East India Company , The

A History

Philip Lawson

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317897644
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Historia
• Thema: Historia del mundo

This is the first short history of the East India Company from its founding in 1600 to its demise in 1857, designed for students and academics. The Company was central to the growth of the British Empire in India, to the development of overseas trade, and to the rise of shareholder capitalism, so this survey will be essential reading for imperial and economic historians and historians of Asia alike. It stresses the neglected early years of the Company, and its intimate relationship with (and impact upon) the domestic British scene.

CHAPTER ONE

England and the East in the Sixteenth Century

THE NAME OF THE GAME: CONTEXT TO BRITISH TRADE IN THE EAST

Any discussion of the European and Asian trading world within which the East India Company emerged in 1600, needs to be prefaced with a word about context. In particular it is necessary to appreciate some basic English assumptions about establishing links between London and the East in the sixteenth century. The first concerns the term East, and its close relations, like the East Indies, Asia and India. These terms were, to all intents and purposes, interchangeable in the context of the sixteenth-century debate about the grand design of England gaining direct access to eastern markets. The East could mean a number of geographical locations from which exotic oriental products emanated. Few of the written records that exist promoting a trading enterprise to the East in this period display a serious concern with geographical detail.

In retrospect this haziness is understandable. Modern methods of cartography were in their infancy, and the sea-borne trading world of the East into which Europeans had thrust their mariners at the end of the fifteenth century proved a diverse place indeed (M. Bowen 1981: 34–6). Centuries-old networks of exchange existed in the East Indian islands, north to China and Japan, west to the Indian sub-continent, and even further west into the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. This huge area witnessed trade in all manner of raw and manufactured products, and, rather than discriminate in accounts of the nations and peoples involved in this cycle of exchange, the English tendency until well into the eighteenth century was to refer to all these places with the generic term – the East.

There existed a similar lack of focus when it came to the question of just what it was that the English wanted from the East. In the chapters that follow, analysing the history of the East India Company over 250 years or so, economic themes loom large. This is not surprising for a trading organization of this type, economic motives provided this Company and others with a raison d’être in good times and bad. Before 1600, however, the reasons for looking East did not appear so reductionist or clear cut. Interest in the Orient was not concentrated solely on trade. There were those encouraging voyages to the East for purely nationalistic reasons; to outdo the Spanish and Portuguese. Others wished to sail around Africa and make landfall in India for religious reasons; to spread Christianity and encircle the Islamic powers of the region (Scammell 1989: 68). In addition there existed a good deal of interest in sailing the eastern seas for plunder and piracy; and both these factors would blight the orderly development of the East India Company’s position in the East over the next century. Last, but by no means least, a great motivating factor behind the desire to go East was the simple thirst for knowledge and adventure in unknown seas. The phenomenal propaganda success of Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe from 1577 to 1580 provides a perfect illustration of this fact. His exploits captured the imagination of English people because they were presented with the right blend of Protestant national fervour triumphing over Catholic perfidy on the high seas, and the more personal story of native seamen surviving the uncharted but perilous waters of the unknown world. The lure of such adventures cannot be neglected as an important element in encouraging England’s eastern design in the late sixteenth century. The more mundane, and narrowly focused, diplomatic efforts at breaking into eastern markets in these years clearly drew inspiration from the support and interest aroused by the actions of figures such as Drake and his fellow circumnavigator, Sir Thomas Cavendish (Morison 1978: 719–21; Rabb 1967: 19–22).

A related factor in this context of England’s perceived desire of the East concerns trade goods themselves and modes of exchange. By the end of the sixteenth century the English had knowledge of many eastern products, most of which could be described as exotic luxuries. These included precious stones, expensive spices, ceramics and silks. Such products were not the necessities of life, but they made it more bearable and fashionable, especially for the élite. No less important, they could be the avenue to quick riches for those merchants and middlemen fortunate enough to handle this merchandise. In such an economic framework of supply and demand it would obviously pay the English merchants to have direct access to eastern products rather than rely on other Europeans to bring them in. Nevertheless, it should not be assumed that a simple causal relationship occurred whereby the English wanted and then suddenly achieved direct access to eastern markets. Far from it: until the 1580s few Englishmen knew where direct access to these goods could be secured either by land or sea. Popular literature, which politicians, merchants and the reading public readily assimilated, circulated stories of fabulous wealth and kingdoms in the Orient (Lawson 1989). But there was nothing of either physical or practical use in these images for opening up a trade. The English first invented an East that bore no relation to the reality of the temporal or spatial imperatives of trading there. Only when fragments of information from actual voyagers and travellers began circulating in the 1580s and 1590s did they see the error of their ways. Accounts by Drake and Cavendish, for example, not only contradicted all romantic notions of dealing with native and European powers in the East but also revealed the sheer logistical magnitude of the task facing English captains and their fleets. In the last two decades of the century, therefore, England’s role in these trading patterns of the Orient had to be reinvented.

