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Britain had made itself into an India. It had adapted many fashions from India, and it had become the world’s most efficient producer of India’s fabrics. It had accumulated great wealth to rival India. New England, Virginia, Jamaica, Bengal, and many places more had all been Indias in the sense explained by Edward Wynne and many other early-seventeenth-century Britons. Over time, Britons used these Indias together, exploiting each in different ways to eventually make Britain the most powerful India of all.
Britain had also, in many ways real and imagined, become corrupted by this pursuit. Great wealth had not so much stimulated laziness; nevertheless, Wynne had been correct in 1623 that riches were “the readie waie to povertie” for many of Britain’s factory workers, for many Indians reduced by the combined power of the East India Company and British industry, and for many enslaved people in the cotton fields of America. Political corruption was not learned from India’s rulers, but it was fomented by imperial ideas and by imperial adventurers determined to find and tap Indias to draw riches to themselves. Many in Britain and America argued that the corruption stimulated by such pursuits could be seen in multiple restrictions on their self-proclaimed British liberty, from the chartering of monopoly companies to launch the empire, to the mimicking of supposed Mughal and Catholic tyranny in India and potentially America in the 1760s and 1770 s, and to the adoption of supposedly Indian customs of rule. After and despite the American Revolution, this concern over particularly Asiatic and heathen luxury and corruption encouraged American evangelicals to support their British counterparts in the project of converting both India’s economy and its faiths.1
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