Abstract
AbstractThe final chapter highlights the differences in global corporate governance, providing a case study of how differing governing models could ensure corporate success rather than failure. It continues the story of the EIC’s evolving religious governance in the second half of the century. It investigates how, following the acquisition of Bombay in the 1660s, company leaders such as Strenysham Master, Gerald Aungier and Josiah Child, developed the company’s religious governance to deal with administrating over a variety of peoples and faiths. Following 1662, in the post-Braganza era of the EIC, the flexibility of the corporate form was accentuated because of its adoption of an ecumenically broad form of governance, which allowed it to establish government over not only English Protestants but also Catholics, Armenians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews. The chapter also investigates the role of passive evangelism in the EIC’s religious governance as a way to encourage conversion. In doing so, the company hoped to bring local Indians not only into the Protestant faith, but under the English government.
Highlights
This chapter investigates the role of one individual, the EIC governor Josiah Child, in the development of ecumenical governance, and his ideas surrounding emulation of the Dutch models of religious governance
It assesses the influence of South Asian religious cosmopolitanism and governance in the policing of religious behaviour through government in EIC jurisdictions
The chapter considers how the EIC in dealing with the behaviour of its own personnel acclimatised to the religiously cosmopolitan governments of the Indian Ocean. This is achieved by an examination of EIC officials and employees’ struggles to adapt its ecumenical governance to deal with practical environmental factors of daily religious life in India
Summary
Catherine of Braganza’s dowry, on her marriage to Charles II in 1662, brought England its first major jurisdictive acquisition of the English in the Indian subcontinent: Bombay. Its officials developed and adapted a policy to include these new populations to be able to police and govern over their religious and political behaviour It was in the context of the cultural exposure of EIC officials to the religious world of the Indian subcontinent, as well as the pluralistically Protestant community that they had created over the previous 60 years, that it began to form a policy of religious governance that embodied ecumenicalism centred around sufferance. It was this policy that led to the future Governor of the Company, Sir Josiah Child, to comment in 1665 that the company strived for uniformity in England, they allowed ‘an Amsterdam of Liberty in our Plantations’.5. Child, New Discourse, pp. 152, 160. Ibid., p. 163
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
