Introduction: Alternative Histories of the East India Company

Abstract

Introduction:Alternative Histories of the East India Company Julia Schleck (bio) and Amrita Sen (bio) The English East India Company, established on December 31, 1600, by a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I, became one of the most important and influential mercantile companies. While it was not the first of the new joint-stock companies set up in order to access the great trading centers of the East directly, the English East India Company (EIC) proved to be one of the most successful, far outstripping the others in profit by the middle of the seventeenth century. This was in part due to the Company's adoption of what many mercantilist pamphleteers believed to be non-conventional trading practices: exchanging spices and textiles for bullion instead of actual commodities. Abandoning Edward Misselden's famous call for an exchange of "Wares for Wares," the Company was seen to be setting a dangerous precedent, one that we now recognize as being rooted in the early capitalistic transformations that accompanied the emergence of early modern globalization. Thanks to its extraordinary success, the Company became one of the very first conduits through which English men and women came to experience the East first-hand, a direct access that led to the generation of new types of knowledge about the Indies. Whether in the fields of ethnography, botany, political discourse, or myriad other areas, the East Indies, and the East India Company, fundamentally impacted the way that England perceived the world and itself. Given its importance in shaping early modern English life, it is surprising how little scholarly attention the East India Company has attracted in the last several decades, particularly from literary scholars and cultural historians. Economic historians such as K. N. Chaudhuri and Philip Lawson have made invaluable contributions in helping us recognize how the Company helped transform global circuits of trade, and Philip Stern's recent study The Company-State importantly locates the EIC as a political governing body (as opposed to a merely economic organization) from its very inception.1 However, the cultural [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. "The East Indies," Historia mundi: or Mercator's atlas (1635). Courtesy John Hay Library, Brown University. [End Page 2] and social impact of the East India Company has been largely overlooked. Despite the upsurge of interest in the "Global Renaissance," one of the organizations that most successfully linked the early modern globe in an exchange of goods, ideas, and bodies—the joint-stock trading corporation—has been left largely unexamined, and with it, a large portion of the globe (see Singh, "Introduction"). The paucity of scholarship on English encounters with the East Indies becomes most evident when we consider the rich wealth of studies based on Anglo-Ottoman or even Anglo-Mahgreb or Anglo-Safavid exchanges. Dozens of scholarly monographs and edited collections have now been published detailing the place of Ottoman, North African, and Safavid figures and cultural practices in the English imaginary, but with a few notable exceptions, the lands east of the Safavid Empire have been left untouched.2 This imbalance is partly due to the sources available to literary critics and cultural historians. As Daniel Vitkus, Nabil Matar, Matthew Dimmock, Matthew Birchwood, and now many others have shown, dramatic and other literary works featuring Islamic (particularly Turkish) characters multiplied in the early modern period, leaving us a rich body of literature through which to examine the place of Islam and its adherents in the English imaginary. The East Indies, on the other hand, appear in relatively fewer surviving dramatic works before the late seventeenth century, and even less frequently in romances or epic or lyric poems. However, this rationale does not explain the neglect of the travel narratives and other written records produced by EIC directors and servants. Although infrequently published as singular narratives, the vast body of detailed letters, logs, lists, and minutes written by company officials is weighty enough to bring an elephant to its knees. There are famously nine miles of EIC archives stored in the British Library, much of the earlier portion of which is cataloged and reprinted in widely available editions by Henry Stevens and W. Noel Sainsbury...