Tag: American Revolution

Westborough Center Pastimes – August 16, 2024

Special Edition: Westborough Center Updates

This summer has been busy in the Westborough Center with lots of big projects coming together all at once. Many of these developments will improve access to Westborough’s deep historical collections and will ensure that they can be enjoyed for years to come. Here is a summary of all these exciting happenings, which you can read about in more detail below:

  • The Digitization of Two Important Collections
  • Vault, a New Lockbox for Digital Files
  • A New, and Significant, Ebenezer Parkman Publication
  • The Processing of the Kristina Nilson Allen Papers
  • A New Exhibit on the State Reform School for Boys
  • An Upcoming Exhibit on the 1774 March to Worcester
  • Nature Notes for August

The Digitization of Two Important Collections

One of the Westborough Center’s most important collections is the Historical Photographs of Westborough Collection (LH.011). These photographs document Westborough’s history in images going back to the mid-nineteenth century and up to the present.

After I first took the position of Local History Librarian in 2015, I made a concerted effort to digitize this collection and progressively add the images I scanned to the Westborough Digital Repository. Over the years, a few interns also helped with this digitization. But the collection is massive—over 1,800 photographs—and with our combined efforts, we only managed to digitize about a third of the collection. (Needless to say, scanning single photographs over and over again entails drudgery, plus the tedious task of assigning metadata [the descriptive information that allows the photographs to be searchable] to each image. So excuses to work on “more pressing” projects other than this one were always easy to find.)

But this spring we received some unexpected grant money through our association with the Community Webs program run by the Internet Archive. We decided to use this money to finish off digitizing both the historical photograph collection and the Historical Postcards of Westborough Collection (LH.036). (By the way, if you are not already familiar with the Internet Archive, go check out its website now! You can spend hours searching and accessing all kinds of books, movies, television shows, audio recordings, even old video games!)

After I prepped the photographs and postcards for digitization, we sent them out to a private vendor to scan, and then I spent much of the summer adding metadata to each image. Taken together, the Historical Photographs and Historical Postcard collections comprise well over 2,100 images, and they are now all available online in the Digital Repository: Photographs and Postcards.

Vault, a New Lockbox for Digital Files

Okay, once all of these images are digitized, how do we preserve these digital files and ensure that they suddenly do not disappear? A lot of money and effort went into digitizing the above two image collections, not to mention all the items from other collections already in the Digital Repository, so saving them for posterity is imperative. Perfect timing! Once again Community Webs and the Internet Archive comes to the rescue with their brand new service, Vault.

Digital files are great for making content available when you want, wherever you want. But they are also extremely volatile. Think of all the times that a digital storage format you used, such as floppy disks, became obsolete because the machines needed to read them are no longer being made. Or the times when you mistakenly deleted something by hitting the wrong button. As a storage format, print is much more stable than digital, which is one reason why we do not throw away any print materials from the Westborough archives after we digitize them. Print and similar media formats are much better positioned to survive for long periods of time than digital files: think about how many books and manuscripts have survived hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Just as I was preparing the photograph and postcard collections to send out for digitization, Community Webs announced that it was offering its members free digital storage through its new Vault service. Before this time, I relied on the principle of LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) for preservation. I saved files on multiple computers and on separate disc drives, including one that I kept in my own home just in case the library met with some kind of disaster. Needless to say, my piecemeal digital preservation system was cumbersome, if not precarious, with the challenge of keeping all of these storage areas up to date.

With Vault, I can upload any file I want to save indefinitely into this storage service and be confident that we will always have access to it. Now the Internet Archive has the job of maintaining the integrity of this uploaded file by employing multiple storage facilities across the country that are constantly and automatically backed up. I have already uploaded all of the files in the Digital Repository, including the two image collections we just digitized. After nine years of worrying about digital preservation, I can now sleep just a little bit better at night!

Vault is the most important development at the Westborough Center that you will never feel or experience directly. But it is a crucial, game-changing tool that will reap benefits for our library for years to come. And did you catch that this service is entirely FREE for our library?! Go Internet Archive!

Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, Diary, September 5-7, 1774
(American Antiquarian Society)

A New, and Significant, Ebenezer Parkman Publication

Regular readers of this newsletter should already be familiar with the Westborough Public Library’s Ebenezer Parkman Project, a digital humanities project that makes the diary of Rev. Ebenezer Parkman (Westborough’s first minister, who began his position in 1724), his other writings, and related documents from the town available and searchable online. The project is a joint effort with two other scholars besides myself: Dr. James Cooper, formerly the director of New England’s Hidden Histories, and Prof. Ross Beales, Jr., who provided all the transcriptions, content, and scholarship for the website. This project marked the first time that the entire extant Parkman diary was publicly made available.

But, like the issue of digital preservation above, the devilish problem of sustainability continued to dog me: our library is not in the publishing business, so what will happen to this project when the inevitable time comes when I leave the library or retire? Would the person who succeeds me be able to maintain the website, and if so, the person after that?

I am thrilled to announce that the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, which has a thriving publishing program centered on making important historical manuscripts and documents available to researchers and the public, has just published the first installment of Ebenezer Parkman’s World, basically, a more formal publication of the Ebenezer Parkman Project. New content will be added over time, so that this publication will eventually replicate all of the material that is currently on the Ebenezer Parkman Project website and more. Currently, Ebenezer Parkman’s Diary, Church Records, Sermons, and Relations of Faith and Confessions of Sins are all available. Future installments will include contextual documents from the town of Westborough that illustrate the people and places who appear in Parkman’s diary and existed during the time that he did, up until he died in 1782.

As co-directors of this project, we have often mused whether Westborough is the most well-documented colonial town in all of New England, given Parkman’s extensive diary and writings and our town’s near complete collection of historical records. Now, after working on this publication with the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, we wonder whether Westborough is the most well-documented colonial town in the entire country. That we can even ask this question in all seriousness shows how important this material is for the history of the United States.

The Processing of the Kristina Nilson Allen Papers

Anyone familiar with Westborough history knows Kris Allen, who in 1984 wrote the definitive history of Westborough, On the Beaten Path: Westborough, Massachusetts, and who today continues to be a historical force here in town. Over the past several years, Kris has been cleaning out her historical files and donating the contents to the library.

This collection, the Kristina Nilson Allen Papers (LH.032), includes newspaper clippings, brochures, pamphlets, manuscripts, photographs, and other materials about Westborough history, as well as a manuscript copy of On the Beaten Path. Other items include “The Suppers of the Club” cookbook, “A Collection of Historical Articles” written by Helena Engberg for the Evangelical Congregational Church, gravestone rubbings, and Lyman School materials.

Now sitting next to the Reed Collection, which covers much of Westborough’s history in the early- and mid-twentieth century along with its earlier history, Kris’s collection fills in much of Westborough’s history in the later-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I have recently processed Kris’s collection, so you can gain a better understanding of what is in it in the Finding Aid, which I will update as Kris continues to donate important historical materials to the library.

State Reform School Boys

A New Exhibit on the State Reform School for Boys

When I first conceived of the Westborough Center for History and Culture, I envisioned a place where all kinds of people can not only research Westborough and its deep history, but also use this history to create new understandings about Westborough and share that knowledge with others. A new exhibit, “State Reform School for Boys, 1848-1884” curated by Jon Maynard, does just that!

Maynard, who has conducted deep and impressive research into the Reform School, the Lyman School, and the Westborough State Hospital, has colorized black-and-white photographs, so that, in his own words, “we get to see more of the humanity of those who lived and worked at the school.” You can experience this new way of seeing the Reform School in the display case right outside of the Westborough Center, which will be on view until the end of September.

Westborough Militia Training Day – 2017

An Upcoming Exhibit on the 1774 March to Worcester

Believe it or not, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with the signing of the Declaration of Independence is fast coming up on July 4, 2026. But there were many significant events that led up to this momentous moment in history, and some of their anniversaries are already upon us. One of the most important of these events occurred in September, 250 years ago, when Westborough participated in the March to Worcester in 1774.

As a response to England’s passage of the “Intolerable Acts,” which restricted many of the civil rights that colonists had been enjoying up until that point, 4,622 militiamen from surrounding towns, including Westborough, marched into Worcester on September 6, 1774 to close down the Worcester County court. We only know this exact number of militiamen because Ebenezer Parkman recorded it in his diary (see the Parkman Project illustration above)! Many historians point to this moment as the true start of the American Revolution since the British never regained control of Worcester County. The event does not generally receive credit as such because what promised to be a violent uprising turned out to be a relatively peaceful transfer of power when the British quickly backed down after they learned about the colonists’ plans to block their army, which was poised to march from Boston to protect the Worcester court. Instead, the military action that occurred in Lexington and Concord created a much more exciting story to tell about our rebellion against England, and so better captured the public imagination.

