Europeans, Mestizos and Slaves: The Population of Colombo At The End Of The Seventeenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit Knaap
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
White Women ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Sexual Contacts ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
English East India Company

In India under the English East India Company, it was said: “Necessity is the mother of invention and the father of the Eurasian”. This saying is based on the widespread belief that, during the first centuries of their presence in Asia, European men were to a large extent dependent on “non-white” women for their sexual contacts. The character of these early colonial settlements is therefore often described as non-European. Their population is characterised as a melting-pot of ethnic groups, dependent on the uneuropean institution of slavery. The cultural values this entailed were far from those of the mother countries, certainly not those of the (Calvinist) Netherlands.

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.

The Trade of the English East India Company in the Far East, 1623–84

1960 ◽  
Vol 92 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 32-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. K. Bassett
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Far East ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The Subject ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Work Done

Much has been written about British activities in the Far East, particularly in China, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, especially by American historians. Dr. H. B. Morse's monumental Chronicles of the East India Company trading to China was first in the field and Professor E. H. Pritchard and J. K. Fairbank have been worthy successors. English scholarship on the subject is naturally somewhat older but, possibly for that reason, the work done has not usually been as detailed or thorough: an exception is Michael Greenberg's recent book, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–42. To find general surveys of Anglo-Chinese relations by British writers which extend back into the seventeenth century, it is necessary to turn to the books of A. J. Sargent and J. Bromley Eames. But as far as the seventeenth century is concerned historical research has been scanty. That Greenberg should have regarded a summary of events before the period with which he was immediately concerned as sufficient for his purpose was only natural. Fairbank's introductory chapters are more comprehensive but show greater interest in the attitude of the Chinese to external intruders than in the efforts of the East India Company to intrude. Sargent, as he himself acknowledged, was mainly concerned with the nineteenth century and his attempt to provide a historical background was very superficial. Eames paid considerable attention to early British contacts with China but was prone to errors of fact which make him unreliable.

The Long Road to Livorno: The Overland Messenger Services of the Dutch East India Company in the Seventeenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
René J. Barendse
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Portuguese Empire ◽  
Thin Thread ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company

The overland communications between Asia and Europe were of crucial importance to the economic and military survival of the East India companies. This applies equally to the English, French and Dutch East India companies - and even to the Portuguese empire.At some of the most crucial moments of its history, the very survival of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) depended on the thin thread connecting it overland to Europe. One of these crises occurred in the mid-seventeenth century when during the first Anglo-Dutch war, English fleets challenged Dutch naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. Reflecting on the defeat of the British fleets and the near eradication of the English East India Company or EIC's naval presence there in 1654, the Dutch director of Surat commented: ‘We would never have gained such an easy victory if the English had reacted more promptly or had we not received warnings so promptly [tijdig].’ Similarly, the catastrophic defeat suffered at a later date by the French admiral De la Haye is normally attributed to De la Haye's hesitations. Yet is is doubtful whether the VOC would have been able ot assemble a fleet quickly enough to destroy De la Haye's fleet had the VOC not received messages overland.

The Imperial Coronation of 1819: Awadh, the British and the Mughals

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Other ◽  
North India ◽  
Gangetic Plain ◽  
Indian History ◽  
The Face ◽  
English East India Company

The interaction among the expanding British, the regional rulers of the Gangetic plain, and Mughal Emperors stands central to Indian history during the first half of the nineteenth century. Each of these three groups determined to advance its own political and cultural values in the face of the conflicting expectations and assumptions of the other two. The English East India Company regarded itself as under the authority of the British Parliament and the sovereignty of the British crown. At the same time, the Company continued nominally to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Mughal Emperor, at least in India. The various regional rulers of north India, most prominently the rulers of the province of Awadh, acted and apparently perceived themselves as de facto independent of the Mughals while also symbolically submitted to Mughal sovereignty. The Mughal Emperors, whose power to command armies had faded to nothingness during the last half of the eighteenth century, continued to pretend to absolute sovereignty over virtually all of India until 1858. Each of these three groups wished to see the 1819 imperial coronation by the Awadh ruler as an overt proof of their own cultural values and of their understanding of their relationships to the others.

The Mughal Fiscal System in Surat and the English East India Company

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-718 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhat Hasan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Common View ◽  
Corporate Body ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Fiscal System ◽  
The Common ◽  
English East India Company

In this paper an attempt is made to outline the basic structure of taxes on trade and commerce at the Mughal port of Surat during the seventeenth century. This is explored chiefly from documents relating to the English East India Company. By the very nature of the Company being a foreign corporate body, it did not represent a typical ‘peddling’ tax-payer. But the system in so far as the ordinary merchants were concerned, can be restored for us indirectly by considering how far the Company was favoured in taxation matters. We may also reconsider the common view that the English enjoyed ‘invidious trading privileges’ by virtue of the orders of the imperial court, and that it was their privileges that explain their ultimate success in India.

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