English Private Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges and Global Networks
Timothy Davies - University of Warwick
English private trade in early modern Asia has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Much is known about this branch of European commerce, particularly the intra-Asian ‘country trade’, thanks to the important work of Holden Furber, Ian Bruce Watson, P.J. Marshall. They detailed the extent, scope and operation of English Company servants’ private trade networks from the late seventeenth through to the end of the eighteenth century, stressing the significance of this for the Indian Ocean economy and for the transition to dominion.[1]The growth and success of private trade has frequently been seen as a significant factor in supporting the Company’s move from trade to colonial control by extending the reach of English influence into new areas and market. Private trade has remained a popular subject for new research on the East India Company and Eurasian trade more generally, and the field has been enriched it the last decade or so by a number of important studies by Søren Mentz, Emily Erikson & Peter Bearman, and Om Prakash.[2]
My recently completed PhD thesis, British Private Trade Networks in the Arabian Seas, 1680-1760 (University of Warwick, 2012), feeds into both this more traditional work on private trade, whilst it also takes cues from newer work. The study is concerned with addressing the relationship between regional, Indian Ocean contexts, and the transnational networks of private trade. Existing work has not adequately explored this relationship between the local and the global in the realm of private trade, either concerned rigidly with a bounded Indian Ocean world, or placing undue emphasis on metropolitan connections for the success of private trade.
In the most recent in-depth study of private trade, Søren Mentz focused resolutely on connections between the City of London and Company men and free merchants resident in India. Capital exchange and the diamond trade formed connections that provided an important foundation for intra-Asian trade operating out of Madras. Mentz importantly asserts, therefore, that private trade should be seen as a sophisticated, independent, and global network that relied on European capital just as much as India-based financing.[3] Newer work on private trade has tended to emphasise that this was a system that flourished between 1680 and 1760, linking disparate regional markets in the Indian Ocean together, connecting them with currents of global trade.[4]
Focusing on the western Indian Ocean region reveals a rather different picture of the character and impact of private trade however. This was an area where commerce was fundamentally determined by an unstable political climate in India, Persia and the Yemen; yet Indian mercantile networks continued to dominate trade throughout the eighteenth century.[5]Indian financing remained critical for supporting the business of the most successful English merchants too.Political problems and commercial competition greatly affected the development and operation of the private trade of Company servants, as well as that of their employers.Conditions in other segments of the Indian Ocean world were much more favourable in terms of supporting the growth of Company servants’ private trade.[6] For a more complete and nuanced understanding of English private trade in this period, it is important to establish precisely how merchants worked within and dealt with these differing regional dynamics right across maritime Asia.
The study also addressed the historiographical bias towards the eastern Indian seaboard, and especially on the Coromandel Coast and Bay of Bengal. Despite long-standing interest in private trade, few studies have focused on the networks that operated in the Arabian Seas, including the Malabar Coast, Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.[7] No work has looked at this commerce in detail for the period prior to 1740.[8]
Making use of a wide range of primary materials is critical for a full understanding of the complexities of private trade networks. The source base for my thesis was naturally rooted in the India Office Records Collections in the British Library; there is much still to be learnt about private trade from ‘official’ Company documents. Private papers are also critical for any detailed exploration of private trade, and my research has relied on several important, but under-utilised, collections of private papers in the India Office collections and, in particular, in the Chancery Masters’ exhibits in the National Archives.[9] There are also useful but often overlooked materials on East Indian trade – both private and official – to be found in regional record offices in the south of England.[10]
I intend to expand on this work in two important directions. One key concern of my research is to further investigate the actual practices and mechanisms of private trade, particularly in the realm of information exchange. Just how did merchants network with each other and how did gather the information necessary to cultivate their private trade portfolios?The most successful private traders relied not just on maritime ventures, but on a plethora of diverse and inter-linked activities. All eighteenth century traders were well-connected individuals too; they depended on widespread and broad-based correspondence networks, and the way in which letters communicated commercial information, reinforcing trusting commercial relationships in the process. How private traders collected and collated the information they needed from individuals within their network, and how letters formed the architecture of these critical interactions, has not yet been attended to in enough detail. In many ways, private trade looks much like Atlantic trade: our knowledge and understanding of East Indian trade would, I think, be enriched by connecting Atlantic trade and merchant networks in the western hemisphere, with those in Asia.
A second new area of research will focus on the issue of malfeasance and its relationship to private trade. Existing approaches to this have mostly been related to a discussion of the ‘principal-agent problem’ faced by the Company. This rarely adequately captures the complexities of the relationships between private trade and official directives however.In the eighteenth century Company, inter-personal relationships cut across, and often took primacy over, corporate hierarchies, particularly as merchants stationed in Asia retained important ties to influential Company figures at home. Moreover, private-regarding activity was frequently aided and abetted by the Directors themselves despite official admonitions.[11] Existing work on private trade has tended to neglect these fluid distinctions between ‘principal’ and ‘agent’, and the boundaries between corporate directives and the reality of servant conduct, in the context of the Company.
