This chapter deals with a kind of organization—the chartered company—which historically did not always evolve into imperial structures. Not everyone would agree that chartered companies were engaged in empire-building in Asia before 1800, and those who do might further contend that developing imperial traits was the exception rather than the norm. They might further argue that only the two giants, the Honourable East India Company (EIC) and the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), or Dutch East India Company, merit closer attention. Such consideration, moreover, would only apply to the last decades of their corporate lifespan, namely, from the middle of the eighteenth century onward. This chapter, however, takes a broader view of the East India companies as trading ventures and instruments of empire, especially as the building blocks for a subsequent phase of empire-building. In other words, the era of the East India companies can be seen in terms of a transition, or prelude, to High Imperialism. Their longevity and success depended on several factors: the moment at which they were formed, the place(s) in which they had their principal markets, support from the home government in the form of capital injection and subsidies, or also interference in company management. All chartered East India companies were joint projects of sorts: at home in Europe, they can be seen as joint projects between government, the sociopolitical elites, and the mercantile classes. At the other end is the ability of these companies to form working relationships with the elites and diasporic communities in and around their Asian base(s). Bringing the minor European entities into the picture serves to create a more balanced perspective and highlight that the EIC and VOC were the exceptions rather than the norm.
Most chartered companies were founded in the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, but their heyday was during the early-modern period covering the two centuries between 1600 and 1800 approximately. Chartered trading companies covered a range of organizational forms and sizes, and as a rule they were organized as joint stockholder companies. In the sixteenth century chartered companies were formed to exploit particular resources, such as fishing or whaling, or to carry out trade with designated regions, such as in the case of the Spanish (1530), Muscovy (1555), Venice (1583), or Levant (1592) companies. The English (EIC) and Dutch (VOC) East India companies, formed in 1600 and 1602, respectively, bore common traits with these earlier ventures. Several directors of the Levant Company, for example, also served in the EIC during the early phase of its corporate lifespan. Together with the many similarities between the East India and other chartered companies, there were also some significant differences. While the VOC had been formed as a joint stockholder company right from the time of its foundation, the EIC only became one in 1657.
Some of the East India companies represented the capitalist robes of evolving colonial projects—such as notably the various French ventures and the Portuguese East India Company. Others can be seen as joint ventures between the state and merchant communities, in which imperial motives were minor or absent. This was the case, for example, with the Danish, Swedish, and Ostend companies. All of them, however, were founded as profit-driven corporate entities. Building and maintaining company infrastructure at key trading locations around Asia generally laid the foundations for what later became a sustained (colonial) presence. Such infrastructure included ports, docks, warehouses, settlements, and fortifications that remained operational and intact even after a company lost its charter, went bankrupt, merged with competitors, or was liquidated. Once the corporate shell had been taken over by the state and liquidated, the fixed assets passed into the ownership of the state, and became infrastructure of a new company, or were occasionally sold to (foreign) competitors. In this way, the overseas assets of the defunct companies came under direct control of the home state and rarely, if ever, returned to local Asian polities. This was most visibly the case with the winding up of the assets belonging to the New French East India Company (Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes Orientales) in 1794, the VOC after 1795, and the EIC after 1858. The latter two liquidations transferred rule over much of modern-day insular Southeast and South Asia to the Dutch and British governments respectively.
It was on the infrastructure of defunct companies, therefore, that European powers in the later half of the eighteenth century and especially during the nineteenth century built, expanded, and consolidated their imperial presence. The chartered companies may not originally have represented institutions of imperial presence and rule strictly speaking, but through their fixed assets, administrative structures, know-how, and networks, they laid the foundations of what would become the age of High Imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Together with the chapter on the Iberian empires by Anthony Disney, this is one of only two chapters in this volume that addresses non-native Asian imperial structures. Just how “European” were they, however? While all chartered companies represent a joint project in some respect, their composition hardly qualifies as national in a narrow sense: there were many foreigners among shareholders and among the company servants, albeit not necessarily among the senior officers of the company. Furthermore, to insist only on a given East India Company’s European core, agenda, and shareholder base would deny its roots and support in Asia, especially among the diasporic mercantile communities. A company’s long-term success depended as much on the open or tacit support of mercantile and political elites in Asia as on the politics at European courts and even the prowess of financial centers like London, Paris, and Amsterdam. The chartered East India companies—especially the two long-term survivors, the EIC and VOC—inserted themselves into preexisting business networks, adopted Asian business practices, created economies of scale, and played the political games of the Asian powers. They also forged from an early stage a working relationship with diasporic commercial elites to establish and consolidate their grip on certain commercial activities. The VOC’s synergy with the Chinese diaspora, for example, traces its beginnings to the opening decade of the seventeenth century and arguably grew with the company’s clout across Southeast Asia.1 The Dutch also co-opted the Chinese in the running of their colonial settlements, not least in Batavia, through the sale of monopoly concessions. The EIC would do the same in its Southeast Asian settlements, such as notably in Singapore after 1819.2 But such synergy was not limited to the diasporic communities of Southeast Asia. Local political elites (who generally also dominated local economic activities) co-opted the VOC, as the cases of Johor and Siam illustrate for early-seventeenth-century Southeast Asia.3
Adaptation and accommodation were also vital for both securing and maintaining the goodwill of Asia’s (powerful) rulers. The VOC, for example, became a tributary of China, but the company’s governor-general who resided in Batavia on the island of Java began to behave like an Asian tributary overlord with all the pomp and visual trappings that this entailed. The VOC, in other words, had found its place within the hierarchy of Asian rulers. The company had enjoyed a considerable degree of independence in managing commerce and its diplomatic relations with Asian monarchs, but over time, the VOC—not unlike its counterpart, the EIC—began to resemble an Asian patron state with its clients tied to the company by treaty and alliance.
