Eacott’s Selling Empire endeavors to join together, through an examination of the British Empire, the now fashionable arenas of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean “worlds.” Furthermore, along with the usual discussion of trade, manufactures, and politics, Eacott incorporates consumption, taste, aesthetics, and cultural assumptions more generally into an account of an extended period of about 200 years. His central argument is that India was “essential to the making of the British Empire in America, and, to a lesser extent, America the empire in India” (3). Although in such an ambitious undertaking, comprising eight richly detailed chapters, some of Eacott’s discussion inevitably covers familiar ground, much of it is suggestive and original.
Eacott argues that the English initially envisaged India as a source from which Asian goods, such as spices and fine textiles, could be transferred to, and cultivated in, the American colonies, thus facilitating the integrated empire imagined by...