The forgotten story of Yankee merchants: America’s first trade connection with India

How early US trade with India was made possible

US trade with India began immediately after America’s independence from Britain in 1783, when American shipowners, no longer bound by the British East India Company’s monopoly, could trade directly with the East. They entered an arena long dominated by the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, following established global sea routes. At the time, “India” referred broadly to the “East Indies,” stretching from the subcontinent to Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago, and sometimes even including China and Japan.

After the 1783 Treaty of Paris opened the Indian Ocean to US vessels, Yankee merchants moved quickly. ‘Yankees’ refers to traders from New England, particularly the ports of Salem and Boston. They were among the first Americans to reach India because they were already seasoned merchants and, after the American Revolutionary War, were forbidden from British markets. Seeking new opportunities, they sailed to Asian markets.

The painting depicts the forces of British surrendering to French and American forces during the Revolutionary War (Wikipedia)

In the first decade, the British tolerated these newcomers because they brought much-needed silver for trade and expanded foreign markets for Indian goods. “It was silver specie, not products, domestic or foreign, that dominated these outgoing cargoes,” notes Bean.

Between 1784 and 1786, three American ships—two from New York and one from Salem—reached China, while another from Philadelphia sailed to India’s Coromandel Coast. The United States, the first American vessel to reach India, arrived in December 1785 at Pondicherry, a French port. The principal ports, however, were Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras.

In 1794, interestingly, the British negotiated the Jay Treaty, which excluded American merchants from carrying goods to Europe and from engaging in port-to-port “country trade” in India. “American ships were permitted to trade only at British-controlled ports, and their voyages were to return directly to the United States—limitations accepted by the American government but resented by Yankee mariners,” writes Bean.

By 1800, after a decade of experience and expanding activity in Indian ports, Yankee traders had forged durable ties with local middlemen. They deliberately avoided British agency houses, where fees were higher. For modest commissions, Indian middlemen signed customhouse bonds, sold incoming cargoes, procured export goods, arranged lodging, and supplied clerks and domestic staff.

 Indian dubashes and banias

These local middlemen—Madras dubashes and Calcutta banias—brokered relations between foreign captains and Indian merchants. Fluent in English, they employed clerks to manage correspondence and accounts in English, Bengali, or Tamil.

Visiting Calcutta in 1803-04, American merchant Dudley L Pickman assessed several leading banias. Of Ramdulal Dey, he wrote (as cited by Bean): “Ramdulolday [Ramdulal Dey] (who is also banyan to the very respectable English house of Fairlie, Gilmore and Co.) … does most of the southern and some of the New England business, is very shrewd and capable, extremely avaricious, and possesses great talents for business.”

Nusserwanji Wadia (Kumud Merani)

In Bombay, Nusserwanjee Maneckjee Wadia, from a prominent Parsi shipbuilding family,  dominated American trade. So effectively did he manage French commercial interests that his portrait hung in Paris’s Marine Office, and Napoleon Bonaparte awarded him the Legion d’Honneur.

Yet the relationship was layered with perception and power. As Bean observes, “Americans contrasted their young, energetic, expanding civilization with the ancient, declining one they saw in India and felt their own superiority.”

Much of this is evident by examining Yankee journals.

Vivid journals, rich in details

The earliest journal was kept by Benjamin Carpenter, master and supercargo of the Ruby, during a 1789 voyage from Boston—just five years after the first American ship sailed to India. Bean writes, “It is an account of a man conscious of his pioneering role and intent on the business of developing a profitable trade in the Indian Ocean.”

A decade later, Pickman, who came from a prominent Salem family and kept detailed journals of five long-distance voyages, sailed as supercargo to Madras (1799) and Calcutta (1803). In 1817, William A Rogers, a young Harvard-educated attorney, financed his legal career by serving as supercargo aboard the Tartar to Bombay. In 1832, James B Briggs, a leader of the Salem East India Marine Society and its museum of “natural and artificial curiosities,” commanded the brig Apthorp to Calcutta. The last journal, from 1854, was written by Edwin Blood, a 19-year-old supercargo’s clerk from Newburyport with a taste for adventure. All hailed from New England port towns.

