Abstract
The American merchants who voyaged to India in the early republic perceived and related to native South Asians very differently from their missionary countrymen. Sea captains were businessmen, and so they emphasized intercultural tact and respect when dealing with Indian merchants and formed long-term (and often friendly) relations with their South Asian partners. Yankee missionaries, in contrast, perceived Hindus as benighted souls whose lives were overshadowed by false religion. The decline of the India trade and the rise of the missionary movement in the early nineteenth century ultimately reshaped Americans’ perception of themselves, their role in the world, and foreign peoples.
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Acknowledgement
This chapter has been reprinted from an article in The Journal of the Early Republic entitled, “An Eye for Prices, An Eye for Souls: Americans in the Indian Subcontinent, 1784–1838” (JER 33 (Fall 2013), 397–431). The author would like to thank the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Journal for allowing this republication.
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Verney, M.A. (2017). An Eye for Prices, an Eye for Souls: American Merchants and Missionaries in the Indian Subcontinent, 1784–1838. In: Arora, A., Kaur, R. (eds) India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62334-4_2
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