British East India Company

“ And this fine spirit will be found to be confined to no special century nor to any particular ship: but rather to pervade the whole of the East India Company’s merchant service. The days of such a monopoly as this corporation’s trade and shipping are much more distant even than they seem in actual years: but happily it is our proud boast, as year after year demonstrates, that those qualities, which composed the magnificent seamanhood of the crews of these vessels, are no less existent and flourishing to-day in the other ships under the British flag that venture north, south, east and west. ”

“ Notwithstanding all the quarrels, the jealousies, the murders, the deceits, the misrule and corruption, the bribery and extortion which stain the activities of the East India Company, yet during its existence it raised the condition of the natives from the lowest disorder and degradation: and if the Company found it not easy to separate its commercial from its political aspirations, yet the British Government in turn found it very convenient on occasions when this corporation’s funds could be squeezed, its men impressed ”

“ Every Company's servant in Madras, from the Governor to the youngest writer, engaged more or less in trading ventures. The number of traders was swelled by private individuals who came from England, under the licence of the Court of Directors; as well as by Hindu, Mohammedan, and Armenian merchants, who often took shares with the Company's servants. Moreover, this private trade increased the demand for European commodities which were sold by public [24] auction in Fort St. George, and swelled the revenue of the East India Company which was derived from the sea customs. ”

“ Yet the actual profit of the East India Company at this time was nothing prodigious; it barely touched 8 per cent. on the capital employed. Still, the monopoly must have been valuable, for the efforts made to retain it would fill volumes; and one Act of Parliament followed another, prohibiting foreign adventure to India under penalty of forfeiture of triple the sum embarked, and declaring all British subjects found in India who were not in the Company's service liable to seizure and punishment, and generally crying "hands off" to all and sundry. ”

“ The march of events is without a parallel in the annals of the world. In 1600 the East India Company obtained from Queen Elizabeth a charter of exclusive rights to trade in the Eastern seas. In 1612 it established its first factory at Surat. In 1639 it began to build a fortified factory at Madras, [2] whilst a Hindu population of weavers and other manufacturers grew up by its side. Before the beginning of the eighteenth century, before Queen Anne ascended the throne of Great Britain, the British settlements at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta had each a fortress and a town. ”

“ But it is NOT SO with regard to the chief seats of Indian commerce; they will find, that they cannot arbitrarily exclude British subjects from those seats, beyond a limited time; that they cannot debar the nation the beneficial use of them; and that they will not be suffered to render them unavailable, or unprofitable. As soon as the India Trade shall be thrown open, the ports of India will necessarily become open; and, if the Company should then search for their private right to close them, they will find, that it is merged in the public right to use them ”

“ But at this time, when the English settlements seemed on the point of emerging from continued difficulties to a state of prosperity, the erection of a new East India company, in opposition to the old, renewed all their former evils. The new company established their factory at Hughley, and the competition between the respective agents was carried on with the same animosity as exasperated their principals in England, which exposed the concerns of both to the impositions of the Nabob, and of the merchants of Bengal, who took every advantage of this rivality. ”

“ The spirit of enterprise was as busy [5] amongst the British as in after years. One factor urged the Company to send ships up the river Indus and open up a trade with Central Asia; whilst another tried to persuade the Great Mogul to lay down leaden pipes from the river Jumna to the city of Ajmere, a distance of more than two hundred miles, in order to convey drinking-water to the imperial palace in the heart of Rajputana.
Factory life.
In those early days no British ladies were allowed to reside in India. ”

“ The crisis, at which the affairs of the East India Company are now arrived, is one which involves the most important interests of the British Empire. It would be unnecessary to prove a proposition which is so universally acknowledged and felt. ”

“ From being at first a small trading concern with a handful of factors and an occasional factory planted in the East in solitary places, the Company progressed till it had its own civil service with its training college in England for the cadets aspiring to be sent out to the East. It is due to the Company not only that India is now under the British flag,5 but that the wealth of our country has been largely increased and a new outlet was found for our manufactures. The factors who went out in the first Indiamen sailing ships sowed the seed which to-day we now reap. ”

“ Even the outcry at first raised last winter in Lancashire against the increase of the Indian import duties as an intolerable blow to British textile industries, though at once firmly checked by the Secretary of State, provoked enough irritation in India to show how deeply engrained is the suspicion that, from the days of the East India Company onward, the industrial and commercial interests of India have always been deliberately or instinctively sacrificed to those of Great Britain. ”

“ It sufficed for them to know that their countrymen were carving an empire there, conquering provinces and bringing millions of alien people under British rule; as it suffices for them to know to-day that they have an empire in India. India brought them wealth and material prosperity. Individuals became fabulously rich and their wealth filtered downward and filled the whole British nation. The nation became rich by the dividends of the East India Company, and by the enormous profits which British manufacturers and British traders made by the fact of British supremacy in India. ”

“ The British Government, in granting a charter of exclusive trade to India and China to the East India Company, gave that Company thereby a right to expel from their dominions all British-born subjects who had not their licence to reside there, this being deemed necessary to protect them from the competition of "interlopers" as they were called, who might undersell them in their own markets. ”

“ The land containing many magnificent tracts, and the climate presenting many varieties of temperature, it has often been urged that that noble 519country presents advantages for settlement which ought no longer to be overlooked. So long as the East India Company’s power existed, any colonising schemes would necessarily prove almost abortive; but now that British India owns no other ruler than the sovereign of England, there may in future years be an opening offered for the thorough examination and testing of this important question, that its merits and demerits may be fairly compared. ”

“ It would be very unbecoming in me to suppose for a moment, that the East-India Company would hesitate to allow those privileges to their fellow-subjects which are permitted to foreigners in a trade, that is so much out of the line of their own commerce, and therefore cannot be injurious to it. ”

“ The East India Company rose from being a private venture of a few enterprising merchants to become a gigantic corporation of immense political power, with its own governors, its own cavalry, artillery and infantry, its own navy, and yet with its trade-monopoly and its unsurpassed “regular service” of merchantmen. The latter were the largest, the best built, and the most powerfully armed vessels in the world, with the exception only of some warships. ”

“ The East India Company thus not only built its own ships at its own dockyard, victualled them from its own stores, but conducted its own hydrography department. It was therefore positively unique in its monopolies and self-dependence. England has never had any corporation like it: and it is pretty certain it never will. ”

“ No commercial ventures to the East Indies were made in colonial days because, in part, of the monopoly of the East India Company, but chiefly because abundant profitable employment for all available capital was found in various trades nearer home. The fact that ships in the China trade very often made cent per cent was, of course, very well known in the colonies, and colonial merchants had a general knowledge of the cargoes suitable for that trade. ”

“ With a simplicity, amazing only to those who are inclined to be vain of a superior wisdom—not their own but that of their wisest contemporaries—one of the chief reasons for establishing the East India Company was stated to be the necessity of providing against low prices of Oriental productions in Europe. ”