Anglo-Indian Trade Research Articles

Avoiding “Negligence and Profusion”: The Ownership and Organization of Anglo–Indian Trading Firms, 1813–1870

Debates in business and economic history have focused on the role played by business ownership and organisational forms on the performance of firms, industries and economies. Alfred Chandler asserted that it was the adoption of hierarchical managerial structures and joint-stock ownership which enabled an unprecedented expansion of the scale of business in the late 19th century. This argument is widely debated and a growing literature has looked at the role played by different forms of business organisation, such as the partnership and cooperative, in enabling economic growth. This thesis contributes to these debates through an investigation of Anglo-Indian trading firms between 1813 and 1870. A new data-set of firms operating in Calcutta identified the use of various business forms to conduct trade. In this period the number of trading partnerships increased from 24 to 88, whilst the number of joint-stock firms expanded from a handful in the years before 1850 to over 170 by 1868. In the decade after 1858 the number of hybrid managing agency firms tripled, whilst the number of firms using agents grew from 57 to 183. Drawing on the ‘analytic narratives’ method a novel analysis using transaction cost and agency theories is made of four firm case studies. This analysis reveals that changes in the economic environment altered the transactions undertaken by the firms and incentivised the adoption of different forms of ownership. In turn, the internal organisation of the firms adapted to mitigate costs of agency caused by changes in ownership. These findings show that entrepreneurs sought adaptive organisational solutions to balance an evolving set of trade-offs between transaction and agency costs. Key to this process was the capacity of the partnership form to reduce the costs of agency incurred by firms operating with geographically distant actors. This resulted in the proliferation of the managing agent form. These findings reinterpret existing explanations of the evolution of firms in the Anglo-Indian trade, showing that problems of managing agents at distance remained a key challenge throughout this period.

Rehabilitating the intermediary: brokers and auctioneers in the nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian trade

The complications of long-distance trade restricted the expansion of the Anglo-Indian trade in the first half of the nineteenth century. The take-off occurred after 1850, and can be correlated to the growing number of brokers and auctioneers. This article analyses the role and effects of these intermediaries, drawing on information economics theory. A new data-set shows that volatility in supply, demand and price of indigo was reduced by half as the number of intermediaries quadrupled. Analysis shows that they were uniquely placed to reduce information asymmetries significantly improving market co-ordination. These findings positively reassess the importance of these organisations and have implications for understanding the evolution of long-distance trade in the nineteenth century.

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732–1795

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732–1795

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732-1795

Journal Article An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732–1795 Get access Robert Paulett. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. xvi, 259 pp. Cloth, $69.95. Paper, $24.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 1, June 2014, Pages 241–242, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau291 Published: 01 June 2014

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732–1795

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732–1795

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo–Indian Trade, 1732–1795 by Robert Paulett (review)

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732-1795. By Robert Paulett. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Pp. 264. Paper, $24.95.)Reviewed by Jon ParmenterRobert Paulett's new volume in the Early American Places series (a collaborative publishing endeavor undertaken by four university presses) makes an important intervention in the growing body of literature tracing transitions in eastern North American Native-settler relations from the colonial era to the early national period. Taking the southeastern deerskin trade as his framework, Paulett analyzes change over time in the spatial sensibilities that governed human relations in that region. Anglo American colonists initially adapted to indigenous concepts of in order to gain access to the deerskin trade. After 1763, British colonial authorities, and later those of the state of Georgia and the United States, found ways to impose their vision of a proper spatial order on the land. Linking ideological changes with physical transformations of the landscape, Paulett's study captures the rich spatial experience of a diverse range of historical actors in what is now the southeastern United States during a crucial period of its history.The book consists of six chapters, organized thematically but progressing in chronological order. Vividly written narrative vignettes open each chapter and prime the reader for the broader interpretive claims offered within. Paulett attends effectively to the intellectual challenge of reconstructing the Indian sense of space (4) while also assessing critically the transformative power of settler spatiality. While the study tracks the evolution of the deerskin trade from its origins in a Nativedominated, messy, and difficult-to-control empire of commerce, through British imperial efforts to better regulate an empire of land, down to a republican American empire of liberty devoted to the exclusion of Native people from their ancestral homelands, Paulett avoids falling into a narrative of inevitable indigenous decline. The author's focus on the originally shared and eventually contested production of in the southeast demonstrates how thousands of discrete human movements shaped the region's history before, during, and after the fundamentally transformative Revolutionary War.Paulett's opening chapter on the mapping of colonial Georgia-a colony founded to serve the interests of British imperial (12), intersects with cutting-edge work on imperialist cartography by demonstrating how colonial projectors' fantasies of controlling gridded Cartesian spaces confronted the competing discourse of indigenous peoples' relational, processual notions of as a series of interconnected points. The author's arguments are sustained by the sources cited, but unfortunately the reproductions of the maps in the text are small and lack the resolution to make an independently convincing visual case. Nevertheless, Paulett paints an effective picture of how sweeping claims to territorial mastery conveyed by early British imperial maps contrasted with colonial traders' actual experience of space; far from reflecting mastery over the landscape, the constricted movements of traders along Native paths generated traders' deep familiarity with only a limited number of places and peoples. Still, the jealousy with which traders guarded their particular, experiential geographical knowledge of the southeast became a flash point of controversy with imperial authorities seeking to rationalize control of revenues from the deerskin trade after 1763, as well as with colonial backcountry planters interested in replacing the town-based commercial economy of the deerskin trade with more intensive cultivation of agricultural commodities by an enslaved African labor force. …

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732-1795 by Robert Paulett (review)

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732-1795 by Robert Paulett (review)

Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Anglo-Indian Trade Rivalry in Colonial Malawi, 1910-1945

L'A. analyse le rapport entre ethnicite et classes sociales dans la communaute marchande indienne a Malawi de 1910 a 1945, en periode de crise economique. Bien que les reseaux commerciaux indiens etaient fondes sur des liens ethniques et parentaux, les commercants se sont alignes pendant la crise, en fonction d'interets economiques et non sur les bases d'une identite raciales ou ethnique. Quand les Indiens rejetaient les differences economiques et culturelles, c'etait pour former un front uni contre les politiques raciales de l'etat colonial et pour repondre aux prejuges sociaux. Mais ces initiatives menacaient leur mode de vie largement partage par tous les Indiens (le commerce marchand).