Walt Whitman's 1871 poem “Passage to India” celebrates three of the era's signal engineering feats—the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable (“eloquent gentle wires” in Whitman's rendering) in 1858; the completion of North America's transcontinental railroad in 1869; and the opening of the Suez Canal later in the same year. These infrastructural advances—“our modern wonders,” the poet calls them—accelerated the pace of travel and communication, but for Whitman they also subtended an expansive American presence abroad, a rebirth, in his framing, of the Age of Exploration, with North Americans this time figuring as agents rather than objects of inquiry. In a poem that seems willfully to ignore the national catastrophe (the American Civil War, that is) that formed the subject of the poet's collection Drum-Taps, published just six years earlier, Whitman here heralds the United States’ international emergence with an exuberance that mirrors his expressed faith in human beings’ capacity to control and reshape the earth itself.

As the poem's title suggests, of the three wonders, the Suez Canal most pressingly commands Whitman's attention. In his rendering, this newly dug passage to India completes Christopher Columbus's earlier gambit, which sought readier access to South Asian spices and other commercial ventures in the East but instead eventuated in European empires and genocidal campaigns in the so-called New World.

The 1890s saw a dramatic rise in American international humanitarianism. Enabled by the material prosperity of the United States, Americans mitigated the effects of war and famine overseas to demonstrate the alleged moral, economic and religious power of the United States in the world. This included South Asia, where the year 1896 marked the beginning of a prolonged period of amplified hunger. Historians commonly divide this period into the famines of 1896–97 and 1899–1900. Although Americans had shown interest in alleviating social ills in British India before, the scope of the responses of mission societies, philanthropists and the religious press in North America to these famines was unprecedented. In this chapter, I examine US-sponsored famine relief in India in the late 1890s as a defining moment in the history of the encounter of India and the United States, and some of the multidirectional engagements of both societies that emerged against this background.

The missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), who ran the American Marathi Mission (AMM) in Bombay since 1813, were amongst the most vocal advocates of greater US involvement in South Asia. Missionaries portrayed India as a land of evangelical opportunities and Indians as a people waiting to become Protestants.

The election of Kamala Harris as the first South Asian American Vice President of the United States has expanded interest in the long history of connections between the United States and South Asia. Harris joins an impressive roster of Indian American politicians—a roster that spans the political spectrum from conservative Republican governors like Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal to progressive Democratic members of congress like Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal. It would be a mistake to see the growing political prominence of the South Asian American community as a clear marker of the unity or visibility of that community. Indeed, questions of identity and authenticity mark many of the most prominent Indian American politicians—including Harris, Haley, and Jindal. What it means to be South Asian American—or Indian American—has long been bound up with complex and ever-shifting boundaries of race, nation, and religion. Those boundaries were in turn linked to larger and longer histories of mutual perception, multifaceted entanglements and concrete interactions between the United States and South Asia.

For decades, the historiography on modern South Asia has been tethered to the signposts of Empire and the nation-state as its recurrent referents. Even as postcolonial theory, Subaltern studies and feminist theory sought to expand the intellectual terrain, the dominance of the nation-Empire dyad has continued more or less unabated. The gradual waning of the Cold War, concurrent with the rise of Global History, has, however, brought into sharper focus the methodological limitations and shortcomings of both Imperial history and Area Studies. This edited volume offers a fresh approach to the intellectual, cultural, economic and literary histories that have “entangled” the United States of America and the Indian subcontinent. After global history had been initially dominated by transregional comparisons and the study of (unilateral) long-distance transfers, the more dynamic and process-oriented concept of “entanglement” became increasingly prominent in the field from the late 1990s onwards, producing myriad studies on the “back and forth of people ideas and things across boundaries”. The shift toward interactive “transnational” histories at times risked an uncritical celebration of connections and entanglements of various kinds, as if such histories could themselves usher in a new and more just way of looking at the human past. A “breathless sense of freedom,” to use the words of historian Paul Kramer, tinged even many of the richest transnational histories.

