This chapter emphasises the significance regional variations had for the Company’s development in Asia, using Sumatra as a case study to demonstrate the limits to the Company’s political and economic enfranchisement by Asian rulers and elites. While powerful states such as the Mughal empire or the sultanate of Golconda could integrate, subordinate and utilise the Company’s presence, the demand of Company servants for sweeping powers and privileges in the smaller polities of Asia proved destabilising and destructive. On the West Coast of Sumatra, Company servants were reluctant to abandon the strategies of integration and subordination which had proved so successful on the subcontinent, and therefore struggled to establish a sustainable presence at places such as Bencoolen when these rights could not be acquired or mobilised. With limited economic resources, few opportunities for transcultural networks and a shifting state formation process in which multiple imperial powers sought to claim the West Coast as part of their own jurisdiction, Company servants repeatedly failed to acquire a durable foothold on the Coast, and Bencoolen struggled to develop into a vibrant city as both Madras and Calcutta had.

This chapter depicts the failure of the English nation state to launch and sustain overseas enterprises in Asia in the early seventeenth century. It reveals that the East India Company was conceived as a mercantilist strategy of monopoly and force by the crown to acquire new markets and sources of wealth beyond the Cape of Good Hope. But a combination of fiscal–military weakness, unrealistic policies fostered on it by the state and a general economic and constitutional crises which engulfed England by the mid-century, all combined to undermine the Company’s attempt to establish itself at Bantam, Japan and on the Coromandel Coast in India. The result was the abandonment by Company servants on the spot in Asia of metropolitan policies in favour of realising their own local private interests of trade, power and transcultural immersion. As the Company teetered on the verge of collapse in England, it left a vacuum of authority and leadership within its factories in Asia, allowing Company servants to seize new opportunities to empower themselves and appropriate Company policies to suit their own interests. As investment, shipping and specie stopped flowing from Europe, Company servants insinuated themselves into pre-existing Asian networks of commerce and influence.