India Company Research Articles

Recultivating Connections across the Indian Ocean

ABSTRACT How did enslaved people in the Dutch East India Company’s empire use food to maintain their cultural identities? These people – from Malabar, Coromandel, Bengal in present-day India, together with the eastern part of today’s Indonesia – were forcibly transported across the ocean to the Company’s ports littered along the littoral. By shifting our perspective away from colonial elites, we can grasp a very different sense of the ocean, one that speaks of lost homelands, families, and selves. This article explores food from the perspective of enslaved cooks and cultivators on Ambon, the Company’s first conquest in the Indian Ocean,, in present-day Indonesia. By spotlighting how enslaved people transported, grew, and processed familiar plants from their homelands, it explores how the ocean signified both disconnection and loss as well as opportunities for reconnecting with their cultural identities through food. Using food as an analytical object, the article reconstructs how enslaved people used food to grapple with their disconnection from their homelands, forging links, however partial and incomplete, with memories of self before their enslavement.

A Translator's Face: Persianate Selfhood and Portraiture, 1760–1800

AbstractWithin the framework of Persianate self‐hood, this article explores the intersection between translation, Indian dress, and portraiture in India and Britain, 1760–1800. It examines the translator's lived experience and cultural output as a published scholar and Persian secretary in the East India Company. First, it considers the self‐constructed through clothing; second, it examines how the role of the EIC translator is discretely performed. The third is the role of art and the artist in visualizing a record of professional life and its relationship with material culture, and finally, how it evoked a multifarious kinship on a network of ideas unrelated to ethnicity or place. Engaging with the concept of transculturalism, it considers the global ‘family’ as a flexible and dynamic unit that empowers the movement of visual and material culture within generations. The investigation of dress and grooming reframes the imperial ‘self’, seeing dress as the primary navigator of cultural space.

Mishaps in the Land van Eendracht: Exploring the Cause of Zuytdorp’s Wrecking

AbstractZuytdorp is one of four known Dutch East India Company shipwrecks off the western Australian coast. Believed to have foundered in the fall of 1712, its wreck site was located in 1927 on a remote stretch of the central western Australian coast. Since its identification in 1958, the site has been investigated during several archaeological expeditions. The cause of Zuytdorp’s wrecking, however, has never been properly assessed. Some researchers assume the ship crashed into shore due to an inaccurate longitude determination. Others believe the ship reached the Australian coastline safely and foundered due to a storm or other mishap. This study will use various lines of evidence to answer the question of how Zuytdorp wrecked. These include an assessment of contemporary cartographic and navigational knowledge, charts that would have been available on the vessel, coastal visibility, and signs that ships were nearing land as found in contemporary ship logs. It will be shown that Zuytdorp’s officers had access to the necessary cartographic information in order to navigate the Indian Ocean and Western Australian coastline, that there were numerous warning signs the vessel was nearing the coast and various measures taken to avoid a collision, and that meteorological conditions at the wreck site likely drove the ship ashore. Through a thorough analysis of these lines of evidence, it will be demonstrated that a sudden and unexpected encounter with the shore is an unlikely scenario. Instead, Zuytdorp could have reached the Australian coastline intentionally and most likely wrecked due to a storm.

Adrift in the Andaman Sea: 
Law, Archipelagos and the Making of Maritime Sovereignty

Abstract This essay focuses on the long history of archipelagic formations in the Bay of Bengal as sites of legal experimentation. This history is often narrated beginning with convict transportation and the permanent occupation of the Andaman Islands as a British penal settlement in 1857 and the violent erasure of indigenous cultures that followed it. This essay focuses instead on the hundred years preceding it where the English East India Company experimented with abandoning jurisdiction over the lesser-known islands off the Bengal and Burma coasts and people who lived on them, despite being in the position of a territorial sovereign. These experimentations were recorded most eloquently in legal and administrative records about crime - which included, for example, how assault and “river dacoity” on the deltaic islands of the Sunderbans in lower Bengal were to be dealt with and how men convicted of murder on the islands off the Tenasserim coast in southern Burma were to be prosecuted. In each case, prompted by tensions between the Company and the British Crown, policing and prosecution were abandoned, but this escaped public attention as it took place on the empire’s maritime edges. Although jurisdictional claims were central to the expansionist aims of the British empire in the nineteenth century around the Indian Ocean, these instances offer an alternate account of sovereignty, one where assertions and abandonments were both critical to the making of empires.

