The East India Company

The East India Company is our topic starting in September 2017. Our investigation will range widely over its history and the development of trade, technologies, the impact on India, and Great Britain), and the battles with the Dutch East India Company (VOC), interaction with China and the development of trading entrepots around South East Asia.

From John Keay’s The Honorable Company (see below):

The career of ‘the Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe’ spans as much geography as it does history. To follow its multifarious activities involves imposing a chronology extending from the reign of Elizabeth to that of Victoria upon a map extending from southern Africa to north-west America. Heavy are the demands this makes on both writer and reader. (And hence perhaps the dearth of narrative histories of the Company in this post-imperial age.) But the conclusion is inescapable. The East India Company was as much about the East as about India. Its Pacific legacies would be as lasting as those in the Indian Ocean; its most successful commercial venture was in China, not India.

Freed of its subservient function as the unworthy stock on which the mighty Raj would be grafted, the Company stands forth as a robust association of adventurers engaged in hazarding all in a series of preposterous gambles. Some paid off; many did not but are no less memorable for it. Bizarre locations, exotic produce, and recalcitrant personalities combine to induce a sense of romance which, however repugnant to the scholar, is in no way contrived. It was thanks to the incorrigible pioneering of the Company’s servants that the British Empire acquired its peculiarly diffuse character. But for the Company there would have been not only no British India but also no global British Empire.

This page lists a bunch of resources, both printed and available on websites. The page is going to be updated regularly.

Timeline

There are a number of simple timelines available on webpages, and some of the better ones are linked below. But we can construct our own, and there will be separate page for this, which can be eventually filtered by topic (I hope).

Maps

This is just a list of links to maps as they are found on websites:

In Our Time

There is an episode of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time devoted to the EIC. Broadcast in June 2003,. The contributors were Linda Colley, Hugh Bowen, both of whom are represented in the book lists below, and Maria Misra, from Keble College, Oxford.

In Our Time: East India Company

There is also a similar In Our Time episode on the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, the EIC’s early great rival.

Books & articles

The are not that many available, modern, books on the whole history of the East India Company. The most frequently quoted one is John Keay’s The Honorable Company. The links go to the appropriate Amazon page: many of these books are either hard to come by, or expensive, often both! The John Keay, Philip Lawson and Jean Sutton books are available via Cumbria Libraries.

There’s also a quite complete annotated bibliography, in PDF form (up to late 2013) here:      University College, London

There are a number of other books that have useful coverage of the East India Company:

     Articles

Websites

Wikipedia: Quick links

  • East India Company  A pretty comprehensive starting point! The hyperlinks from this page will take you to just about everything factual about the company, its history, people, battles, impacts, with a huge range of external references and websites annotated.

People

Wikipedia has a number of categories for the people of the EIC. The most useful are these:

Obviously, there are some big names that might deserve further exploration. The  link on the name is to Wikipedia, the Dictionary of National Biography  page is shown afterwards. You can use your Cumbria Libraries card number to access these pages:

Places

Governance

India

Trading

Competition with VOC

Relationship with British Government

Quotes:

  • It accomplished a work such as in the whole history of the human race no other Company ever attempted and as such, is ever likely to attempt in the years to come.
    The Times, 2nd January 1874