Banias and the British: the Role of Indigenous Credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
State Building ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Western India ◽  
Senior Member ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Trade And Exchange ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Service Groups

The pressing preoccupation of the British administration in the early decades of the nineteenth century to clip the wings of the malicious Indian shroffs (Bankers) and their manoeuvres and secret dealings was in sharp and in a sense valid contrast to their earlierperceptions of the Indian shroffs and their Hundi empire. By 1807, Mr Rickards, senior member of the Bombay establishment, was urging the Governor-General in Council to establisha General Bank whose operations would extend throughout India, facilitate remittances andcredit transfers from one part of the country to another, and above all ‘free the mercantile body from losses and inconveniences suffered in the exchange and from the artifices of shroffs’. Their ‘undue and pernicious influence over the course of trade and exchange’ could no longer be treated with forbearance, and the urgency of remedy was stressed. It was both strange and ironical that such advice should stem from a quarter where in the crucial years of political change and transition in the second half of the eighteenth century, the cooperation and intervention of the indigenous banking fraternity and their credit support had proved vital to the success of the Imperial strategy. The experience was admittedly not unique to Bombay and the English East India Company (hence-forth E.E.I.C) and in a sense the guarantee of local credit and the support of service groups for a variety of reasons, was clearly envisagedas a basic ingredient to state building in the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Weak Ties in a Tangled Web? Relationships between the Political Residents of the English East India Company and their munshis, 1798–1818

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (05) ◽  
pp. 1574-1612 ◽  
Author(s):  
CALLIE WILKINSON
Keyword(s):  
Political Influence ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
And Control ◽  
Developing System

AbstractAlthough historians have long recognized the important role that Indians played in the English East India Company's operations, the focus has usually been on the mechanics of direct rule in ‘British’ India. Yet, the expertise of Indian cultural intermediaries was arguably even more important, as well as more contested, in the context of the Company's growing political influence over nominally independent Indian kingdoms. This article examines the relationships between the East India Company's political representatives (Residents) and their Indian secretaries (munshis) at Indian royal courts during a period of dramatic imperial expansion, from 1798 to 1818. The article considers how these relationships were conceptualized and debated by British officials, and reflects on the practical consequences of these relationships for the munshis involved. The tensions surrounding the role of the munshi in Residency business exemplify some of the practical dilemmas posed by the developing system of indirect rule in India, where the Resident had to decide how much responsibility to delegate to Indian experts better versed in courtly norms and practices, while at the same time maintaining his own image of authority and control. Although the Resident–munshi relationship was in many respects mutually beneficial, these relationships nevertheless spawned anxieties about transparency and accountability within the Company itself, as well as exciting resentments at court. Both Residents and munshis were required to negotiate between two political and institutional cultures, but it was the munshi who seems to have borne the brunt of the risks associated with this intermediary position.

History as Self-Representation: The Recasting of a Political Tradition in Late Eighteenth-Century Eastern India

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 913-948 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kumkum Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
English East India Company

If power is mediated by knowledge, then the early decades of British colonial rule in India were indeed, as Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, the intellectual and historian par excellence of those times wrote, a time of ‘half-knowledge’.The decades between 1757 and 1772 witnessed the implantation of this colonial regime in Eastern India through the transformation of the English East India Company from a mercantilist trading corporation into the paradoxical status of ‘merchant-sovereign and the sovereign merchant’ at the same time. The role of sovereign thrust upon the officials of the company the far from easy task of administering this society in ways that were most conducive to the extraction of the largest possible surplus from it for its new masters.

John Company Armed: The English East India Company, the Anglo-Mughal War and Absolutist Imperialism, c. 1675–1690

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

During the 1670s and 1680s, the English East India Company pursued an aggressive programme of imperial expansion in the Asian maritime world, culminating in a series of armed assaults on the Mughal Empire. With important exceptions, most scholarship has viewed the Company's coercive imperialism in the later seventeenth century and the First Anglo-Mughal War as the results primarily, if not exclusively, of political and economic conditions in South Asia. This article re-examines and re-interprets this burst of imperial expansion in light of political developments in England and the wider English empire during the later Stuart era. The article contends that the Company's aggressive overseas expansion was pursued for metropolitan and pan-imperial purposes as much as for South Asian ones. The corporation sought to centralise and militarise the English presence in Asia in order both to maintain its control of England's trade to the East and in support of Stuart absolutism. By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Company's aggressive imperialism formed part of a wider political project to create an absolute monarchy in England and to establish an autocratic English empire overseas.

