The First Scientific American by Joyce Chaplin

Author:Joyce Chaplin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

HIS DECISION to stay in London meant that he remained at the heart of an expanding empire, which daily offered up new opportunities in the sciences and just about everything else.

The British incursion into India was probably the most gripping development—tigers and nabobs easily chased electrical Americans and rioting Wilkesites out of the headlines. England had held trading interests in South Asia since the early seventeenth century, when the East India Company was formed, but Britain remained a minor player in comparison to Portugal and France. The situation changed after the Seven Years’ War, when Britain won important concessions from France and its South Asian allies and gained a meaningful foothold on the subcontinent.

India was a long way from British America, but it had important implications for American colonists, as Franklin knew. The British East India Company was the trading monopoly that had had access to India since the early seventeenth century. Its officials did not lose a second, after the war, in expanding company interests—and offering more revenue to the state, more commodities to consumers, and more work to sailors. It was as these opportunities were expanding that Franklin recalled his half brother Josiah’s return from the fabled Indies. Now, the younger generation of his family hankered to go east. Jonathan Williams Jr., Franklin’s grandnephew, intended to go “to East India as a Writer in the Company’s Service”; Franklin applauded the idea because “he cannot fail bringing home a Fortune.” Williams instead returned to Boston but solicited East India Company ships and goods for his trade in America. He asked his London-based granduncle to “recommend their Business” there.41

Through merchants such as the Williamses, many new goods from Asia made their way to Britain and America, permanently changing the texture of everyday life. Cotton became a standard fabric for ladies’ dresses; tea, the standard drink that the awakening ladies sleepily sipped before they donned the dresses; and china, the standard container for the tea. “Mark how Luxury will enter Families,” Franklin warned. His household had long breakfasted on “Bread and Milk, (no Tea)” served in earthenware and pewter until one morning his wife presented him with “a China Bowl with a Spoon of Silver.” It was all done “without my Knowledge,” Franklin claimed; Deborah justified it as a matter of keeping up with the neighbors, which was probably how the eastern “luxuries” did infiltrate the colonies.42

Other “Indian” imports included Asian specimens that naturalists solicited and then passed on to others. These joined the stream of seeds, dried plants, preserved animals—and live ones—that were crossing the Atlantic at the same time. Britons transported Asian plants to the tropical and subtropical American colonies in order to generate new crops. In 1771, for example, Franklin distributed “a few seeds from India” to Georgia, for which he was acting as colonial agent. Calcutta to London to Savannah—a seemingly small gesture brought seeds across two oceans and halfway around the world.43

It only remained for the British to command the Pacific, and their empire would span the globe.

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