India Company Research Articles

Issues of Improvement and Reorganization of Russian-Chinese Trade in the Notes and Projects of its Participants

The article is devoted to the projects of the Siberian merchants to improve the Russian-Chinese trade through changes in its organization to attract more participants, transfer operations to Chinese and Mongolian territories, and develop transport infrastructure. Particular attention is paid to proposals for the unification of merchant capital for the development of commercial development of Southeast Asia and the Pacific region. Even in the initial period of the Russian-Chinese bargaining, projects of the Irkutsk vice-governor L. Lang and Governor A. Bril appeared, proposing to create a single merchant company under the auspices of the state, like the East India Companies of England and Holland. Further projects were devoted to the transfer of trade to the territory of the Qing Empire, the expansion of the social composition of participants through the formation of merchant companies. The analysis of merchant notes and projects allows us to speak of their authors as creative and experienced entrepreneurs seeking to expand Russian-Chinese trade ties and strengthen the empire's position on the southeastern borders of Russia.

Banaras and Resurrection, 1781 and 1799

The political scenario of the eighteenth century in India is well known for its transitional character. The triumph of the East India Company at Plassey had an unexpected impact on the structure of Indian politics. Those who looked for opportunities in the Company rule very soon realised what the loss of power to the British meant. This article studies the factors behind the revolts in Banaras Raj against the Company in 1781 and then in 1799.

Historicizing Real Estate: The East India Company in Early Colonial Bombay

Property-as-real-estate emerged in Bombay at least by the turn of the nineteenth century. Real estate is historicized through previously unexplored archival sources (qualitative and quantitative) by analyzing how property was transacted in a colonial port, and how it became embedded in global circuits of commerce and the accumulation strategies of locals and the English East India Company. The paper demonstrates the existence by this time of legal institutions of publicity and property registration, specialized intermediaries, price-finding mechanisms such as auctions, and imaginaries of a property market as an abstract entity marked by general trends and values. Contrary to the literature that sees prices in this period as erratic and inconsistent, a systematic analysis of prices suggests a rationalized and standardized property market. These findings push back the timeline usually associated with the development of real estate in India.

The Beginnings of the Grants-In-Aid System to Fund School Education in United Provinces in Modern India

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the advent of a change in the hitherto followed traditional system of education in India. The East India Company, tasked with the administration of a vast territory, gradually went from a policy of non-intervention and detachment, towards active reform in the structure of education in India, based on the English model. This paper attempts to capture the early stirrings of modern educational development in India. It seeks to streamline years of structured proposals and policies, ranging from the Charter Act of 1813, to Wood’s Dispatch of 1854, coupled with individual efforts of many officials, that ultimately brought about a grants-in-aid system, to establish modern learning on secular grounds. The system, which sought to achieve the uniform development of educational institutions on non-religious grounds, through grants-in-aid provided by the Government, seemed just and participative, but also suffered from limitations on diverse and vernacular interests.
 Even though the education system in India saw further development to reach its present form, this paper highlights the crucial and imperative understanding we must possess, of the ideals and the means that went into introducing modern education in the country.

A Mercantilist Brand: The British East India Company and Madeira Wine, 1756–1834

This study analyzes the long-term power of mercantilist firms and brands in industries characterized by high uncertainty and asset specificity. It contrasts the reputation-building and protection strategies employed in two similar industries in Portugal in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; namely, those of Madeira and Port wine. The Portuguese crown created a collective brand for Port in 1756, the first regional appellation in the world. Madeira wine only received similar protection in the late twentieth century. This study argues that the Madeira wine industry relied on a different type of mercantilist proto-brand—a diffuse and multi-faceted “global” umbrella brand—of the British East India Company, which during its heyday more than rivaled the power of the Portuguese state as a product certifier and endorser.

Geoff Quilley. British Art and the East India Company. Worlds of the East India Company. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2020. Pp. 370. $120.00 (cloth).

Geoff Quilley. British Art and the East India Company. Worlds of the East India Company. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2020. Pp. 370. $120.00 (cloth).

PERCEPTION OF INDIA IN CHINA AND GERMANY

Due to the spread of Buddhism and Buddhist culture to the East, Chinese travellers and pilgrims started visiting India in pursuit of Buddhist scriptures and learning of Buddhist philosophy as early as the first half of the first millennium of Common Era. These pilgrims and travellers also left the description of their travel. In the medieval and modern period also Chinese travellers, diplomats and scholars continued their journey towards India. However, the situation and perception both were different in these two periods from previous ancient era. German travellers to India started with the participation of the German soldiers in the British East India Company from the army of the Electorate of Hanover in 1782. The German nationalism grew as a reaction to the political and cultural domination of France and Britain. In their quest to find the roots of their language, they started looking at Sanskrit, Indian philosophy and culture. During the early 19th Century several German Romantics and scholars showed interest in Sanskrit literature. Some of the prominent names among them are Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Max Müller, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder. Friedrich von Schlegel studied Sanskrit for over forty years and in 1808 he published the book Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, wherein he argued that the prototypical “Aryans” founded the ancient European civilizations. With August Wilhelm Schlegel, the first Indology chair was started in the University of Bonn in 1819. Karl August Schlegel, the elder brother of Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel prepared a military survey of southern India for the East India Company which proved very useful.

