The Reckoning

2020 ◽  
pp. 112-147
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Central Component ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Financial Settlement

The English government struggled for thirty years to receive restitution for the incident they had come to know as the Amboyna Massacre. This chapter traces the repercussions in the Indian Ocean and especially in Europe. In England, the English traders who had survived the conspiracy trial became the key witnesses for the East India Company. This chapter explores how these men created new lives for themselves in the wake of the trial. A central component to the success of the East India Company in securing restitution was the publication of old and new Amboyna pamphlets, as well as new illustrations, especially during the 1650s and the First Anglo-Dutch War. The Treaty of Westminster resolved all outstanding claims in 1654, but the animosities of the Amboyna crisis ensured that the English remained dissatisfied with a financial settlement alone and still looked for justice.

France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Marvin ◽  
Blake Smith
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
French Military ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The 19Th Century

France was a latecomer to the Indian Ocean among European powers. After some tentative and short-lived initiatives by private merchants, the first French East India Company was founded in 1664 by a French monarchy eager to catch up with England and the Netherlands, which had founded companies of their own at the beginning of the 17th century. Competing with the English and Dutch to replace the Portuguese as the preeminent European power in the Indian Ocean, France gradually established a network of colonial holdings that included the island colonies of the Mascarenes in the southwestern Indian Ocean (Réunion and Mauritius) as well as a network of trading posts along the shores of the Indian subcontinent. Plans to expand this colonial empire to Madagascar, however, met with repeated failure. Established as a regional power by the middle of the 18th century, France would be reduced by the century’s end to the role of a spectator of Britain’s rising hegemony. Nevertheless, France held on to some of its Indian Ocean territories, including Réunion and Pondicherry in South Asia. These outposts of French imperialism would inspire nostalgia, regret, and new colonial ambitions among metropolitan observers, and they would become sites of cultural hybridity and exchange. Indeed, while France’s empire in the Indian Ocean is often overshadowed by the emergence of British dominance in the 19th century, or by the intensity of French investment in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean was a key area of French military, diplomatic, economic, and cultural interest in the 17th and 18th centuries, and beyond.

The Promises and Perils of Subjecthood and Jurisdiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Weiss Muller
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Government ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Chapter 5 moves to the Indian Ocean and centers on the vibrant trading community of Calcutta. The East India Company’s assumption of the diwani for Bengal in 1765 and its accelerating territorial expansion in the Indian subcontinent provoked concerns about subject status and jurisdiction over those residing in Company territories. These concerns were never fully resolved by the 1773 Regulating Act and were intimately connected to struggles over authority between the British government and the East India Company. This chapter identifies the range of individuals actually subject to the Supreme Court of Judicature, founded in 1774, at the same time as it focuses on the political and jurisdictional repercussions of subject status. It underlines why the judiciary became a central site for negotiations over subjecthood and how subject status became a malleable tool in the hands of judges.

The Maritime Adventures of Grand Eunuch Ho

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Willetts
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Mandate Of Heaven ◽  
To Receive

In 1368 a native Chinese dynasty, the Ming, received the Mandate of Heaven, and after a century and a half of alien rule a true son of Han ascended the Dragon Throne. A burst of diplomatic activity followed. It took the form of a grandiose series of naval expeditions designed to announce to the more-or-less petty rulers of South Asia the advent of a new native house, and to receive their tribute. Over the next hundred years the Chinese established themselves as the dominant naval power in the Indian Ocean.

Christopher Henrik Braad (1728-81) and his extracts in 1760 from the Surat Capuchins' mission diary that they had kept since the 1650s. An Introduction

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 435-448
Author(s):  
Jeremy Franks
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The City ◽  
Made In

AbstractMade in Surat, India, in 1760, these extracts from a confidential diary kept in French by a Capuchin mission there since the 1650s are presented in a 21st-century translation into English. Beginning when Aurangzeb became the Mughal emperor, they record nearly a century of significant events while the mission survived as the city declined. The manuscript of extracts, held by Uppsala University, is the only known evidence of the diary's existence. C.H. Braad (1728-81), a senior trader for the Swedish East India Company when he made the extracts, was a Stockholm-born Lutheran. The Catholic Capuchins' trust that he, alone of countless Europeans in Surat, would keep the diary secret—as he did to the end of his life—is good reason for relying on his accuracy. The introduction provides a context for the extracts by drawing on his extensive, still unpublished writings about India: Surat in 1750-51, Bengal in the mid 1750s and his autobiography from 1781 for this and his voyages in the Indian Ocean.