An Unpublished Manuscript of Hugo Grotius: ‘On Public Partnership with Unbelievers’ (De societate publica cum infidelibus): Introduction, Transcription and English Translation

Abstract This introduction presents an analysis of Grotius’s treatise ‘On Public Partnership with Unbelievers’ (De societate publica cum infidelibus). It was probably written between 1606 and 1609, when Grotius served as a legal advisor of the Dutch East India Company (voc). In his treatise, Grotius explains what kinds of partnerships with non-Christians are permissible under divine and natural law. These include public partnerships, such as treaties and military alliances, but also private associations, such as commercial contracts, marriages and relations of servitude. As we argue in this introduction, De societate can be interpreted as a general treatise on legal partnerships with non-Christians, which relates both to the voc’s policies of treaty and alliance-making in the East Indies and to debates about the legal status of religious minorities in the Dutch Republic.

Translating Orientalism. Louis-Mathieu Langlès as editor and translator of English literature between Oriental studies, commerce, and popularisation

This article delves into the translation and editing work of Louis-Mathieu Langlès (1764-1824), a significant figure in French Oriental studies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By examining Langlès’ translations of British literature about Asia, the analysis underscores two interrelated strategies shaping his work. The first strategy involved the dissemination of knowledge about Asia through translations shaped by both a literalist approach to the text and intensive editing practices. These practices resulted in the incorporation of extensive footnotes and additions that served both informative and domesticating functions and highlighted Langlès’ agency as a mediator of knowledge. The second strategy centres on Langlès’ reform project for the French system of teaching and learning Asiatic languages, resulting in the establishment of the École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes in 1795. This strategy is strongly connected with his translation work as it reflects Langlès’ pragmatic vision of Oriental studies as based on the British example, particularly the scholarly activities of individuals working for the East India Company. His translations, therefore, were not mere acts of appropriation but both embodied and encouraged ‘emulation’, allowing us to reveal the interplay of scholarly admiration and political competition and to uncover a distinct strand of Anglophilia within the broader context of early French Oriental studies.

Stories of resistance and resilience: The role of the port city of Calicut in the seventeenth-century Indian Ocean trade

The Dutch East India Company attempted to control the pepper trade in the seventeenth-century Indian Ocean trade. Attempting to control pepper-growing areas such as the Malabar Coast (south-western coast of India) was part of this plan. Calicut was an important port city in Malabar and a vital player in the Indian Ocean trade. Unlike many port cities that were controlled by the European companies, the rulers and merchants of Calicut attempted to sustain a free trading port on their own instead of accepting a European company monopoly. In short, Calicut offered an alternative emporium for Indian Ocean trade in Malabar by resisting imperial endeavours. This article explores the ways in which Calicut participated in the Indian Ocean pepper trade despite the Dutch attempts to control it.

ADAM SMITH ON THE “WRETCHED SPIRIT OF MONOPOLY” IN THE EAST INDIES TRADE

According to Adam Smith, the “wretched spirit of monopoly” dogged the East Indies trade. The regulations that governed the East Indies trade established legal barriers or restrictions to entry and sustained a mercantile community whose interests were “the opposite to that of the great body of the people” (WN IV, ch. iii, p. 494). The East Indies charter conferred a special privilege that shielded the English East India Company from all domestic competition in Asian trade. The East India Company was the complete incarnation of a mercantile system against which Smith had determined to launch “a very violent attack” in Wealth of Nations (Smith 1987, p. 251). Smith’s mistrust of trading bodies like the East India Company was compounded by its having assumed political powers commensurate with the sovereign while still in possession of its monopolistic franchise. Smith’s proposal was, first, to abolish the monopolistic franchise to rid society of “the unfortunate effects of all the regulations of the mercantile system” (WN IV, ch. vii, p. 606), and, second, to reform the East India Company’s administrative duties and functions in the Indian territories. The contention of this paper is that Smith’s call to abolish the East Indies monopoly was inseparable from his appeal for reform of the English East India Company.

From the Voc to the Spac: At the Root of the Corporation’s Soul

This article aims to provide a thorough analysis of the evolution of the company, starting from the inception of the first public company in the seventeenth century, namely the United East India Company (VOC), until the modern expression of a novel form of cash-shell company that in recent years has taken Wall Street by storm: the Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC). As opposed to common wisdom that would like to compare the SPAC to England’s South Sea Bubble of 1720, the paper argues that both the VOC and the SPAC have remarkable similarities by virtue of sharing one of the most important corporate features: ‘venturing beyond’ for special purposes, and being the instruments through which the dreams of entrepreneurs can be realised.

