European Merchant Tribute in Yemen

The Gift ◽

Local Grammar ◽

Foreign Merchants

Drawing on the gift registers of the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company, this chapter shows that the gifts bestowed by European merchants in Yemen may not be collapsed indistinguishably with other types of offerings, such as diplomatic bestowals, imperial gifts, and acts of pious charity. By contrast, European merchants’ gifts were comprised of relatively routine trade items and were remarkably formulaic in nature, thus overlapping with Indian Ocean commodities in uneven and unexpected ways and drawing their power and meaning from their association with extended commercial geographies. A close perusal of European commercial gifting practices also reveals that foreign merchants became quite adept at the local grammar of giving, even if they decried its legitimacy in their letters back to home offices.

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

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115300004708 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

pp. 25-43 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

René J. Barendse

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Indian Ocean ◽

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.

Inventing the English Massacre

10.1093/oso/9780197507735.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Alison Games

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

British Empire ◽

English Language ◽

East India Company ◽

Violent Event ◽

The Indian Ocean ◽

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.

The Portuguese Estado da Índia (Empire in Asia)

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.329 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Zoltán Biedermann

Keyword(s):

East Africa ◽

20Th Century ◽

East India Company ◽

16Th Century ◽

Republic Of China ◽

Negotiated Agreements ◽

Cape Of Good Hope ◽

Trading Posts ◽

English East India Company

The origins of the Portuguese Estado da Índia—the sum of all Portuguese Crown possessions east of the Cape of Good Hope—can be traced back to the late 1400s, most importantly to the inaugural voyage of Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to Calicut (Kozhikode) in 1497–1498. After some initial hesitations, the Portuguese Crown created a governorship for India in 1505, with a seat at Cochin (Kochi) later transferred to Goa, to oversee commercial, military, administrative, and other activities in an increasing number of possessions along the shores of East Africa and Maritime Asia. Portuguese trading posts (feitorias), forts, and fortified towns across the region resulted from conquest or, more frequently, from negotiated agreements with local rulers, on whose cooperation the Portuguese generally relied. The Estado reached its apex in the second half of the 16th century, drawing vast resources from trade around the Cape and within Asian and African waters, while investing increasingly in military and religious campaigns in a variety of regions from southeastern Africa to the Moluccas (Malukus) and Japan. Despite significant losses to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the English East India Company (EIC) during the 17th century, the Estado survived until the 20th century. Goa became a part of the Indian Union in 1961, and Macao integrated into the People’s Republic of China in 1999. The perceived decadence of the Estado during much of its history is at odds with its longevity and has prompted longstanding debates about the nature of Portuguese power in Asia; its reliance on trade, military might, and imperial ideas; and its intertwinement with Asian polities and societies.

Book Reviews : ASHIN DASGUPTA, Merchants of Maritime India 1500-1800, Variorium, 1994. SINAPPAH ARASARATNAM, Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century, OUP, 1994. OM PRAKASH, Precious Metals and Commerce. The Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean Trade, Variorium, 1994. SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM (ed.), Money and the Market in India 1100-1700, Oxford in India Readings, OUP, 1994

The Indian Economic & Social History Review ◽

10.1177/001946469603300205 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 33 (2) ◽

pp. 209-218

Author(s):

Lakshmi Subramanian

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Indian Ocean ◽

Precious Metals ◽

East India Company ◽

Indian Ocean Trade ◽

The Indian Ocean

Shāh ‘Abbās, the English East India Company and the Cannoneers of Fārs

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115300013048 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

pp. 104-125 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Colin Paul Mitchell

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

Early Modern ◽

North Africa ◽

Profit Sharing ◽

East India Company ◽

Underlying Assumption ◽

Relative Ease ◽

Preliminary Step ◽

European Technology

To nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship, the early modern expansion of powers like Spain, Portugal, England and Holland, was a necessary preliminary step towards Europe's ultimate domination of the Asian and African continents. Moreover, the relative ease with which colonial powers manhandled regions like North Africa and the Indo-Pak subcontinent suggested that their early modern ‘pioneering’ counterparts must have shared similar experiences. While some historians highlighted superior business concepts (joint-stock companies, profit-sharing) or superior shipbuilding and navigation techniques as the means with which trading powers like the Estado da India and the English East India Company penetrated and overwhelmed Indian Ocean commerce, other scholars boiled it down to the European affinity for using ‘men-of-war, gun, and shot’. The critical underlying assumption of any of these teleological explanations s i that ‘encountered’ cultures were unable to adequately respond to European technology, of course hinting at some deeper and more profound deficiency. Scholarship in recent decades has shorn such confidence and begun to scrutinise this seedling period of interaction between Europe and non-Europe, suggesting that the initial playing ground between ‘encounterer’ and ‘encountered’ was perhaps more level than previously portrayed.

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

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115314000357 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 38 (2) ◽

pp. 51-73 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

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 ◽

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.

Introduction

Inventing the English Massacre ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197507735.003.0001 ◽

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 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.

No Boats to China. The Dutch East India Company and the Changing Pattern of the China Sea Trade, 1635–1690

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x00014086 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 51-76 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Leonard Blussé

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

East India Company ◽

China Sea ◽

China Trade ◽

The Indian Ocean ◽

Direct Trade

By 1690 the Supreme Government of the Indies in Batavia agreed that, financially speaking, it was no longer wise to continue the direct trade between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and China. It was argued that the vessels so far used for the China trade could be better deployed in the Indian Ocean.

From Hold to Foredeck: Slave Professions in the Maritime World of the East India Company, c. 1660-1720

Maritime History as Global History ◽

10.5949/liverpool/9780986497339.003.0005 ◽

2010 ◽

Author(s):

Anna Winterbottom

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

Forced Migration ◽

East India Company ◽

Maritime Industry ◽

The Indian Ocean ◽

English East India Company

This chapter analyses slave professions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Indian Ocean. It explores the activities of the English East India Company in the Indian Ocean and the utilisation of slave labour within the company itself. It tackles the use of slaves in maritime industry; the obfuscation of slavery with titles that resembled employment; the movement and forced migration of slaves; the routes into slavery; methods of slave-stealing; and the slave professions - sailors, soldiers, interpreters, doctors, builders, gardeners, domestic slaves, and concubines. It concludes that slaves were a source of revenue for the company, and were forcibly relocated both to quell resistance and to further distribute and exploit their skillsets.

Inventing the Amboyna Massacre

Inventing the English Massacre ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197507735.003.0004 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 76-111

Author(s):

Alison Games

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

English Language ◽

East India Company ◽

Divine Providence ◽

Habsburg Empire ◽

History Of ◽

The Government ◽

True Relation

The English East India Company turned the Amboyna conspiracy into the Amboyna massacre in 1624. Massacre was a relatively new word in the English language. This chapter analyzes how the company drew on this new word, detached the incident from its Indian Ocean origins, and obscured the participation of non-Europeans in creating the massacre. At a time of renewed Anglo-Dutch alliance, the company could not use the word massacre in print, so it created this powerful message in other ways, especially in a pamphlet called the True Relation and through illustrations of tortured traders. By linking the executed English traders to martyrs, miracles, and acts of divine providence, the company crafted an enduring history of the Amboyna Massacre. The Habsburg Empire printed its own works in an effort to sever the alliance. This chapter charts the tension between the EIC and the English government as the government sought to secure the Dutch alliance and suppressed multiple works connected to Amboyna.