Chapter Ten
British Private Trade Networks and Metropolitan Connections in the Eighteenth Century
Timothy Davies
Introduction
The private trade of British free merchants and East India Company (EIC) servants in the early modern Indian Ocean world has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Important work on intra-Asian private trade—known as the ‘country trade’—by Ian Bruce Watson, Holden Furber and Peter Marshall in particular, emphasised the extent to which this branch of European commercial enterprise played an important role in transforming the nature of the Indian Ocean economy and supporting the EIC’s move from ‘trade to dominion’ from the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Furber estimated that by the Eighteenth Century, British merchants formed the largest single group of Europeans engaged in private trade in Asia.
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[i] Here, the term ‘private trade’ refers to the commerce conducted by merchants on their own account, independent of their Company business. Watson usefully defined this as a portmanteau term ‘delimiting all the trade with the East Indies, and within the East Indies, not conducted for the Company’s benefit’. ‘Private trade’ is a term that covers several different commercial systems and channels of trade, incorporating the activities of ‘free merchants’ and ‘interlopers’ as well as Company employees.[ii] Despite this important body of scholarship, and the continuing interest in private trade amongst economic and imperial historians, we still know relatively little about how this element of British commerce in the East Indies dovetailed with Eurasian private trade, how private trade goods moved between the East and Europe, and how this trade was coordinated by individual merchants ‘on the ground.’
Like most early modern merchants, the servants of the English East India Company based in the East Indies lay at the heart of complex and geographically wide-ranging commercial networks. Their private business ventures were intimately connected to the local political and economic settings in which they worked, while they were also embedded in global circuits of trade and transcontinental circulations of capital, goods and information.[iii] Although concerned primarily with intra-Asian commerce, historians of this trade have discussed the significance of British merchants’ connections with the metropole, focusing particularly on financial ties, and the remittance of private fortunes home to Britain. Over four decades ago, Furber emphasised the significance of EIC servants’ links to London, particularly for the remittance of private fortunes in the later Eighteenth Century.[iv] Historians writing later also underscored the importance of networks of family members, friends and other associates in the capital. They were hugely important for British private trade in the East Indies, particularly as a source of start-up capital, and financial assistance more generally.[v] Indeed, a metropolitan-centred approach has now come to the forefront of the field. In a recent in-depth study of this branch of European commerce, Søren Mentz argued that ties between India and London were of primary importance for the success of private trade. Mentz describes how, from the late Seventeenth Century, English merchants in Madras cultivated networks of commissioners who were able to readily access home markets. These merchants in London, who received goods or bills of exchange from Company servants, in turn dispatched capital to India. This capital was hugely significant for funding private ventures in the Indian Ocean. The system was a reciprocal one; Company servants looked after the economic interests of City merchants in Asia, and received much needed capital in return.[vi] More than ever before, European intra-Asian private trade is now considered not just as a bounded endeavour that took place within the trading world of the Indian Ocean, but as a complex global system that linked Company employees, the servants of other European companies, Indian merchants, and financiers in the City of London.[vii]
There is still much to be learnt about British private trade, especially about its role in the trade of goods to Europe. This chapter aims to shed new light on private trade. It makes two principal arguments. First, it argues that the current emphasis on the importance of metropolitan connections in private trade has obscured the degree to which British merchants’ more local, intra-Asian networks were imbricated with their European connections. The chapter emphasises the connections, rather than the separation, between metropolitan and more local connections in private trade networks. We need to be aware that British merchants based in the East Indies during the Eighteenth Century depended on connections with the metropole for numerous different services. They were vital not only for securing the necessary capital to trade in Asian waters and further afield, but also essential for receiving valuable information about different markets, and for maintaining a trustworthy reputation in commercial circles. In turn, these European connections relied upon and were intertwined with intra-Asian networks of information, finance and goods. Whilst the new metropolitan-centred approach pioneered by Mentz has breathed new life into the field, it has also tended to artificially separate out the metropolitan dimension of private trade from the more quotidian intra-Asian commercial activities of British merchants in the East Indies. In addition, it has concentrated particularly heavily on financial ties, rather than the more intricate connections that undergirded private Eurasian trade.
Second, the chapter argues that, in order to fully understand the complexity of private networks, it is vital to closely examine particular ventures and to pay special attention to merchants’ correspondence. The foregoing discussion pinpoints correspondence and merchants’ letters—which circulated between Company servants, metropolitan agents, and, crucially, commanders of East Indiamen—as the vital architecture that upheld private trade networks. Looking at this form of long-distance communication reveals important information about just how this form of commerce operated. The chapter explores one private trade venture from the 1750s in detail, in order to emphasise the place of the social, or ‘inter-personal’, connections—formed between merchants, their relatives and correspondents—that upheld the private trade in ‘goods from the East’. Such a focus is important in light of recent work on Eurasian private trade that has glossed over social ties in favour of concentrating on financial and rigidly ‘economic’ forms of connection. There thus remains a need to engage directly with social networks in Eurasian private trade, to highlight the types of personal associations that were necessary for the success of global business in the Eighteenth Century.
