Barbour's detailed microhistory of the East India Company's doomed Sixth Voyage is a fascinating, sometimes frustrating, and illuminating account of an early capitalist effort by Europeans to stamp their (often arrogant and willfully ignorant) will on the wider world. The core characters of this narrative are the ship Trades Increase, “the greatest English merchant vessel of the Jacobean age” (1), and her mercurial, ambitious commander, Sir Henry Middleton. Both were to meet ignominious ends in Eastern oceans—the Increase worm-eaten, aground, and burned to the water line at Bantam Bay, and Middleton dead of “disease and despair” (227) nearby—and the casual reader might expect that, based on such titanic failures, the Company should have been destined to go down with them.
This, however, is where Barbour's argument refocuses on the broader implications of the Increase's burning and claims that the methods of modern late-stage capitalism are in fact inspired by how Jacobeans responded to such catastrophic losses. The Company's founding voyages remain pertinent because they “expressed and propagated, in a stark and sometimes brutal manner, global appetites, cultural and material logistics, methods of governance, conflicts of interest, patterns of exploitation, and vulnerabilities that persist in profit-seeking multinational corporations” (4). We can, in Barbour's telling, trace the “recurrent volatility” of modern markets to enterprises like the Sixth Voyage and the hard-headed determination of English profit-seekers to accept even the unacceptable wreck of the Increase.
Whether this presentist framing will convince the reader will, no doubt, be in the eye of the individual beholder. The book's chapter-by-chapter retelling of the voyage is otherwise rich, entertaining, and valuable to the social, political, and economic history of European expansion, even if we might also despair at the pigheaded and sometimes, frankly, inexplicable decisions made by Middleton and his lackeys. These included attempting to blockade and bombard Mocha after the hapless commander had been imprisoned by local authorities, having apparently forgotten (!) in London their introductory letter to the contemporary Ottoman sultan; another failed attempt to trade with local intermediaries at Surat, nearly provoking open conflict with a Portuguese fleet; intra-Company squabbles with the commander of the Eighth Voyage, led by the altogether more pragmatic (and differently instructed) John Saris; and, of course, the intendant death and destruction of both human and marine bodies as the long, fractured journey took its toll. The labor struggles of the EIC's sailors and officers, and the difficulties of around-the-world travel in this era, are well complemented by an even more recent work, Eleanor Hubbard's compendious Englishmen at Sea: Labor and the Nation at the Dawn of Empire, 1570–1630 (2021).
The chapters follow the voyage chronologically, beginning and ending in London. Barbour starts by tracing the financing and building of the great ship, whose bungled launch was as abortive and sad as its end. Brief but effective biographies introduce us to the personnel of the Sixth and Eighth Voyages, who are then followed to Arabia Felix, to India, back to the Red Sea, and to Bantam. Finally, Barbour finishes the particular story of the Increase by tracing what reactions appeared to its loss and the end of the voyage (which, despite everything, was financially successful due to the—albeit slow and limping—survival of one of the Increase's convoy ships) in the British pamphlet press. It is here, in the uneasy triumph of pro-Company publications, that Barbour finds the EIC's “pattern of self-righteous yet ruthless resilience” that would “turn tragedy into an engine of capital accumulation” (272) and influence later generations of corporate rapacity. After getting through the litany of disaster the Sixth Voyage endured, it is hard to disagree with him.
Only an odd technical decision distracts from the narrative: a confusing double-citation system is present in the text whereby some sources are footnoted and others referenced in-line. I could not determine whether there was any rhyme or reason to these additions, and they are best left to the endnotes. Otherwise, The Loss is a thickly woven, brightly colored, and infuriatingly human tapestry of life, death, greed, and adventure that will be of great service to period scholars.