Back in 2017 as part of Westborough’s 300th anniversary celebration, the library in conjunction with the Rotary Club of Westborough and the Westborough Historical Society held a Militia Training Day that recreated preparations for the historic march to Worcester. To help explain the details of this event, Leslie Leslie and I created an exhibit, which the library is now resurrecting to mark the march’s 250th anniversary.

The exhibit will be displayed in the library starting on Monday, August 26, 2024 and will run until the end of September. You can also learn more about the March to Worcester in the “exhibit catalog” I created for the Militia Day event: The Rebellion Begins: Westborough and the Start of the American Revolution, which is available here in the library.

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And finally (whew!) a Westborough Pastimes newsletter would not be complete without . . .

Katydid (Courtesy Garry Kessler)

Nature Notes

This past May when I visited my parents, who live in north-central Illinois, I was excited to experience the arrival of the cicadas. I remembered their emergence when I was a kid back in 1973. The sound of their roaring and periodic buzz filled the air, and the shells they shed clung to all the trees. (By the way, the 2024 confluence of the 13- and 17-year broods that was hyped in the media did not mean that people would experience more cicadas than usual in a given place. Rather, because the broods inhabit different geographical areas, they simply emerged in a wider area than usual, so more people got to experience them at the same time than usual.)

Alas, I did not hear or see any cicadas around my parents’ house. But, as Annie Reid in her Nature Notes observes, I can still enjoy the “sounds of summer” here in New England by listening to katydids. Learn all about them and then read about other natural phenomena to expect to see and experience in August here.

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Did you enjoy reading this Westborough Center Pastimes newsletter? Then subscribe by e-mail and have the newsletter and other notices from the Westborough Center for History and Culture at the Westborough Public Library delivered directly to your e-mail inbox.

You can also read the current and past issues on the Web by clicking here.

Westborough Center Pastimes – August 18, 2023

Metacom – “Philip King of Mount Hope” by Paul Revere – Yale University Art Gallery, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14571036

This essay is part of a new Westborough History Connections series called, “A Meeting of Two Cultures: Native Americans and Early European Settlers in Westborough.” Click here to start at the beginning of the series.

Early Relations, Praying Towns, and War

“Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs.”

—Benjamin Franklin, “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America” (1784)

Benjamin Franklin recognized that when two cultures judge one another, each one brings its own attitudes and perceptions about human behavior to its assessment. What makes contact between Native Americans and Europeans so fascinating is that for the first time in human history, two groups of people who had no contact with each other or with any other neighboring group for thousands of years suddenly came face-to-face. If we ever want a real-life example outside of science fiction of what could happen when two completely different civilizations suddenly confront one another, this is it!

Around 5,000 to 6,000 Nipmucs were living along rivers and streams connected to the Blackstone, Quaboag, Nashua, and Quinebaug Rivers when the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620. First contact between the Nipmuc and the English probably occurred in Sterling, MA in 1621, and their relationship with one another was initially friendly. Any recording of Nipmuc activity or behavior by the English, though, was piecemeal. The English never really developed any true understanding of the motives or experiences of their indigenous neighbors—they just weren’t that interested—and so such insight is lost to us as well.

We do not know how centralized political leadership was among Native American tribes in Massachusetts before European arrival. The Wampanoag Nation may have been created after local Native Americans, who up until this time had lived separately next to one another, saw a need to coalesce together in response to European disease and encroachment on their land. In 1675, Metacom (also known as King Philip) led a rebellion against English occupation by banding together several major tribes in and around Massachusetts—a rebellion that became known as King Philip’s War (1675-1678). Metacom was born around 1640, so unlike his grandparents who faced disease and European advancement on their land head on in the 1610s, he never experienced a world without Europeans. He lived in relative material prosperity and considered himself the equal of any Englishman. Metacom had always lived in, and hence had learned to navigate, the bicultural world of the mid-seventeenth century.

