‘Indian’, when referring to the Indian subcontinent and its inhabitants, derived from the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman indien.[1] ‘Indian’ originated from the Greek name for the river Indus, which flows through modern-day Pakistan, and which specifically related India to the geographies of the East until the late fifteenth century.[2] After 1492, Europeans also used ‘Indian’ to label the indigenous peoples of North and South America, from the Iroquois of present-day Canada to the Inca of Peru.[3] As Jonathan Gil Harris has suggested, Columbus’s voyages to America turned ‘Indian’ into ‘the capacious, portable, and problematic term for diverse peoples around the globe’, so that Europeans, in many ways, ‘invented “Indians”’ as a result of global expansion.[4] Imtiaz Habib notes that the ‘predatory impulse’ of early modern expansion meant that the descriptor ‘Indian’ often revealed more about the intent and behaviour of the English than about the societies described.[5]
Examining Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595), John Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1621), and John Dryden’s Amboyna (1673), Shankar Raman concluded that ‘India’ throughout the early modern period was a fluid ‘final frontier’ representing ‘the exotic and the unknowable’.[6] ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ became discursive spaces for fantastical imaginings in early modern England, operating as a shorthand to describe a vast array of continents, peoples, and commodities, such as spices or tobacco. ‘India is properly called that great province of Asia, in whiche great Alexander kepte his warres’, the Protestant cosmographer Richard Eden wrote in 1577.[7] As Eden acknowledged, however, European exploration into the Atlantic divided ‘India’ into two ‘Indies’. Columbus could be credited with arriving ‘fyrst to the knowledge of the [West] Indies’, though Eden faulted him for erroneously believing that he had found a route to Cathay [China] and India in the Caribbean.[8] The influence of Columbus’s writings about the Carib ‘Indians’ he encountered created a strong association between ‘India’ and the Caribbean, rather than North America. In deliberating an act of potential piracy in the Atlantic, an anonymous English author raised the fact that ‘it must be considered...although it is disputeable, whether Virginia be part of the Indias though it be scituate upon the same continent of the West Indies’.[9] When the adventurer William King prepared an expedition to ‘West India’, he referred to Puerto Rico, St Domingo, and Honduras.[10] Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Queene (1590), referred to ‘th’Indian Peru’.[11]
Whether referring to South America or the Mughal empire, the ‘Indian’ realms signalled the possibilities of wealth and abundance. As physical spaces, these territories were closely related to commodities and their exploitative potential. Writing to Robert Cecil in 1607, the diplomat Hugh Lee reported that ‘the late fleet aryved in Spayne fro[m] the West Indyes’, laden with ‘4 Millions of Treasure’.[12] In ‘The Sunne Rising’, the poet John Donne used ‘both th’Indias of spice and mine’ to evoke separate places, the spice-rich East and the gold and silver mines of Spanish America, both sites reconciled in his mistress’ body. [13] The element of commodification is further evident in the poetry the amorous Orlando composes in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (c. 1599): ‘From the east to western Ind, / No jewel is like Rosalind’ (III.2.77-8). While ‘Indian’ wares could refer to products like tobacco and pearls from America, or eastern spices and silks, these goods were ultimately desirable because they would enrich the domestic realm. This also meant discourses of political economy made ‘Indian’ goods the crux for anxieties over luxury and moral corruption. Luxury, wrote the satirist George Wither, will impoverish the soul and the body, depriving the realm of native trade. ‘Our home-made Cloth, is now too course a ware, / For Chyna, and for Indian stuffs we are’.[14] To wear ‘Indian stuff’ risked altering individual and national character.
While ‘Indian’ related to other geographic spaces and their commodities, the word also described local inhabitants. When Trinculo in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) surmised that Caliban is a descendant of ‘men of Ind’, the distinction is not clear-cut.[15] ‘The undifferentiated Indian’, in the words of Rebecca Ann Bach, highlights the ambiguity of European views towards Asian/American geographies and people.[16] Nonetheless, while the lens of colonial expansion certainly made ‘Indian’ adaptable and at times indistinct, there were differences in how the English viewed American and eastern Indians, and these differences indicate much about English imperial aspirations. The early colonial experiences of the English in the Greater Amazonia, Virginia, Newfoundland, and New England led to the belief that Native Americans were ‘savages’: ‘rude & naked Indians in the Westerns parts of the world’.[17] ‘A very fair Iland’, George Percy wrote of his first view of the Chesapeake in 1606, ‘the Trees full of sweet and good smels, [but] inhabited by many Savage Indians’.[18] On the other hand, a ‘Mahumetan, or an Heathen in India’, wrote the East India Company chaplain Edward Terry, was often ‘excellent in many moralities’.[19] Concerned with the behaviour of the English abroad, Terry complained that ‘tis sad to behold there [in India], a drunken Christian and a sober Indian…[for] It is all one to be a bramble in the wildernesse and a barren tree in Gods Orchard’.[20] For Terry, the success of English activities in India hinged on their negotiations with local peoples. Such individuals were also brought to London to promote English activity overseas. In 1614, the EIC chaplain Patrick Copland brought a Bengali boy to England and taught him Latin and English. Baptized in London in 1616 as Peter Pope, Copland praised this ‘Indian youth, borne in the bay of 'Bengala’ for his aptitude in learning other languages. Pope became an example of how conversion might help effect English overseas expansion.[21]
The ‘global turn’ in scholarship has revealed some of the shared ideologies and interrelated economic ambitions that underpinned English imperialism in America and the East, despite differences on the ground. Rather than spaces that were viewed as interchangeable, they point to interlocked relationships relating to English conceptions of empire. Columbus’s naming of the ‘West Indies’ related to his desire to seek direct access to trade in India and China; and much of the rapid increase of English trade with the East was fuelled by the rising consumer culture in England for luxury goods.[22] The English desire to access the highly-coveted goods of India and China involved westward plantation, since colonial industries would bolster trade and the capital needed to successfully compete in and with eastern markets.[23]
By the end of the seventeenth century, support for luxury goods from China, India, and Japan came under scrutiny as various merchant and political groups attacked the East India Company’s monopoly on trade. An anonymous pamphlet from 1697 criticized the company for having ‘debauch'd the Nation with Cobwebs and Cockle-shells, in return for their Gold and Silver’.[24] The ramifications of trade for the ‘[t]rinkets of the Mogul’ were such that the ‘[l]uxurious and Effeminate are made Indians’.[25] Two years later, a similar pamphlet described the consumer culture for luxury products as an ‘Indian Gangreen’, whereby cheap ‘Indian Commodities’ had destroyed the nations ‘Principal Manufactures’.[26]
‘Indian’ embodied these conflicted, entangled associations between trade and colonialism, situated at the crux of English imperial fantasy and anxieties about cultural difference, the foreign, and the unknown. This is evident in the remark by the Puritan founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams. ‘We have Indians at home’, Williams proclaimed in 1652, quoting the words that an ‘eminent Person’ had uttered in a recent debate about conversion, ‘Indians in Cornewall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland’.[27] To Williams and his source, the project to convert, deeply enmeshed as it was with expansion and social order, both collapsed notions of ethnographic difference and amplified alterity. Today, questions over identity and the historic use of the word ‘Indian’ continues to be a point of contention in the United States. Among the hundreds of federally-recognized Native American tribes, some find the term offensive due to its connection with European colonialism and forced identification, while others have chosen to reclaim the term as a marker of pride (‘Indian country’ now refers to land controlled by self-governing Native American communities in the United States). Either way, the label points to the historic role of colonialism in disrupting the identities of individuals and communities who were impacted by European expansion.
