant in Calcutta. He boasted to his brothers that he would get $5,000 for the animal in America. In 1795, such a profit on a single journey would be remarkable. But Crowninshield had actually underestimated the value of his magnificent cargo. The elephant sold for $10,000, a substantial fortune in eighteenth-century America. Crowninshield’s success inspired other merchants to import animals from India. Elephants, monkeys, and at least one large Bengal tiger crossed the Atlantic to the delight of American audiences, and the profit of savvy sailors.
Adventurous merchants like Crowninshield learned how to profit from the distance — both figurative and literal — between India and America. Novelty sold, and nothing was more exotic than the mysterious East. Even as they benefited from the divide between India and America, merchants built bridges across that divide. With every shipload of goods, Americans became more familiar with the products of India and thus, to some degree, with India itself. Of course, wearing calico cloth or gazing at Crowninshield’s elephant did not require Americans to learn anything about the intricacies of Indian culture. Indeed, the India trade reinforced a peculiar dualism that would define Indo-American relations for generations. Even as connections between India and the United States multiplied, many Americans remained remarkably ignorant of India and Indians.
The interplay of the foreign and the familiar, so central to the India trade, also defined the intellectual networks that linked India and the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. While the Crowninshields ferried goods from India to New England, a variety of American thinkers — from Unitarian theologians to Transcendental philosophers — consumed the intellectual fruits of Indian culture. Just as Americans enjoyed Indian material goods without learning much about India, so thinkers mined Hindu texts without respecting their context. From material culture to ancient philosophy, American Indophiles often engaged in a hollow form of cultural, intellectual, and material appropriation. But despite a certain shallowness, their interest in Indian culture stands in sharp relief to the views of those Americans who rejected Indian philosophy and religion as backward and barbaric. The largest number of Americans to travel to India during the nineteenth century were missionaries bent on converting the subcontinent to Christianity. While some expressed admiration for Indian art and literature, many denounced Indian culture as uncivilized.
American missionaries worked alongside British missionaries — and shared their prejudices. National divisions proved less salient than notions of race and culture, a consequence of the fact that British imperialism varied dramatically between India and the thirteen colonies that would become the United States. In America, British colonists had come to dominate the land. The “Indians” they encountered had been killed in large numbers, victims of disease and war. In India, by contrast, the British remained a tiny minority in a land they would continue to see as inextricably foreign. Many explained that foreignness in terms of race. The color line divided the British from India while connecting them to the new rulers of the United States. The modern idea of race, shaped by the European encounter with the Americas, solidified in the plantations of the American South and the colonial cities of India. A sharp distinction between white and nonwhite came to dominate the world.4 That distinction fueled two massive conflicts that rocked India and the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. In India, the rebellion of 1857 shook the foundations of British rule. Four years later, the American Civil War erupted. The rebellion of 1857 led to the consolidation of British rule. It was a victory for empire. By contrast, the emancipation of America’s slaves framed the American Civil War as a victory for freedom. It seemed as if the United States was marching toward democracy even while India slid further into despotism. But the resurgence of white supremacy in the United States defies such a contrast. Consider the production of cotton. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, in both India and the United States, cotton was produced by an impoverished labor force controlled with violence and set apart from the ruling elite by a steep racial hierarchy. Despite the myth of American freedom that still clings to narratives of the Civil War, the late nineteenth century saw both India and the United States become more deeply wedded to a global system of imperial white supremacy.
India and the United States were not equal in their relationship to the imperial power structure. While the United States emerged as an industrial powerhouse, India became a source of raw goods for imperial Britain. In 1700, India had been the greatest manufacturer of cotton textiles in the world. By the mid 1800s, India’s manufacturing prowess had been gutted, its economy reduced to producing raw cotton for export. Much had changed since Timothy Pickering praised India’s advanced economy and the Crowninshields sailed toward India’s riches.
The earliest commerce between India and America involved the transport of raw goods — not from India, however, but to India. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at a time when the Mughal Empire was among the wealthiest in the world, India was a consumer of raw materials from America. Then, the most important commodity was not the white gold of the cotton fields, but gold itself, along with silver, emeralds, and other precious jewels. Mined by “Indians” whose lands were conquered by Europeans, the riches of the Americas were hoarded by the rulers of India. From the beginning, inequalities of power dictated who gained and who lost as the economies of India and America began their long journey toward interconnectedness but not equality.
