Afterword

Reeves, Mark

Abstract

As sites of British imperial state-making and resistance to colonial power, India and the United States have found themselves entangled since the late eighteenth century. To choose a paradigmatic moment, the dumping of East India Company tea into Boston Harbour in 1773 offers a view onto multiple levels of this entanglement. The cargo and the participants – white settlers who adopted a pretended Indigenous “costume” to claim a native identity as “Indians” – reflected the discursive entanglement of the Americas with South Asia in European thought going back to Columbus. Yet, to say that India and the United States have been entangled for centuries raises more interesting questions: what is this unit called “India”? Or “the United States”? What might it mean for such units to be “entangled”? And, crucially, who are the agents of this entanglement? What is being entangled, where does this entanglement happen, and who is doing the entangling?

• Online Publication Date: Dec 6, 2022
• Publication Date: Dec 6, 2022
• Deposit Date: Feb 21, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 22, 2023
• Publisher: Leiden University Press
• Pages: 267-274
• Series Title: Global Connections: Routes and Roots
• Series Number: 5
• Edition: 1st
• Book Title: The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonization: A History of Entanglements
• Chapter Number: 11
• ISBN: 9789087283971
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10477791
• Publisher URL: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61212
• Related Public URLs: https://www.lup.nl/publications/history/global-history/the-united-states-and-south-asia-from-the-age-of-empire-to-decolonization/