Yale, Calico, Cotton Mather etc.
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In 1687, the city of Madras — today’s Chennai — was in the grip of a devastating famine.
The rice crop had failed. British East India Company records from Fort St. George, the white‑walled coastal fortress that served as the Company’s headquarters in the region, read like ledgers of catastrophe: grain shortages, soaring prices, and “multitudes of poor people” dying in the streets. What did it mean in the capital city as people in various districts along the Coromandel Coast were gripped by hunger?
Famines in India, 1500 to 1767
In Madras, it created a surplus of desperate people who could be bought cheaply. As hunger deepened, the price of grain soared while the price of people fell — a grim arithmetic that Company officials, Yale among them, quickly exploited. And the man who presided over this terrible moment was Elihu Yale — Boston born, Welsh by ancestry, and newly appointed governor of Madras.
Yale had arrived in India in 1672 as a young Company servant. Fort St. George was part military outpost, part administrative capital, part warehouse of commerce. By 1687, he had risen to become the Company’s chief agent in Madras, a position that offered opportunities for personal enrichment even without corruption.
But the famine opened a darker door. Company officials, including Yale, began purchasing starving people and exporting them as slaves; children were sold for shillings. Many were sent to the English colony of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. As governor, Yale enforced what became known as the “ten slaves per ship” rule — every Europe‑bound vessel leaving Madras had to carry at least ten enslaved people to be sold abroad. In one month in 1687 alone, Company records show that at least 665 enslaved people were shipped out of the port.
This history, long buried in archives, has become clearer thanks to digitized East India Company documents. Historian Joseph Yannielli first suspected Yale’s involvement when he noticed a portrait at Yale University depicting the man, and two others, being served by a child slave. The painting was a clue; the records confirmed the scale.
Yale’s own fortunes grew. When he finally returned to England in 1699, he did so under a cloud — dismissed from the governorship, placed under house arrest for seven years, and facing charges of embezzlement. Yet his wealth remained largely intact. He sailed home with tons of personal cargo and with an enslaved woman named Ellea on board. Her fate, like that of so many others trafficked in this trade, is unclear.
As Yale sailed home under a cloud of scandal, New England was entering its own season of fear and revelation.
Yale & Slavery A History by David Blight
Mather had another concern: Harvard College. The Puritan minister believed it was drifting toward theological laxity. A group of Connecticut clergymen founded a new institution — the Collegiate School of Connecticut — a potential rival to Harvard. But this school was fragile, underfunded, and in need of a benefactor whose name could lend prestige.
Elihu Yale, wealthy, childless, and Boston born, seemed ideal. But scandal in Madras did not diminish what mattered most to the Collegiate School: Yale’s fortune, his Boston birth, and his desire for a legacy.
Mather wrote to him across the ocean, appealing to his birthplace and flattering his sense of immortality. Between 1713 and 1721, Yale sent hundreds of books, a portrait of King George I, and “sundry goods and merchandizes” to support the school. He did not send money. He sent textiles — the very commodities that had made him rich in Madras: chintz, calico, muslin, silk crape, camlet, Spanish poplins, and cloth woven and dyed by south Indian artisans.
According to the new book Yale & Slavery: A History, the goods sold in Boston for £562 12s., far more than Yale had estimated. The books and portrait were valued at another £600. In total, his gift amounted to roughly £1,162 — modest compared to his wealth, but enough to secure naming rights. As a writer on philanthropy observed in 1999, “surely, never has so much immortality been purchased for so paltry an eleemosynary sum.”
And the Collegiate School of Connecticut became Yale College.
Mather was a man of fierce certainties, yet also one of the few in his world willing to let new knowledge — even knowledge carried by an enslaved African — change his mind.
Mather, who had managed to establish the college on firmer ground, was not only an astute reader of people. He was also one of the most intellectually curious figures in colonial America. He read widely, experimented constantly, and corresponded with the Royal Society of London — the leading scientific institution of the age, whose members included Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle. Mather himself was elected a Fellow.
And it wasn’t just heavy reading on the latest scientific research from Europe. He also learned something extraordinary from Onesimus, the African man he enslaved. Onesimus described the West African practice of variolation or inoculation — deliberately introducing a small amount of smallpox matter into the skin to induce immunity. Mather listened, investigated, and believed him. Smallpox variolation was not vaccination — it was riskier, because it used live smallpox virus.
When smallpox swept through Boston in 1721, Mather urged the town’s physicians to attempt inoculation, but nearly all refused. Only one doctor, Zabdiel Boylston, agreed to try it, beginning with the three people — his six‑year‑old son, his enslaved man, and the man’s two‑year‑old child. All three survived with only mild illness. Encouraged, Boylston went on to inoculate 247 people over the following months. Only six of them died, a mortality rate of about one in forty, compared with roughly one in seven among those who contracted smallpox naturally. The numbers were unmistakable: inoculation saved lives.
Mather’s campaign was the first large‑scale public health experiment in colonial America. It was also one of the earliest documented cases of African medical knowledge influencing Western medicine.
It is one of the stranger ironies of early American history: a university owes its name to a governor of Madras whose fortune was built partly on famine‑driven slavery, and its early survival to a Puritan minister who is remembered for listening to the scientific wisdom carried by an enslaved African in his household.
One man’s legacy demands reexamination for the human suffering that financed it. The other, despite his severity, earns a measure of reprieve for having recognized knowledge when it spoke to him.
Famines in India, 1500 to 1767