Exploring the richness and variety of letters sent to the East India Company

https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2022/10/exploring-the-richness-and-variety-of-letters-sent-to-the-east-india-company.html

by Petiver • 4 years ago

86 25 4 years ago

blogs.bl.uk

sklargh• 4 years ago

Encourage persons interested in these letters to read The Anarchy by William Dalrymple. Summarizes establishment of East India Co. and subsequent financial outcomes and violence.

Jun83• 4 years ago

If you want to delve into the history of EIC (and you should, esp. if you’re interested in how Northern Europe’s tremendous growth was fueled) I suggest reading The Anarchy by Dalrymple. It has great detail but also vey well written and engaging (qualities usually hard to combine in history books).

pinkwinds• 4 years ago

Also in the same vein Dalrymple and Anita Anand have a podcast called Empire.

notart666• 4 years ago

Are we considering the UK the entirety of Northern Europe now? That's a bold claim. If I recall correctly most of northern Europe stayed in poverty long after the end of the British East India Company

DiggyJohnson• 4 years ago

No, this seems like a naive uninformed comment unless you say more.

Jun83• 4 years ago

I wasn’t clear in my comment: note that the Dutch India Company was a precursor to the EIC and there was a lot of competition between the two( among other powers). The concept of LLC was mainly invented there. The book covers these points extensively and contrast the development in Southern Europe.

biorach• 4 years ago

The tone of your comment was unnecessarily sarcastic and confrontational.

la64710• 4 years ago

And for the perspective of the modern jewel of the empire May I suggest watching the views of Indias MP and diplomat Mr Shashi Tharoor https://youtu.be/1giYXrofZYo

hawk_• 4 years ago

The video linked by parent is light on details. This one has more details if anyone's interested (A debate on the empire but many of the things apply to EIC) https://youtu.be/f7CW7S0zxv4

Jun83• 4 years ago

OK, I'm finally back at home in my library and able to consult my books. I'd like to add a lengthy comment so rather than edit my comment above I'm creating another one.

First, I misplaced where I read the thought I summarized above: Rather than The Anarchy it was in the excellent The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. Second, as others have zealously pointed out, the term "Northern Europe" is not appropriate, it should be England and the Low Countries. The reason I said "North" was to show the contract with Southern Europe, which, starting by the period in which EIC was founded has started to lag behind.

This is one of the most most important points that I took away from The Silk Roads: The Long Divergence(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence) is usually formulated in terms of Europe vs "The East" (e.g. Ottomans, India, and China), which makes the discussion very complicated and polarizing due to additional factors of religion, widely varying cultures, etc. However, there was a similar divergence that happened between Southern Europe (Spain & Italy) and North East Europe* . This is very interesting because it cannot be easily explained by religions influence (e,.g. Islam) and Orientalism, nor it can easily be explained away by easy access to the Atlantic route to Asia. I now think that a key component of this divergence One of the key components (which I didn't not know before and learned from these two books) is the formation of the large companies like the EIC.

In mid-1550s a number of companies with geographic ambitions were founded. I especially admire the Company of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknown, founded in 1551 for its fantastic name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscovy_Company)! However, England was still at the periphery of trade action at this time. "In teh last years of the sixteenth century, circumstances came together to provide the context for a miracle in the Low Countries" (SR, p. 245). The Dutch began their amazing growth. The Verenigde Cost-Indische Compaigne (VOC), was founded in 1602, two years after the EIC, but the Dutch wee much more successful than the British. An interest start "Some have suggested that 3 million paintings were produced in the seventeenth century alone" in the Lowlands (SR p. 249) This shows the tremendous wealth in the region as well as the rise of bourgeois taste. Population almost doubled in England and Low Countries between 1500 and 1800, concentrated in large towns.

The VOC initially kicked EIC's ass: in mid 1600s they were shipping around 3x as much value as EIC (SR, pp. 258). But then there was a war between the English and Dutch which lead to a maritime revolution in England in second half of the seventieth century. After which began EIC's rise against the VOC and England's naval supremacy (EIC gave up east Asia and focused on India).

The above developments was the beginning of the end of Southern European powers, e.g. Venice and of course the Ottomans and Central Asia.

So many interesting things to talk about here, but, as they say, "Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet." I cannot resist to point out a few:

* According to SR (p. 269), the efforts to bail out EIC by the government in the second half of 1700s led to the Tea Act. So, EIC's greed may have spurred the American Revolution

* The possibility of a pact between England the Ottoman Empire is one of the great what-ifs of history: Queen Elisabeth courted Mehmet III with gifts and letters (and contacted Safiye Sultan, too, as a friend): she sent an organ to Constantinople in 1599 with Thomas Dallam, who gained admiration of the sultan when he played it so much so that he was offered "tow wyfes, either tow of his Concubines or els tow virgins of the beste I could Chuse" (for more of this great trip see https://www.amazon.com/Sultans-Organ-London-Constantinople-a...)

* The invention of a joint stock company (I mistakenly called it LLC in my original comment) which EIC and VOC were examples, is one of the most important business inventions of mankind. The Muscovy company I mentioned above is the first one

ETH_start• 4 years ago

IMHO, a better explanation for England and the Low Countries developing more rapidly than Spain and Portugal (which also had access to the Atlantic) is their climate, which is very wet. This gave them a highly productive agricultural sector that was not dependent on often-disrupted irrigation networks.

MaysonL• 4 years ago

I've just been reading Babel, by R.F.Kuang, a fantasy novel which explores the E.I.C. in a strange and wonderful way. Well worth reading.

29athrowaway3• 4 years ago

The East India Company were the world's first narcos.

mradek• 4 years ago

You’re not wrong. They purposefully funneled opium into China to get their silver bullion to open up trade, whilst also destroying an entire generation.

Destruction of people was basically the EIC’s MO.

detritus• 4 years ago

Not really, it was 'just' sheer largely-unhinged capitalism.

Plus ça change.

29athrowaway3• 4 years ago

It doesn't stop with one generation.

As Chinese workers immigrated into America, they opened opium dens here too.

https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Chinatown%27s_Opium_...

Then, the opium poppy, a plant not endemic to the Americas, started being cultivated in Mexico. Why Mexico? because the US banned Chinese immigration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

We cannot ever blame the drug crisis on the British because it breaks the rules of history where history is written by the victors. We have to let people get away with stuff. We cannot describe the EIC as narcos, and if someone does, we have to downvote them.

somenameforme• 4 years ago

Fun historic footnote on that as well. After China tried to enforce their ban on opium trade, Britain declared war on them to try to force them to accept it. The Brits won and thereafter claimed Hong Kong as one of the spoils of war. A spoil that was returned only in 1997, after which an invisible (and on occasion not so invisible) game of tug-of-war ensued. Can't wait to read the next chapter!

glaucon• 4 years ago

I've been trying to access blogs.bl.uk on and off for ~three hours and consistently getting an error page. Can anyone else access successfully? Time now is Sun Oct 30 08:16:14 2022 UTC

scrlk• 4 years ago

It's down for me as of 2022-10-30T09:38:21Z

Exploring the richness and variety of letters sent to the East India Company

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