Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole

A Sale of English Beauties in the East Indies, May 16, 1786

This print depicts a mock-auction of "English Beauties" at an East Indian port. English women's desire for foreign luxuries, combined with their physical presence in India (however minimal compared to the number of English men working for the East India Company), was seen to threaten the "purity" of their race. The most prominently featured English woman in the print is the object of "Western" and "Eastern" men simultaneously. The Indian consumer depresses the top of her globular, exposed breast with his middle finger. Given Britain's imperial aspirations, one might read this gesture as signifying a desire to mark the "globe"; that his finger creates a dark shadow on an otherwise snow-white breast suggests racial competition and, perhaps, contamination. The reality of enslaved African women and men being sold in markets prompts the "humorous" metaphor for Gillray's print, further implied by the presence of a caricatured African boy attending the Englishman. Catalog Record

Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library

James Gillray