Conflict at this time was not solely between Native Americans and European colonizers. Until recently, our tendency in recounting this time and place in history is to put Europeans at the center of the narrative and pretend that the central drama was in how Indians progressively lost their land to these new arrivals. The construction of this narrative is perhaps understandable, since the historical sources we have do not provide much detail about Native American life before or during this time. But with a little reflection, we can easily see that this story does not adequately cover the way these actors experienced their times. As human beings, Native Americans of course had their own patterns of historical dynamics, population movements, politics, and cultural change—patterns that had been at play well before European arrival. Once Europeans landed, the newcomers automatically became players in Native American inter-tribal dramas, where many tribes tried to use the appearance of these outsiders to their own advantage.

Native Americans continually reached out to the English to acquire their goods and to tap into any power they may possess that could prove to be useful. They also constantly tried to form alliances with the English—despite their alien ways and manners—to help throw any balance of power their way in tensions with other tribes. But if in these alliances Europeans proved to be more dangerous than advantageous, Native Americans would just as easily encourage them to go and bother their neighboring rivals instead.

To use the implication of our science fiction analogy from above, the situation in North America is as if aliens descended on earth and then the U.S. and other Western nations tried to court them into an alliance against Russia and China to bolster our political position (and vice versa)—yet in the end the aliens end up taking over the entire planet. From the alien’s perspective, planetary conquest is the main story line in such a history because they would have had little interest in the squabbles between earthly nations before their arrival. But for we humans, our historical narrative would instead focus on the insertion and role of the aliens in the geopolitics of our time before they ended up taking control of the world. To return to our real-world scenario, the alien Europeans were more interested in how North America could suit their own needs than in understanding the history of Native American relations before their arrival, and since this history was never recorded, we are left to speculate on what it was based on the scant evidence available to us today.

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John Eliot

Not long after John Eliot arrived in Natick, MA in 1651 to recruit members of the Nipmuc tribe to form “praying town” communities, native people in New England were already living alongside 60,000 English colonists. Eliot’s towns were designed as tightly controlled environments that regulated Christian morality and encouraged Indians to adopt a European work ethic, raise livestock, become sedentary, and follow the Christian God. Eliot educated them to read the Bible, and recruited preachers and teachers among the Nipmuc to help bring more people from the tribe into their fold. In short, he wanted to turn the Nipmucs into Europeans, as well as to turn them into productive laborers for colonial markets. Some of the Nipmucs went on to attend Harvard Indian College where they mastered English, Latin, and Greek. James Printer, one of these Nipmuc scholars, set the type on the first Bible published in North America.

Title page of the Eliot Indian Bible (1663), the first Bible printed in North America. The type was set by James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar.

By the time King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, around 2,300 Native Americans were living in Eliot’s praying towns, which were spread throughout Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. Some of the Nipmuc joined Metacom’s forces, while Eliot’s praying Indians became fighters and scouts for the English. Nonetheless, the colonial government feared that the praying Indians would join Metacom, and so they confined them to five plantations: Natick, Nashobah (Littleton), Punkapoag (Canton), Wamesit (Tewksbury), and Hassanamesit (Grafton). If any of these praying Indians were found outside of these limits, they would be subject to jail or death.

The intricacies of King Philip’s War are too complicated to cover in this newsletter (you can consult the Native American Resources in the WPL for book suggestions if you are interested), but here are a few notable observations. Even though Native Americans fought against the English with the aim of kicking them out of the territory, the war was not between two groups of strangers, but between neighbors. By this point, the two groups had been trading, working, negotiating, and, in some cases, attending school and church together. Leading up to the war, Native Americans had sought cooperation and coexistence on shared land; they were not interested in forming a frontier that kept the two groups apart from one another. In fact, Metacom thought he could use the presence of the English to build on his tribes’ unprecedented wealth accumulation. The notion that Native life was incompatible and opposed to English interests was a belief held by the colonists, not the Native Americans, who instead sought flexibility in living together side-by-side.

Metacom was killed in 1676, and the war named after him ended in 1678. Nipmucs who had fought against the English were either killed, sold into slavery, or went into hiding with tribes in the north and west of where they used to live. Others returned to their praying town sites to resettle, but many of them left or were forced out as more English settlers moved in. Some among this group adopted English habits and dress and made a living by selling baskets, brooms, and herbs to settlers.