Europe’s chartered companies operated across a range of maritime and coastal spaces in Asia, Africa, and the Americas and beyond. This chapter limits the geographic scope to the littoral of the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific, in other words, the maritime and coastal spaces reaching from the southeast and eastern coast of Africa across to the Japanese Islands, and as far south as Timor in the Indonesian Archipelago. This maritime space, in fact, broadly aligns the area that fell under the purview of the Portuguese viceroy in Goa before 1800 but also aligns with the area covered by the VOC charters.4
The history of European chartered companies active in the east and western hemispheres has been subject to renewed and vigorous research in recent decades. With specific reference to Asia, much of this research interest has focused on the two behemoths and long-term survivors: the EIC (1600–1874) and the VOC (1602–1799). These two chartered companies founded at the beginning of the seventeenth century are seen to have laid the foundations of the British and Dutch Empires in Asia respectively. The VOC was the Asian arm of what some authors have dubbed the “First Dutch Empire.”5 With respect to the long-term process of empire-building, East India companies today form an indispensable part of the picture. Holden Furber dedicated an entire section of Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, titled “Structures of Empire,” to the discussion of different chartered companies that were active in Asia during the early-modern period.6 An overview of the most important companies trading in the East and West Indies, as well as in the Arctic, Russia, and the Levant during the period 1500–1800, can also be found in the older but still helpful study of Pierre Bonnassieux, Les Grandes Compagnies de Commerce (the Great Companies of Commerce), originally published in 1892 and now made available in several reprints.7
Besides the diversity of the East India companies studied, there is a growing interest in their different activities and achievements. Several studies have been published discussing how the chartered companies became innovators, their role in developing financial centers like London and Amsterdam, or their specific long-term contributions toward bookkeeping and corporate management.8 There have also been efforts to explore their activities beyond the confines of management, commerce, and trade, such as their contribution toward warfare and diplomacy, in the development of international law, statecraft, and republican discourses, as a patron of the arts, in the advancement of science and astronomy, as information and knowledge networks, or their contributions toward the study of geography, cartography, medicine, biology, and anthropology.9
In addition to examining the East India companies as a phenomenon, there has also been a growing interest in comparing them with contemporary structures such as nonstate global forces, as agents of globalization, in debates about the responsibilities of multinational corporations, transnational corporate liability, or transnational legislation and jurisdiction.10
In this chapter, the focus is placed on the chartered East India company as a foundation or as an instrument of empire. This covers the more conventional interest in the issues of war, peace, diplomacy, and (shared) sovereignty, as well as the quasi-state, sovereign company or company-state11; or alternatively as an ever-evolving set of political, social, and economic networks.12
A chartered (trading) company is a business-based and thus profit-oriented trade organization that has been granted a type of constitution by its home government. This constitution, or charter, establishes the hybrid private-public legal persona of the company. The charter is a document of far greater significance and complexity than today’s articles of association or certificate of incorporation. The VOC offers an excellent case study in this regard. Early ventures operating in the East Indies, including significantly the so-called voorcompagnieën (predecessor companies) of the VOC, had been entirely private, unincorporated ventures. The decision of the States-General, the federal assembly of the Dutch Republic, to issue a charter establishing the VOC in 1602 marked a key innovation with reference to East India trade. It firmly established limited liability for the shareholders and the directors from creditors, staked out the responsibilities of management, and distinguished more cleanly between company management and a stakeholder’s entitlement to a share in the company’s profits.13 The charter of the VOC created a standing legal personality to which the Dutch States General contractually delegated certain rights, prerogatives, and privileges that brought together elements of the private and the public spheres.14 The company’s exercise of such delegated rights, however, was never absolute or unconditional, for the States General retained the power to override any decision of the VOC’s central board of directors. Other officers and institutions of government retained either the capacity or the clout to influence and informally steer the decisions of the directors.15 As P. W. Klein observed: “The distinction between the company as a private body of enterprise and as a public authority enjoying more or less sovereign power was actually somewhat lost.”16
It is characteristic of the early-modern company charters that they identified and staked out a so-called chartered territory. This is a region carved out for the company in which it was to conduct its operations and enjoy a monopoly of trade with the home country. The VOC’s chartered territory, for example, covered the region of the Indian and the Pacific Oceans and their littorals between the Cape of Good Hope in Africa and Cape Horn in South America. The territory covered by the charter was normally allocated to the company with trading privileges and certain quasi-sovereign powers delegated by the state. As a result, the trade in all (or at least designated) goods between the home country and the territory assigned by the charter was the prerogative to this company or its agents. However, not all monopolies were created by charter, and this is especially true of the VOC’s spice monopoly. Conceived during the first two decades of the VOC’s lifespan and theoretically defended by Hugo Grotius, this spice monopoly was not anchored in the charter, but rather gradually built up through violence, war, and conquest and also via a web of delivery contracts concluded with Asian rulers. These contracts secured for the VOC exclusive supplies of spices guaranteed by the Asian rulers in exchange for pledges of protection against common (European) enemies.17
While it was not unusual before 1600 to establish chartered ventures that were dedicated to organizing and promoting trade in a broadly defined region (such as the “Levant” or “Muscovy” Companies), the EIC was the first chartered company to carry the title “East Indies” in its name. A number of smaller and highly leveraged Dutch partnerships formed in the late 1590s also carried the name “East Indies” in their name, but they were not entities conceded and backed by a charter. Admittedly, the EIC’s first charter only tenuously staked out the target markets, employing elastic toponyms or place names like “Africa” and “East Indies” and “as many of the islands, ports and cities, towns and places, thereabouts” as the company’s trading grounds.18 While the words “East India” featured in the EIC’s name, trade would also be promoted in a region that was broadly defined and not limited to the East Indies strictly speaking. That was important, for as history shows, the British colonies in North America would emerge by the eighteenth century as a key sales market for the EIC’s goods and produce.
Era of the East India Companies
When was the heyday of the East India companies? Broadly speaking, the flourishing of the chartered East India companies spans a period of about two centuries from the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. The majority of the East Indian chartered ventures had been founded and went bankrupt in this period, with the notable exception of the EIC. As will be argued later, this company experienced a fundamental transformation during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, after which its character as an integrated trading institution was steadily eroded. Within the period between 1600 and 1800, Niels Steensgaard distinguished three phases in the development of the European chartered companies operating in the East Indies. The first phase starts at the beginning and ends around the end of the seventeenth century. This period is marked by the decline of Spanish and especially Portuguese power in the East Indies. Chartered companies founded in this period, such as notably the VOC, were to compete against the Iberian powers, and even wage war against them in Asia.
The second development is the transfer of Spanish possessions in the Netherlands and Italy to Austrian overlordship. This era saw the formation of several chartered ventures based in Ostend, Antwerp, and Trieste. A short period bridging the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries is the shortest and least significant of Steengaard’s three phases. It falls between the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the Wars of Spanish Succession until 1714. The main developments in this period cover the reorganization of British trade in the East Indies, the passing of a deregulating act (1694), and the founding of a (short-lived) rival to the EIC, the English Company Trading in the East Indies. This company operated for around a decade between 1698 and 1708 and merged with the old EIC to form a new, united company.19
The third phase lasts from the end of the Wars of Spanish Succession (1701–14) until the end of the eighteenth century that was marked by the onset of the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars. The War of Spanish Succession had achieved two things: first, the installation of a Bourbon candidate on the Spanish throne. Second, this led to a tightening of dynastic interests in France, Spain, and their colonial possessions, expressed most visibly in the so-called Bourbon Family Pacts of the eighteenth century.
Looking at the chartered companies in terms of their numbers active in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific regions, their apex falls in a period covering a little over six decades between the 1680s and the 1750s. This age became synonymous with Europe’s pursuit of mercantilist trade policies.20 During the first half of the eighteenth century, Europe also experienced a massive surge in commerce with China. Two peaks in company foundations had taken place in the period around 1600–25 and again in 1660–80.21 A third wave took place in the years 1719–35. This latter period saw the birth in 1719 of the French Perpetual Company of the Indies (Compagnie Perpétuelle des Indies) that is also known as the Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes). It was established by crown intervention and by merging some struggling French ventures into a new single company. There was also the founding in 1722 of the short-lived General Company Established in the Austrian Netherlands for the Commerce and Navigation to the Indies (Compagnie générale établie dans les Pays-Bas Autrichiens pour le Commerce et la Navigation aux Indes), or Ostend Company for short. Both Britain and the Dutch Republic bitterly opposed its formation and by 1727, they had persuaded Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI to suspend the company’s charter. The Ostend Company was liquidated in 1731.22 In Scandinavia, there were the Swedish and the (refounded) Danish East India companies of 1731 and 1732/4, respectively.23
Companies founded after 1735 include two Brandenburg-Prussian ventures established at Emden: the Royal Prussian Asiatic Company at Emden for Canton and China (Königlich Preußische Asiatische Compagnie in Emden nach Canton und China) in 1751 and the Bengal Trading Company at Emden (Bengalische Handlungskompagnie zu Emden) in 1753, the Imperial Asiatic Company of Trieste and Antwerp (Société impériale asiatique de Trieste et Anvers—sometimes called the “Austrian East India Company”) in 1775, the Spanish Royal Philippine Company (Real Compañía de Filipinas) in 1785, and the French New Company of the East Indies (Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes Orientales) in 1785.24 Most of these later ventures had a short life span.
