The Dutch virtually excluded company members from the East Indies after the Amboina Massacre in an incident in which English, Japanese, and Portuguese traders were executed by Dutch authorities , but the company's defeat of the Portuguese in India won them trading concessions from the Mughal Empire.
The company settled down to a trade in cotton and silk piece goods, indigo, and saltpetre, with spices from South India. The company's encounters with foreign competitors eventually required it to assemble its own military and administrative departments, thereby becoming an imperial power in its own right, though the British government began to reign it in by the late eighteenth century.
Before Parliament created a government-controlled policy-making body with the Regulating Act of and the India Act eleven years later, shareholders' meetings made decisions about Britain's de facto colonies in the East. The British government took away the Company's monopoly in , and after it worked as the government's agency until the India Mutiny when the Colonial Office took full control.
The East India Company went out of existence in During its heyday, the East India Company not only established trade through Asia and the Middle East but also effectively became of the ruler of territories vastly larger than the United Kingdrom itself. In addition, it also created, rather than conquered, colonies. Singapore, for example, was an island with very few Malay inhabitants in when Sir Stamford Raffles purchased it for the Company from their ruler, the Sultan of Johor, and created what eventually became one of the world's greatest trans-shipment ports.
Encyclopedia Britannica. The expedition returned two years later with a cargo of pepper weighing almost tons! James Lancaster was duly knighted for his service. Although these initial voyages turned out to be extremely profitable for the shareholders, increased competition in the mids made trading much more difficult.
Wars, pirates and lower profit margins forced the Company to grow into new markets where competition was less fierce. It was during this time that the Company also decided that it could not compete with the more powerful Dutch East India Company in the trading of spices, so instead turned its attention to cotton and silk from India.
This strategy appeared to pay off, as by the s the Company had grown so large that it had come to dominate the global textile trade, and had even amassed its own army in order to protect its interests. Although the forces of the East India Company were at first only concerned with protecting the direct interests of the Company, this was to change with the Battle of Plassey in Faced with a local uprising led by Siraj ud-Daula with some French assistance!
However, this was to be a turning point for the Company and the following years saw it take full administrative powers over its territories, including the right to tax anyone living within its boundaries. The reasons for this were two-fold. Firstly, the industrial revolution had changed the way that the Company dealt with the textiles trade. Many of the hallmarks of the modern corporation were first popularized by the East India Company.
For example, the Company was the largest and longest-lasting joint stock company of its day, which means that it raised and pooled capital by selling shares to the public. And while the East India Company charter granted it an ostensible monopoly in India, the Company also allowed its employees to engage in private trading on the side. There were so many opportunities to fudge, cheat and smuggle. Think about jewelry, which is a very small and very expensive thing that you can hide on yourself easily.
Before the East India Company, most clothes in England were made out of wool and designed for durability, not fashion. But that began to change as British markets were flooded with inexpensive, beautifully woven cotton textiles from India, where each region of the country produced cloth in different colors and patterns. When a new pattern arrived, it would suddenly become all the rage on the streets of London. Once they brought over the cotton goods, it introduced this new volatility in what was popular.
When the British and other European traders arrived in India, they had to curry favor with local rulers and kings, including the powerful Mughul Empire that extended across India. Over the years, the company shifted its attention from pepper and other spices to calico and silk fabric and eventually tea, and expanded into the Persian Gulf, China, and elsewhere in Asia. In , however, it seized control of the entire Mughal state of Bengal. The company then built on its victory and drove the French and Dutch out of the Indian subcontinent.
In the years that followed, the East India company forcibly annexed other regions of the subcontinent and forged alliances with rulers of territory they could not conquer.
In , after a long wind down, the British government finally ended company rule in India. By , the company was a shell of its former shelf and was dissolved.
By then, the East India Company had been involved in everything from getting China hooked on opium the Company grew opium in India, then illegally exported it to China in exchange for coveted Chinese goods to the international slave trade it conducted slaving expeditions , transported slaves and used slave labor throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
The East India Company may have since been overshadowed by modern capitalism, but its legacy is still felt around the world. All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city.
0コメント