Week 9: Great Britain and the American Colonies

Required Reading
Chapter Title: Patriotic Indians and Identities of Revolution Book Title: Playing Indian Book Author(s):
Philip J. Deloria

 Disputes involving white Indians in New England as reported by the Boston Evening Post
 Years pre American revolution, colonial crowds often acted out their political and economic discontent in
Indian disguise – most notorious in the Boston Tea party
o New Englanders often adopted traditional European methods of social power – blackfaced disguise
 In Middle colonies, Americans dressed as Indians for different reasons
o May First frolics that opened their club’s sporting season – Schuylkill Fishing Company
o After passage of stamp act, these celebrations turned into overtly politicised demonstrations of
patriotic Americanness
 Societies canonised Tammany, a former Delaware leader, and staked their claim on an
essential Indian Americanness
 Misrule and carnival offered proto-americans a platform for imagining and performing an identity of
revolution – most compelling expression found at the Boston Tea party
 In Carnival season, lots of meat and drink emphasised fertility
o According to Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival signified a second life
o It broke down boundaries demonstrating the commonalities between upper and lower classes
o Perfect for beginnings and ends of cycles of time – these often ended with the ritual death of a figure
representing the past year
 This second life awakened participants to future possibilities
 Tammany societies also celebrated Tammany’s mythic end – a metaphor for the disappearance of Indian
people from the land – the dawning of a new era where successor americans would enjoy their new world
 Tammany rituals relied on reborn Indian Americanness to question the British identity that the empire would
have rather seen
 Food and fertility carried heavy political burden.
o Eating and drinking heartily was argued to encourage a different kind of social order
 Tammany society sonds celebrated the destruction of old world social restrictions
o In the new world, the abundance of game made hunting democratic – through Indianness, Tammany
members tied the act of hunting to social and political control over the landscape and an ethos of
equality
 Carnival forms thus carried connotations of revolution, otherthrow, and transition
 Festivals meant little without the figure of the Indian
o Robert Berkhofer sees this manifestation of Indian as “ideal”, whom Europeans have interacted with
as a collection of mental images, stereotypes and imaginings
 Colonists perceived real Indian people through a variety of European cultural lenses
 National identity was the goal of the protonationalist celebrations of the Tammany societies and Indian
others were being included on the inside of American boundaries the members sought to create
o As England became a “them” for colonists, Indians became an us.
 In New England, rituals were pushed towards misrule
o Blacking, in windsor forest, began to take on a more revlutionary shape
 By repressing certain holidays, puritan elites disengaged misrule rituals from their association with festive
time
 By playing indians, rioters evoked local understanding abut the freedom, naturalness, and individualism of
native custom
o By conflating indians and land, the rioters suggested that these qualities lay embedded in the
american continent
 o playing Indian suggested that a powerful landscape had somehow transformed immigrants, giving
them the same status as Indians and obligating them to defend the same customary liberty
 Yet the rioters did differ from the Tammany paraders.
o The Philadelphians' urban setting tempted them to downplay actual Indians and accompanying
images of savagery.
o Tammany was a noble figure. When the Mast Tree rioters played Indian, they engaged both noble
and savage, interior and exterior Indian Others.
 Like the carnival revelers in Philadelphia, New Englanders used Indianness to create an identity
psychologically attuned to resistance and, eventually, rebellion.
 The challenge for would-be revolutionaries lay in creating points of unity and shared meaning out of this
diversity.
o The order and discipline that characterized the Tea Party suggest that it was an event plotted and
controlled by those elites, who took pains to avoid involving a crowd that had demonstrated a
collective mind of its own.
 Using Indian identity, misrule, and carnival inversion, Tea Party revolutionaries crossed the boundaries of
civilized law in order to attack specific laws that displeased them and to speak to the British from a
quintessentially American position.
 As Indian words and expressions spread into proto-American discourse, they subtly shifted the ways in which
colonists understood themselves and their world
o Metaphor was key to this.
 From the very beginning, the Revolution has been conceived as an enormous societal rite of passage, a ritual
characterized by difficult social separation, grueling trial, and triumphal reemergence. The carnival sacrifice
of Tammany and the blackfaced defiance of the Tea Party enacted such rituals on smaller, perceptible scales.
 Americans had to displace either the interior or the exterior Indian Other. As long as Indian Others
represented not only us, but also them, Americans could not begin to resolve the questions swirling around
their own identity vis-a-vis Indians and the British. Yet choosing one or the other would remove an
ideological tool that was essential in propping up American identity. There was, quite simply, no way to
conceive an American identity without Indians.

