Introduction

Summary

On July 8, 1865, the Englishman newspaper reviewed a performance by blackface minstrel showman Dave Carson at the Town Hall in Bombay. Carson was from Montana in the United States, and he had arrived in India with the San Francisco Minstrels four years earlier. That month, Bombay was at the center of a financial crisis caused by the price of cotton. The American Civil War (1861–65) decreased cotton exports from the United States and increased their value in India, and speculators in Bombay bet that the price of cotton shares would remain consistent or increase. Known as “share mania,” share values increased substantially until April 1865, when the exuberance suddenly ended. On the other side of the world the Confederate armies surrendered to the Union forces to end the war. US cotton exports suddenly had the potential to reach prewar levels as the American industry regained its footing. The price of cotton in India plummeted.

The speculative economy structured to support the exchange of these commodities in Bombay collapsed on July 1, 1865, and cotton shares became almost unsellable. Banks, financial associations, insurance companies, joint-stock companies, law firms, and many other financial institutions failed, and the personal wealth of large numbers of businesspeople in Bombay declined. Dave Carson's blackface minstrel productions were known for their raucous ridicule of local people and recent events, and his performances in early July parodied the irrationality of the crash mere days after its highpoint. He entertained audiences of professional and middleclass patrons, including Europeans, British, and Indians. The Englishman review of his performance directly references the financial crisis, and even jokes about it:

Dave Carson himself was as brilliant and as brimful of local hits as ever. His songs in illustration of the crisis now existing in Bombay, though extravagantly comic in their way, yet possessed a touch of the tragic in them, which, no doubt, many present felt, by sad experience, as in reality, the relation of an “ever true tale.” We hear that the demands for tickets to each performance are so numerous, that the company intend making a longer stay amongst us than they at first anticipated. On the whole, it appears to be a far better “spec” [speculation] to turn “minstrel,” than anything else on the cards.