The European Trade with the East Indies

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Erikson
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Organizational Characteristics ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Trading Decisions ◽  
Sustained Innovation ◽  
Patterns Of Behavior ◽  
European Trade ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter undertakes a comparative analysis of the organizational characteristics of the English East India Company, highlighting the firm's record of sustained innovation through the incorporation of new markets, and the extent to which this may be explained by the degree of militarization in the Company, relations with the state, and the management of employees' private trade. While setting up a comparative argument for why individual-level trading decisions (associated with the private trade) are important to understanding the differences between the English and other East India companies, this chapter also provides the organizational background necessary to understanding why employees of the English Company would engage in certain patterns of behavior.

The Dutch and English conquest of South East Asia.

2021 ◽  
pp. 247-263
Author(s):  
James F. Hancock
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
East Indies ◽  
World Power ◽  
European Trade ◽  
Philip Ii Of Spain

Abstract The chapter summarizes the rise of Dutch and English empires. The Dutch path to world power was aided greatly in 1588, when a huge armada sent by Philip II of Spain to invade Protestant Elizabeth I's England was roundly defeated. This decisive defeat of the Spanish Armada greatly bolstered the confidence of the English and Dutch and encouraged them to forge their own routes to the riches of India and South East Asia. The chapter also discusses the first Dutch expeditions to the East Indies in search of spices and how Jacob Van Heemskerck's invasion started the end of the Portuguese monopoly on trade in the East Indies. The establishment of English and Dutch East India Company is also discussed. Finally, the chapter summarizes how the East India Companies affect the European Trade.

The English East India Company

2020 ◽  
pp. 291-330
Author(s):  
Ron Harris
Keyword(s):  
Equity Capital ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Other ◽  
Essential Component ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Legal Structure ◽  
Corporate Entity ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Royal Charter ◽  
Passive Investors

This chapter focuses on the English East India Company (EIC). In September 1599, a group of London merchants held a number of meetings that turned out to be the founding meetings of the EIC. It describes two parallel tracks—one for obtaining a royal charter that would incorporate the promoters as a corporate entity and permit them to enter trade with new territories, and the other for raising equity capital for voyages to the East Indies from a large number of passive investors. By employing this dual track, the promoters of the EIC coupled the familiar legal structure of the corporation with the less familiar element of joint stock. In contemporary constitutional terms, incorporation was considered an essential component of the monarch's exclusive and voluntary prerogative to create and grant dignities, jurisdictions, liberties, exemptions, and franchises. The chapter covers how EIC was incorporated in its first charter for a period of fifteen years, ending on December 31, 1614.

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.

This Is an Abridged Account of Delhi Which Is an Old City and One of the Chosen Ones amongst the Cities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirza Sangin Beg
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Work Spaces ◽  
History Of ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The City ◽  
Cost Of Construction

The second part of the translation has three segments. The first is dedicated to the history of Delhi from the time of the Mahabharat to the periods of Anangpal Tomar to the Mughal Emperor Humayun as also Sher Shah, the Afghan ruler. In the second and third segments Mirza Sangin Beg adroitly navigates between twin centres of power in the city. He writes about Qila Mubarak, or the Red Fort, and gives an account of the several buildings inside it and the cost of construction of the same. He ambles into the precincts and mentions the buildings constructed by Shahjahan and other rulers, associating them with some specific inmates of the fort and the functions performed within them. When the author takes a walk in the city of Shahjahanabad, he writes of numerous residents, habitations of rich, poor, and ordinary people, their mansions and localities, general and specialized bazars, the in different skills practised areas, places of worship and revelry, processions exemplifying popular culture and local traditions, and institutions that had a resonance in other cultures. The Berlin manuscript gives generous details of the officials of the English East India Company, both native and foreign, their professions, and work spaces. Mirza Sangin Beg addresses the issue of qaum most unselfconsciously and amorphously.

Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
English Translation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Times ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.

The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.

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.

Alcohol and the Ambivalence of the Early English East India Company-State

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Philip J. Stern
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Company Governance ◽  
Regulatory Instruments ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Early English

Abstract This article explores the various roles that alcohol played in defining the governance of East India Company fortifications and settlements in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that, much like elsewhere in Europe, Asia, and the colonial world, alcohol was absolutely crucial to political and social life, as well as a source of great revenue and profit for both the Company and individuals who worked for it. At the same time, it was a cause of immense anxiety and concern for Company government, which understood the use (and overuse) of alcohol as a principal sign of potential disorder and disobedience. Far from a contradiction, this ambivalence towards alcohol formed a foundation for a variety of regulatory instruments, from tavern licences to taxation, that were crucial to the establishment of early Company governance and a prime reflection of the Company's very own ambivalent nature as both merchant and sovereign.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document