The wars among the British, French, and Spanish powers in North America in the seventeenth century were not simply European. They were also Native American and involved Inter-Indian as well as Indian-colonial rivalries where Native Americans had just as much at stake as the Europeans. Taken together, these wars were a complex process of working out an equilibrium among European imperial powers and among various groups and alliances of Native Americans. Loyalties ebbed and flowed (and sometimes conflicted) in figuring out control and coexistence in eastern North America.

After the War of the League of Augsburg (a.k.a., “King William’s War,” 1689-1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (known in the U.S. as “Queen Anne’s War,” 1702-1713)—wars that are usually lumped together now as the “French and Indian Wars”—British America became remarkably politically stable between 1720 and 1750. Relative economic prosperity through this time certainly helped, as the expanding British Empire brought tea, coffee, sugar, rum, dishware, and other luxury goods that were normally confined to the aristocracy into the colonies. This new prosperity also attracted new immigrants from Germanic principalities, Ireland, and northern Britain.

In a way, competition in North America among European powers within the context of Native American interests and rivalries created conditions where both European and Native peoples could potentially live next to one another. If one group became too powerful, a shift in loyalty by one of the groups could put the balance back in order. But British victory in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) reoriented geopolitics throughout the world, and the effect on North America was no exception. Now, complete British victory in this global conflict put North American power mainly in England’s hands. Devoid of competition from any other European nation, this situation eventually made the British-American people so confident in their ability to govern themselves that they claimed the right to secede from the British Empire and started the American Revolution. Consequently, Indian and European coexistence in the colonial world that was the norm for over two hundred years was erased from historical memory. Going forward, the historical narrative would instead focus on the alien invaders, in this case the English, and their triumphal formation of a new American nation.

Lest we forget, though, as historian Pekka Hämäläinen points out, America remained “overwhelmingly Indigenous well into the nineteenth century.” Control over the North American continent was essentially a four-centuries-long war against Native Americans who fiercely resisted it. Gone were the days when Native Americans and Europeans could potentially have learned how to live next to one another peacefully.

—Anthony Vaver, Local History Librarian

Works Consulted:

Click here to go to the next essay in the series, “A Meeting of Two Cultures: Native Americans and Early European Settlers in Westborough”

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Square-stemmed monkey-flower. Photo courtesy of Garry Kessler.

Nature Notes

We sure have had a wet summer!

According to Annie Reid, we also had a wet summer back in 2013, when we experienced a proliferation of the square-stemmed monkey-flower, a native wildflower that enjoys wet areas. I’m guessing that this wild flower is running rampant this year! Put on your galoshes and see if you can find it, and while you are at it, discover even more about Westborough’s natural surroundings during this time of year in Reid’s Nature Notes for August.

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History Corner

Look for me and other Westborough residents with an interest in history at Westborough Connects’ “Westborough for Life!” program on Sunday, September 10 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Westborough High School. We will be putting together a “History Corner,” where you can stop by to learn and ask questions about Westborough’s past.

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Did you enjoy reading this Westborough Center Pastimes newsletter? Then subscribe by e-mail and have the newsletter and other notices from the Westborough Center for History and Culture at the Westborough Public Library delivered directly to your e-mail inbox.

You can also read the current and past issues on the Web by clicking here.

How Does History Connect Westborough and India?: Separation

Note: The following is the eleventh and final post in a series that presents my attempt to answer the question, “How does history connect Westborough and India?” See the Introduction for an overview of the series and to start reading it from the beginning.

–Anthony Vaver, Local History Librarian, Westborough Public Library

Separation

The Great Rebellion of 1857 in India ultimately failed due to a lack of organization and institutional structures to sustain it. But the American colonies were well positioned to carry out rebellion against the British government and rule themselves once they separated from England. Westborough and other towns in Massachusetts had their own sets of laws, self-rule in the form of town meetings, elected representatives to the House of Representatives, and their own militias. During the American Revolution, more than a hundred Committees of Correspondence were set up, including one in Westborough, which served as an informal shadow government to carry out rebellion and ultimately revolution. After both the signing of the Declaration of Independence by the Americans on July 4, 1776 and British defeat in the resulting war, England turned its attention to defending its colonial interests in India and other colonies throughout the world.

