Competition and Control in the Market for Textiles: Indian Weavers and the English East India Company in the Eighteenth Century

2013 ◽  
pp. 281-305
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
And Control

scholarly journals Styles of mastery of a Calcutta Brahman family: Krishnachandra Ghoshal’s pilgrimage to Gaya, Kashi and Prayag, 1769, in Vijayram Sen’s Ti-rthaman.gala

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-123
Author(s):  
David L. Curley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Gift Exchanges ◽  
And Control

This article examines styles of mastery practised by a wealthy, managerial Brahman family in late eighteenth-century Bengal, when managerial Brahmans found new opportunities in association with the English East India Company. It is based on Tīrthamaṅgala by Vijayram Sen, a verse narrative of a pilgrimage in 1769, led by Krishnachandra Ghoshal for the purpose of performing the trayasthalī śrāddha in Gaya, Kashi and Prayag. Krishnachandra was the elder brother of Gokulchandra Ghoshal, who then was the chief banian of Governor Harry Verelst. The poem describes agencies that enabled the Ghoshals’ success and purposes that shaped their identity. It represents the family’s practices of accountancy, patronage and charity. It represents Krishnachandra’s self-control and control of others, his austerity and munificence in shraddha rites (obsequies), and his use of both Indo-Persian and Sanskrit codes of conduct in gift exchanges and formal conversations. In quite different settings, he used ‘pleasing conversations’ or discussions of knowledge in Sanskrit texts. Both kinds of formal conversation revealed the ‘character’ or ‘dignity’ of participants, and introduced them to important men whom they did not already know. Portraying agencies and purposes that were both this-worldly and spiritual, the poem does not categorically distinguish them. It does de-emphasise courtly aesthetics.

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.

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 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 

Managing Expertise: The Problem of Engineers in the English East India Company, 1668–1764

Itinerario ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Tim Riding
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early History ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Knowledge Network ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
English East India Company

Abstract This article challenges the assumption that the early modern engineer acted as a reliable agent for colonial authorities. Far from acting as trusted mediators between colony and metropole, experts could exacerbate tensions. The English East India Company knew this, and avoided engineers throughout its early history. This article considers the interplay between authorities in London and their subordinates in Bombay. The company's directors saw engineers as untrustworthy agents who increased expenditure and disrupted the company's system of consultative governance. For much of its early modern history, the company's fortifications and built environments relied on a knowledge network of informal expertise. Examining these experts-in-context reveals how expertise was managed and built environments maintained in colonial settings. When the company did turn to experts in the mid-eighteenth century, it struggled to utilise and incorporate them. This demonstrates that in some colonial contexts experts could be profoundly disruptive.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document