scholarly journals Slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire: A global comparison

2008 ◽  
Vol 82 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rik van Welie
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Global Comparison ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Dutch Colonial

Compares slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire, specifically between the former trading and territorial domains of the West India Company (WIC), the Americas and West Africa, and of the East India Company (VOC), South East Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and South and East Africa. Author presents the latest quantitative assessments concerning the Dutch transatlantic as well as Indian Ocean World slave trade, placing the volume, direction, and characteristics of the forced migration in a historical context. He describes how overall the Dutch were a second-rate player in Atlantic slavery, though in certain periods more important, with according to recent estimates a total of about 554.300 slaves being transported by the Dutch to the Americas. He indicates that while transatlantic slave trade and slavery received much scholarly attention resulting in detailed knowledge, the slave trade and slavery in the Indian Ocean World by the Dutch is comparatively underresearched. Based on demand-side estimates throughout Dutch colonies of the Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere, he deduces that probably close to 500.000 slaves were transported by the Dutch in the Indian Ocean World. In addition, the author points at important differences between the nature and contexts of slavery, as in the VOC domains slavery was mostly of an urban and domestic character, contrary to its production base in the Americas. Slavery further did in the VOC areas not have a rigid racial identification like in WIC areas, with continuing, postslavery effects, and allowed for more flexibility, while unlike the plantation colonies in the Caribbean, as Suriname, not imported slaves but indigenous peoples formed the majority. He also points at relative exceptions, e.g. imported slaves for production use in some VOC territories, as the Banda islands and the Cape colony, and a certain domestic and urban focus of slavery in Curaçao.

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.

English Private Trade on the West Coast of India, c. 1680–c. 1740

Itinerario ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Davies
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
West Coast Of India ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Indian Ocean World

This article explores the private trade networks of English East India Company merchants on the west coast of India during the first half of the eighteenth century. Existing studies of English private trade in the Indian Ocean have almost exclusively focused on India's eastern seaboard, the Coromandel Coast and the Bay of Bengal regions. This article argues that looking at private trade from the perspective of the western Indian Ocean provides a different picture of this important branch of European trade. It uses EIC records and merchants' private papers to argue against recent metropolitan-centred approaches to English private trade, instead emphasising the importance of more localised political and economic contexts, within the Indian Ocean world, for shaping the conduct and success of this commerce.

scholarly journals Convicts, Commodities, and Connections in British Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1789–1866

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (S27) ◽  
pp. 205-227
Author(s):  
Clare Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Company Governance ◽  
Convict Transportation ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article explores the transportation of Indian convicts to the port cities of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean during the period 1789 to 1866. It considers the relationship between East India Company transportation and earlier and concurrent British Crown transportation to the Americas and Australia. It is concerned in particular with the interconnection between convictism and enslavement in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Examining the roots of transportation in South Asia in the repressive policies of the East India Company, especially in relation to its occupation of land and expropriation of resources, it moves on to discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in Moulmein, Singapore, Mauritius, and Aden. This includes their labour regime and their relationship to other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was part of a carceral circuit of repression and coerced labour extraction that was intertwined with the expansion of East India Company governance and trade. The Company used transportation as a means of removing resistant subjects from their homes, and of supplying an unfree labour force to develop commodity exports and to build the infrastructure necessary for the establishment, population, and connection of littoral nodes. However, the close confinement and association of convicts during transportation rendered the punishment a vector for the development of transregional political solidarities, centred in and around the Company's port cities.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
British Empire ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Regional Setting ◽  
European Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
English Culture

A conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators in the Indian Ocean in 1623 caused a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known in English culture for four centuries as the Amboyna Massacre. This introduction explains the European context of the Anglo-Dutch alliance that helped produce the conspiracy and that in turn enabled the English East India Company to create the massacre. In creating the incident as a massacre, the English East India Company yoked the episode to a new word, “massacre”; detached the conspiracy from its regional setting; and created new histories for the episode—as a massacre and as a story of violence against English innocents that would in turn become foundational to the history of the British Empire.

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