Abstract
An addition to the ‘Passages: Key Moments in History’ series, this slim volume contextualises the rise and fall of Britain’s most successful trading enterprise, but it also does much more than this. The explanatory text, three chapters dealing with the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, is accompanied by transcripts of eighteen printed sources, spanning the time frame 1624–1857, included both to support and illustrate the text. Does it work as a formula for a volume? Will it be of use and value to maritime historians? This review aims to provide answers to these questions plus other, hopefully, useful comments.
A two-page Chronology and a Glossary of Terms twice that length are of great value to academic and lay readers alike, especially those who may be approaching the Company’s complex history for the first time. Three useful maps follow, outlining and reinforcing the concept of change over time, the last one showing the Company at the apogee of its territory-holding in the Indian subcontinent. Six illustrations serve to give extra ‘life’ to the text, though it should be noted that current ownership details are only provided in the case of the first two.
Opening dramatically with the execution of septuagenarian Maharaja Nandakumar Bahadur on 5 April 1775 following a conviction for forgery, the volume examines organisation of the venture, settlements, the sinews of trade and the value of silver exports to the East, military dimensions and the upheavals of 1857. As it does so, however, it begins to reveal flaws in the approach. The author has perhaps attempted to do too much, with the inevitable consequence of ‘loose ends’. Why state, for example, on p. 31, that Richard Penkevell and Robert Kayll have ‘(no known dates)’? Associated with the ‘Colleagues for the Discovery of a Northern Passage to China, Cathay, and other parts of the East Indies’, Penkevell was granted a royal licence on 9 January 1607. He was, in fact, of Cornish stock, had been M.P. for Tregony between 1588 and 1593, and died in 1616, as a little extra research would have demonstrated. Opposition to the Company’s early trading privileges came from Robert Kayll in 1615 when, under the initials ‘J.R.’ he published The Trades Increase, deriving his title from the Indiaman lost by fire while careening at Bantam on 19 November 1613. He was described as a gentleman of St. Bride’s parish in the City of London at his death in 1638.
The second chapter handles a range of issues, including the Company’s increasingly extensive and important trades in opium and tea. In just over six decades chests of opium entering China would rise tenfold. The tea trade is similarly examined, its consumption linked to, and driving on, changing tastes and economic structures. The third chapter deals with the Company’s military dimensions and various wars, expansion, religion and reform, before accounting for the venture’s collapse. By virtue of attempting to deal with so many issues the treatment is, almost inevitably, thin in places. In some instances, it just required a little more application. Table 1 on p. 83, for example, would have been both stronger and more effective by the provision of some totals with regard to Army strength, 1763–1823. Furthermore, the point could have been reinforced with a simple comment to the effect that the Company was running the world’s largest private army.
The volume is rounded off by a selection of eighteen documents spanning the period 1624–1857. Here, however, a few words of caution are necessary. Firstly, they are light on the seventeenth century, with only three being included, from 1624, 1681 and 1690. Secondly, the reader is told at the outset that ‘The documents in this section are selections from primary sources’ and that ‘Most words in this section are written with modern American spellings’. Beyond skewing the work towards the American market, why undermine and harm the tenor and beauty of the documents’ original language? Nor does the problem stop there. A comparison of document 5, Alexander Hamilton’s 1727 description of Bencoolen, against the original resulted in more than twenty slips in terms of transcription! Perhaps there is a warning message there? If that is the case, great care will be needed as to the reliability of the sources section.
Will the volume be of use and value to maritime historians? Sadly, for a company built on organisation, reliability and a solid military and maritime service, the last-named element receives but scant attention. Indiamen, the greyhounds of the sea that ensured it all operated efficiently, received only cursory treatment at the author’s hands. And when they do, there are flaws and deficiencies. The handling of details regarding rates of pay to Company commanders and crew on p. 10, for example, is in error. Also overlooked is that they were paid two months in advance. In many ways the maritime dimension, so important in the story of Company success, is restricted to a minimalist approach. Thus shipping receives just three index entries. By the same token, nothing is made of the Company’s widespread provincial impact on the British Isles in terms of recruitment, shipbuilding operations and the multi-faceted ports and their communities and their involvement in the lucrative trade to the East. Allusion occurs in the volume to the Company’s powerful ship-owners but nowhere near enough is made of their power and how it came to be broken.
While the volume was produced handsomely and while there were only a very small number of ‘typos’, the reviewer was left with one disconcerting impression. The front cover bears a colour illustration entitled ‘Two Views of an East Indiaman of the Time of King William III (c. 1685)’ by Isaac Sailmaker. The last of the Dutch generation who had introduced marine painting to England during the decade or so after the Restoration, Sailmaker’s style was rather wooden. The same illustration and caption have been used elsewhere, with the added information that the vessel mounted sixty or more guns. In Lords of the East: The East India Company and its Ships (1600–1874) (2000 edn., p. 17), Jean Sutton also uses the illustration, the original of which is in the National Maritime Museum, with a different caption: ‘Two Views of an East Indiaman of about 1700, in the time of William III, displaying the Company flag’. Her sense of chronology does not date it to three years before William of Orange’s Descent on England!