In the 1580s and 1590s this process got under way with a systematic approach to educating the English about the eastern enterprise, evident in the work of writers such as Richard Hakluyt and translators like Thomas Hickock (Parker 1965: 129–33). Hakluyt, in particular, believed that England’s future survival and greatness as a nation lay in developing a colonial and trading empire overseas. He himself undertook the mammoth task of gathering and disseminating all available information about the Orient to further this aim. Personal interviews, translations from foreign travel accounts, folklore and any relevant histories all fell within his purview, and it is not surprising that with such expert knowledge he became an adviser to those planning a trading company to the East by a sea route around the Cape of Good Hope. This tinge of reality that observers such as Hakluyt brought to the English view of the East was certainly welcome and very timely, and yet it would be an exaggeration to say that old impressions of eastern geography and civilizations were eradicated overnight. Put bluntly, by 1600 the English were ready to sail east around the Cape, but the ultimate destination of the voyage remained unclear. No one quite knew what would happen when an English fleet entered the Indian Ocean and the seas beyond. The first royal charter granted to the East India Company echoed all these uncertainties, and simply hedged around the question of a specific destination; its operations were … to be global, comprising

the said East-Indies, in the Countries and Parts of Asia and Africa, and into and from all the Islands, Ports, Havens, Cities, Creeks, Towns, and Places in Asia and Africa, and America, or any of them, beyond the Cape of Bona Esperanza to the Straits of Magellan, where any Trade of Traffick or Merchandize may be used or had …¹

The lesson to be learned from such documentation is that initially the English had no particular interest in the Indian subcontinent. A perception emerged in the late sixteenth century that the best oriental markets (and thus profits) lay in the East Indian islands of Java, Sumatra, the Bandas and Moluccas to which India might prove a stepping-stone. The whole enterprise was no more certain than this, and the fact that any fleets set sail in the first years of the seventeenth century represents an enormous tribute to the spirit and courage of the seamen involved.

In the event the English risked all and eventually succeeded after 1600 in finding a niche in the trade networks of the East. However, one further complication had to be resolved before the rules of this trading game were mastered. Again it stemmed from inexperience. Of those promoting this eastern design in the late sixteenth century, few had bothered to consider what sort of trade patterns would develop, if all other obstacles to direct access could be overcome. On the surface this appeared to be the least of the worries related to establishing an oriental trade, and yet it presented a fundamental problem for the simple reason that English export products, principally woollen cloth, lead and tin, proved very expensive and not in great demand in the markets of the East. The only cargo of real interest to the merchants of the East was silver bullion which could be of benefit to the English in any exchange because of its higher value in Asia compared to Europe. Yet under existing English law, its exportation was forbidden. Consideration of this practicality then opened the door on to other imponderables: could a dispensation on the bullion restriction be had? If so, would the straight import value of an eastern cargo recoup the initial outlay or would the English have to become involved in the inter-port carrying trade of the Indian Ocean? And, finally, might it be necessary to develop a re-export trade to Antwerp from England of eastern goods to make the enterprise viable? Any one of these questions left unanswered was capable of bringing the whole eastern design down, and all three were crucial factors in the policy of fits and starts that characterized English contact with the East in the early seventeenth century. Up to the 1590s the salient experiences of England’s designs in the East had proved to be uncertainty, lack of focus, inexperience and misconception. There was much to learn in this context, therefore, but so little time to enjoy the lesson with European competitors, like the Dutch, on the horizon. That such a legacy was overcome in the seventeenth century says a great deal about the hopes and aspirations of the English; not least because other, more immediate, problems had still to be solved – in particular, the establishment of a trading company to fulfil these long-held goals in the East.