The population of San Francisco increased dramatically within a few months of the discovery of gold in California in 1848. By 1849, improved transportation networks moved people, cargo, and news between the city and international destinations with ever-increasing efficiency and frequency, including to countries in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The New York Serenaders, a six-person American blackface minstrel troupe, initially led by Bill White on violin, were part of the flood of entertainers that travelled to San Francisco in 1849. Shortly after their arrival, they took advantage of the large number of ships departing the city to Pacific ports, seeking opportunities in Hawaii, Australia, and eventually India. They were among the first organized American blackface minstrel troupes to tour the Indian subcontinent, travelling to Bombay (modern Mumbai), Calcutta (modern Kolkata), and other small cities and towns between 1851 and 1853. They performed minstrel songs, parodies, stump speeches, and skits in racist blackface, but they also performed British folk and traditional songs and dances, including clog dancing, a style of step-dance characterized by the use of inflexible wooden-soled shoes.

Latin Americans can feel insecure for many different and overlapping reasons. U.S. and Latin American leaders don’t always agree on what these are, what causes them, and what should be done about them. Given all the previous chapters, this shouldn’t surprise us. In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence pointed to threats stemming from economic crisis (exacerbated by Covid-19), crime, narcotics trafficking, corruption, and Venezuela. It also noted the threatening presence of China and Russia. Latin American leaders show widely varying degrees of agreement about these. This chapter highlights U.S. policy dealing with insecurity and Latin American divergence from it. The dynamics of the economy, as well as extrahemispheric actors, are already addressed in other chapters. That leaves a focus on crime, drug trafficking, and corruption, but also considered is climate change, which the Organization of American States keeps front and center.

Following the Civil War, the United States exerted its diplomatic, economic, and military leverage to pursue economic and political interests in Latin America, as it believed that what was good for business was good for the country. The emphasis on national security had not disappeared, but the threats to U.S. borders were less dire than in the past as European countries were generally easing themselves out of the region. Latin American leaders had neither the unified political support nor the military strength required to counter U.S. influence. While certain Latin American policy makers resisted U.S. hegemony, both politically and militarily, others welcomed it. Political and economic elites out of power appealed to the United States for assistance because they believed it could provide stability and wealth. The United States stepped neatly and easily into this political maelstrom. The chapter concludes at the turn of the twentieth century, when the era of intervention began in earnest.

During the 1960s, the effects of the Cuban Revolution – especially in terms of support for guerrilla warfare against U.S. allies – became all too evident, and the United States pursued interventionism with new vigor. This renewed use of power included economic and diplomatic pressures, veiled threats, covert operations, and even invasion. U.S. officials framed the Cold War as a valiant struggle to protect freedom in the hemisphere, and the cases of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Guatemala epitomized the lengths to which the United States would go to fight what it considered to be security threats. In Latin America, many elites supported U.S. policy, but a growing undercurrent of discontent also emerged, which pushed for negotiated conclusions to war and protested against the treatment of so many citizens caught in the middle. They did not share the notion that leftist or even Marxist governments necessarily constituted a threat to national security and global order. This chapter ends with a discussion of the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989.

Mexico’s 1982 announcement that it would be unable to make its debt payment set off Latin America’s “Lost Decade.” All over the region, economies stagnated and millions of people suffered. The international response, spearheaded by the United States, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank, initiated market reforms that would cut state spending, privatize state-run industries, dismantle tariffs, and construct free trade agreements. The neoliberal era had been launched. The reforms and trade agreements that accompanied this new era reflected continued U.S. hegemony but also the ways in which economic power was supplanting military power. Latin America initially found few alternatives to the neoliberal model. At the end of the twentieth century Latin American economies were growing once again, but in many cases they were only returning to where they had been before the crash. With millions feeling economic pain, neopopulist leaders gained momentum. Commitment to free trade agreements also waned as leaders like Donald Trump questioned their benefits. This chapter explores the region’s political economy of the last 50 years.