The founding of colonies, forts, and factories was not limited to the VOC and EIC: the French had several colonies along the eastern coast of India including Carical (Karaikal), Pondichéry (Puducherry), and Yanam (Yanaon), Chandernagore in Bengal, and Mahé (Mayyazhi) on the Malabar Coast. They remained part of French India well beyond the life span of the Nouvelle Compagnie, namely, until the 1950s. The Ostend Company maintained settlements at Banquibazar (Ichapore) in Bengal and Cabalon (Covelong, after 1746 ruled by the French) on the Coromandel Coast. The Danish Company had Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) and Serampore (Frederiksnagore, Sarampur). These Danish colonies were sold in 1845 together with the Nicobar Islands, or Frederiksørne, to the British. Despite earlier Danish claims to the Nicobars, the Antwerp Company maintained factories on the Malabar Coast of India, on Nancowery (Nicobar Islands) and also briefly at Delagoa (now Maputo) Bay in present-day Mozambique.25
The golden age of the EIC is situated in the period between 1680 and 1760.26 For the VOC a similar period applies, albeit somewhat shorter, namely, from the 1680s until about 1740–50. This dating is broadly based on the company’s size and frequency of dividend payments, though it does not reflect the VOC’s overall state of financial health. Profits were recorded for the years 1680–85 and 1689–92, and thereafter the company consistently recorded losses with the exception of the five years between 1745 and 1752.27
Why did the chartered company become an instrument to further commercial and political agendas? To answer this, it is best to glance briefly at working alternatives that existed at the time.
The most important of these alternatives, with reference to Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral at large, was the Estado da Índia, or Portuguese Asia. In the early 1600s, political leaders and merchants had come to consider certain features of the Portuguese system worthy of emulation, while others clearly seemed undesirable. The VOC, for example, recognized the advantages of having a central administrative and logistics base in Asia, just as the Portuguese had at Goa.28 The chartered companies also claimed a blanket monopoly of trade similar to that asserted by the Portuguese crown, but each developed different strategies for maintaining and administering this monopoly: the Portuguese crown leased voyages to private traders and built up a protection system based on the management of trade and the containment of piracy by issuing cartazes (safe conduct passes).29 By contrast, the VOC upheld its monopoly of trade and internalized protection costs as an institutional innovation.30 Company employees, moreover, were prohibited from trading on their own account. This was a prohibition that the Dutch found difficult to enforce in practice and which set them apart not only from the Portuguese but also from the English and most other European competitors. As P. J. Marshall has reminded us: “It is important to remember that much British trade in Asia was conducted not by the Company’s agents on behalf of their employer, but by them and by other British people on their own behalf.”31
Perhaps the most prominent difference that set the chartered companies apart from their Iberian counterparts was their relation to religion. As is known, the Iberian crowns had received papal sanction of their early colonial enterprises in return for an obligation to encourage missionization and act as patrons of the church in the East and West Indies. This became a costly undertaking. By contrast, the companies generally limited religious activity to provision of the sacraments to company employees, their families, to company slaves, or to residents of the scattered forts, factories, and colonial settlements.
Chartered companies made innovations to business practices, especially with respect to their standing paid-in capital.32 Considerable ink has been spilled on the origin of stockholder corporations during the second half of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century.33 Partnerships were formed for a single venture and subsequently dissolved on the completion of the voyage. The English Levant and Muscovy companies and the early EIC worked in a similar manner, as did in fact the Dutch trading ventures before 1602.34 These were business ventures engaged in long-distance trade. A standing capital base, however, lent the company a “permanent structure” that “outlasted any shifting group of investors, making it possible to dispose continuously of a large stock of fixed assets.”35 The VOC fixed the prices of spices and other commodities and gradually released stock on to the market. This practice enabled the company to retain capital and make the necessary long-term investments in Asia. Rather than cash out the profits after a single voyage or on the dissolution of a partnership, stakeholders could sell their shares on the bourse.36
The chartered company, moreover, spread risk across its shareholder base. In this way, a company could become an evolving joint project of the government with mercantile interest groups. This joint project could last only for a short duration and could change as a result of external shocks, geopolitical developments, or company mergers.37 Examples of such mergers include the formation of the VOC or the French Compagnie Perpétuelle des Indes.38 Chartered companies emerged as the most accepted means of securing commercial interests over the long term. Such continuity was created, for example, by building and maintaining trading infrastructures in Asia and placing them at the disposal of the company or country traders. Chartered companies also benefitted from creating economies of scale, even if they were not turning a regular profit.39
Generating income and maintaining an acceptable level of profitability were certainly topics of many internal company debates. Among the key points of discussion were these: Should the company defend and actively manage its monopoly within the designated charter region, or should it farm out the trade in less profitable goods and commodities to private traders for a fee or for a portion of the profits?40 Should the company own expensive infrastructure that quickly depreciated—such as ships—or should it lease these from independent ship owners?41 An eye on the bottom line helped to run the companies more efficiently, but cost controls alone proved insufficient to ensure a regular profit.
Were the East India Companies Successful?
Steensgaard wrote of the VOC that “the yardstick of success was not victory or conquest, but the financial results.”42 One may find this statement intuitive, but it is also overly simplistic. Success has many faces, and financial gain is not historically a prerequisite for establishing the foundations of empire. Moreover, what should the criteria for measuring this success be over and beyond profitability? Longevity? Size? Return on invested capital? The division of capital risk between the government and private investors? The degree of government control and intervention? The size and scope of the charter territory? Their success in maintaining a monopoly (or sometimes an oligopoly) in the home market? A combination of all these? While certainly valid to a point, the size, life span, or profitability of a company only yield an incomplete picture. Given the profit-driven raison d’être of the chartered companies, just how one was to measure those profits was a question not easily answered. The complicated structure of the VOC with its six chambers and Asian outposts made it difficult to ascertain the company’s financial health as a whole. Such considerations led to initiatives in the VOC and the EIC to centralize and improve accounting at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries.
To employ current criteria to gauge a company’s success would distort the historic context as well as the objectives for which it had been founded. While the East India companies shared common traits, each was also to serve a specific role in their home market. The VOC, for example, had been founded with an eye to promoting trade with the East Indies in defiance of Iberian policies of exclusion and obstruction. Through the sweeping, quasi-sovereign powers it had been granted, however, the VOC was also to serve as a privately funded instrument of war against the global empires of Spain and Portugal, across the vast area covered by its charter. The VOC, in other words, was established both as a war machine and as a trading venture. Its longevity was as much due to profits, as to government subsidies and inadequate, sporadic returns on capital that were sometimes paid in kind.43
By contrast, the Danes had twice refounded the much smaller counterpart(s) of the VOC in order to help develop Denmark’s domestic institutions and financial infrastructure (banks, insurance, financial markets). The Danish companies arguably had the lowest level of government support and intervention. This, in part, explains why war and a total loss of capital induced the demise of the first two Danish East India companies.44 In its third incarnation, the Danish company had focused on maintaining fixed infrastructure (notably at Tranquebar and Serampore) while trade was outsourced or farmed out to private traders for a fee. At the other end of the spectrum was the Second French East India Company, the Compagnie des Indes Orientales. The crown became the company’s major shareholder. As the eighteenth century progressed, the French crown discovered it was bleeding capital. Of this and related phenomena, Steensgaard concluded:
Their (i.e. the chartered companies’) historical significance was the unique combination of the time perspectives of power with the time perspectives of profit, in other words in the balance between the forces of the market and the power of the government. Their unplanned losses became unexpected investments that led from the Age of Discoveries to the existence of the modern world marketplace.45
The passage contains two important points that need further unpacking in the present context. The first concerns the idea of balance; the second the treatment of investment capital. It is problematic to consider the early modern chartered companies as a multinational corporation of a recognizably modern type.46 As joint projects, chartered companies “could balance the powers of a government and the forces of the market in such a way that they would use government power to reinforce their commercial position without fear that government power might be imposed on them for other goals.”47 Still, they underwent significant institutional and structural change, especially the EIC and the VOC. Most companies relied in some form of support or subsidy from the government. The VOC enjoyed direct and indirect support from the home government while the second French Compagnie des Indes Orientales (1664) and the short-lived Portuguese Companhia do Comércio da Índia (1628) had the crown as their major shareholder.48 The crown acted in unison with groups of private investors to facilitate the procurement of new goods or commodities, and in turn developed channels to market these in Europe. Two such commodities that transformed European consumer culture during the eighteenth century were tea and coffee, and over time tea emerged as the largest single commodity of trade for several East India companies.49
The corporate joint projects forged between government and merchants transformed attitudes in Europe toward capital, risk, and liability. The structure of the shareholder company made it possible to solicit surplus funds and working capital from across a broader spectrum of society, while at the same time limiting the risk of loss to the overall performance of the company. For sure, capital was not always put to efficient use, but it did enable the chartered companies to embark on making costly long-term investments. In the early years of the VOC, for example, fleet commander Admiral Cornelis Matelieff lamented that his fellow company directors were old men who only maintained a short-term horizon when it came to trade. He sought to co-opt senior members of the government into recognizing the need to invest heavily in long-term infrastructure, a plea, incidentally, that was not ignored.50 In order to have sufficient capital at its disposal to make the necessary investments in Asia and also fight the war against the Iberian powers East of the Cape of Good Hope, the VOC gave its shareholders a meager return on capital.