In 1885, the Indian National Congress was formed to advocate for Indian home rule, and when Mahatma Gandhi became its leader in 1920 he began to mobilize it into a body of resistance under a doctrine of “non-cooperation.” Gandhi and other Indian nationalists studied the tactics and read the treatises that led to the American Revolution for inspiration when they organized boycotts, shutdowns, demonstrations, and tax protests.  Mahatma Gandhi’s famous “salt march” to the sea to collect salt in protest over its taxation by the British was one such protest. Gandhi also used the symbolism and economic significance of cotton to galvanize nationalist and anti-colonial sentiment by both writing a history of cotton in India and practicing the spinning of cotton on a wheel as a means of publicizing India’s potential to reclaim its dominant position in the global economy from its British oppressors.

In the end, the strains of World War II on Great Britain ultimately led to India’s separation from the British Empire and its independence. During negotiations over the future of Indian rule in 1947, the two dominant political parties, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, could not agree on a common future. The League insisted on carving out part of India to create a separate Muslim nation, which ultimately became Pakistan. The inability to keep India together as one nation resulted in mass displacement, plunder, and revenge killings with over 1 million people dying and more than 12 million being forced from their homes before it was all over.

The Declaration of Independence copied into Westborough’s Town Records, 1776
(Westborough Town Clerk, http://repository.westborougharchive.org/files/original/700d82def53c4ac7be6098193541cdf0.jpg)

The Boston printing of the Declaration of Independence was circulated to towns across Massachusetts and included an order at the bottom for town clerks to copy the content of the document into their town records. Above is Westborough’s hand-written copy.

Gandhi during the Salt March, 1930
(Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gandhi_during_the_Salt_March.jpg)

In an act of civil disobedience against the heavy taxation of salt by the British, Gandhi organized a widespread protest march to the sea to collect salt through evaporation in violation of the salt laws.

Gandhi Spinning Cotton, 1940’s
(Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gandhi_spinning.jpg)

As a reminder of India’s history of once being the dominant producer of cotton cloth throughout the world, Gandhi held cotton spinning demonstrations and encouraged others throughout India to take up the practice.

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Social and political tensions created during British rule in both India and the United States continue to be felt today. In India, violent conflict played out almost immediately during the partitioning of the country into India and Pakistan in 1947, and struggle between the two countries over control of Kashmir continues to this day. In the United States, tensions over slavery lingered for decades until they finally came to a head with the outbreak of the American Civil War. But the social, political, and cultural differences that initially led to this conflict in many ways remain unresolved. Westborough and India no longer fall under British rule, but the common history we experienced under that rule continues to reverberate and connect us, even though geographically we sit at opposite sides of the globe.

This concludes the series of posts on “How Does History Connect Westborough and India?”

Westborough-India Series Bibliography

Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Bunker, Nick. An Empire on the Edge. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Collingham, Lizzie. Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Darwin, John. Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012.

Eacott, Jonathan. Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2016.

Frankopan, Peter. Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books, 2015.

Freeman, Joshua B. Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Schama, Simon. Civilizations. PBS television series, 2018. http://www.pbs.org/civilizations/home/.

Vaver, Anthony. The Rebellion Begins: Westborough and the Start of the American Revolution. Westborough, MA: Pickpocket Publishing, 2017.

Wilson, Jon. The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India. New York: Public Affairs, 2016.

How Does History Connect Westborough and India?: Tea

Note: The following is the second in a series of eleven weekly posts that present my attempt to answer the question, “How does history connect Westborough and India?” See the Introduction for an overview of the series and to start reading it from the beginning.

–Anthony Vaver, Local History Librarian, Westborough Public Library

Tea

“What misery this right of taxation is capable of producing in a provincial government. We need only recollect that our countrymen in India, have in the space of five or six years, in virtue of this right, destroyed, starved and driven away more inhabitants from Bengal, than are to be found at present in all our American Colonies.”

–Jonathan Shipley, from a speech intended for the House of Lords during debate over altering the Massachusetts charter in 1774 and subsequently published and distributed in the American colonies by Benjamin Franklin.