19세기 영국의 중국차 인식과 차 시장의 변화

This study aims to examine the perception of Chinese tea in Britain in and around the 19th century and its effect on the tea market. The findings are summarized as follows: First, in the 19th century, an error of judgment by the Chinese tea producers and immoral British tea merchants brought about the import of adulterated tea into Britain. In the wake of the abolition of the monopoly of the British East India Company, there was a widespread negative view of Chinese tea and China itself due to the lack of quarantine facilities and the outbreak of the Opium War. Second, to eradicate the import of adulterated tea, the British government introduced a new custom quarantine system, along with amendments. Scientific research and publications, and the advertising of tea by merchants, helped to improve consumer awareness regarding food safety and establish good tea standards. Third, after the discovery of tea trees in Assam in India, the tea industry in India and Sri Lanka grew and saw better productivity due to the invention of the tea rolling machine and tea drier. Advertisements promoting pureness gained the widespread trust of consumers, and the tea industry in both these countries surpassed China in the 1880s and led the global tea trade.

DEVELOPMENT AND DEGRADATION IN THE COOCH BEHAR STATE DURING MAHARAJA NRIPENDRA NARAYAN RULE, 1863-1911

The Cooch Behar State was a small princely State of undivided Bengal during British rule. We know the State became a tributary State of the British East India Company in 1773 A.D. From this time the British ideology introduced in all aspects of the State by the Cooch Behar Maharajas. During the period of Maharaja Nripendra Narayan, who was known the modernizer of the Cooch Behar State, the British ideology had touched the highest stage of modernity during his time. During his time State introduced the First scientific land revenue management, Budget System and other developmental works. This had portrayed him as the modern Maharaja of the State or light side of the State. But this new land revenue management had sharp impact on the State environment and ecology and land-based society. This could portray him as destroyer of State environment and society.

The British Lion’s Triumph over the Bengal Tiger: The Royal Combat and the Allegory of Imperial Dominance

This article shows how the allegory of British-tiger rivalry became a distinct feature in 19th-century British imperial visual culture to imagined imperial attitudes over India. After the second Anglo-Mysore war (1799) between the East Indian Company and the Tipu Sultan, in 1808, a visual description of lion-tiger bloodshed was issued as a medal by the East India Company to reward its troops. Such a description shows a lion, representing the British nation’s suppression over a Bengal tiger, the royal emblem of Tipu Sultan. After this, the same imagery served to be imagined and visualised the British dominance and control over ruthless and unwilling India. Moreover, in such an allegory, a fiction of dead white women was added to invoke nationalism among Britons. This raises a feminist issue of how this fictional image of victimised women fulfils the British masculine agenda of imperialism and nationalism while the women remain deprived.

Importing Arcadia into 18th‐century Madras: Poetics of the contact zone and the politics of genre in Eyles Irwin's Saint Thomas's Mount

AbstractEyles Irwin (1751–1817), an East India Company official who spent much of his life in the British settlement of Fort St. George, Madras, was one of the earliest practitioners of anglophone belles lettres in the Indian subcontinent, and his writings predate the development of a robust culture of English‐language literary composition in the colony by quite a few years. The scant scholarly attention he has received belies his importance as an anticipator of the momentous literary‐historical processes that would transform India's public sphere in the 19th century. This essay offers a contextual reading of Saint Thomas's Mount (1774), his earliest extant poem, which is avowedly modelled on canonical English topographical poems like Alexander Pope's Windsor‐Forest (1713) and makes use of a host of neoclassical conventions, but which also differs from them in terms of the kind of landscape that is represented (Irwin's is a tropical landscape, with abundant mangoes, palms, and Oriental fauna, unlike Pope's pleasant, idyllic British park). However, Irwin's target readership being chiefly metropolitan, he contends with the difficulty of highlighting India's irreducible foreignness while simultaneously trying to ensure that readers in London do not find the Oriental descriptions too alien, incredible, and unrelatable. The authorial strategies he adopts to navigate this difficulty constitute the focus of the first part of the essay. The second (and final) part seeks to shed light on his hybrid, hyphenated identity as an Indian‐born Irish poet, and on his perception of himself as somehow fundamentally unlike those Britons who never ventured beyond the geographical confines of Europe, let alone setting down roots in places on the very fringes of the British empire. The affiliative bonds he forges with expatriate colonial officials living in and confronting the hardships of life in the monsoonal tropics mark him as a member of the steadily growing community of Anglo‐Indians in the Indian subcontinent. While noting the shifting connotations of the term ‘Anglo‐Indian’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, this essay will also examine the implications of identifying Irwin as a member of this initially amorphous but steadily growing community.

