The rise and rise of East India Company

The most fascinating chapter of this book is the Company's response to the Amboyna massacre

A Business of State
Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company
Rupali Mishra
Harvard University Press,
412 pages; Rs 799
 

On December 31, 1600, in the 43rd year of her reign, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal “letter patent” for 15 years to the “Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies”, to “freely traffick and use the Trade of Merchandize, by Seas, in and by such Ways and Passages already found out and discovered, or which hereafter shall be found out and discovered… into and from the said East-Indies”.
 
This royal charter granted the organisation monopoly trading rights with all countries “beyond the Cape of Bona Esperanza [Cape of Good Hope] to the Straights of Magellan”. Thus was born the English East India Company, the most powerful corporate, geo-political, military and imperial enterprise that the world has ever seen.

 
Many historians have a good knowledge of the working of the East India Company from the second half of the 17th century up to its nationalisation in 1858 and dissolution in 1874. Relatively little is known of the crucial early years, especially the changing role of the Company vis-à-vis the Crown, the Privy Council and the Parliament under the Stuarts — James I, who ruled from 1603 to 1625 and Charles I, who was crowned in 1625 and beheaded in 1649. It is a fascinating story well told in this excellently researched book by Rupali Mishra.
 
Even in its early years when it was a pure trading entity, the Company was the most economically impressive enterprise in Britain. It was financially stronger and better run than the Portuguese Estado da India and at least on a par with the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), or the Dutch East India Company. In its first decade, the Company’s members, or shareholders, invested in specific voyages. But by the 1610s, it opted for joint stocks, which ran for several years and funded multiple trading voyages. The first joint stock was from 1613 to 1623 and capitalised at £418,691; the second ran from 1617 to 1632 and was subscribed £1,629,040; and the third, from 1631 to 1642 collected £420,070. These were enormous amounts: The Company was capitalised almost on a par with the government of the realm. Between 1601 and 1640, the Company sent 168 ships on trading voyages to the East Indies. Storms and shipwrecks took their toll and only 104 ships returned. The profits that were so generated made the Company’s shareholders among the wealthiest in the land.

 
An enterprise of this size needed political goodwill. Much of the book explores the ways in which this was sought in the Stuart era, where it succeeded, and the occasions when it couldn’t move the state to intercede in its behalf. The Governor of the Company and the 24 directors of “committees”, who constituted the Court of Directors, were highly privileged, well-connected people. They knew what favours to ask from whom, how to keep the leadership within the chosen few, how to draft minutes that restricted information and censor private letters of the Company’s overseas servants or “factors”, and how to manage elections so that those who led did so for long periods of time. A Deputy Governor stepped down only when his sight and hearing failed him, and so many of his teeth were missing that he could no longer speak properly.

 
The book is in two parts. The first deals with the Company’s internal governance. It involves the letter patent, formation, the constituting authority, how the enterprise gathered and wooed its shareholders and other “useful men”, internal dissent and factions, and how it interacted with the public in an era in which pamphlets and broadsheets were becoming increasingly important tools of discourse. The second deals with the Company and the state, and highlights ways in which the Crown and the Privy Council could turn the screws — and when they did, how the Company and its Court of Directors could counter-manoeuvre. Sometimes the state won; often times the Company prevailed. Yet, when it did, the Company was careful to portray these as examples of the state’s goodwill.

 
The most fascinating chapter is the Company’s response to the Amboyna massacre. On March 9, 1623, the VOC accused 10 Company men of plotting with Japanese mercenaries to overthrow the Dutch from the island of Amboyna in the Moluccas. Herman van Speult, VOC’s governor of the island, ordered their beheading. Hell broke loose in the Company with its Court of Directors making loud calls for speedy restitution. These were backed by grisly woodcut illustrated propaganda and a booklet titled A True Relation of the Unjust, Cruel and Barbarous Proceedings against the English at Amboyna. Despite the public uproar, it became clear that James I had a different priority — that of not being drawn into a European conflict. As Ms Mishra shows, “The problem of Amboyna for the Company and… for the regime were not the same.”

 
I unhesitatingly recommend this book. But it is not for much of the laity. One needs to have a reasonable grasp of the history of the time, the world of maritime trade, the organisational structure of joint stock enterprise and the political economy of a powerful corporation and the state to appreciate the rigour of this work. Ms Mishra deserves kudos. May her book extend to beyond academic libraries, for it deserves to.