Importance of the Charter Territory
How important was the size or geographic location of the charter region for ensuring the long-term success of a given company, or even in offering opportunities for empire-building? To answer this question it helps to briefly broaden the horizon and make some comparisons with chartered companies active in the Americas. While the latter were generally involved with the direct exploitation of resources as well as in colonial settlement (as in the case, e.g., of the Virginia Company or the Atlantic fishing ventures), the East India companies, as a rule, were unconcerned with settlement and resource exploitation, at least up until the first half of the eighteenth century.51 Instead, their focus was placed on bartering and trading of commodities, manufactures, or slaves, maintaining infrastructure and fortifications, and raising taxes on trading goods. Moreover, the East India companies acted as transportation and marketing organizations, challenging their operations by mounting overheads.
The trade monopoly granted by the home government for the company’s charter region was more often than not a double-edged sword. It existed first and foremost on paper. Defending the trading monopoly both at home as well as beyond the jurisdiction of home courts and outside a company’s home ground was a time-consuming and a very costly undertaking. The larger the region staked out by the company charter and the larger the population within that area, the more complex and costly the suppression of interloping and smuggling proved to be.52 In fact without direct or active government support, the companies arguably could not have suppressed interloping and smuggling on their own. Interloping and smuggling were not the only developments that were undermining the company monopoly. The EIC also fought battles to preserve its monopoly in Parliament, namely, against the political proxies of private merchant groups based in Bristol, Liverpool, and London.53
In addition to taking on real and potential enemies at sea, in Parliament and in the courts, the size and location of the charter area posed additional challenges. It was clear that some regions could not be profitably exploited. India, China, and parts of insular Southeast Asia were easier to exploit than, say, east Africa. The charter region was crucial to the long-term success of a company insofar as it determined the range and volume of the goods that could be traded. The diversity and volume of trading goods together with the ready availability of cheap labor had to be carefully managed to meet the fickle demand of the European markets. Overall, the opportunities for profitably exploiting a charter region were more important for securing the stability and long-term success of a given company than the political and economic policies and conditions at home.54
Were All Chartered Companies Instruments of Empire?
The hybrid nature of the chartered companies rendered them more than just commercial enterprises, and many exercised far-reaching quasi-sovereign powers on behalf of their home governments. The VOC offers a case in point. The first charter of 1602 already granted the company sweeping powers to declare war and make peace, conduct diplomacy, sign treaties in the name of the states-general, appoint and dismiss magistrates, mint coins, pronounce justice, and so on. These were all powers that were normally associated with the rights of a sovereign ruler, and the VOC was, as its predecessors had been, to limit itself to trade. The French Compagnie des Indes Orientales should be seen in a similar light, even if it controlled fewer possessions and was financially less robust. In its heyday from the late seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, the French Company’s activities were always tightly knit to the interests and political ambitions of the French royal court.
What about the minor East India companies? The problem here is that while these companies shared with their Dutch and British counterparts certain forms and structures in common, they differed considerably in terms of aims, size, and longevity. East India companies such as the various Danish and Brandenburg ventures were designed specifically with an eye on developing home industries and institutions, not necessarily on securing market share of Asian produce, manufactures, or developing a critical presence overseas. They generally represent a synergy of government and private interests at a given point in time, a synergy that was tied to the evolving and shifting policies of home governments. When they had served the purpose for which they had been established, they were either dissolved, had their charter suspended, or given a face-saving exit by merging them into other more successful entities. The Portuguese, Ostend, and Brandenburg companies come to mind in this context.
The lesser companies were not without their bases, factories, and settlements in Asia and sometimes also Africa. Like the EIC and VOC, the minor companies often maintained a presence across different degrees of independence, autonomy, and self-administration. The size varied from a couple of dozen to several hundred or even thousands of inhabitants. As a company settlement, the VOC’s Batavia clearly led the way. Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast of India was acquired by the French in 1674, and remained a French settlement well beyond the life span of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes Orientales, as mentioned earlier. Similarly, Tranquebar was acquired in 1620 and continued to remain a Danish possession across the life span of three Danish East India companies until 1845. By contrast, Banquibazar (present-day Ichapore) was established by a paravana (permit) granted by the Nawab of Bengal, Murshid Qulī Khan, to the Ostend Company on July 5, 1727.55 It comprised a factory with some surrounding land and minor settlements nearby. The black and gold flag of the Holy Roman Empire kept flying above the factory even after the emperor suspended the charter in 1731, and Banquibazar continued to serve as a factory-colony of the Austrian Netherlands until 1745.
How should we understand these factories, fortifications, and their surrounding dependencies? Were they colonial possessions properly speaking? Some were built with permission or leased from a local Asian overlord. Other settlements (with some surrounding land) had been acquired as sovereign possessions, mainly however as booty of war seized from the Portuguese, as was notable in the case of Melaka in 1641. In a publication from 1930, for example, the Antwerp city archivist Floris Prims dubbed Banquibazar “Belgium’s first colony.”56 Were such factories and settlements colonies in the sense that they did not return to local rule with the bankruptcy of a given company, but continued to be administered directly or indirectly (through a successor company) by a European government? What does this tell us about empire and imperial reach?
Readers today are perhaps accustomed to imagining empire in terms of large-scale settlement over the longue durée. But this ignores two important points: first, the very idea of empire comprises different levels and degrees of control, from outright sovereign possessions (direct rule) to areas ruled by an indigenous ruler whose actions can be influenced and controlled (indirect rule). To put things into a temporal perspective, European high imperialism enjoyed its apex for only about five decades, or from around 1870 to 1918. Against this backdrop, how are we to view these possessions of the early East India companies, especially the factories, fortresses, and settlements of the lesser companies? True, Banquibazar’s heyday lasted for only two decades, but the Danes were in Tranquebar for well over two centuries, and the French held on to Pondicherry for just under three. Does size matter here, and are these colonial settlements of the Danes, French, and the Austrian Netherlands also manifestations of empire? To answer this question, it is helpful to turn to the EIC and the VOC and ask: When are the major turning points in their history and when, by the latest, can we say that they had transformed into imperial structures or instruments of empire in Asia?
From Companies to Company States
Examining the two long-term survivors, the EIC and the VOC, there are several landmark developments that help account for their transition from predominantly business-oriented enterprises to predominantly instruments of empire. As chartered companies they shared in common a number of key features: they were both profit-driven entities that kept an eye on the bottom line and they jealously guarded their monopolies and trading privileges, even when this meant adopting a militarily aggressive and commercially ruthless stance toward other European competitors (as their behavior toward the Ostend Company in the 1720s clearly shows).57 When the EIC and VOC expanded trade in commodities such as tea, coffee, and opium during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they also became subject to tighter financial controls, cost-cutting, and bureaucratization as a way of maintaining control over expanding volumes of trade and of the growing colonial settlements. While the Dutch company continued to focus on intra-Asian trade (a trade that actually ceased to be profitable after 1690) and banned company servants from trading on their own account, the EIC was moving in a different direction.58 After 1661, the EIC decided to sideline intra-Asian trade and focus instead on expanding commerce with the British home market.59 This commercial reorientation helped to transform the British company into a more competitive enterprise. Before 1773, moreover, company servants were permitted to trade on their own account.