In 1771, the East India Company bought shiploads of tea on credit in the hope that it could reverse deficits created by the drop in tax collections due to the famine in Bengal. Over twenty ships carrying 90,000 chests of tea arrived in London that summer, more than twice as much tea as the British could consume in a year—and Great Britain had not even finished consuming the tea that had been shipped the year before! With its tea sitting in the harbor, its coffers empty, and with creditors demanding payment, the East India Company was nearly broke. The British government deemed the company too big and too important to fail, so Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773, which gave license to the East India Company to corner the market on tea in the American colonies and tax it at the same time, moves that that would ultimately prove to be disastrous in England’s ability to maintain control over the American colonies.

The Tea Act of 1773 was passed around the same time that American newspapers were carrying reports about the high rates of taxation imposed by the British on Bengal, the ruthless measures put in place to maximize those tax collections, and the famine that resulted from these policies. American colonists naturally wondered whether the British government intended to impose similar imperial administrative rule on their part of the world, and if so, what would prevent America from experiencing a similar fate?

To protest the passage of the Tea Act, a group of rebels threw the excess tea that the East India Company had shipped to America into Boston Harbor, and the British government responded by passing the Intolerable Acts in 1774, which closed the ports in Boston, fundamentally changed the charter of Massachusetts, and consequentially led to rebellion with Westborough and Worcester leading the charge.

The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor, 1846
by N. Currier (Firm)
(Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91795889/)

This 1846 picture fancifully depicts the destruction of East India Company tea in Boston Harbor to protest its taxation in 1773.

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Read the next post in the series: Rebellion.

Westborough-India Series Bibliography

Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Bunker, Nick. An Empire on the Edge. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Collingham, Lizzie. Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Darwin, John. Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012.

Eacott, Jonathan. Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2016.

Frankopan, Peter. Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books, 2015.

Freeman, Joshua B. Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Schama, Simon. Civilizations. PBS television series, 2018. http://www.pbs.org/civilizations/home/.

Vaver, Anthony. The Rebellion Begins: Westborough and the Start of the American Revolution. Westborough, MA: Pickpocket Publishing, 2017.

Wilson, Jon. The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India. New York: Public Affairs, 2016.

How Does History Connect Westborough and India?: Taxes

Note: The following is the seventh in a series of eleven weekly posts that present my attempt to answer the question, “How does history connect Westborough and India?” See the Introduction for an overview of the series and to start reading it from the beginning.

–Anthony Vaver, Local History Librarian, Westborough Public Library

Taxes

The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) was expensive and created massive government debt for Great Britain. The fact that the war was mostly fought in North America and that victory led to a new need to increase the number of soldiers in the colonies more than tenfold in order to prevent revolt in Quebec caused Britain to rethink their taxing strategy in the American colonies. In 1765, the British enacted the Stamp Act, which taxed legal papers and other documents in America. The colonies reacted swiftly against these new taxes—protests were especially intense in Boston, New York, and Rhode Island—so the British had little choice but to repeal them.

Following British victory at Plassey in Bengal during the Seven Years’ War, the East India Company acquired the diwani of Bengal, i.e., the right to collect taxes in exchange for regular payments to the Mughal emperor in Delhi. In 1769, after the British had pushed the limits of taxing Bengal to such a degree that its economy began to teeter, a drought hit. Because the British had already stockpiled food for themselves, food prices began to soar until famine broke out and up to ten million people died as a result. The severe loss of population resulted in dwindling tax revenues for the East India Company, so after the rains returned it wasn’t long before yet another financial crisis hit.

The British basically inherited the administrative tax system from previous Mughal rulers, but as they expanded their rule and taxing powers into other Indian regions, they sought out inconsistencies and put in place ruthless efficiencies to maximize tax collection. In addition to utilizing accounting and administrative tools, they instituted a census (in order to tax people, you have to know who they are and where they live). A British obsession over collecting information about the population for tax purposes grew. These censuses ended up changing the very nature of the Indian population, because it forced Indian society to start placing its people in categories that before were not perceived as important or even existed as concepts, such as caste and race.

The British never “measured” the American colonies in the way they did in India. They had no idea how many people lived in America, how fast the colonies were growing, or how large the militias in each colony were. This lack of data meant that the British had no way to gauge the seriousness of the move towards independence that was beginning to brew in the colonies.

The Mughal Emperor Shah Alam hands a scroll to Robert Clive
by Benjamin West
(The British Library, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shah_%27Alam_conveying_the_grant_of_the_Diwani_to_Lord_Clive.jpg)

This painting depicts Shah Alam, the Mughal emperor, transferring tax collection rights, or diwani, for Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa to Robert Clive and the East India Company in 1765. The moment was a turning point for the East India Company as it became less a trading company and more an administrative and military organization focused on tax collection.