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

Ecology and Imperium: State Formation in Early Colonial Bengal c. 1765–1800

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Baijayanti Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
State Formation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Remote Areas ◽  
Tribal Communities ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Outlying Regions ◽  
Power And Authority

This article looks at the process of state formation in Bengal in the second half of the eighteenth century when the English East India Company emerged as the paramount authority in the province. The article argues that compared with the previous regime of the Nazims who were content in exercising a loose sovereignty over the outlying regions of Bengal, the Company showed greater initiative in conquering and pacifying the remote areas of the province. In terms of its ecology, the province of Bengal could be divided into three distinct zones: the plains, the hills and the delta. The process of state formation varied in these three distinct eco-zones. While it was easy for the Company to establish its control over the Bengal plains, it became increasingly difficult for them to establish their power and authority in the hill forests (home to autonomous tribal communities who resented and resisted British interference) and in the deltaic tracts where the maze of rivers provided safe refuge and a means of escape to the Magh pirates and every other state fugitive. This article is an account of the Company’s struggles to establish its supremacy in Bengal, but it also looks at the resistance offered by autonomous tribal groups to retain and preserve their independence. Finally, this article attempts to link ecology with the process of state formation in early colonial Bengal.

Human Taxonomies: Carl Linnaeus, Swedish Travel in Asia and the Classification of Man

Itinerario ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (02) ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
Christina Skott
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Species ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Carl Linnaeus ◽  
Eyewitness Reports

AbstractThis article looks at ways in which Swedish travel to Asia informed the classification of man in the work of Carl Linnaeus. In the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758), Linnaeus made substantial changes to his earlier taxonomy of humans. Through two case studies, it is argued that these changes to a great extent were prompted by fresh Swedish eyewitness reports from China and Southeast Asia. The informants for the Homo asiaticus, a variety of Homo sapiens, and a proposed new species of humans, Homo nocturnus (or troglodytes), were all associated with the Swedish East India Company. The botanical contribution by men trained in the Linnaean method travelling on the company's ships has long been acknowledged. In contrast to the systematic collecting of botanical material, Swedish descriptions of Asia's human inhabitants were often inconclusive, reflecting the circumstances of the trade encounter. Linnaeus also relied on older observations made by countrymen, and his human taxonomies also highlight the role of travel literature in eighteenth-century anthropology.

scholarly journals Role of Sufi Saints in North –Western India

IJOHMN ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Dr R. Subramony
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Northern India ◽  
North Western ◽  
Cultural Structure

The eighteenth century in Indian History is characterized as an epoch of political anarchy and social chaos that spread unchecked in the wake of the collapse of the Mughal empire. But disintegration of the imperial center and its administrative institutions did not produce any profound effect on the pre-existing pluralistic socio-cultural structure, which was distinguished by widespread Hindu-Muslim unity and culture syncretism in northern India.

scholarly journals Acquiring the Power of Natives: The Socio-Economic Transition of Malabar into the Colonial Economy, 1792-1812

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 160-163
Author(s):  
T Sandeep
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Economic Transition ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Indian Peninsula ◽  
Administrative Power ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
English East India Company

The end of the eighteenth century, the English East India Company dominated most of the part of the Indian peninsula. In a way, it was also considered as the revolutionary transition of the Indian society through the westernization. At the same time, some historians point out that, it was the period of anarchy as well as the dark age of the Indian history. The English East India Company controlled the trade between India and Europe, and finally they acquired the administrative power over India. In the context of Malabar, the English East India Company took the administration in 1792, and emerged as a kind of superlord through the domination over the indigenous rulers. The advent of the Company rule in Malabar replaced the traditional customs and introduced structural changes in the society and economy. This study emphasis on the people’s attitude towards the Company administration in Malabar  and how they incorporated to the ‘new administration’. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ijssm.v1i4.11180 Int. J. Soc. Sci. Manage. Vol-1, issue-4: 160-163 

Biota Barons, 'Neo-Eurasias' and Indian-New Zealand Informal Eco-Cultural Networks, 1830s–1870s

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-164
Author(s):  
James Beattie
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Environmental Modification ◽  
White Settler ◽  
Ecological Imperialism ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Cultural Networks ◽  
Different Parts

This article examines informal (private and commercial) imperial networks and environmental modification by former English East India Company (EIC) employees in New Zealand, as well as the introduction of subcontinental species into that colony. Several very wealthy settlers from India, it argues, single-handedly introduced a cornucopia of Indian plants and animals into different parts of nineteenth-century New Zealand and used money earned in India to engage in large-scale environmental modification. Such was the scale of their enterprise 'in the business of shifting biota from place to place' and in remaking environments in parts of New Zealand that these individuals can be considered 'biota barons'. A focus on the informal eco-cultural networks they created helps refine the thesis of ecological imperialism. It also expands the more recent concept of neo-ecological imperialism, by highlighting the role of non-European natures and models in the re-making of Britain's colonies of settlement and by tracing exchanges between white settler colonies and colonies of extraction. In sum, the paper demonstrates the influence of particular private individuals with the necessary wealth and will to effect certain kinds of environmental change, and tentatively suggests that we might usefully consider Australasia as 'neo-Eurasias' rather than 'neo-Europes'.

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