The East India Company and the island of Johanna (Anjouan) during the long eighteenth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-233
Author(s):  
H. V. Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Mozambique Channel ◽  
Maritime Operations ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Maritime Infrastructure ◽  
Do So

For just over 230 years the East India Company’s maritime operations were supported by a far-flung network of islands, ports and watering points across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These places provided supplies to company ships and safe havens in times of danger. The island of Johanna, or Anjouan, in the Mozambique Channel was one such place and this article considers how it came to be a key component within the company’s maritime system. The article also examines why the company chose not to exert direct control over the island when it had the opportunity to do so at the end of the eighteenth century. It is concluded that Johanna formed an important part of the flexible and durable maritime infrastructure that underpinned the territorial empire constructed by the company in India from 1750 onwards.

Life in the foreign quarters of Canton: The case of the Swedish East India Company in the long eighteenth century

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 798-802 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Hellman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Small Space ◽  
Intercultural Interaction ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Special Relations ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

This note describes a project analysing the everyday life in the foreign quarters of Canton, focusing on the Swedish East India Company employees 1730–1830. Canton was a well-known hub in the global trade during the long 18th century. However, it had strict restrictions on the foreign traders. Additionally, this port had a complex make-up in terms of ethnicity, class and religion, and I argue for the need to take its many groups into account. The Swedish company is a rare topic of study compared to other, larger companies, but it provides an unusual perspective: that of the small and non-colonial European company meeting a large and powerful Asian empire. The intercultural interaction in Canton took place in a very small space. This environment, in a restricted space, under Asian control, with many different groups, made for special relations among the foreign traders, and between the foreigners. This is particularly clear when focusing on the everyday life. I have studied the daily life Swedish employees in terms of how they acted as parts of groups, how they lived in this cramped space, their communication (amongst themselves and with others), their consumption and material practices, and finally which practices and strategies they used to establish trust.

Military Scotland in the Age of Proto-globalisation, c. 1690 to c. 1815

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Mackillop
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Military Service ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Officer Corps ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Class A ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

This chapter considers the way in which military service acted as an agent of mobility and a means of extending global networks. In the long eighteenth century. The so-called military economy allowed Scots, who were over-represented in the British officer corps, to use existing regional and kinship connections to extend a form of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. Service in the armies of the East India Company provided Scots from the emerging middle class a means for social mobility. The creation of these networks allowed Scottish localities to connect directly to the remotest areas of the British empire.

Opium and the Company: Maritime Trade and Imperial Finances on Java, 1684–1796

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEORGE BRYAN SOUZA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Over Time

AbstractWhile trade in opium was of limited financial significance in the eighteenth century to the larger accounts of the Dutch East India Company as a whole, this article shows its critical importance to the Company's comptoir accounts at Batavia. The article examines the VOC's commercial operations at Batavia in the eighteenth century and places opium trade and opium revenues within that larger context. It examines how the trade in Bengal opium through Batavia changed over time, based on a statistical analysis of the Company's accounts. These results show that opium dwarfed all other individual or groups of commodities that were available to the Company to sell profitably on Java and in the Indonesian Archipelago over the long eighteenth century.

scholarly journals The Dutch Mogharaer, Arabic Muḥarrar, and Javanese Law Books: A VOC Experiment with Muslim Law in Java, 1747–1767

Itinerario ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmood Kooria
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Chinese Subjects

This article examines the claims of Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials in the mid-eighteenth century regarding the Islamic source of a legal code prepared for the local population in Semarang, northeast Java. Although the VOC had encountered local legal cultures in Indonesia since the mid-seventeenth century, it preferred to circumvent those in favour of European laws whenever possible. But in the eighteenth century, VOC officials addressed indigenous legal systems more directly when the company sought possibilities for direct control. This resulted in the production of many codes on the legal status of Muslim and Chinese subjects of Indonesia. In the process of codification, some officials claimed to have consulted Islamic legal texts and Muslim jurists. One criminal code that came out of the effort supposedly took its rulings accurately from the Mugharrar, which is possibly the Muḥarrar written by the Islamic jurist ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1226). I argue that this assertion is baseless, and demonstrate that the very pretense is part of a larger colonial project that sought legitimacy from the indigenous subjects at a time of political and economic crises.

Liberty, Property and Popular Politics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
The University

Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career. Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The book includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

Gender, Class and a Naming Process in the English Long Eighteenth Century: Leicestershire c. 1680-1836

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-68
Author(s):  
Dave Postles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Society ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

During the 'long eighteenth century', a novel practice of naming was introduced into England which had a long precedent in some parts of continental Europe. Associated at first with aristocratic status, two 'forenames' were selectively adopted at various levels of English society. How that process occurred is illustrated here through a selective sample of Leicestershire parishes as it varied by the intersections of gender and class.

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.

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