Private Trade and Metropolitan Connections
Throughout a career in the EIC in India, on-going connections to home were vital for British merchants to develop new private trading opportunities. Using home-provided capital and commercial information conveyed from Britain, Company merchants used their European correspondents to organise private ventures in Asian waters, and then to send home goods or remit profits. Capital sent from London—often as part of ships’ captains’ and other mariners’ privilege trade—could be extremely important for the private trade of Company servants in India. Silver was frequently sent out to the west coast; Bombay governors Charles Boone and Robert Cowan regularly received large consignments.[viii] Money from London was an important source of capital for Boone’s involvement in the country trade, which included several voyages to China, and took in numerous other Indian Ocean destinations. He had ‘got a very good Estate’ and ‘acquir’d a handsome Fortune’ thanks to his time in the East Indies by the time he left his post at Bombay.[ix] A vast range of other goods were sent out to India as part of private trade cargoes too—coral for the purchase of diamonds was a particularly prominent item that appeared in the Company’s list of requests from private individuals to convey goods to the East.[x]
Private ventures directed from London also took place, involving commodities on the East India Company’s list of permitted articles, those goods that were allowed to be conveyed to Europe as part of private cargoes. While Company servants were not forbidden to engage in port-to-port trade in Asian waters as part of their covenants, trade between the East Indies and London was, in theory, reserved strictly for the Company. However, from the beginning of the ‘de-regulation’ of private trade in the Seventeenth Century, the Company provided a list of certain commodities that were not officially part of the Company’s concerns, but could legally form part of both outward- and homeward-bound private trade cargoes.[xi] As Wretts-Smith suggested, Directors realised that some private trade must be countenanced in order to keep it above ground and subject to control. It was better to allow private imports on the Company’s ships, they believed, than to drive the traders into the arms of interlopers.[xii] Watson similarly argued that the Company’s acquiescence to private trade removed some of the necessity to smuggle goods in Company ships.[xiii] A wide range and high volume of these ‘unprohibited’ and ‘permission’ goods were carried on Company ships back to Britain on private accounts.[xiv] All such goods had to be properly registered in the ships’ manifests and brought directly to the Company’s private trade warehouse on arrival in London. Despite the Company’s ‘monopoly’, it was eminently possible for private merchants working within this framework to form significant and lucrative commercial connections between Britain and India via this trade.
What was imported into Europe via private trade comprised a much more diverse set of commodities than those imported by the Company. The EIC allowed an extremely varied range of goods to be traded privately to England. A list of permitted articles from the 1730s included agate, ambergris, ammoniacum, arrack, asafoetida, benjamin, bezoar stones, cabinets, cambogium, camphor, canes, cardamoms, cassia fistula, cassia lignea, China fans and pictures, China root, chinaware, civet, leather goods, cornelian rings, cubebs, diamonds, pearls and precious stones, ebony wood, galangal, Goa stones, gold, Japan ware, lacs of ‘all sorts’, lacquerware, lapis lazuli, long pepper, musk, myrrh, olibanum, opoponax, ostrich feathers, rattans, rhubarb, rice, sago, various spices, tea, tortoiseshell, tutenaque and worm seeds. The types of goods on this list had changed little from the first lists of permitted articles published in the 1670s: spices, drugs, and other ‘luxury’ items.[xv] Later in the Eighteenth Century, more specific and highly detailed regulations were created for different types of commodities and for different types of ships. Some of the guidelines governing private trade had become extremely intricate by the 1770s.[xvi]
As Huw Bowen has importantly pointed out, captains, supercargoes and other mariners acted as the critical intermediaries between retailers and commissioners in London and Company servants in India.[xvii] The mariners of Company ships were permitted a certain amount of tonnage to use for their private trade. The general amount allowed, codified in the 1770s, ranged from around thirty tons for the Captain to a single ton for carpenters, gunners, boatswains and first mates.[xviii] These privileges offered by the Company, particularly to ships’ commanders, meant captains often acted as entrepreneurs and ensured there was always a vigorous private trade between Britain and Asia.[xix] Moreover, the activities of commanders were ‘instrumental in the creation of extensive networks of private enterprise that served to link producers, merchants and consumers across the EIC’s trading empire, thereby facilitating important flows of information, commodities and finance between Britain and Asia’.[xx] Company servants looking to freight cargo to Europe therefore depended on close relationships with these commanders and other ships’ officers in order to make use of their privilege space to convey goods homeward, and on their communication networks to keep in contact with associates and correspondents at home. In turn, mariners relied upon the human capital, information networks, and personal connections of Company servants stationed in the East Indies and familiar with the rhythms of the country trade.