A New Sanctified British Era of Architecture and Supremacy at Rawalpindi, Punjab Pakistan

This article defines the ‘Church Architecture’ with its genera which was introduced by the British government to the Subcontinent. This architecture is a significant part of the cultural heritage and British Archaeology of Pakistan. ‘Church Architecture’ is still a center of attention for the general public and the Christian community in Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan. These “churches” were not only religious buildings of the British era but have always been the political and religious epicenters of British authorities. When the British East India Company was expanding its trading activities all over the subcontinent before 1849, simultaneously, ‘Company’ was trying to achieve the political and religious agenda of the British authorities. With combat skills, this trading company was able to meet the existing Sikh ruling powers on the battlefield, and the ‘Regime Change Operation’ ended, and the ‘British Era’ of architecture and supremacy emerged in Rawalpindi, Punjab Pakistan.

Translating Jain Philosophy at the Confluence of Persianate Hinduism

Abstract In 1796, Claude Martin (1735–1800), a wealthy French officer of the East India Company living in Lucknow, commissioned the Brahman Delārām to translate into Persian two classical texts from the Digambara Jain philosophical tradition. Using the Braj Bhāṣā commentaries composed by the seventeenth-century Jain author Hemrāj Pāṇḍe, Delārām was able to access the original Prakrit texts of the eighth- and tenth-century philosophers Kundakunda and Nemicandra via an updated vernacularized version. His translations are as an exceptional document showing the hermeneutic tools that a Persian-speaking Brahman could use to parse the doctrinal system of Jainism. Delārām’s language was markedly shaped by his familiarity with Advaita Vedānta and the “unity of being (vahdat al-vojud)” school of Sufism, focused on ontological unity. More specifically, the Sufi-Advaita idiom that developed in Persian from the early Mughal period onward functioned for Delārām as a lens through which he could engage with the doctrinal diversity of India’s religious landscape. His efforts to translate the unfamiliar and sometimes perplexing elements of Jainism reveal the complex modalities of crossing linguistic and religious boundaries through Persian in South Asia and their partial incommensurabilities.

Exploring the Role of the Dutch East India Company in Making Taiwan a Center for the Sugar Trade From 1624 to 1662

Exploring the Role of the Dutch East India Company in Making Taiwan a Center for the Sugar Trade From 1624 to 1662

Banditry or Peasant Insurgency? Contextualizing and Analysing the Chuar Rebellion of Midnapore Under East India Company (1770s–1800)

Midnapore was one among the first three districts ceded to the East India Company in 1760 by Mir Qasim, the other two being Burdwan and Chittagong. Following this, the acquisition of the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1765 launched the East India Company into a complex administrative role related to revenue in an alien territory with complex, multi-tiered, customary land rights that were beyond their knowledge. Their attempts at revenue collection and the accompanying imposition of a legal, rational state on a customary framework led to tragedies like the Bengal famine of 1770. It served as the impetus for the initial uprisings against colonial rule, which mainstream accounts on resistances in the early colonial period tend to omit. The study here aims to shed light on the nature of rule transition and complexities regarding land ownership that the Company encountered, the special nature of Midnapore frontier, and phases of the chuar rebellion pre- and post Permanent Settlement. Special attention has been placed on conceptual clarification of chuars, paiks, their status overlaps and subalternity and on analysing the nature of the rebellion in the light of Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of banditry and Ranajit Guha’s analysis on features of peasant insurgency in colonial India.

Enlightenment and Genocide: Johannes Andreas Paravicini’s Mission on Timor in 1756

Abstract The Dutch United East India Company (voc) had a Janus-faced position in early-modern maritime Asia as merchant and politician. The present study highlights this through the case of the Spanish-born diplomat Johannes Andreas Paravicini (1710–71). During his mission to Timor in 1756, he concluded a major contract with numerous indigenous states that ostensibly brought a major part of Timor under the voc, in defiance of the rival Portuguese. The contract itself merits attention as literature due to its Enlightenment rhetoric and stress on general welfare, despite being accompanied by excessive physical violence, genocide, and slaving. The article furthermore scrutinizes the ceremonies and symbols that aimed to subjugate the native states. It is argued that Paravicini, while relying on local informants, misrepresented the Timorese hierarchical power structures and concepts of authority. For the Dutch, this led to a series of disappointments and setbacks in the region during the following decades.

