scholarly journals Palmer and Company: an Indian Banking Firm in Hyderabad State

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1157-1184 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN LEONARD

AbstractAlthough the misreading of Hyderabad's early nineteenth century banking firm, Palmer and Company, as scandalous, illegal, and usurious in its business practices was contested at the time in Hyderabad, and at the highest levels of the East India Company in both Calcutta and London, such conspiracy theories have prevailed and are here challenged. The Eurasian William Palmer and his partner, the Gujarati banker, Benkati Das, are best understood as indigenous sahukars or bankers. Their firm functioned like other Indian banking firms and was in competition with them in the early nineteenth century as Hyderabad State dealt with the increasing power of the British East India Company and its man-on-the-spot, the Resident. Historians need to look beyond the English language East India Company records to contextualize this important banking firm more accurately.

Author(s):  
Todd Nachowitz

Shipping logs reveal that the first Indians to set foot on New Zealand soil were two young lascars from Pondicherry who arrived on a French East India Company ship in 1769—the year that James Cook first visited the country. Indian arrival in New Zealand was, therefore, contemporaneous with first European contact, a fact never before recognized in the extant literature on nation-building. Since then hundreds of Indian sepoys and lascars accompanied British East India Company ships to New Zealand, many going through Australian ports seeking work with sealing expeditions and on timber voyages. In the early nineteenth century, some of the lascars began to jump ship, marry local Maori women and settled down in New Zealand. This chapter argues that Indians in New Zealand can claim a history that goes as far back as the earliest Maori–European (Pakeha) contact.


Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lachlan Fleetwood

East India Company surveyors began gaining access to the high Himalaya in the 1810s, at a time when the mountains were taking on increasing political significance as the northern borderlands of British India. Though never as idiosyncratic as surveyors insisted, these were spaces in which instruments, fieldbook inscriptions, and bodies were all highly prone to failure. The ways surveyors managed these failures (both rhetorically and in practice) demonstrate the social performances required to establish credible knowledge in a world in which the senses were scrambled. The resulting tensions reveal an ongoing disconnect in understanding between those displaced not only from London, but also from Calcutta, something insufficiently emphasized in previous histories of colonial science. By focusing on the early nineteenth century, often overlooked in favor of the later period, this article shows the extent to which the scientific, imaginative, and political constitution of the Himalaya was haphazard and contested.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-279
Author(s):  
Abhijit Roy

Purpose In the past three centuries in India, outsiders have dominated economic fortunes. Yet, for a brief interlude for two decades (i.e. in the 1830s and 1840s), the Bengalis from Eastern India played a dominant role in the modern business sector of the economy as partners of the British. The singular reason behind this phenomenon was the role of Dwarkanath Tagore (DT) in building multiple multiracial business partnerships in a myriad of businesses. This study aims to demonstrate how all of these activities were synthesized in an integrated marketing approach and how DT was the catalyst in forging these partnerships with the British East India Company and other enterprises. Design/methodology/approach A historical research method is used in critically examining the business practices of DT. Resources include a few biographies about him as well as several print sources, including several publications owned by him. Findings DT’s approach to an integrated marketing approach in the nineteenth century, involved the traditional production, distributional and promotional components, and he understood the significance of using all tools at his disposal to reach his market using these synergies, each reinforcing his main self-identify was that of an entrepreneur. He used forward integration techniques in running other operations, e.g. distribution, publishing, advertising and promotion of his products. His multiracial social networks for business and social activities are also identified. Originality/value This study synthesizes different sections of DT’s businesses and illustrates how he used integrated marketing to build an enterprising, profit-making business, which was good for both the economy of Bengal and that of the British East India Company and his other partners. The study also establishes him as a pioneering Indian entrepreneur and identifies major social networks with other business partners (both Indian and British).


1973 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth L. Malcolm

In the first decades of the nineteenth-century Western missionary activity, like the opium trade, was prohibited by the Chinese government. The Protestant missionaries, however, could not equal the independent opium traders in their evasion of the Chinese authorities. As well, they had to contend with the opposition of the British East India Company, which theoretically monopolized Anglo-Chinese commerce at Portuguese Macao.


1990 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Peers

The history of the East India Company's rule of India is marked by sporadic outbursts of civil-military conflict. It was not unknown in India for European officers to down tools and commit acts that bordered on outright mutiny. Perhaps this could be expected when, on the one hand, the Company, as a commercial body, sought to maximize its profits, while on the other, the army was essentially a mercenary force, ever grasping for a larger slice of the fiscal pie. If, however, we penetrate deeper into the labyrinth of their relations, we find that the issues at stake lose their simplicity. In the early nineteenth century, a third group came into play, further confusing the state of civil-military relations in India. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, which had incorporated military attitudes into the operating system of British India, had begun to assert itself. Through such spokesmen as Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe and Mountstuart Elphinstone, an increasingly militarized rule of British India was put forward, angering the court of directors and allowing the officers to mask their private interest under the guise of the national interest. This ideology of militarism, however, must be firmly placed within the context of nineteenth-century British India for it bore little resemblance to those strains of militarism witnessed elsewhere.


1961 ◽  
Vol 107 (449) ◽  
pp. 687-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Shepherd

Jealousy is more than a psychiatric symptom. Its language is universal: the conduct and feelings of the jealous man and woman have repeatedly drawn the attention of the great observers of human nature, the moralists and the philosophers as well as the poets and the novelists. They have, on the whole, described the reaction more successfully than they have defined it. Even the most celebrated definitions—Descartes' “kind of fear related to a desire to preserve a possession” or Spinoza's “mixture of hate and love”, for example— merely illustrate the complexity of a term whose many nuances of meaning can be detected in its roots. The English adjective “jealous” and the noun “jealousy” are derived respectively from the French “jaloux” and “jalousie”, both taken from the old Provençal “gilos”; “gilos” in turn may be traced back to the vulgar Latin adjective “zelosus” which comes from the late Latin “zelus” and so indirectly from the Greek ζηλoς. In its transmission the word has thus been debased. It has ceased to denote “zeal” or “ardour”; the “noble passion” which stood opposed to “envy” for the Greeks has acquired a pejorative quality. In modern German the distinction is preserved verbally, “Eifersucht” having been formed from the original “Eifer” (zeal) and the suffix “-sucht”, which is cognate with “siech”, meaning “sickly”. Amorous jealousy claims associations of its own. During the seventeenth century the French word “jalousie” acquired the meaning of “blind” or “shutter”; in this sense it entered the English language as a noun in the early nineteenth century; the transmutation is thought to have signified a jocular reference to the suspicious husband or lover who could watch unobserved behind the jalousie; the Italian word “gelosia” is used in this way as early as the middle of the sixteenth century. In the Scandinavian languages separate words designate amorous jealousy. (1) The Swedish “svartsjuk”, literally “black sick”, is taken from an old expression which identified jealousy with the wearing of black socks; the Danish “skinsyg”, “afraid of getting skin (a rebuff)”, harks back to an old link of jealousy with skin which may in turn have been connected with hose or socks. (2) The origin of the colours which are traditionally employed to depict jealousy, especially black, yellow and green, is obscure.


2020 ◽  
Vol 93 (262) ◽  
pp. 715-733
Author(s):  
Keith Alcorn

Abstract Nursery owners played a critical role in transforming imported plants and trees from scientific specimens into commodities that became widespread in British gardens in the first half of the nineteenth century. This article uses rare surviving business records of London nurserymen to investigate the scale and structure of the nursery trade and its business practices between 1800 and 1850 and how nursery businesses innovated to meet the needs of an emerging middle class.


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