[1] Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800 (Minneapolis; London, 1976); P.J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976); Ian Bruce Watson, Foundation for Empire: English Private Trade in India 1659-1760 (New Delhi, 1980).
[2] Søren Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at Work; Madras and the City of London, 1660-1740 (Copenhagen, 2005); Emily Erikson and Peter Bearman, ‘Malfeasance and the Foundations for Global Trade: The Structure of English Trade in the East Indies, 1601-1833’, American Journal of Sociology, 112/1 (2006), pp. 195-230; Om Prakash, English Private Trade in the Western Indian Ocean, 1720-1740’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 50/2-3 (2007), pp. 215-234.
[3]Mentz, English Gentleman Merchant.
[4] Erikson and Bearman, ‘Malfeasance’, pp. 201-202.
[5] See Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Power and the Weave: Weavers, Merchants and Rulers in Eighteenth Century Surat’ in Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Subramanian, Politics and Tradein the Indian Ocean World: Essays in Honour of Ashin Das Gupta (Delhi; Oxford, 1998) and Ghulam Nadri’s more recent studies of Gujarat, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat: The Dynamics of its Political Economy (Leiden, 2009), and Idem., ‘The Trading World of Indian Ocean Merchants in Pre-Colonial Gujarat, 1600-1750’, in Om Prakash (ed.), The Trading World of the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800 (New Delhi, 2012), pp. 255-284. For an older perspective see Ashin das Gupta, ‘Gujarati Merchants and the Red Sea Trade’ in Blair B. Kling and M.N. Pearson (eds), The Age of Partnership: Europeans in Asia Before Dominion (Honolulu, 1979), pp. 123-158.
[6] Mentz, ‘European Private Trade in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800’ in Prakash, Trading World, pp. 503-504.
[7]Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India (Cambridge, 1998), p. 252. For a detailed and recent historiographical overview of private trade, see Om Prakash, ‘The Trading World of the Indian Ocean: Some Defining Features’, in Prakash (ed.), Trading World, p. 24.
[8]There are some important exceptions to this:Lakshmi Subramanian (Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat and the West Coast (Delhi, 1996)) and Pamela Nightingale (Trade and Empire in Western India, 1784-1806 (Cambridge, 1970)) have both discussed private trade in this region for the later eighteenth century, particularly in terms of its connection to imperialism. Om Prakash has more recently attempted to address this historiographical gap, and his article ‘Private Trade in the Western Indian Ocean’ (JESHO) is the only piece focused directlyon English trade in the region.
[9] National Archives, Kew: C 105/4 Best v. Gammon - Correspondence and Accounts,Bombay; C 103/158 Boone v. Hill - Accounts and Correspondence, Bombay and Mocha; C 103/158 Boone v Nightingale - Accounts (one in Portuguese), invoices, bonds, India; C 104/248 Waterson v. Atkyns - Papers relating to William Mildmay’s mercantile activities in India and the administration of his estate after his death; C 110/145 Adams v Boone: Accounts and Correspondence Relating to East India Trade; C 106/411 Gayer v Gayer: Letter book of William Gayer (nephew of Sir John Gayer), journal of ships and other papers relating to India trade: India and England. The Robert Cowan papers, that have been well-used by Kirti Chaudhuri and Om Prakash, remain a key set of private trade materials due to their extent and detail. The papers are on microfilm in the IOR in the British Library, with the originals in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast. BL, IOR, Mss Eur Neg 11606-11636: 1719-1741 - Correspondence and account books of Sir Robert Cowan, free merchant at Bombay 1719, Chief of the Factory at Goa 1720, Chief at Mocha 1724, Governor of Bombay 1729-34.
[10] Shropshire Archives, Shrewsbury: 894/432-463: Hanmer Family Papers: Letters and affairs of Capt. James Hanmer; Somerset Heritage Centre, Taunton: DD/TB/30/14/1-52 and DD/TB/41/81-9, Papers relating to East India Company trade; Berkshire Record Office, Reading: D/ESv/M/F7-F10: Papers related to the private trade of John Stevens, 1744-1765.
[11] One of Bombay governor Robert Cowan’s letters to a Company friend in Bengal argued that, ‘Altho the Honble Company hav frequently signified to their several Presidencys in India that they respect their servants and all acting by Authority under them … who shall conform themselves to the orders & rules of the sundry settlements or factorys they frequent … tis apparent they have at several times shown very little regard to such orders even at Surat the principal mart of All India the Company have been advised of this and yet have not thought proper to give any direct orders to prevent it’. Robert Cowan Papers, Reel 11607, D 654/B1/1D, Robert Cowan to Martin French, 25October 1729.