Another key operational difference is worth highlighting here. The Dutch had imitated the Portuguese example by centralizing their Asian operations at a single location, namely, the port city of Batavia, or present-day Jakarta. In contrast, the EIC had not hitherto centralized its Asian operations but instead allowed local factories considerable autonomy. After 1720, however, the company directors united the various possessions of the EIC in South Asia into the three “presidencies” of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, each under its own governor. During the initial years, there was little coordination between them, as each presidency maintained direct contact with the Court of Directors in London, built up their own administration and infrastructure, and even maintained their own armies. British Parliament, however, fundamentally changed this arrangement in 1773 with the Regulating Act. This created a more unified company and tightened government supervision over its operations. The new governor-general who was based at Calcutta was a crown appointee, further blurring the division of crown and company in India and paving the way for eventual rule of India from Whitehall.60
The EIC and VOC also operated in different political environments in Asia: the EIC would consolidate its power in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries thanks to its privileged position within the Moghul Empire. As time progressed, the British Company jockeyed to fill the power vacuum created by the waning and erosion of Moghul authority. The VOC, however, found itself involved since the late seventeenth century in a series of drawn out and costly wars that erupted over succession in the Javanese kingdom of Mataram.61 Still, both companies seized the opportunity to exploit local rivalries and expand territorially, politically, and economically at the expense of their once powerful neighbors.
A gauge for ascertaining the transformation of the VOC in the course of the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries was its growing proportion of non-trading revenue after about 1700. Trade-related activities of course continued to generate the largest proportion of revenues, but a scrutiny of the financial accounts also shows a growing proportion of revenues deriving from non-trading activities such as customs, imposts, duties, taxes, and other state revenues. J. P. de Korte’s study of the VOC’s accounts has revealed that between 1640 and 1760 the proportion of revenue generated from non-trading activities quintupled from around 10 to 50 percent.62 This significant growth of non-trading income reflects the company’s evolution into a company-state, especially in its dependencies around the Indonesian Archipelago. As the VOC came to assume more responsibilities over lands and peoples, however, it also saw its expenditures rise very significantly. By 1725, Batavia’s capital surpluses accumulated during the previous century had been consumed because of escalating costs and expenditures.63 Hereafter, the VOC’s Asian operations became progressively dependent on support and direct cash injections from Europe. Another ominous sign was that the company failed to register regular profits after the beginning of the eighteenth century.
As the VOC expended its business, it also faced escalating costs and rising overheads. Rather than expand its paid-in capital base, the company increasingly sought to overcome financial bottlenecks with borrowed funds in the form of bonds. The price the company subsequently paid for this move was mounting interest payments on the funds borrowed. These payments had to come out of flagging company revenue and profits, a situation that had been made worse by heavy competition from the British in the Bengal and Coromandel textile trade.64 During the Fourth Anglo-Dutch Naval War (1781–84), the situation reached a breaking point, and in the final year of this conflict, Dutch overseas trade ground to an almost complete halt. The British had seized VOC factories in Bengal as booty of war, and the Dutch company found itself not only steeped in debt, but also in a financial crisis from which it would never recover.65 VOC operations came to a definitive close in 1795 with the onset of the Napoleonic Wars and the transformation of the United Netherlands as the French client state, the Batavian Republic. War and debt have been blamed for the VOC’s failure, and its endemic corruption arguably accelerated its demise.66 Without regular support and intervention from the Dutch state, the company could not have survived as long as it did.67
Some of the developments in the EIC mirror those of its Dutch competitor and these include financial reform, bureaucratization, and the expansion of trade in commodities such as tea and coffee. The EIC came to rely increasingly on the tea trade with China, and this segment alone reached 60 percent of the company’s aggregate trade.68 However, there are also important differences that, with the benefit of hindsight, may very well have given the British company an unexpected lease of life. Four developments that should be mentioned in this context are: the Carnatic Wars, the conquest of Bengal, the tighter relationship with the British government, and the EIC’s handling of its Asian monopoly.
Following the VOC’s eviction of the EIC from Banten, their principal factory in insular Southeast Asia, in 1682, the EIC focused its activities on the Indian subcontinent, restricting its trade in the Indonesian Archipelago to the western coast of Sumatra, especially at Barus and Bencoolen (Bengkulu).69 On the Indian subcontinent, the establishment of presidencies of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta had helped the company consolidate its position against its principal European rival there: the French. EIC armies and their South Asian allies defeated the French (and their local allies) in a series of conflicts known as the Carnatic Wars between the mid-1740s and the end of the Seven Years War (1763). This period also marks the transition of the EIC from a loose confederation of merchants to a company state.70 As H. V. Bowen put it: “The transformation of the company from trader to sovereign is ... quite clearly discernible from even the most cursory examination of the military and political events that unfolded in India after 1740.”71
The conquest of Bengal took place against this backdrop of an escalating conflict with the French and a politically receding Moghul Empire. Fearing a French attack on its factories in Bengal, the EIC insisted on strengthening its fortifications at Calcutta in defiance of protestations by the Nawāb of Bengal, a vassal of the Mughal emperor. The Nawāb sought to punish this affront by attacking and capturing Calcutta in 1756. A counterforce led by Robert Clive recaptured the city for the British and defeated the Nawāb at Plassey (Palashi) in June 1757. The EIC pressed home its advantage and seven years later imposed a treaty on the Mughal emperor, Shāh ‘Ālam II, by which it secured the formal right to act as revenue collector (dīwān) for the Mughals in the province of Bengal. Thereafter, within a relatively short space, the EIC transitioned from a predominantly trade-oriented enterprise to become the civil and judicial administrators of one of the Mughal Empire’s most prosperous and populous provinces. Like the VOC in the Indonesian Archipelago, the business of the EIC was increasingly caught up with collecting tax revenues on agriculture. The EIC conquest of Bengal was almost certainly the single most important development that the British company made in the course of the eighteenth century, if not in its entire corporate life span. However, they could not have achieved this on their own: acceptance of British company rule over Bengal by the Mughals as well as collaboration with local elites proved important.
The third major development links into the aforementioned events in Bengal. The acquisition of this province with its estimated twenty million inhabitants accelerated the bureaucratization of the EIC. After the 1770s, the swelling legion of administrators demanded a better, tighter, and more uniform supervision. Different practices and procedures that had evolved under the three separate presidencies were harmonized. Financial administration was tightened and bookkeeping was centralized. With these developments, the company also became more closely tied to the home government, a relationship best exemplified by the establishment in 1784 of the Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India, also known as the Board of Control, or India Board, for short. By the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, the EIC was an organization in full transition: efforts to keep it financially self-sustaining had been the top concerns, priorities, and objectives of the old chartered company. Bureaucratization, administration, and centralization under the eye of the home government in London were, by contrast, developments associated with the later era of the British Raj.
The fourth development concerns the erosion of the company’s monopoly rights against the backdrop of new economic thinking, inspired by Adam Smith, which championed open markets and competition. As the focus of operations moved away from direct involvement in trade, the EIC was required to let go of parts of its trading monopoly. In 1813, the country traders became the chief beneficiaries of the new modus operandi and in 1833 Parliament abolished the company’s ability to bar non-Company merchants from carrying out trade with China.72 After the fall of this last bastion in its monopoly, the EIC would only survive another two and a half decades until 1858. The governments that had once created and supported the establishment of chartered company monopolies during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had made an about-turn, and gradually dismantled these by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By this era, commercial monopoly had become a dirty word.