Osteological, multi-isotope and proteomic analysis of poorly-preserved human remains from a Dutch East India Company burial ground in South Africa

Skeletal remains discovered in Simon’s Town, South Africa, were hypothesised as being associated with a former Dutch East India Company (VOC) hospital. We report a novel combined osteological and biochemical approach to these poorly-preserved remains. A combined strontium (87Sr/86Sr), oxygen (δ18OVPDB) and carbon (δ13CVPDB) isotope analysis informed possible childhood origins and diet, while sex-specific amelogenin enamel peptides revealed biological sex. Osteological analyses presented evidence of residual rickets, a healed trauma, dental pathological conditions, and pipe notches. The combined isotope analyses yielded results for 43 individuals which suggested a diverse range of geological origins, including at least 16% of the population being non-local. The inclusion of δ13CVPDB had intriguing implications for three individuals who likely did not have origins in the Cape Town region nor in Europe. Peptide analysis on the dental enamel of 25 tested individuals confirmed they were all biologically male. We suggest that isolated enamel may provide crucial information about individuals’ pathological conditions, geographical origins, diet, and biological sex. These data further demonstrated that a combined approach using multiple osteological and biochemical methods is advantageous for human remains which are poorly preserved and can contextualise a site with little direct evidence.

Empire and Enlightenment after John Law: Merchant Capitalism and Political Economy in the French East India Company

Empire and Enlightenment after John Law: Merchant Capitalism and Political Economy in the French East India Company

Plane nostris moribus: customary financing on future salary by the Dutch East India Company

Summary Transferring claims has traditionally been a dogmatic near impossibility in the civilian institutional tradition. In practice, however, contractual creativity provided space to develop a variety of mechanisms for transferring claims. Our paper explores such a mechanism, which financed the seamen of the Dutch East India Company (voc), on the basis of their claims to future salary. The associated document, the so-called transportbrief, started from a seaman’s debt, which by mandate the Company accepted to pay to the bearer of the document, if conditions as performance of labor obligations were met. Payment practice itself was carefully orchestrated by resolutions of the voc board, the Heeren xvii, thereby tailoring market and law according to the various interests involved.

History in Documents: VOC Records from Batavia (17-18th centuries)

The present article deals with Malay letters and documents from the archives of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie – VOC), dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The documents belong to the collection of the Russian scholar and collectioner N.P. Likhachev (1862-1936) and have been kept in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg since 1938. The collection of VOC diplomatic letters that was in a possession of to Governor-General Johan van Hoorn (1653-1711), travelled from old Batavia, to Amsterdam and then to St. Petersburg. Fifty-six letters were written in different languages: Malay in Arabic and Javanese scripts, Dutch, Persian, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese. Mostly addressed to Johan van Hoorn the Dutch Governor-General in 1704-1709, they are not only exemplary of the fine art of Malay letter-writing, but also original diplomatic documents and historical sources on Dutch early colonial policy in Malay Archipelago.

Three big wars between Afghanistan and England

From the establishment of Ahmad Shah Durrani's government in Kandahar, Afghanistan had become a completely independent country in the region. For this reason, the first rulers of this country come to power and acted as king, which resulted in the domination of foreign countries, especially England, in Afghanistan some of the king or ruler, like Shah Zaman Durrani, was very interested in conquering the northern and northwestern regions of India. On this issue, in the early year of 1797, Shah Zaman sent a message to Marquis Wesley, the Governor General of the East India Company, informing him of his decision to conquer the northern parts of India and inviting him to help push the Maratha tribe back to the Deccan and cooperate with Afghan forces. Finally, these actions imposed a series of agreements on Afghanistan that are still in place today. During the first period of Shah Shuja's reign, 1804-1809, the first treaty that was imposed, called the Peshawar Treaty, was signed by the representatives of Afghanistan and England, Alfinstin from England, Muhammad Akram, Amin Mulk, and Abul Hasan, the treasurer of Shah Shuja, on June 17, 1809, in Peshawar. The British signed three treaties with Shah Shuja. The Treaty of Peshawar, Treaty of Lahore, and Treaty of Kandahar, in all three of these treaties Shah Shuja was in different conditions. The colonialist actions of the British caused a lot of opposition from the people and governments of Afghanistan, and among all the colonial powers of that time, the European country was the first country that paid special attention to Afghanistan and its foreign policy and was still earlier than others in its internal affairs. Interfered, Britain was controlled by the East India Company from India, the said company had been able to develop its political, military, and economic influence in the land of India until the end of the 18th century. One of the most important reasons for the three wars between the two countries was the policy of development and advancement of Britain and protecting India from powers like Russia and France, and also the competition between the two empires of Russia and England in Central Asia, which led to British aggression in the territory of Afghanistan and Taking many parts of these lands was imposed by signing treaties and contracts.