HOPES AND ASPIRATIONS OF A COMPANY TRADING TO THE EAST

To explain the appearance and early success of the East India Company on the international trading scene after 1600 used to be a simple matter. The phenomenon of a trading company becoming an imperial power over the span of 250 years or so was rooted in the glories of the Elizabethan age. The accession of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558 seemed to later generations of writers and scholars the very point when the most debilitating constraints on English overseas expansion receded. This Protestant heroine became in the words of one seventeenth-century MP (Sir John Eliot), ‘Elizabeth, that glorious star, glorious beyond any of her predecessors’. A cult of the invincible Gloriana grew up in English writing, originating in the work of writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare, and lasting well into the twentieth century. And in the making of this mythology about Elizabeth’s reign, the eastern design played its part. Sir George Birdwood, who did much to publicize the records of the old India Office Library in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, captured this heritage perfectly when he lamented that 17 November, the day of her accession or, as it was known, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Day’, was no longer a public holiday: ‘it should still be so observed, at least in the India Office, and in British India’, he wrote in 1886, ‘in praise perennial of Her Imperious Majesty’s heroic memory.’²

The misleading assumptions embodied in this unashamedly nationalistic cult have only come to be questioned in the later twentieth century. It is not difficult to see why. The story of a warrior queen taking the fight for the spoils of new worlds outside Europe to her Catholic enemies has enduring emotional appeal, especially when it is dressed up in the heroic exploits of men such as Drake, Cavendish and Hawkins. However, in an age that has seen the collapse of empire and the state’s economic might, such interpretations of English overseas expansion are now considered inadequate. Heroic exploits and bellicose nationalism in traditional histories encapsulate a singular and uncomplicated vision of the nation’s past; one in which the state controls its own destiny. Thus, when Elizabeth and her ministers wished to trade with the East, they simply chartered a company for the purpose, and ensured its success through aggressive diplomacy, and, if necessary, force of arms. Such a narrow vision of the East India Company’s emergence in English history may be attractive reading but it is an incomplete analysis of this dynamic in expansion to the East. Modern historical research on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries illustrates that the so-called glories of the Elizabethan moment played but one small part in the quest and eventual organization of an overseas trade to the Orient. By the sixteenth century there existed a backdrop of European and global exchange that the English could neither avoid nor ignore if they wished to take a role in the drama. And it is within this broader supra-national context that a revised view of the East India Company’s foundation and early experience has evolved.

This process of reinterpretation begins with an acceptance of the fact that the formation of the East India Company was not a novel event in itself, but the culmination of almost a hundred years of erratic attempts at securing direct access to eastern markets. Indeed, the founding of the ‘Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East Indies … ‘, as it was described in the royal charter of 1600, could be termed a last desperate throw in England’s efforts to gain those eastern markets the produce of which was then controlled in Europe by Portugal, Spain and Holland. The English enjoyed the fruits of European trade with the East throughout the sixteenth century, but they paid a higher price for these products because of its control by foreign middlemen, and supply could prove unreliable for the same reason. This economic disadvantage in relation to eastern trade irked successive English monarchs, their councils, parliaments and merchant élites from Henry VII’s reign onwards. Yet there existed few practical means by which to remedy this ailment. The English state and its trade structures were backward in comparison to its European competitors. Its rulers faced the constant prospect of wanting to break into a trading network that saw European ships making successful voyages to the East Indies, while lacking the resources to do so. First the Portuguese, then the Spanish and Dutch all had an edge on the English when it came to sea-borne trade to the East. Their superiority covered straightforward sailing technology right through to the financial organization and support for expensive, hazardous, deep-sea voyages in tropical waters (Parry 1981: 38–114). In consequence, these European nations, not England, led the way in innovation and the adaptation of medieval techniques used in the short-haul trade routes which eventually resulted in the great merchant marines of fair-skinned sailors in the East by 1600.

Nevertheless, the fact that the English knew nothing in detail of this trading world, and could not provide the resources before 1600 to find a toe-hold in its structures, does not mean they did not try. England’s interest in the trade of the East began a century before the founding of the East India Company. This interest never amounted to much in practical terms, principally because of England’s weakness in the framework of European power politics of the sixteenth century. After the epic voyages of Columbus across the Atlantic and da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope to India in the 1490s, the two Catholic powers, Spain and Portugal, decided to partition the world. Their basic intent was simply to avoid conflict and monopolize trade routes to the East, which, in the contemporary European view of the world, would lead to untold wealth. This partition received papal sanction, and was formalized in diplomatic terms with the treaty of Zaragossa in 1529 between Spain and Portugal. Trade patterns soon developed in the wake of these agreements in which these two nations seized the initiative in deep-sea voyaging beyond Europe. Portuguese control and influence on the high seas became focused on bases down the coasts of Africa, on to the west coast of India and then into the East Indian islands of modern-day Indonesia. Conversely, Spanish power in the New World became concentrated in the Caribbean, central and south America, and eventually across the Pacific to the Philippines.