At the end of this section, a summary of the salient conclusions is warranted. Concerning the question when the chartered companies had evolved into company states, the approximate dates for the VOC and EIC are to be found around the middle of the eighteenth century. For the VOC it was the early 1740s, for the EIC a little over a decade later in the wake of the Carnatic Wars and especially Battle of Plassey in 1757. The transformation of company operations away from an integrated trading and transportation enterprise took place against the canvass of territorial growth (both lands under direct and indirect rule), bureaucratization, and the growing corps of administrators not directly involved in trade, as well as the growth of non-trading revenue, both in absolute as well as in proportional terms. We need also remember that all of this took place against the backdrop of expanding trade volumes, mainly in stimulants such as tea, coffee, and opium. This transformation of the company’s focus and operations was not planned strictly speaking, but rather the result of opportunities recognized and seized. None of this could have happened without active support from the home governments.
Legacies of the Chartered Companies
By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the era of the East India companies had almost ended.73 As a business model and especially as an instrument of empire, chartered companies continued to be used, particularly in Africa. Just as in earlier times, the chartered companies assumed there an important role in opening up trade with new markets and in forging a working relationship of private capital, entrepreneurship, and government. One thinks here, for example, of the British South Africa Company founded by the controversial British tycoon and imperialist Cecil John Rhodes.74 The EIC served as its model.
Researchers have long mulled over the long-term legacy, or legacies, of the chartered companies. At the beginning of the third millennium, their findings have been put together in volumes commemorating the fourth centennial of the EIC’s and VOC’s founding. Their legacy is a mixed one. On the one hand, they continue to inspire the historical imagination and have long served as a source of national pride, especially in Britain and the Netherlands. The mountains of paper that are among the most tangible facets of their legacy offer a wealth of knowledge about trade, peoples, and histories of Asia that may not be recorded by indigenous Asian sources. The association of chartered companies with commercial monopolies and mercantilist economics have long made them maligned institutions, not least by the advocates of free trade during the late eighteenth century and especially also by the political left. In Asia as in other parts of the world, these companies laid the foundations and shaped some postcolonial nation-states and their populations. They are responsible for creating ethnic minorities in the Americas, in Africa, and of course Asia.
While rarely, if ever really financially self-sustaining in the long run, the chartered company stood out as an accepted and acceptable instrument for bringing together interest groups in government and business, both at home and overseas. Governments always had a stake in the venture, ranging from the role of facilitator to the dominant shareholder or even the shareholder of last resort. Business interests could be galvanized by the lure of potential profits while governments formed other ventures by arm-twisting members of the aristocratic and merchant classes. Chartered companies were capable of striking a balance between the short-term, profit-oriented inclinations of the merchant with the perceived need of directors and company agents to build infrastructure and maintain security.75 The relationship of the entrepreneurial segments of society and the government, however, was always fluid, a dynamic that is exemplified in the evolving priorities and fates of the individual companies. Chartered companies could be used and abused to serve government agendas or to fight wars at the company’s and shareholder’s expense, as the history of the VOC evidences. Support for a venture could also be quickly dropped once specific objectives had been fulfilled, such as in the case of the Portuguese East India Company.
As the examples of the two company giants, the EIC and VOC show, non-trading revenue of a given company serves as an indicator of their transition from being predominantly a trading venture to a company-state. Some additional observations are worth making here: as these companies expanded both the volumes of trade as well as the range of goods traded, and as they transformed from trading ventures into institutions of colonial control, they became more bureaucratized and increasingly risk-adverse. When they became unwieldy, lethargic institutions, the symbiotic relationship with their home government also shaped their destiny. It was evident that they had become instruments of empire, but they were not necessarily strong and active participants in formulating imperial policy.
These observations also offer an opportunity to revisit a point raised at the beginning of this chapter: How and in what ways can the study of the lesser East India companies inform about their specific role as agents or instruments of empire? To concentrate on the big players, the EIC and the VOC may falsely lead readers into thinking that they are the norm, rather than the exception. What the lesser companies can teach is this: in order to carve out a niche for themselves in Asia, the smaller chartered companies had to be willing to take on greater risks, offering a sharp contrast to the increasingly lethargic and bureaucratized corporate giants EIC and VOC. The wars that engulfed Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were conflicts that were fought globally. The Dutch Revolt (1568–1648) is a case in point, as is the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), or the Seven Year War (1756–63). Such conflicts had opened up opportunities for trade, but they also posed very serious threats and could easily break a company, as experienced by the first Danish East India Company. This experience fundamentally changed the Danish strategy. Stefan Diller and Jurrien van Goor have observed that the Danish Company “managed to eke out a precarious existence by maintaining a low profile between the belligerent European powers,” the latter being a reference to the Dutch, the English, and the French.76 The Ostend Company, by contrast, was not so lucky: though operationally successful, it became almost right from the start a cause of disagreement between the great European powers who questioned its legality based on the Westphalian settlement of 1648 as well as the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. The debate surrounding the founding of the Ostend Company had arguably unleashed the most significant theoretical discourse on global free trade since the controversy over Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum (1609) a century earlier.77 Though the company’s voyages were suspended, its charter revoked, and the enterprise liquidated in 1731, the factory at Banquibazar continued to operate for about another decade. The Ostend Company’s fate at the hand of Austrian Imperial and European politics drove its shareholders to reorganize themselves under a new charter obtained from the king of Sweden.
The eighteenth-century chartered company ventures expressed a change in thinking that was taking place in Europe about the role of government in economics. During the Age of Enlightenment, governments and rulers came to see it as their duty to promote the development of national industries and the general welfare of their people. Mercantilist policies that ensured more bullion entered a given country than went out are as much an expression of this age as the budding idea of free trade. The large East India companies came increasingly under siege from country traders and their proxies in parliament, as well as from intellectuals who in their pamphlets and publications were waging debates on the merits of free trade. In this sense, one should bear in mind that the lesser East India ventures were as much about opening up colonial trade and finding export opportunities, as they were designed to help develop financial and commercial infrastructure at home. This bigger picture is crucial for weighing the success and legacy of the lesser chartered companies, especially those founded in the eighteenth century.
In light of the above, one can also conclude that profitability, longevity, and continuity are inadequate criteria to measure the success of a given venture. The French companies exemplify this particularly well. Despite the hemorrhaging of capital, the refounding of ventures, and the amalgamation of smaller entities in 1719 to create the French Compagnie Pérpetuelle des Indes Orientales, the latter still emerged as the most formidable competitor and political rival to the EIC and VOC in India.
Finally, the basis of empire was laid in Asia through the building and maintenance of infrastructure in the form of factories, forts, and settlements, as well as in establishing or tapping into commercial networks. The lesser companies either established new facilities (such as the Ostend Company in Banquibazar), or reused those of their defunct predecessors (such as the Danish Company at Tranquebar). Facilities built by one company were either passed on to a successor organization, acquired by the home government, or seized by a rival European power and confiscated as booty of war. The Dutch did this with Portuguese settlements around Asia in the seventeenth century and the French and English in the eighteenth century. Rarely, if ever, did a facility transfer permanently into the possession of the local or neighboring Asian overlord unless this facility had been destroyed or abandoned. This observation is crucial, for it is on the infrastructure, contacts, and networks of defunct companies that the great powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries established the next stage of their imperial (ad)venture.
