David Veevers. The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750.

Abstract

David Veevers has written an original and stimulating work on the history of the English East India Company in South and Southeast Asia during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The book’s main arguments address the evergreen questions of when and how the East India Company established an empire in Asia. Veevers’s unequivocal answers are that the roots of empire are to be found long before the East India Company conquered significant territory in India during the 1750s and 1760s, which traditionally has been seen as the beginning of the company’s empire, and that the actions of the company’s agents, or servants, in Asia were much more significant in laying the groundwork for empire than political maneuverings, decisions, and events in London. Veevers divides his book into four parts of unequal length. The first part, “Weakness and Adaptation,” sets the stage for his arguments by examining the company’s early failures to establish successful trade settlements, or factories, on the island of Java and at Masulipatam and Armagon on the east coast of India. He notes the lack of corporate investment, the strength of the Dutch East India Company, and the inability of English servants in Asia to ingratiate themselves with local powers. Veevers then details how the Company’s servants adjusted their posture to local elites through intermarriage and the pursuit of private trade, with the result that more profitable business avenues were opened to the company. Veevers focuses on the founding of Madras to reinforce his point that real initiative and power shifted from London to the company’s servants in Madras who sustained the company’s trade through the cultivation of personal relationships with indigenous elites.