By the early sixteenth century this structure had excluded the English from the East along the sea routes plied by Spanish and Portuguese vessels, and this dominance looked secure for the foreseeable future. From England the situation looked grim and raised the question of what could be done (in the absence of financial and naval resources) to break this mould. At first the English thought that circumventing the problem would resolve the exclusion issue. In short, the state supported the idea of discovering a sea route to the East by sailing from Europe either north-east or north-west in waters not frequented by Spanish and Portuguese ships. If a route to the eastern markets could be found by voyaging in either of these directions, the Iberian monopoly would be breached without a direct challenge to the existing, and overwhelming, power of Spain and Portugal.

It is this theme that dominates English thinking on the eastern design for seventy-five years or so after Henry VII’s accession in 1485. In fact it appeared in Henry VII’s own ‘Letters Patent’ to John Cabot in 1496, as he set sail north-west from Bristol to find a sea-route to the East. The king charged Cabot ‘to seek out, discover, and find whatsoever isles, countries, regions or provinces of the heathen and infidels whatsoever they be, and in what part of the world soever they be, which before this time have been unknown to all Christians’.³ Such endeavours took on an almost missionary zeal in the first half of the sixteenth century, as the English became obsessed with discovering routes to the East safe from Spanish and Portuguese influence. As late as 1553, when Sir Hugh Willoughby’s and Richard Chancellor’s expedition set sail to find a north-easterly route to Cathay around Norway and Russia, circumventing the Iberian powers remained uppermost as a motivating factor behind the whole enterprise.

All the hopes and moneys invested in opening up these routes in the frigid northern seas proved in vain. By the mid-sixteenth century, therefore, the English had certainly avoided a major conflict with Spain and Portugal, but the long-held desire for direct access to eastern markets was no nearer to fulfilment than it had been under Henry VII. It is at this point in traditional accounts of English expansionism that the Elizabethan period (1558–1603), assumes a special importance in putting an end to those national frustrations at the control exercised by the Iberian powers over eastern trade. Under the leadership of a dynamic new queen, proclaimed many generations of admiring historians, the English state was transformed and its people eventually found the resources and sea power to meet the Spanish and Portuguese threat head on. Elizabeth’s apotheosis came in 1588 with the defeat of the Armada. In its wake, England began to send its sailors and merchantmen into the very eastern waters so long controlled by the Portuguese. Royal actions in this period embodied a new spirit of endeavour and national enterprise. The crown supported two circumnavigations of the globe: Francis Drake’s in the years 1577–80 and Thomas Cavendish’s, during 1586–88. Charters were granted to merchants who wished to trade in the Mediterranean and Africa, and royal encouragement was given to aristocrats who wanted to establish English settlers in America. Here, at last, was a leader and her people in accord, dismissing the uncertainties of the previous age, and thrusting England into the European and, through this, world trading structures.

Did it happen this way? Was there a simple cause and effect in this historical context to deal with a pressing problem in Tudor trade aspirations? The answer must be, not really: only the simple chronology of voyages and grants by the crown is accurate in accounts such as the one outlined above. The rest requires severe qualification and revision. True, Elizabethan England was undoubtedly a place of change, both in its domestic affairs and dealings with foreign powers. Yet it would be folly to say that the state and its ruling élites controlled this change or that it was beneficial to the people as a whole. Indeed, many of the latest opinions on Elizabethan governance and economic management present a very unflattering picture o...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Dedication
• 1 England and the East in the Sixteenth Century
• 2 The Formative Years: 1600–60
• 3 The Restoration of the Company and its Trade:1660–1709
• 4 The Company’s Expanding Universe 1709–48
• 5 From Trading Company to Political Power: 1748–63
• 6 The Fall from Grace: 1763–84
• 7 The Company Set Adrift: 1784–1813
• 8 The Lull and the Storm: 1813–57
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index