Chapter Title: A Company to Fear: India and the American Revolution Book Title: Selling Empire Book
Subtitle: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830

 A broad cross section of people throughout the British empire also increasingly used a stunning variety of
India goods. Indeed, India goods— and progressively more goods from China as well—had an especially
prominent place in a broader expansion of consumer spending, particularly in the colonies.
 Tea consumption had taken off in the colonies somewhat later than calicoes, but by the 1750s and 1760s it
was widely consumed by men and women at a range of wealth levels.
 As demand for a growing variety of India and China goods increased, Company servant John Henry Grose
hoped that, “under the sanction of proper regulations, the West Indies, and our American colonies, might
receive a greater benefit than they do from the East India trade, still preserving to England its right and
advantage of being the centrical point of union of both.”
 That conquest, combined with the popularity of India goods, the existing India trade regulations, and long-
standing designs to capitalize on that trade would drive a constitutional struggle over colonial legislation and
revenue in the decade following the Seven Years’ War.11
o Britain needed to pay off their debt.
 Customs revenue on goods imported from Asia more than doubled, from £430,123 in 1763–1764 to
£886,922 in 1769–1770. In the latter fiscal year, the British exchequer brought in a total of £2,739,257 of
customs revenue. The Company thus accounted for about one-third of Britain’s customs income in 1769–
1770.
 In the often misunderstood 1764 Sugar Act, Parliament duly enacted the proposal to reduce the drawbacks
on white calico and muslin reexported to the colonies by a third. Additionally, the act levied duties of 2s on
every pound of India wrought silk, and 2s 6d on every piece of colored India calico reexported to the colonies
 Pownall agreed with the principle that America should be made into “one of the greatest marts in the world,
with every attendant advantage to the British general commerce, and the special interest of the East India
trade.”
 Still, other Britons argued that Parliament had gone too far with the duties on India goods consumed in the
Atlantic colonies.
o He also expected that British merchants would be compelled to quit the whole Africa trade owing to
a new requirement to cancel their bonds on India goods reexported for Africa within eighteen
months to reduce the risk of smuggling. Colonists would suffer doubly as enslaved people would
become more expensive
 Some Britons, meanwhile, returned to calls for more radical revisions of the trade linking India and America.
The “Untainted Englishman,” for instance, rehashed long-standing arguments that an open trade allowing
any Britons anywhere to trade with India would drive down prices through competition and generate more
revenue for the state.
o By disbanding the Company, moreover, the British state could take direct control of the Company’s
Indian conquests and land tax revenue,
o Colonists would “reap very considerable Advantages from the East India Trade; greatly to the
Prejudice of Great Britain.” These advantages would lead ultimately to “the Independence of the
Americans,”
 Under the Indemnity Act (1767), Parliament lowered duties on tea sent to the colonies to discourage
smuggling and aid the Company’s sales.
 Townshend estimated that the duty on tea would generate twenty thousand pounds, less than that
generated by the duties already on calicoes sent to the colonies.
o Townshend did not intend to drain significant wealth directly out of the colonies.
 Instead of focusing on a split between internal and external taxation, John Dickinson explained that the
duties failed the test of regulating commerce for the good of the empire and were therefore illegal.
 The Sugar Act duties, in contrast, were not illegal taxes; they were duties on foreign goods, which were not
necessities, and despite generating revenue they were also designed to regulate trade to benefit the empire
as a whole. Duties on calicoes and teas, as foreign luxuries, were therefore not necessarily a problem. The
use of the Townshend revenue to pay colonial officials, however, was a serious usurpation of colonial
constitutional rights. What looked like a modest extension of an existing system and an implementation of
old ideas in London appeared remarkably different to Dickinson
 Linen draper argued:
o The author argued that trade riches came from the biggest imbalance possible between exports and
imports— therefore, Britain kept America poor by siphoning off its wealth in exchange for British and
Indian manufactures.
o Public spinning meetings bringing together several women to produce thread and cloth to political
effect surged in New England.
o Attempt to boycott british goods and press for the repeal of the Townshend acts
 Many patriot and loyalist merchants and consumers, however, continued to support the pan-imperial system
and did not see India goods as conduits for corruption or dangerous constitutional changes
o The Virginia boycotts of 1769, for instance, specifically exempted a range of goods that included
inexpensive linen and woolen cloth as well as spices from India
 For the vast majority of colonists, the remaining tea duty, even to pay colonial officials, was worth neither
war nor continuing nonimportation. Between 1770 and 1773, colonists paid duties on 787,000 pounds of
Company tea
 Additionally, he claimed that Britons in Bengal sent back more than £700,000 in private fortunes, and a net
positive balance of trade with Bengal generated a further £300,000
o This public and private revenue from India was not generated through gentle means, and between
1769 and 1770 the activities of Company servants exacerbated a devastating famine in Bengal.
  Many Britons feared that what they saw as India’s political, economic, and material influence would spread
across the empire, particularly with Company servants returning home
 As in the early seventeenth century, some authors suggested that the solution to the crisis in Bengal and
Britain might be found in America— India’s government should be patterned from the Atlantic colonies,
advancing the notion that colonial Bengal and colonial America were constitutionally similar.
 They must be enslaved as conquered people, even if lightly governed. Although not necessarily so willing to
call the Indians enslaved to Britain in a positive sense, most Britons in power adopted some form of the view
that elected assemblies of Indians were completely unsuitable to peoples who supposedly only knew how to
live under despotism.39
o Instead of reforming Bengal as a new America, in 1773 the British government passed the Regulating
Act to reform the terms of the Company’s charter and increase Parliament’s role in the management
of the Indian colonies. The Regulating Act forbade the governors, councillors, and revenue collectors
in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa from participating in any private trade or accepting gifts;
 The early-eighteenth century decisions regulating the India trade and using colonists as consumers for the
Company’s India goods had a substantial, even revolutionary, knock-on effect. Since the calico compromise,
the desires of colonists in America had been second in London to the perceived need for the colonists to be
markets, not only for British manufactures but also for goods from India as well.
o Parliament dissuaded Americans from making products while encouraging Asian Indians to make
them for Americans, supporting the Company in trading for these products and using imperial
officials to impose duties on them. The decision to pass the Tea Act was completely in keeping with
this system of trade, revenue, and control. For many colonists, the root problem with the Tea Act in
America was not so much taxation; rather, the act made more direct the economic and political
linkages between America and the monopolistic and sensationally despotic East India Company at
precisely the moment that Bengal and America appeared to inhabit similar positions within the
imperial constitution

