Warfare, Trade, and the Indies in British Literature, 1652-1771 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781683933083)

Warfare, Trade, and the Indies in British Literature, 1652-1771 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 people's 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 Heylyn's 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 Craft's Warfare, Trade, and the Indies in British Literature, 1652-1771 proposes a modification of Saidian postcolonial theory that better applies to texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Author: Peter Craft
ISBN-10: 1683933087
ISBN-13: 9781683933083
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/22/2021
Pages: 166
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.91lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.50d