How far back would someone outside of the United States of America immediately recognize the abbreviation “US” as referring to the country?
He’s the reason why I ask. I was watching an episode of the British show Ripper Street. This particular episode was set in 1897. An Indian major of the Bengal Lancers is introduced to someone who is reffered to as a captain. Captain of what he asks. “US Army” he replies. It hit me as being anachronistic. But then I realized I had no idea. Would an Indian soldier in London for the first time automatically know that US Army refers to the United States? I know the Army used US on belt buckles and other uniform pieces long before that but you can presume that US soldiers would know what it meant.
I don’t think Ripper Street, with its steampunky sort of ambience, was ever intended to be a piece of social realism, so that’s only relevant as the occasion for raising the question in principle.
Western fiction (shootouts in the old west, cowboys and Indians, etc) got its start in the late 1800s. A lot of the Western dime novels were popular in England, and some of them were edited or re-written for a British audience. Western stories also started showing up in the British Penny Dreadfuls in the 1880s and 1890s.
Wild West shows were also touring England in the 1880s and 1890s.
With all of that exposure to American writings and culture, I would be a bit surprised if someone in London at that time wasn’t familiar with the “U.S.” abbreviation.
Slight hijack but I don’t remember one instance of steampunk. Reid and Jackson are just slightly ahead of their time with forensics. Probably not even that. They are just too knowledgeable about every technique that is being explored in various parts of the world with regards to forensics. The 1890s is when the first fingerprint database was being complied in Argentina. In France a guy who’s name escapes me was also using biometrics for indentification. The show does require suspension of disbelief but it’s not that far off with regards to technology.
AFAIK it’s only become common for Brits not to refer to the US as ‘America’ pretty recently, out of postmodern type ‘sensitivity’ that the latter term somehow disses Latin Americans or Canadians. It’s still common actually. I’d guess in general referring to the country as US or USA would have been rare in 19th century Britain. It was America, hence the American Army.
The one thing that might be different about the Army, and from POV of a professional British soldier referring to it, was the convention of that time of centering military identity on regiments. And the regiments of the regular Army were ‘[number] US [infantry/cavalry]’, as opposed to volunteer regiments in wartime with state monikers, not only in the Civil War as most famously but previous wars and Spanish War also, and as compared to the Bengal Lancers regimental identity high in the Brit officer’s mind. ‘US’ was prominently associated with the ‘regulars’ that way, besides just insignia.
I’d also note that the abbreviation ‘USA’ was commonly used after officer’s names to mean ‘United States Army’ from at least the Civil War, eg. letters from Grant to his wife during the war from ‘Ulysses S Grant, USA’. That was still common for professional officers (as Grant considered himself, though long on hiatus from the Army) up to at least WWII though it’s no longer as common.
Rereading the question maybe I was confused by third person pronouns. Would a Brit (soldier or otherwise) refer to ‘the US Army’ in 1897? I’d say no, almost certainly ‘American Army’, the Army of the country Brits almost invariably called ‘America’. Would a Brit officer understand who he was talking to if it another English speaking Westerner said he was an officer in the ‘US Army’? Sure, the appellation wasn’t that obscure, and definitely used in the US, though again at the time tended to distinguish professional officers from volunteer officers and regular regiments from volunteer ones rather than necessarily being used referring to any and all US ground units (and not considering the Marines).
An Indian Army officer in the 1890s who had never visited London before really requires a suspension of disbelief.
Any English officer, and most especially a cavalry officer, would have gone to school in England, then entered an officers’ training academy in England, before going out to join a regiment in India. This applies also to English children born in India. They were always sent back to England at a young age to go to school. And there was no other route to an officer’s commission except via English public schools, and an officers’ academy.
Well, some rose to be officers from the ranks — although not as often as with the French — and Indians could be junior commissioned officers. Some Indian Officers. No doubt some of the Indian Princes were part of the British Army. However people also forget the Raj only held half of India ( usually about 80,000 British soldiers ) and the Princely States ruled much of the rest — albeit with a British Agent to keep them in line ( like a Soviet Political Officer, or a present day American adviser east of Suez ) — and before the Mutiny in 1857 any British parts were held, and the armies owned by the East India Company in 3 different presidencies. The British strength of these armies was 39,500 men in 1857.
Some of these officers were kinda odd, and included non-Britons, from rather dodgy backgrounds ( and even at that time the Public Schools were only beginning to exercise dominance in British social life – more Tom Brown’s Schooldays than Goodbye Mr. Chips — plenty of upper-class boys were educated at home ), but in 1858 the Raj subsumed the Company Armies ( the bits they trusted ) into the Raj’s Indian Army.
It’s just possible a few colonial officers had never seen England and stood in Piccadilly Circus.
Wiki gives:
United States of Belgium, a confederation that existed during the year 1790
Republic of the United States of Brazil (Portuguese: República dos Estados Unidos do Brasil), the official name of Brazil between 1889 and 1937
United States of Brazil, the official name of Brazil between 1937 and 1967
United States of Central America (informal name), or the United Provinces of Central America and the Federal Republic of Central America
United States of Colombia, name held by Colombia between 1863 and 1886
United States of Indonesia, name of the country from 1949 to 1950
United States of the Ionian Islands, former British protectorate from 1815 to 1864
United State of Saurashtra, an Indian state between 1948 and 1956
United States of Stellaland, a short-lived political union of Goshen and Stellaland proper in southern Africa
United State of Travancore and Cochin, the former Indian state of Travancore-Cochin between 1949 and 1950
United States of Venezuela, from 1864 to April 15, 1953
But there were some others.
Taking a different tack, you can look up digitised newspaper archives.
I just tried Trove, which is the Australian one. Typing ‘US’ and ‘USA’ both give massive jumps in cites from the 1840s into the 1850s. Some spot checks show ‘US’ used in the form referred to by the OP.
Ignoring the coincident rise in newspaper publication at the same time, this also matches the start of the gold-rush era, with many Americans, including USanians, coming to Australia, better communications and a more literate public.
I don’t think the British did “almost invariably” call the US “America” in the nineteenth century, not least because the British still had their own possession in America at the time. (The Canadian provinces were federated by an Act of the Westminster Parliament called the British North America Act 1867.) “American” was a common adjective meaning, in the right context, “pertaining to the United States” (American currency, the American government) but the country itself was commonly called “the United States”, and I’d expect that from fairly early on “U.S.” was an abbreviation commonly used in newspaper headlines, and “U.S. Army” would have been readily understood. The OED has citations for “U.S.” from 1834 and for “United States” (in British, not American, sources) from 1812.
To be clear, is the line “US Army” spoken by the American captain, or by the person introducing him? And is there clear indication that the Indian officer did in fact understand?
The links refer to havildar-majors, subedar-majors and the like. These are not commissioned officers; they represent an intermediate class between enlisted men and commissioned officers which wasn’t found in the regular British forces and which represented, basically, the highest level that native soldiers could attain in the Indian forces. A Subedar-Major or Risaldar-Major would not be addressed or referred to as “Major”, any more than a sergeant-major would be.
These officers might have significant command responsibilities, but only over native troops. They were subordinate to all British commissioned officers (known in the jargon as “King’s Commissioned Officers”), of whatever rank.
Late in the piece this began to change, and from the 1920s onwards under a policy of “Indianisation” a number of Indian cadets were sent to the UK to complete officer training, and were given full regular commissions as “King’s Comissioned Indian Officers”, with parity with their British counterparts. But this proceeded very slowly, and by the Second World War only a tiny proportion of the Indian Army’s comissioned officers were Indian. The character in this novel appears to be one of them.