Notes
1For the earliest testimonies of Dutch cooperation with the Chinese diaspora, see T. Weststeijn and L. Gesterkamp, “A New Identity for Ruben’s ‘Korean Man’: Portrait of the Chinese Merchant Yppong,” Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 66, no. 1 (2016), 143–69, esp. 155; L. Blussé, “Inpo 恩浦, Chinese Merchant in Pattani: A Study in Early Dutch-Chinese Relations,” in Proceedings of the Seventh IAHA Conference, held in Bangkok, 22–26 August 1977, ed. K. Sawanagul (Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Press, 1977), pp. 294–309; Leonard Blussé, “Het ware gezicht van de eerste Chinees in Vlissingen,” Zeeuws Tijdschrift 72, no. 1 (2016), 74.
2C. Dobbin, Asian Enterpreneurial Minorities: Conjoint Communities in the Making of the World Economy, 1570–1940 (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 53; C. Trocki, “Boundaries and Transgressions: Chinese Enterprise in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Southeast Asia,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. A. Ong and D. M. Nonini (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 61–85.
3P. Borschberg, The Singapore and Melaka Strait: Violence, Security and Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden and Singapore: KITLV Press and NUS Press, 2010); P. Borschberg (ed.), Admiral Matelieff’s Singapore and Johor, 1606–1616 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016); Bhawan Ruangsilp, Dutch East India Company Merchants at the Court of Ayutthaya: Dutch Perceptions of the Thai Kingdom c.1604–1765 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
4For the original Dutch text of the first VOC charter with an English translation, see W. G. Grewe (ed.), Fontes Historiae Iuris Gentium. Sources Relating to the History of the Law of Nations (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 171–6.
5J. Jacobs, “The Seventeenth-Century Empire of the Dutch Republic, c.1592–1672,” in The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley, ed. J. Jacobs and L. H. Roper (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), p. 3; also P. Borschberg (ed.), Journal Memorials and Letters of Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge. Security, Diplomacy and Commerce in 17th-century Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015), p. 47.
6H. Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient 1600–1800 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 185–229.
7P. Bonnassieux, Les grandes compagnies de commerce. Étude pour servir à l’histoire de la colonisation (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1892).
8N. Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974); J. P. de Korte, De jaarlijkse financiële verantwoording van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984); De Korte The Annual Accounting in the VOC (Leiden: NEHA, 2000).
9See, for example, G. Knaap and G. Teitler (eds), De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie tussen Oorlog en Diplomatie (Leiden: KITLV, 2002); S. Huigen, J. L. de Jong, and E. L. Kolfin (eds), The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks (Leiden: Brill, 2010); G. Schilder and H. Kok, Sailing for the East. History and Catalogue of Manuscript Charts on Vellum of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), 1602–1799 (Utrecht: HES & De Graaf Publishers, 2010); R. Parthesius, Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters. The Development of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) Shipping Network in Asia, 1595–1660 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010); G. Schilder, J. Moerman et al., Grote Atlas van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie—Comprehensive Atlas of the Dutch United East India Company, 7 vols (Voorburg: Uitgeverij Asia Maior, 2006–10); J. A. Somers, De VOC als volkenrichtelijke actor (Deventer: Gouda Quint and Rotterdam: Sanders Instituut, 2001); K. Zandvliet, De Nederlandse Ontmoeting met Azië 1600–1950 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2002); F. S. Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company. Expansion and Decline (Zuphen: Walburg Pers, 2003); L. Blussé and I. Ooms, Kennis en Compagnie. De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie en de moderne wetenschap (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2002); J. E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2011).
10See, for example, A. M. Carlos and S. Nicholas, “Giants of an Earlier Capitalism: The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals,” Business History Review 62 (1988), 398–419; K. N. Chaudhuri, “The English East India Company in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Pre-modern Multinational Organization,” in Companies and Trade. Essays in Overseas Trading Companies during the Ancien Régime, ed. L. Blussé and F. S. Gaastra (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1981), pp. 29–46; N. Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (London: Pluto Press, 2012).
11P. J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); J. van Goor, “From Company to State,” in Prelude to Colonialism: The Dutch in Asia (Hilversum: Verloren, 2004), pp. 83–98; A. Westeijn, “The VOC as a Company-State: Debating Seventeenth-Century Dutch Colonial Expansion,” Itinerario 38, no. 1 (2014), 13–34.
12K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
13O. Gelderblom, A. de Jong, and J. Jonker, “An Admiralty for Asia: Business Organization and the Evolution of Corporate Governance in the Dutch Republic, 1590–1640,” in Origins of Shareholder Advocacy, ed. J. G. S. Koppell (New York: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 29–60, esp. pp. 30, 54.
14On this, see also N. Steensgaard, “The Companies as a Specific Institution in the History of European Expansion’ in Blussé and Gaastra (eds), Companies and Trade, p. 247.
15Gelderblom et al., “An Admiralty for Asia,” pp. 40–1, 44.
16P. W. Klein, “The Origins of Trading Companies,” in Blussé and Gaastra (eds) Companies and Trade, p. 23.
17G. N. Clark and W. J. M. van Eysinga, The Colonial Conferences between England and the Netherlands in 1613 and 1615, 2 vols (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1940–51); P. Borschberg, Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese and Free Trade in the East Indies (Leiden and Singapore: KITLV Press and NUS Press, 2011).
18Grewe, Fontes Historiae Iuris Gentium, “Charter Granted by Queen Elizabeth to the English East India Company, 31 Dec., 1600,” p. 165.
19Steensgaard, “The Companies as a Specific Institution,” pp. 261–2.
20Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, p. 186.
21For an overview of the various French companies focusing on Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Bonnassieux, Les grandes compagnies de commerce, pp. 253–343.
22See specifically J. Crokaert, La Compagnie d’Ostende (Brussels and Paris: C. Van Oest, 1919); G. H. Dumont, Banquibazar (Antwerp: L’Amitié par le livre, 1948); M. Huisman, La Belgique commerciale sous l’empereur Charles VI: la Compagnie d’Ostende (Brussels: Henri Lamertin, 1902); M. Kessler, K. Lee, and D. Menning, The European Canton Trade in 1723: Competition and Cooperation (Berlin-New York: Oldenbourg-De Gruyter, 2016); G. Lefèvre, De Indische Compagnie an Oostende (Antwerpen: K. Dirix van Riet, 1925); J. Parmentier, De holle compagnie. Smokkel en legale handel onder Zuidnederlandse vlag in Bengalen, c.1720–1744 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1992).
23Concerning these companies, see as a general overview the study by Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, esp. pp. 185–229. For specific studies on these companies, see D. C. Willington, French East India Companies: A Historical Account and Records of Trade (Lanham: Hamilton Books, 2006); O. Feldbæk, Danske Handelskompagnier, 1616–1843: Oktrojer og interne Ledelsesregler (Copenhagen: Selskabed for Udgivelse af Kilder til Dansk Historie, 1986); C. Koninckx, The First and Second Charters of the Swedish East India Company (1731–1766) (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1980); S. T. Kjellberg, Svenska Ostindiska Compagnierna, 1731–1813 (Malmö: Allhelms Förlag, 1974); S. Diller, Die Dänen in Indien, Südostasien und China (1620–1845) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999) ; M. Krieger, Kaufleute, Seeräuber und Diplomaten. Der Dänische Handel auf dem Indischen Ozean (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998).
24For an overview of the various Austrian, German, Scandinavian, and Spanish companies focusing on Asia, see Bonnassieux, Grandes Compagnies de Commerce, pp. 425–39, 450–2, 465–7, 472–5. For the Brandenburg-Prussian companies, see H. Berger, Überseeische Handelsbestrebungen und Koloniale Pläne unter Friedrich dem Grossen (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1899); K. Jahntz, Privilegierte Handelscompagnien in Brandenburg und Preußen. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Gesellschaftsrechts (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006). For the Austrian or Antwerp Company, see W. Markov, “La Compagnia asiatica di Trieste (1775–1785),” Studi Storici 2, no. 1 (1961), 3–28; and J. Everaert, “Willem Bolts: India Regained and Lost: Indiamen, Imperial Factories and Country Trade (1775–1785),” in Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, ed. K. S. Mathew (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), pp. 363–9. For the Royal Philippine Company, see also W. L. Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1959), pp. 409–18; and for the Prussian companies, Berger, Überseeische Handels-bestrebungen.