Philadelphia opposition to the Tea Act:

 Philadelphia resolutions
o Emphasises property rights
o Taxation without representation – arbitrary govt
o Those who abet the enforcement of this act is an enemy of america
 Philadelphia handbill
o Whoever pilots the tea ship into the harbour will be tarred and feathered
o Letter threatening Cpt Ayres who is bringing a ship into philadelphia
o Letters emphasise the malice of these acts.

Boston handbill signed "The People" (2 December 1773)

 Voted that no duty shall be paid, nor any tea land in the harbour.
o Those against this become “public enemies”

Association of the Sons of Liberty in New York (15 December 1773)

 Consent to being taxed needed – an undoubted right of englishmen

o Reasserted a tax despite repealing the stamp act
Newspaper report of the Boston Tea Party (16 December 1773)

 Rioters broke up 342 chests – the total number on the ship

 Care taken to make sure no one took any tea

A retrospect of the Boston tea-party, with a memoir of George R. T. Hewes

 Tea that was destroyed was contained in 3 ships at Griffin’s wharf

 Day before the 17th a meeting took place to discuss how to prevent the ship’s landing
 Governor hutchinson was found t have abandoned the meeting and the plan altogether for his country seat
at Milton
 Were divided into 3 parties to board the 3 ships
 No effort was made by British armed ships to resist the perpetrators
 Several citizens attempted to carry off some tea for family use
o These people were commanded to be taken into custody
 Seems much more like a concerted effort to stop tea coming in – stop the flow of trade from
the East Indian company
 Pre-planned that they dress up as Indians

Seminar

 Interconnectedness of empire – importance of india to America

o East India Company presented as a despotic and corrupt organisation
 Americans can frame ideas of liberty against this
 Fear of the East India company being brought into America
o Siphoning of funds coming out of Bengal – fear that this would happen to America
 Nabobs – east india administrators
 Eacott calls the EIC a “company of fear” for the risk of America becoming dependent on Indian goods
o They are seen as incompetent in the face of the Bengal famine
o Boston Tea Party happens because colonists fear the importation of despotism from the East India
Company
 Americans happy to manufacture acts of genocide against Indian americans but call East Indian company
despotic.