When Edmund Burke spoke at one of the many trials concerned with the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788—1795), he offered a scathing diagnosis of the British East India Company. At the heart of his accusation, the idea that the Company was effectively ‘a state in disguise as a merchant’ has persisted in scholarly works and in popular imagination for hundreds of years since. So great is its archival legacy that, over the years, many commentators have remarked that the administrative machinery of the Company more closely resembled that of a state than a corporation (Stern, 2012). Yet like so many former or ‘almost’ states — whether forgotten through being subsumed by a more powerful successor, or simply transformed beyond recognition over time — the extensive records of the East India Company have not guaranteed an extensive historiography.
A relatively small number of narrative histories form the backbone to this body of scholarship. These can, of course, supply us with the requisite chronology — but the life and the times of the East India Company are two very different beasts. As E H Carr noted to wide acclaim, historians are not chroniclers (Carr, 1961). It is therefore very striking that so much of the argument over this strange institution remains more to do with its chronology than its character. There is, and surely will continue to be, much debate as to the significance of the early period in the Company’s operations to its future as a colonial power. Can we isolate in the seventeenth century an age of partnership between the EIC and its contacts overseas? Or already in these encounters, can we discern the sinister beginnings of an age of empire: the construction of others and selves, of East and West (Said, 1978), even the creation of the Third World (Fanon, 1968)?
These are important questions — but they are not the only questions, nor are they necessarily the best way of asking them. What is largely missing from these debates, and what this project aims to provide, is an attempt to reconstruct the early world of the East India Company that does not rely exclusively on long-term structures and global scales. Instead, this study will give preference to the human actors: a belated ‘history from below’ of the merchants and adventurers who sailed across the world four centuries ago, whose actions and decisions form the vital nervous system of a corporation which simply could not have existed without the networks of people on which depended its networks of trade.
Beyond the Francis Drakes and Robert Clives of classroom folklore, it will consider characters such as Peter Floris and Lucas Antheunis, two Dutchmen employed by the English East India Company in 1609 based on their attractive promise of opening a profitable trade not only with the Coromandel coast of India, but across the Gulf of Siam. It will also consider the Company’s early interactions with native populations, from the so-called ‘spice islands’ of South East Asia to the court of Mughal Emperor, examining a range of accounts from letters and journals in order to examine how these merchants variously invoked and ignored the supposedly ‘national’ character of the Company in order to win greater favour and greater profits.
To this extent, at least, the project owes much of its initial scope to the debates of the 1980s, in which historians first sought to challenge the privileged position of the nation in traditional historiography. No longer perceived as central, universal, or inevitable, the cultural force of the nation has since been laid open to intensive reevaluation on a local and a global scale. As effective ambassadors of their places of origin, transnational actors are naturally of particular interest to such a project.
However, transnational history having many of its own roots in the ‘post-nationalist’ moment of the 1980s, there have so far been relatively few transnational historians willing to write on the subject. Having learned to scorn the ‘invented tradition’ of national histories (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), and to eschew the anachronism — even the simple error — of relying on the nation as a unit of analysis (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), this should perhaps come as no surprise. Yet, as this project hopes to demonstrate, whether or not nations are necessarily reliable as units of analysis, there should be no doubt as to their value as objects of analysis, especially when examined at new sites or using new perspectives.
Hence, through a detailed study of these early adventurers and their relationships, both with their fellow Europeans and with the diverse peoples they encountered across the Indian Ocean, this project will seek to interrogate the significance of the nation in the exchanges of the early English East India Company. Fundamentally, it aims to go beyond the question of ‘when was the nation, and where?’ to ask instead: when did it matter, and why? And, of course, its vital attendant, when did it not? And what mattered more?
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Birdwood, George and Foster, William (eds.), The Register of Letters &c. of the Governor and Company of Merchants trading into the East Indies, 1600—1619 (London, 1893).
Burke, Edmund, ‘Trial of Warren Hastings Esq: Third Day, 15th February 1788’, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol 13, (London, 1822), pp.1-87.
Foster, William (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615—1619: As Narrated in His Journal and Correspondence (New Delhi, 1990).
Strachan, Michael and Penrose, Boies (eds.), The East India Company Journals of Captain William Keeling and Master Thomas Bonner, 1615—1617 (Minneapolis, 1971).
Secondary Sources
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).
Carr, E H, What is History? (Cambridge, 1961).
Chaudhuri, K N, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-stock Company 1600-1640 (Abingdon, 1999).
Hall, Catherine (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Cultures of Empire: Colonisers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, 2000).
Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).
Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1968).
Games, Alison, ‘English Overseas Merchants in an Expanding World of Trade, 1590–1660’, in The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford, 2008).
Games, Alison, ‘All the King’s Men: Governors, Consuls, and Ambassadors, 1590–1650’, in The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford, 2008).
Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983).
Gupta, Ashin Das, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (ed.), The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 2001).
Keay, John, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London, 1993).
McPherson, Kenneth, ‘The Age of Commerce, 1450-1700’, in The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (New Delhi, 1993).
Pettigrew, William A, ‘Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and the Local in Seventeenth-Century English History’, Itinerario, vol 39, no 3 (2015), pp.487-501.
Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
Stern, Philip J, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2012).
Winterbottom, Anna, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early Easy India Company World (Basingstoke, 2016).
I think that this will likely be an extremely interesting project, but something that struck me as odd was that your title and introduction seem to imply a somewhat different project than the one you detail later on. As I understand it, you’ll be looking more at the external interactions of the EIC; the voyages of merchants and adventurers, interactions with rulers of various polities, and the ways in which the EIC did or did not act as a “nation” in its dealings in and around the Indian Ocean.
That being said, what Burke and many other English politicians were worried about was that the EIC was acting as a nation separate from England (and later the UK). The question of how the English (and British) government handled the EIC and its semi-autonomous status is related to the question of the EIC’s semi-independent dealings with Indian Ocean populations and rulers, but it is not quite the same. Additionally, how employees of the EIC viewed their organization was likely quite different from how their countrymen back home viewed it.
I suppose that brings me to my actual question, which is whether you are planning to include material about the British-EIC relationship in additional to the EIC-Native relationship. I don’t think delving deeply into the British-EIC relationship is necessary for the “merchants and adventurers” project you lay out in the proposal; it seems like you know exactly what you’re doing there! That being said, there might be an interesting comparative between confusion over the legal status and practical role of the EIC faced by English politicians and similar confusion over the EIC faced by Indian princes, for example. Including that sort of thing might squeeze out some of the other human actors you detail in the proposal though, so it’s very understandable if you want to stick with a more tightly focused project concerned with the EIC’s foreign affairs.