The East India Company: The World's Most Powerful Corporation (The Story of Indian Business) by Tirthankar Roy Read Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Tirthankar Roy
and the large transaction costs that early modern commercialization engendered.
Beyond these general themes, the book is interested in two large questions. How should we explain the transformation of the Company from a trader to an empire-builder, with reference to its own organizational structure and to the opportunities that came its way? Subsequent chapters will illustrate the answer I have hinted at earlier in this chapter, which focuses on the divided nature of the organization. The second question is, what effects did the Company, as a trader and as an empire, impart upon the economy and business organization in India? Again, the answer outlined in this chapter will be embellished as we proceed with thestory. The concluding chapter will consider the second question more fully.
Before we get to these themes, it is necessary to recreate the big picture. The story begins with the combination of enterprise and exploration for which Elizabethan London has earned a unique place in global history.
The Voyages
IT IS HARDLY possible to identify the precise moment when the Company as an idea was born. After all, European interest in India had grown from medieval times and for very compelling reasons too. However, the decade before the official inauguration of the firm in 1600 and the decade after this event saw the idea of organized trading voyages to the Indian Ocean reach maturity.
Ralph Fitch
On 12 February 1583, a group of Englishmen sailed from Falmouth on a ship called the Tyger, bound for West Asia. The group included the merchants John Newberry, John Eldred and Ralph Fitch, a jeweller William Leedes, and a painter James Story. Newberrywas a merchant-explorer who had two years before undertaken a daring overland trip to Hormuz and back, picking up Arabic on the way. Fitch was a leather merchant, and possibly the most senior member of the party. Eldred was a thirty-one-year old trader in Levantine silks. Newberry, Fitch and Eldred had been close to two shareholders of the English Levant Company. These shareholders part-sponsored the expedition. The Company had been doing business in Constantinople for some years, and brought back samples of cotton cloth from India, silks from China, and spices of the Indonesian archipelago. The goal of the expedition was to explore a way to reach the sources of these goods.
The party reached Tripoli in Syria, crossed the Lebanese mountains to reach Aleppo, and from there sailed along the Euphrates to Al-Fallûjah. At this point Eldred stayed on to trade in spices, and the rest of the group journeyed on to reach Hormuz. Hormuz belonged to the Persian empire, but in practice, the Portuguese ruled this port so vital to their policy of blockading the Indian Ocean routes to all but friendly ships. Their friends, the Venetian merchants, did not want English merchants in West Asia. In a recent contest between the Spanish monarch and a Portuguese nobleman for the Portuguese throne, the English tookthe nobleman’s side and their rivals the Venetian merchants supported the Spanish Crown. Not surprisingly, then, the travellers were promptly arrested at Hormuz. The Portuguese chief justice or aveador-general decided that they were spies, ignoring the letters of introduction they had obtained from Queen Elizabeth, addressed to the emperors of India and China.
The party was sent on a Portuguese galleon to Goa to be interrogated by the viceroy Don Francisco de Mascarenhas. Thirteen days into captivity, Story became a Jesuit, ‘partly for feare’, and was released. The release of the rest of the group was secured by the intervention of an English Jesuit Thomas Stevens, who was a known figure in Goa. Once freed, the party lost no time setting up business in Goa. However, the Jesuits kept the pressure on to convert them to Catholicism, and allegedly hatched a plot to get them rearrested. Fearing further trouble the party escaped Goa late in 1584.
The group travelled overland to Belgaum, and onward
Beyond these general themes, the book is interested in two large questions. How should we explain the transformation of the Company from a trader to an empire-builder, with reference to its own organizational structure and to the opportunities that came its way? Subsequent chapters will illustrate the answer I have hinted at earlier in this chapter, which focuses on the divided nature of the organization. The second question is, what effects did the Company, as a trader and as an empire, impart upon the economy and business organization in India? Again, the answer outlined in this chapter will be embellished as we proceed with thestory. The concluding chapter will consider the second question more fully.
Before we get to these themes, it is necessary to recreate the big picture. The story begins with the combination of enterprise and exploration for which Elizabethan London has earned a unique place in global history.
The Voyages
IT IS HARDLY possible to identify the precise moment when the Company as an idea was born. After all, European interest in India had grown from medieval times and for very compelling reasons too. However, the decade before the official inauguration of the firm in 1600 and the decade after this event saw the idea of organized trading voyages to the Indian Ocean reach maturity.
Ralph Fitch
On 12 February 1583, a group of Englishmen sailed from Falmouth on a ship called the Tyger, bound for West Asia. The group included the merchants John Newberry, John Eldred and Ralph Fitch, a jeweller William Leedes, and a painter James Story. Newberrywas a merchant-explorer who had two years before undertaken a daring overland trip to Hormuz and back, picking up Arabic on the way. Fitch was a leather merchant, and possibly the most senior member of the party. Eldred was a thirty-one-year old trader in Levantine silks. Newberry, Fitch and Eldred had been close to two shareholders of the English Levant Company. These shareholders part-sponsored the expedition. The Company had been doing business in Constantinople for some years, and brought back samples of cotton cloth from India, silks from China, and spices of the Indonesian archipelago. The goal of the expedition was to explore a way to reach the sources of these goods.
The party reached Tripoli in Syria, crossed the Lebanese mountains to reach Aleppo, and from there sailed along the Euphrates to Al-Fallûjah. At this point Eldred stayed on to trade in spices, and the rest of the group journeyed on to reach Hormuz. Hormuz belonged to the Persian empire, but in practice, the Portuguese ruled this port so vital to their policy of blockading the Indian Ocean routes to all but friendly ships. Their friends, the Venetian merchants, did not want English merchants in West Asia. In a recent contest between the Spanish monarch and a Portuguese nobleman for the Portuguese throne, the English tookthe nobleman’s side and their rivals the Venetian merchants supported the Spanish Crown. Not surprisingly, then, the travellers were promptly arrested at Hormuz. The Portuguese chief justice or aveador-general decided that they were spies, ignoring the letters of introduction they had obtained from Queen Elizabeth, addressed to the emperors of India and China.
The party was sent on a Portuguese galleon to Goa to be interrogated by the viceroy Don Francisco de Mascarenhas. Thirteen days into captivity, Story became a Jesuit, ‘partly for feare’, and was released. The release of the rest of the group was secured by the intervention of an English Jesuit Thomas Stevens, who was a known figure in Goa. Once freed, the party lost no time setting up business in Goa. However, the Jesuits kept the pressure on to convert them to Catholicism, and allegedly hatched a plot to get them rearrested. Fearing further trouble the party escaped Goa late in 1584.
The group travelled overland to Belgaum, and onward
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