The Rise of Commercial Empires

The Rise of Commercial Empires PDF

Author: David Ormrod

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-03-13

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780521819268

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A work of major importance for the economic history of both Europe and North America.

The East India Company's Maritime Service, 1746-1834

The East India Company's Maritime Service, 1746-1834 PDF

Author: Jean Sutton

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1843835835

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The book charts in detail successive voyages by members of the Larkins family, who were leading owners of East India Company ships, showing what it was like to sail to and trade with India in this period. It provides a great deal of material on trade, warfare, developments in seamanship and navigation, the opening up of trade to China, and much more.

The East India Company and Religion, 1698-1858

The East India Company and Religion, 1698-1858 PDF

Author: Penelope Carson

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1843837323

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An overview of the East India Company's policy towards religion throughout its period of rule in India. This wide-ranging book charts how the East India Company grappled with religious issues in its multi-faith empire, putting them into the context of pressures exerted both in Britain and on the subcontinent, from the Company's early mercantile beginnings to the bloody end of its rule in 1858. Religion was at the heart of the East India Company's relationship with India, but the course of its religious policy has rarely been examined in any systematic way. The free exercise of religion, the policy the Company adopted in its early days in order to safeguard the security of its possessions, was challenged by Evangelicals in the late eighteenth century. They demanded that the Company should grant free access to Christians of all Protestant denominations and an end to 'barbaric' Indian religious practices. This gave rise to an unprecedented petitioning movement in 1813, comparable in strength to that for theabolition of the slave trade the following year. It was an important milestone in British domestic politics. The final years of the Company's rule were dominated by its attempts to withstand Evangelical demands in the face of growing hostility from Indians. In the end it pleased no one, and its rule came to a gory and ignominious end. In this compelling account, Penny Carson examines the twists and turns of the East India Company's policy on religious issues. The story of how the Company dealt with the fact that it was a Christian Company, trying to be equitable to the different faiths it found in India, has resonances for Britain today as it attempts to accommodate the religions of all its peoples within the Christian heritage and structure of the state. Penelope Carson is an independent scholar with a doctorate from King's College, London.

Naval Resistance to Britain's Growing Power in India, 1660-1800

Naval Resistance to Britain's Growing Power in India, 1660-1800 PDF

Author: Philip MacDougall

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1843839482

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Reveals, from a non-Eurocentric perspective, how Indian states developed and implemented maritime strategies which posed a serious threat to British naval power in the region. Most books on the colonisation of India view the subject in Eurocentric imperial terms, focusing on the ways in which European powers competed with each other on land and at sea and defeated Indian states on land, and viewing Indian states as having little interest in naval matters. This book, in contrast, reveals that there was substantial naval activity on the part of some Indian states and that this activity represented a serious threat to Britain's naval power. Considering the subject from an Indian point of view, the book discusses the naval activities of the Mahratta Confederacy and later those of Mysore under its energetic rulers Haidar Ali and his successor Tipu Sultan. Itshows how these states chose deliberately to develop a naval strategy, seeing this as the most effective way of expelling the British from India; how their strategies learned from European maritime technology, successfully blending this with Indian technology; how their opposition to British naval power was at its most effective when they allied themselves with the other European naval powers in the region - France, Portugal and the Netherlands, whose maritime activities in the region are fully outlined and assessed; and how ultimately the Indian states' naval strategies failed. Philip MacDougall, a former lecturer in economic history at the University of Kent, is a founder member of the Navy Dockyards Society, editor of the Society's Transactions, and the author or editor of seven books in maritime history, including The Naval Mutinies of 1797 (The Boydell Press, 2011).

Empire of Free Trade

Empire of Free Trade PDF

Author: Sudipta Sen

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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On the eve of the British conquest of India, northern India was rich in marketplaces that served as centers for an extensive and vigorous organization of inland and oceanic trade. Indigenous commercial practice, which the British never fully understood, was based on an intricate network of social, political, and religious relationships. In Empire of Free Trade, Sudipta Sen demonstrates that these marketplaces became the first sites of conflict between the East India Company and the traditional rulers of Bengal (regional representatives of the Mughal empire), as the Company fought to supplant the rulers' authority and "settle" northern Indian centers of trade by establishing powerful customs and police networks. Sen challenges recent histories that portray the Company as a trading corporation drawn unprepared into the exigencies of warfare in order to protect its ability to engage in trade. He demonstrates instead that, from the beginning, the Company attempted to build a strong and intrusive state in India, and that the first decades of colonial rule entailed much more than the preservation of trade. From the beginning the Company attempted, largely by force and subversion, to dismantle and appropriate successful commercial relationships and, with them, the cultural networks on which they were based. Sen argues that the disorganization that resulted from this dismantling helped to prepare the way for the eventual conquest of India.

British Art and the East India Company

British Art and the East India Company PDF

Author: Geoff Quilley

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1783275103

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Examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art, demonstrating how art and related forms of culture were closely tied to commerce and the rise of the commercial state. This book examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a new "school" of British art was in its formative stages with the foundation of exhibiting societies and the Royal Academy in 1768. It focuses on the Company's patronage, promotion and uses of art, both in Britain and in India and the Far East, and how the Company and its trade with the East were represented visually, through maritime imagery, landscape, genre painting and print-making. It also considers how, for artists such as William Hodges and Arthur William Devis, the East India Company, and its provision of a wealthy market in British India, provided opportunities for career advancement, through alignment with Company commercial principles. In this light, the book's main concern is to address the conflicted and ambiguous nature of art produced in the service of a corporation that was the "scandal of empire" for most of its existence, and how this has shaped and distorted our understanding of the history of British art in relation to the concomitant rise of Britain as a self-consciously commercial and maritime nation, whose prosperity relied upon global expansion, increasing colonialism and the development of mercantile organisations.

Britain's Oceanic Empire

Britain's Oceanic Empire PDF

Author: H. V. Bowen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-05-31

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 110702014X

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A comparative study of how the British managed the expansion of empire in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean.

The Anarchy

The Anarchy PDF

Author: William Dalrymple

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 1526634015

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THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020 LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 A FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, WALL STREET JOURNAL AND TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India ... A book of beauty' – Gerard DeGroot, The Times In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw the East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.

The Richest East India Merchant

The Richest East India Merchant PDF

Author: Anthony Webster

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1843833034

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Biography and business history of wealthy British merchant in India reveals much about the nineteenth-century Empire.