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“The discovery of an India” could do more, for better or worse, than anything else for the English people, wrote Captain Edward Wynne to his king, Charles I, in 1623. The world did not have one India, it had many awaiting English discovery. Wynne explained that the “low-Countrymen,” meaning the Dutch, “have made the Sea their India; and by that sole waie of Fishing, have raised themselves to such an unweildlie Treasure.” The Dutch had found their India near Newfoundland. Wynne was sure that Newfoundland itself would be England’s India. It was more southerly than England, and it had, he claimed, mild winters with rare snows. Its potential wealth most made Newfoundland an India. Still, that wealth could be risky. The newfound wealth of the Dutch, he wrote, might lead to “lazyness, the readie waie to povertie.” But the benefits were worth such a risk. Wynne explained that, through territory in America, Charles I’s harbors would fill with ships and merchants, and “their houses with outlandish Commodities.” The king’s “Dominions” would gain “infinite wealth,” and he would gain great “coffers” of “Treasure.” For Wynne and other imperial thinkers and adventurers in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, India was a set of variable and sometimes competing ideas about wealth, trade, wondrous commodities, and potential corruption, more than it was a place. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, Britons came to see India much more as the subcontinent of Asia—a place of cultivation, manufacturing, conquest, and potential religious allies and converts—than as a set of transferable ideas. America the India and India the place might have many of the same potential benefits and dangers in common.1
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