List of Westborough Males Over 16 Years Old, 1777
(Westborough Public Library, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/z316sd686)

This list of Westborough males over the age of sixteen years old was used to determine who was eligible to serve in the American Revolution.

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Read the next post in the series: Tea.

Westborough-India Series Bibliography

Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Bunker, Nick. An Empire on the Edge. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Collingham, Lizzie. Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Darwin, John. Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012.

Eacott, Jonathan. Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2016.

Frankopan, Peter. Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books, 2015.

Freeman, Joshua B. Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Schama, Simon. Civilizations. PBS television series, 2018. http://www.pbs.org/civilizations/home/.

Vaver, Anthony. The Rebellion Begins: Westborough and the Start of the American Revolution. Westborough, MA: Pickpocket Publishing, 2017.

Wilson, Jon. The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India. New York: Public Affairs, 2016.

How Does History Connect Westborough and India?: Imperial Administration and Rule

Note: The following is the sixth in a series of eleven weekly posts that present my attempt to answer the question, “How does history connect Westborough and India?” See the Introduction for an overview of the series and to start reading it from the beginning.

–Anthony Vaver, Local History Librarian, Westborough Public Library

Imperial Administration and Rule

After near complete British victory in the Seven Years’ War, England was now responsible for administering two colonial empires on opposite sides of the globe with differing governing needs. The fact that America was populated with British subjects did not exactly play to England’s advantage, because these citizens automatically assumed that they had a right to direct participation in their government and could not be ruled with an authoritative hand. But for the most part, the British government tended to interfere in the American colonies only in matters of trade and commerce, because they were more concerned with European foreign policy due to fear of falling back into war with France at any given time. The Americans, on the other hand, were obsessed with following news about the overseas affairs of England in order to discover clues about British intentions for ruling its colonies.

Over in Asia, granting Indians the right to a representative government was out of the question, since doing so would undermine Britain’s economic goals. Instead, the British developed an administrative system whereby officials from the East India Company—many of them former military generals, including the Earl of Cornwallis, who surrendered to Washington at Yorktown to end the American Revolution—ruled India and collected taxes both to pay for their rule and to profit from the arrangement. The East India Company now transformed itself into being less of a trading company and more of a military and administrative power headed by a group of oligarchs who sought to expand British control into other areas of India beyond Bengal. And because the wealth generated in India was so much greater in comparison with the American colonies, the British were much more attuned to the political situation in the East than they were in the West.

“The Reception of the Mysorean Hostage Princes by Marquis Cornwallis,” 26 February 1792
by Robert Home
(National Army Museum, https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1976-11-86-1)

This painting shows General Lord Cornwallis—who had surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown to end the American Revolution and was now serving as Governor-General of India—receiving two of Tipu Sultan’s sons as hostages after the 3rd Mysore War (1790-1792). Cornwallis led British troops in capturing large sections of Mysore in southern India, demanded a hefty financial settlement, and took the sons hostage to ensure that Tipu carried out the treaty to end the war. The sons were returned in 1794. In a show of propaganda, the artist, who appears in the far left-side of the painting, depicts Cornwallis as a paternalistic ruler.

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Read the next post in the series: Taxes.

Westborough-India Series Bibliography

Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Bunker, Nick. An Empire on the Edge. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Collingham, Lizzie. Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Darwin, John. Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012.

Eacott, Jonathan. Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2016.

Frankopan, Peter. Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books, 2015.

Freeman, Joshua B. Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Schama, Simon. Civilizations. PBS television series, 2018. http://www.pbs.org/civilizations/home/.

Vaver, Anthony. The Rebellion Begins: Westborough and the Start of the American Revolution. Westborough, MA: Pickpocket Publishing, 2017.

Wilson, Jon. The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India. New York: Public Affairs, 2016.

The Rebellion Begins

Note: This exhibit was created for and displayed at the “1774 Militia Training Day” held in Westborough, MA on October 14, 2017 and subsequently in the Westborough Public Library.

To learn more, read the companion book, The Rebellion Begins: Westborough and the Start of the American Revolution by Anthony Vaver.

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