Postcolonial History in the Service of Anticolonial Politics: Critical Historiography and National Myth in Contemporary India

The article examines the relationship between the shaping of Indian foreign policy discourse, macro-historical processes that influence the formation of Indian political elites, and the development of historical knowledge about the Indian Ocean region. Its purpose is to ascertain the factors that influenced the specific perception of India’s place in the region by Indian elites and how this perception evolved within the framework of foreign policy discourse. Additionally, the role of historians who have studied the past of the Indian Ocean is explored. The author concludes that the changes in global political discourse following the First World War played a crucial role in shaping the ideas of India’s position in the world among the elites. These elites adopted the stance that the nation-state, with its own industrial base, was the only viable option. From the early stages of independent India, its political elites, influenced by British or Anglicized upbringing and education, rejected the notion of continuity between the new Indian state and the British Raj and the possessions of the East India Company. Instead, they attempted to establish historical continuity with pre-British Indian polities. Indian and foreign historians supported them in this endeavor. The author demonstrates how India’s political elites utilized the findings of scholars to serve their own purposes, selectively adopting suitable historical narratives while discarding others. This process gradually drew the community of historians into the production of discourse. During the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, the Mughal Empire received the most attention as the last pre-British Indian polity. However, with the Bharatiya Janata Party coming into power, research on Hindu polities and personalities is now encouraged.

East Indian misfortunes: the Fraser brothers and the early Raj

AbstractNothing in William Fraser's life in India is better known than his leaving of it. In March 1835, after 30 years in India, Fraser, then the East India Company's chief representative in Delhi, was gunned down by an assassin. The story of Fraser's murder is well covered in history. However, far more of Fraser's life in India—and that of his brothers—is discernible through their letters home to their family in Reelig, outside Inverness in Scotland.The Frasers sent five sons to India: William, his older brother James, and their three younger siblings, Edward, Alexander, and George. Only James ultimately returned home. If service in the East India Company in the time of Clive had offered the chance of making a killing, so too was it possible to die young of disease or in battle. By the early nineteenth century, after a series of Company reforms, it was no longer as possible to make a huge fortune in India, though early death was still a probability. Nevertheless, salaries were respectable, and one could live well and maybe even send money home. There is a great deal more than these material considerations in the Frasers’ correspondence. Among the topics covered are the brothers’ impressions of India, descriptions of travel and working life, their professional and social interactions with the British and Indians, and reflections on the contemporary state of medical care. This article will discuss the lives and travails of the Fraser brothers as exemplars of their generation of East India Company officialdom.

Herbaria as manuscripts: Philology, ethnobotany, and the textual-visual mesh of early modern botany.

While interest in early modern herbaria has so far mainly concentrated on the dried plants stored in them, this paper addresses another of their qualities - their role as manuscripts. In the 1670s, the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646-95) spent several years in Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) as a medical officer in the service of the Dutch East India Company. During his stay he put together four herbaria, two of which contain a wealth of handwritten notes by himself and several later owners. First, it will be shown that these notes provide information on the linguistic skills and interests of those who collected plants in an overseas trading settlement. Hermann's botanical practice demanded and, at the same time, generated knowledge of Sinhalese (an Indo-Aryan language that is spoken by the largest ethnic group on the island) and its script. In his herbarium, observations on the semantics, morphology, and pronunciation of Sinhalese are inextricably intertwined with those of botanical nature. Second, on the basis of these voluminous notes, the character of early modern herbaria as manuscripts will be highlighted. And third, Hermann's herbaria will be integrated into an investigation of scribal practices and publication strategies of eighteenth-century botany. Along with field notes, letters, manuscripts, illustrations, and printed books, herbaria were knots in the textual-visual mesh of early modern botany.

Peter Good. The East India Company in Persia. Trade and Cultural Relations in the Eighteenth Century. I.B. Tauris, London [etc.] 2022. xvii, 199 pp. Ill. Maps. £85.00. (Paper: £28.99; E-book: £26.50.)

Peter Good. The East India Company in Persia. Trade and Cultural Relations in the Eighteenth Century. I.B. Tauris, London [etc.] 2022. xvii, 199 pp. Ill. Maps. £85.00. (Paper: £28.99; E-book: £26.50.)