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4 results

  • 7 - The supremacy of the English East India Company, 1740–1800

  • Om Prakash, University of Delhi
  • Book:
    European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 June 1998, pp 268-314

  • Summary

    A major circumstance contributing to the unprecedented growth in the English trade was the wresting of political authority by the Company in Bengal, the most important region of its trade, between 1757 and 1765. Bengal continued to be by far the most important area of operation for both the Dutch and the English East India companies. The English Company no doubt had acquired a special position in the region, but on nowhere near the scale it had been able to do in Bengal. The French presence on the coast had at best a nuisance value. The available data do not permit a precise division of the value of the textiles exported by the Company from Coromandel between the European and the Asian markets. The Dutch connection with Malabar came to an end in the 1790s. From 1792, the factors at Cochin were trying to sell the Company's establishments to the raja of Travancore.

  • 6 - The VOC and the growing competition by the English and the French, 1680–1740

  • Om Prakash, University of Delhi
  • Book:
    European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 June 1998, pp 211-267

  • Summary

    The last two decades of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century marked a major qualitative change in the Dutch East India Company's trade between Asia and Europe. Between 1708 and 1715, the average value of the textile exports from Coromandel per annum approximated two million florins. As far as textiles were concerned, Gujarat had its share in the fastgrowing European market for Indian textiles. In a memorandum submitted in 1741, Van Imhoff had argued that the Company's trade in the factories west of Malacca had been compared very unfavourably with that carried on by its competitors such as the English and the French. Traditionally, a considerable amount of trade was carried on between the ports in Bengal, the Coromandel coast, Malabar and the Kanara coast on the one hand, and those in Sri Lanka on the other. In 1670, the VOC monopolized the Sri Lanka trade in all major commodities, the only exception being rice.

  • 9 - Conclusion

  • Om Prakash, University of Delhi
  • Book:
    European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 June 1998, pp 337-351

  • Summary

    The principal agencies instrumental in the running of the Euro-Asian commercial network in the early modern period were the European corporate enterprises, the Portuguese Estado da India in the sixteenth, and the Dutch, the English and the French East India companies in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The seventeenth century was marked by a fundamental change in the character of the Euro-Asian commercial encounter. Textiles from Coromandel and Gujarat were indispensable for the procurement of pepper and other spices in the Indonesian archipelago, while raw silk from Bengal was the principal item exported to Japan. In the case of the Dutch East India Company, over the greater part of the century the importance of the Indian trade was derived chiefly from its role in the Company's intra-Asian trade. The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a fundamental alteration in the nature of the Indo-European encounter.

  • 3 - The European trading companies: exports from Europe and the generation of purchasing power in Asia

  • Om Prakash, University of Delhi
  • Book:
    European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 June 1998, pp 72-110

  • Summary

    The early years of the seventeenth century mark the value of the seaborne trade between Asia and Europe. The major company engaged in the Euro-Asian trade was the English East India Company. The only other East India Company to be constituted in the first half of the seventeenth century was the Genoese Compagnia Genovese delle Indie Orientali founded in 1647. The French East India Company was of importance only between about 1725 and 1770 and the Danish Asiatic Company over the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first few years of the nineteenth century. In fact, from the early years of the seventeenth century the Dutch were the undoubted masters of the European bullion trade and Amsterdam the leading world centre of the trade in precious metals. The Dutch pattern of involvement in intra-Asian trade, on the other hand, had a logic involving the forging of important new commercial links across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.