The exchange of letters was at the heart of this and other private trade interactions, because of their importance for conveying information, and for mediating ties of trust. Letters have been linked with commerce in every civilisation, and economic survival often depended on regular written communication.[xxi] Scholars have increasingly highlighted the importance of information flows for early modern and eighteenth-century trade. The rapid commercial expansion worldwide and the birth of a transnational economy in the Eighteenth Century gave rise to new forms of information exchange. Information flows across vast distances became more important than ever and it was correspondence, carried via ships at sea and caravans on land, which linked together disparate markets and oiled the wheels of global commerce. Commercial knowledge itself was a commodity of sorts, and travelled and circulated just as trade goods or finance did. The transmission of information about prices, commodities and markets was vital to all merchants and traders.[xxii] As Gagan Sood, among others, has argued, understanding how information flows is essential for understanding how complex commercial ventures were mediated in the early modern world.[xxiii]
Charles Waters and his Network
The case of Bombay merchant Charles Waters provides us with an important window onto the workings of a private venture involving the trade of Asian goods—in this case, various different ‘drugs’—to Britain. The case of Waters is a vividly illustrative example of this branch of European commerce in the East Indies, and is worth exploring in detail. It also draws attention to the importance of letters and the flow of information within a Eurasian private trade network. Waters was a Bombay Company servant who was charged by a London-based wholesaler with procuring a number of Asian goods to be shipped back to Britain during the 1750s. In addition to his private commerce in India, he acted as an agent for the London drug merchants, Messrs Gammon & Chaloner. A transnational procurement network formed between these men, directed by the druggists in London, and using Waters and his associates to acquire a number of Asian goods that were then conveyed using the privilege trade of Captain Thomas Best.[xxiv] The letters between the members of the network illuminate key details of the machinations of private trade between Britain and western India. The diversity of goods dealt with is particularly evident here, whilst the venture also highlights the complex and multifaceted correspondence networks that allowed private trade to operate. The partnership between Gammon & Chaloner, Waters and Best was based on long-standing commercial associations, sophisticated information exchange, and familial networks—each of which was an important part of the underlying structure of many Anglo-Indian private trade ventures.
Situated in Laurence Pountney Lane in the City of London, adjacent to present-day Cannon Street, the premises of druggists Gammon & Chaloner lay close to the location of East India House in Leadenhall Street.[xxv] Their association with the produce of the Indian Ocean world began when the druggists contacted Captain Best eager to acquire a number of goods from India following his voyage in the ship the Prince Henry in 1754.[xxvi] Amongst the range of goods permitted to be conveyed in private trade, drugs and medicinal commodities were particularly significant. Along with tea, piece goods, indigo and a range of smaller luxuries, drugs were one of the main sets of goods imported from Asia in private and privilege trade.[xxvii] The Company’s regulations stipulated with regard to drugs that ‘Any quantity may be imported paying the Custom, and to the Company 7 per cent. on the face value’.[xxviii] Many articles that the Company permitted to be privately traded were classed as drugs, and many of these could be relatively easily procured in the western Indian Ocean region. These were often sold in London in the Company’s sales alongside pepper, calicos and other East Indies commodities.[xxix] Looking at Waters’ venture therefore reveals much about the operation of private trade venture and how the private trade in Asian commodities could be organised and carried out.
Gammon & Chaloner provided Best with an extensive list of articles available in the markets of the Indian Ocean, with orders to apply to Charles Waters at Bombay for assistance in purchasing those goods listed which could be readily bought in the town. Waters was recommended to Gammon & Chaloner by his father Thomas. Thomas Waters was a friend of Gammon & Chaloner, an EIC director and former Company employee at Bombay and Mocha, who corresponded regularly with both the druggists and his son on matters relating to the venture.[xxx] Whilst nominally acting as representatives of the EIC, many directors engaged in their own private trade. They were often former East Indies servants, and worked with their friends and relatives in the East on private trade ventures, whilst lobbying for and supporting the interests of their Asian correspondents at East India House. The range of items requested by the druggists was extensive and included cubebs (allspice), ‘worm seeds’, sandalwood, goat bezoars, turmeric, various kinds of lac, myrrh, camphor, cardamom seeds, gum Arabic, opoponax, sago and cassia lignea (cinnamon bark). These were all highly sought after trade goods in eighteenth-century India and all permitted private trade commodities.[xxxi] The provenance of such goods was extremely diverse, but Bombay’s regular connections not just to the Indian hinterland but to the Malabar Coast, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, facilitated their acquisition.[xxxii]