‘The Company as Their Lords and the Deputy as a Great Rajah’: Imperial Expansion and the English East India Company on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1685–1730

Abstract

The emergence of new historiographical approaches to the study of British imperialism over the past two decades, has begun to challenge the trade-to-empire narrative which continues to dominate the way historians understand the English East India Company's presence in Asia, anchoring the beginnings of empire there to the mid-eighteenth century. However, as this article argues, Company servants operating on the West Coast of Sumatra sought imperial expansion through political hegemony and territorial acquisitions as far back as the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Indeed, Company servants, distinct from the directors in London, formulated these imperial, expansionist policies on the West Coast in support of a private, patriarchal authority which they had developed to rule over the people they encountered there.