The British East India Company

Paper Summary:

The paper explains that, in 1600, the British East India Company charter from Queen Elizabeth gave the incorporated merchants monopoly privileges on all trade with the East Indies. The author points out that, when the Company entered Oceania, they encountered well established Dutch settlements from Goa to Japan around that lower Southeast Asian rim. The paper relates that the monopoly of trade by the British East India Company from 1757 to 1813 came about not through trade but through the intrusion of power politics by the destruction of the Mughal empire and the usurpation of the opium monopoly of Bengal. The paper includes many quotations.

From the Paper:

"The path from profit to power, and the ultimate combination of both through opium, lay in the struggle between the British and the Dutch, and between the British and the Indian princes. The Dutch had in fact been at war with the British throughout the 17th century, and they had become well established in Southeast Asia. In 1634, the Vleilandt sailed from the Coromandel Coast across the Bay of Bengal to Syriam establishing three factories there for the VOC, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Beach, Adam R., A Profound Pessimism About the Empire: The Isle of Pines, English Degeneracy and Dutch Supremacy, Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation. 41 (2000): 21-36.
• Farrington, Anthony, Trading Places: the East India Company and Asia, History Today. May 1, 2002.
• Mancke, Elizabeth, Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of Oceanic Space, The Geological Review. April 1, 1999.
• Borschberg, Peter, Hugo Grotius, East India Trade and the King of Johor, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. September 1, 1999.
• Borschberg, Peter, The Seizure of the Sta. Caterina Revisited: The Portuguese Empire in Asia, VOC politics and the origins of the Dutch-Johor alliance (1602-c.1616), Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. February 1, 2002

More papers on The British East India Company:

• Analytical Essay # 130712 : "The British East India Company and Trade"
• Comparison Essay # 132651 : "Robert Clive and The East India Company"
• Essay # 137682 : "Arguing the Historical Interpretation of the British Raj as Imperialist Policy in the East India Company of Colonial India"

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