25S. H. Carlson, Trade and Dependency: Studies in the Expansion of Europe (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsalensis, 1984), p. 106.
26L. Blussé and F. S. Gaastra, “Companies and Trade: Some Reflections on a Workshop and Concept,” in Blussé and Gaastra (eds), Companies and Trade, p. 7.
27G. C. Klerk de Reus, Geschichtlicher Überblick der Administrativen, Rechtlichen und Finanziellen Entwicklung der Niederländisch-Ostindischen Compagnie (Batavia and The Hague: Albrecht & Rusche and Martinus Nijhoff, 1894), Beilage V. Also F. S. Gaastra, “The Dutch East India Company,” in Blussé and Gaastra (eds), Companies and Trade, p. 61.
28This was a point made by Admiral Cornelis Matelieff in his memorials, for instance. Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company, pp. 39–40.
29K. S. Mathew, “Trade in the Indian Ocean and the Portuguese System of Cartazes,” in Government and Governance of European Empires, 1450–1800, ed. A. J. R. Russell-Wood (Alsdershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 97–112; Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, p. 185.
30Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution, esp. pp. 151–3.
31P. J. Marshall, “Afterword: The Legacies of Two Hundred Years of Contact,” in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. H. V. Bowen, M. Lincoln, and N. Rigby (Woodbridge and Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2002), p. 227.
32F. S. Gaastra, “War, Competition and Collaboration: Relations between the English and Dutch East India Companies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Bowen et al. (eds), The World of the East India Company, p. 50. Generally also T. K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 26–35.
33For a short overview of the development, see S. Klosa, Die Brandenburgische Compagnie in Emden (Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 9–15.
34Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution, p. 137; O. Prakash, “The English East India Company and India,” in The World of the East India Company, p. 2.
35Klein, “The Origins of Trading Companies,” p. 23, citing Barry Supple.
36Gelderblom et al., “An Admiralty for Asia,” p. 51.
37Steensgaard, “The Companies as a Specific Institution,” pp. 262, 263.
38Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, pp. 207–8.
39Steensgaard, “The Companies as a Specific Institution,” pp. 255, 258.
40An example of the latter was the Compagnie royale de Chine, chartered in 1698, which was to cede 5 percent of its profits to the Compagnie des Indes Orientales; P. H. Boulle, “French Mercantilism, Commercial Companies and Colonial Profitability,” in Blussé and Gaastra (eds), Companies and Trade, p. 109. For a brief but useful exposé on this company in general, see Bonnassieux, Grandes Compagnies de Commerce, pp. 340–4.
41Concerning the management and leasing of ships by the EIC, see the study by L. S. Sutherland, A London Merchant, 1695–1774 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). For the Scandinavian and German companies, see C. Koninckx, “Ownership in East India Company Shipping: Prussia, Scandinavia and the Austrian Netherlands in the 18th Century,” in The Organization of Interoceanic Trade in European Expansion, 1450–1800, ed. P. Emmer and F. S. Gaastra (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 255–64.
42Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution, p. 137.
43Klerk de Reus, Geschichtlicher Überblick, Beilage VI. See also Gelderblom et al., “An Admiralty for Asia,” p. 50, esp. in reference to the “unmunerative VOC monopoly” of the early years; P. van Dam, Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie, ed. F. W. Stapel, 8 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931–43), I, pp. 433–4. Also N. Steensgaard, “The Dutch East India Company as an Institutional Innovation,” in Emmer and Gaastra (eds), The Organization of Interoceanic Trade, pp. 133–56.
44Steensgaard, “The Companies as a Specific Institution,” p. 259.
45Ibid., p. 264.
46K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 5; Klein, “The Origins of Trading Companies,” p. 23; Gelderblom et al., “An Admiralty for Asia,” p. 51.
47Blussé and Gaastra, “Some Reflections,” p. 11.
48D. C. Wellington, The French East India Companies: A Historical Account and Record of Trade (Lanham: Hamilton Books, 2006), pp. 19–20; A. R. Disney, “The First Portuguese India Company,” Economic History Review 30, no. 2 (1977), 242–58; C. R. de Silva, “The Portuguese East India Company, 1628–1633,” Luso-Brazilian Review 11, no. 2 (1974), 152–205; G. D. Winius, “Two Lusitanian Variations on a Dutch Theme: Portuguese Companies in Times of Crisis, 1628–1662,” in Blussé and Gaastra (eds), Companies and Trade, pp. 119–34.
49See the excellent comparative study by Chris Nierstrasz, Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles: The English and Dutch East India Companies (1700–1800) (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
50Borschberg, Journal, Memorials and Letters, esp. pp. 132, 138.
51Steensgaard, “The Companies as a Specific Institution,” p. 256.
52Klein, “The Origins of Trading Companies,” p. 26.
53Bonnassieux, Grandes Compagnies de Commerce, p. 105; Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, p. 193.
54Steensgaard, “The Companies as a Specific Institution,” pp. 259–60.
55Parmentier, De holle Compagnie, p. 27.
56F. H. L. Prims, De stichting van Banquibazar: onze eerste kolonie (1724–1727) (Antwerpen: Leeslust, 1930).
57Chaudhuri, “The English East India Company in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” p. 35.
58Gaastra, “War, Competition and Collaboration,” p. 55.
59P. J. Marshall, “Afterword,” p. 227.
60Bonnassieux, Grandes Compagnies de Commerce, p. 105.
61See esp. M. C. Ricklefs, Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi (1749–1792) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); M. C. Ricklefs, War, Culture and Economy in Java, 1677–1726 (Melbourne: Asian Studies Association of Australia, 1993); L. W. Nagtegaal, Riding the Dutch Tiger: The Dutch East India Company in Java, 1680–1743 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996).
62De Korte, De jaarlijkse financiële verantwoording, p. 47.
63On these reserves, see Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution, esp. pp. 140–1.
64E. M. Jacobs, Koopman in Azië. De handel van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie tijdens de 18de eeuw (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), pp. 112–13.
65Gaastra, “War, Competition and Collaboration,” pp. 66–7.
66C. R. Boxer, Jan Compagnie in War and Peace, 1602–1799 (Hong Kong: Heinemann, 1979), pp. 73–105; also C. Nierstrasz, In the Shadow of the Company: The Dutch East India Company and Its Servants in the Period of Its Decline, 1740–1796 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); I. G. Dillo, De nadagen van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, 1783–1795: Schepen en Zeevarenden (Amsterdam: De Bataafse Leeuw, 1992).
67Gaastra, “War, Competition and Collaboration,” p. 67.
68Nierstrasz, Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles.
69Gaastra, “War, Competition and Collaboration,” p. 53; Bonnassieux, Grandes Compagnies de Commerce, p. 104.
70Bonnassieux, Grandes Compagnies de Commerce, p. 109.
71H. V. Bowen, “‘No Longer Mere Traders’: Continuities and Change in the Metropolitan Development of the East India Company, 1600–1834,” in Bowen, Lincoln, and Rigby (eds), The Worlds of the East India Company, p. 19.
72Bonnassieux, Grandes Compagnies de Commerce, p. 118.
73Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, pp. 169–85.
74J. S. Galbraith, Crown and Charter: The Early Years of the British South Africa Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
75Steensgaard, “The Companies as a Specific Institution,” p. 258.
76Van Goor, “From Company to State,” p. 86, citing Diller, Die Dänen in Indien, pp. 267–301.
77F. E. R. de Pauw, Het Mare Liberum van Grotius en Pattijn (Brugge: Uitgeverij voor Rechts- en Bestuurswetenschappen die Keure, 1960).