The Malacca dilemma of the Raj: the Indian Uprising of 1857, the Second Opium War, and the British proposal of a Kra passage

Abstract In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the idea of building a passage through the Isthmus of Kra in the Malay Peninsula was hotly debated amongst British officials, merchants, and investors. This study finds that the British East India Company's rule over the Straits of Malacca had been a dilemma for itself and British merchants in China. The Second Opium War and the Indian Revolt of 1857 exacerbated the dilemma and pushed some British policymakers and investors to seek an alternative route between India and China. The proposal of the Kra passage was the response and solution to the Malacca dilemma. In historicising the Kra passage proposal and putting it in the context of the British empire's simultaneous crises in Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, the case of the proposed Kra passage reveals the complex relations between different actors within the British empire and the challenges of integrating multiple imperial interests into a British world system

From Ancient Threads to Colonial Commerce: The Evolution of West Bengals Silk Industry from Mythical Origins to Independence

Silk production, or sericulture, has a rich history that is frequently eclipsed by its modern applications. Sericulture began in ancient China approximately 3000 BC and this was a well held secret until it spread to Korea, India and eventually the West through a variety of causes, including royal intrigue and missionary endeavours. By the Han Dynasty, silk had evolved from a luxury item to a valuable economic asset, impacting trade and culture throughout Asia and Europe. India's silk industry, as documented in ancient scriptures, progressed from early wild silk production in the Himalayan foothills to sophisticated mulberry sericulture by the 2nd century BCE. The Mughal dynasty improved Indian silk traditions by incorporating several weaving techniques and nurturing a thriving business in Kashmir and Bengal. From 1612 to 1858, the East India Company capitalised on Bengal's silk potential by building trading centres and using Piedmontese reeling technology to improve quality. Despite initial hurdles, Bengal silk became a major export commodity, but colonial policies and technological shifts eventually led to its demise. Silk output fell dramatically after independence due to a variety of economic and geopolitical issues. This article investigates the growth of India's silk industry, focussing on Bengal's key role and examines the effects of colonial control, technological advancements and the sector's trajectory up to Independence.

Renaming (and Reshaping) The University of Edinburgh’s “Oriental” Manuscript Collection

The University of Edinburgh holds a substantial collection of manuscripts in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and South Asian languages, formerly known as the “Oriental Manuscript Collection”. This article reports recent steps taken to make this collection, which consists largely of manuscripts collected by Scottish East India Company officials between the late 18th and mid 19th centuries C.E, relevant to the present day global audience, and to widen access to it. This includes its renaming as "Manuscripts of the Islamicate World and South Asia", and the creation of a digitally searchable catalogue on the ArchivesSpace platform, largely through the use of “legacy data” from a 1925 printed catalogue, yet with a focus on making provenance information readily available. We discuss the challenges involved in renaming, and indeed reinterpreting, a historical collection whilst adhering to the principles of archival and library science. We share the methodology used to create our digitally searchable catalogue, a relatively simple model that may well prove useful for those curating similar collections.

The establishment, growth and legacy of a settler colony

The Cape Colony was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652 with the initial aim of providing a refuelling station for passing ships, but over time the colony expanded and the European population grew. We spoke to Professor Erik Green about his research into how the settler economy evolved, its impact on indigenous people, and its long-term legacy.

Atlantic Voyages: The East India Company and the British Route to the East in the Age of Sail, by John McAleer

Atlantic Voyages: The East India Company and the British Route to the East in the Age of Sail, by John McAleer

On the fringes of empire? Rethinking suburbs as colonial spaces in early modern South and Southeast Asia

Abstract This survey challenges conventional perceptions of colonial suburbs in the early modern Indian Ocean world in general, and those under the rule of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in particular. Recent urban research advocates re-evaluating suburbs as intricate and diverse spaces, yet this shift has had limited impact on historical studies of early modern colonialism. The survey highlights the importance of recognizing suburban regions in eighteenth-century settlements such as Cape Town, Cochin, Colombo or Batavia, where significant population growth resulted from inter-Asian and internal migration. These areas fostered ethnic and cultural diversity, disrupting normative ideas of segregation. By shifting the analytical focus from the core to the periphery and exploring colonial histories from an outside-in perspective, the contribution emphasizes the potential of a more horizontal approach to sub/urbanity for understanding early modern colonial societies, encouraging scholars to delve into the intersection of ‘the imperial’ and ‘the urban’.