The Indigo Trade of the English East India Company in the Seventeenth Century: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

In the early modern period, commodities imported from the East impacted European societies and political economies in a variety of ways. They reshaped consumer cultures, unsettled some long-established patterns of production and exchange, prompted favourable or reactionary responses among merchants, rulers, and governments, and, above all, caused inter-continental transmission of knowledge that impacted artistry and craftsmanship. A considerable body of literature examines many of these issues. Scholars have studied some of the major luxury and non-luxury commodities imported from Asia into Europe, identified the changes in European fashion and consumption cultures, and explored the arenas of technical, technological, and knowledge transfers between Asia and Europe.1 British responses to the large-scale import of Indian cotton textiles and its impact on consumption culture, for instance, are fairly well studied.2 Indigo, as an industrial raw material imported from India, has not featured much in the literature. This paper is an attempt to explore how indigo imports into Britain, and the knowledge that accompanied it, impacted on the commercial and market relationships among Europeans in India and Britain in the first half of the seventeenth century.