British Private Trade Networks and Metropolitan Connections in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The private trade of British free merchants and East India Company (EIC) servants in the early modern Indian Ocean world has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Important work on intra-Asian private trade — known as the ‘country trade’ — by Ian Bruce Watson, Holden Furber and Peter Marshall in particular, emphasized the extent to which this branch of European commercial enterprise played an important role in transforming the nature of the Indian Ocean economy and supporting the EIC’s move from ‘trade to dominion’ from the middle of the eighteenth century. Furber estimated that by the eighteenth century, British merchants formed the largest single group of Europeans engaged in private trade in Asia.1 Here, the term ‘private trade’ refers to the commerce conducted by merchants on their own account, independent of their Company business. Watson usefully defined this as a portmanteau term ‘delimiting all the trade with the East Indies, and within the East Indies, not conducted for the Company’s benefit’. ‘Private trade’ is a term that covers several different commercial systems and channels of trade, incorporating the activities of ‘free merchants’ and ‘interlopers’ as well as Company employees.2 Despite this important body of scholarship, and the continuing interest in private trade amongst economic and imperial historians, we still know relatively little about how this element of British commerce in the East Indies dovetailed with Eurasian private trade, how private trade goods moved between the East and Europe, and how this trade was coordinated by individual merchants ‘on the ground.’