Dudley L Pickman (Wikipedia)

Their journals are vivid and revealing. Pickman, for instance, observed: “The natives are very dark, with coarse black hair, which grows to a considerable length. They are employed by the Europeans in every capacity, from the lowest menial servants, to head dubashes, where they have almost the entire direction of their business with the natives. As writers and accountants, they are very neat and correct. They are employed in all counting houses and public offices, but generally are overseen by an European bookkeeper.”

The journals also recorded details of food, transport, rituals and daily life. One such account, cited by Bean, describes a Yankee witnessing the harrowing spectacle of an Indian woman being set ablaze on her husband’s funeral pyre.

Curiosity vs commodity

Bean divides Yankee imports into “curiosities” and commodities. “Curiosities were distinct from commodities, useful things like cloth and sugar bought and sold in the world market. By contrast, curiosities, she argues in her book, were “single, individual items, to be looked at, held, and contemplated as products of nature or artifice.” Often of little monetary value, they were picked up or bought cheaply in bazaars: fans, hookahs, images of deities. “Sometimes,” Bean notes, “curiosities were specially commissioned—some statues and figurines, for example.” Tangible and transportable, Bean notes they “transposed those places—and the Yankee experiences of them—to the home front.”

Salem, Massachusetts (Wikipedia

Among the most popular commodities traded were textiles. Before Independence, Indian cloth reached America indirectly via the British East India Company. With direct trade, piece goods flooded US ports, especially along the eastern seaboard. Auction notices listed fabrics by place, type, and quality. Of these, versatile white cottons were most abundant, their names signalling origin and features such as colour, weave, fineness, and size.

Images also became an important trade item. There were two types: those painted by Western (mainly British) artists, who depicted romantic ruins, mountains, and cityscapes; and those painted by Indian artists who depicted monuments like the Taj Mahal, India’s flora and fauna, etc.

Another popular commodity was religious objects. Early acquisitions included three small clay images of the god Balaram from Bengal. According to Bean, two were first entered as “Bengal gods”; later, “gods” were struck through and replaced with “idols.”

American missionaries

The Yankees, however, were not the only Americans visiting India. As Indo-American trade narrowed into the hands of specialised Yankees, a new engagement began: missionaries. In 1812, just before the war, the first American missionaries—Adoniram Judson and Samuel Newell and their wives—sailed from Salem aboard the brig Caravan, hoping to bring Christian salvation to millions of “heathen” souls in India. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, founded in Bradford, Massachusetts, organised and funded the effort, while Yankee merchants provided passage and financial help.

Group of American missionaries (Wikimedia Commons)

Missionary zeal grew in New England with the belief that individual will, not predestination, shaped salvation. Merchants, however, were less optimistic. When Yankee Henry Lee arrived in Calcutta in 1812, he reported that the Judsons and Newells were not permitted to remain. The British East India Company opposed missionary activity: “The Society must abandon their project of Christianizing India—this Government will admit no one, unless they come with the permission of the Court of Directors. . . .”

Despite this intervention, the missionaries were persistent and left Calcutta for Bombay. As Bean notes, Americans “viewed India as a land of heathen idol worshippers, its people in desperate need of knowing Christ and hearing the gospel. Perhaps for this reason, too, India was the first foreign destination of American missionaries.”

Yankee resistance

Within a few years of its inception, Indo-American trade had yielded substantial revenues to the new nation and brought prosperity to its port cities. By the early-19^th century, “more American ships carried on trade with India than with China,” writes Bean. Cotton and silk textiles led exports to the United States, along with sugar, ginger, indigo, and drugs. Duties on these imports stabilised federal revenues, while profits financed early industrial growth—supporting mills, canals, railroads, and steam-powered vessels.

As the European war intensified, British and French forces attacked American shipping, each seeking to deny the other its benefits. In 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain, halting trade for three years. Wartime isolation, which blocked imported goods, spurred domestic industry. When peace returned in 1815, rising textile manufacturers pressed for protection. Thus, in 1816, Congress passed a tariff that effectively shut out the inexpensive Indian textiles that had long anchored the trade.

With industrialisation advancing under government protection and the nation expanding westward, India’s economic importance to Americans declined. Yet, dedicated East India merchants—especially in New England—continued to profit, and the material legacy of their trade endures in the Peabody Essex Museum.

The story of the Yankees is a reminder that it was trade, not empire, that brought the first Americans to India.