Warfare, Trade, and the Indies in British Literature, 16521771

Warfare, Trade, and the Indies in British Literature, 16521771 demonstrates how British travel narratives of the long eighteenth century distinguished between Mughal and American Indians. Through a New Historical and postcolonial lens, it argues that the distinction between East and West Indians was widely recognized and shaped British peoples tendency to view Mughal Indians as similar and in some ways even superior to Europeans while they disdained native populations in the Americas. Drawing on representations of Indians in Peter Heylyns critically neglected 1652 Cosmographie as well as representations in the works of canonical literary authors such as John Dryden, Richard Steele, and Henry Mackenzie, this monograph provides a more nuanced account of the origins and (d)evolution of Indian stereotypes than scholars have to date. A text committed to the exposure and eradication of colonial rhetoric and violence, Peter Crafts Warfare, Trade, and the Indies in British Literature, 16521771 proposes a modification of Saidian postcolonial theory that better applies to texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.