The Early Modern Colonial State in Asia
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The Early Modern Colonial State in Asia Private Agency and Family Networks in the English East India Company David Veevers Submitted for PhD examination University of Kent February 2015 Word count: 92,189 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Pratik Chakrabarti and Dr Will Pettigrew, both of whom have provided me with untold amounts of support – emails in the middle of the night, impromptu lunch meetings and page-after-page of feedback. Specifically, Pratik Chakrabarti has exposed me to the lost art of thinking, instilled in me by his example a rigid work ethic and has been an inspiring role model of academic integrity. He has also supplied me with an unending stream of animal metaphors that have consistently energised my approach to research, while also leaving me slightly confused. Will Pettigrew, on the other hand, has challenged my identity as a protean historian, constantly forcing me to consider the path my research intends to take and the sort of researcher I would like to be. Our historiographical exchanges have been invaluable in shaping my research questions and aims. Furthermore, his never-ending supply of Double Deckers has left a permanent impact upon my waistline. I would also like to thank the School of History at the University of Kent, who succeeded during my nine years as an undergraduate and postgraduate student, and finally as a doctoral researcher, in fostering a lively and creative community of historians at all levels. I would specifically like to thank Professor Kenneth Fincham and the funding provided by the University for both a Postgraduate Taught Studentship and a Graduate Teaching Studentship which allowed me to pursue my studies. I would also like to thank the staff in the History Office who have provided practical guidance and support over the years. Similarly, I am grateful, for an assortment of reasons, to Don Leggett, Oliver Carpenter and Neil Carver, as well as my undergraduate students over the years. Parts of chapters 3 and 4 are revised versions of articles published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of Global History. I would like to thank the editors and reviewers at both publications for their invaluable feedback and advice. Finally, I would like to thank my parents and my sisters for their patience and support during this long process. My four-legged housemates, Zeus and Horatio, have been sources of companionship throughout the often lonely writing-up process. Roughly half-way through the thesis, my beautiful daughter Florence was born. She brought a new sense of perspective and urgency to this research project. More importantly, she taught me the vital and versatile skill of operating on just two hours of sleep. My wife started me down the path of the historian at a payphone in the middle of a dusty street in Tenerife more than ten years ago. For her unwavering support, indefatigable energy and, most importantly, her naivety in marrying an aspiring-historian, I dedicate this work, such as it is, to her. Thank you, M. J. Abstract This thesis studies the formation of the early modern colonial state in Asia. Through an exploration of the English East India Company, it examines the dynamics which shaped political authority, colonial governance and the performance of state power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Specifically, the following research argues that a process of political decentralisation took place within the Company. This was driven by the pursuit of ‘private interests’ on behalf of the Company’s servants in Asia, who, as a result neglected, resisted or subverted the ‘public interests’ of their masters in London. Key to this reconfiguration of power were the family networks established by Company servants between Europe and Asia, and across Asia itself in this period. As constructs of exchange, circulation and movement, family networks allowed Company servants to exercise considerable political agency, distinct from metropolitan authorities. In so doing, they transformed the political landscape around them, laying the foundations of the early modern colonial state through a process of private state formation from the turn of the eighteenth century onwards. Contents Introduction – A Confederacy of Little Platoons 1 Part One: Contested Visions of the Colonial State Chapter 1 – Public Interest and the Discourse of Colonial State Building 39 Chapter 2 – Private Interest and the Decentralisation of Political Authority 88 Part Two: Family Networks and the Process of State Formation Chapter 3 – Company Kinship Networks in Early Modern Asia 139 Chapter 4 – Laying the Foundations of the Colonial State 179 Chapter 5 – Metropolitan Networks in the Later Eighteenth Century 219 Conclusion – The Making of the Early Modern Colonial State 265 Bibliography 280 Figures Figure 1 – Map of the West Coast of Sumatra 92 Figure 2 – The plurality of metropolitan influences upon Company servants 100 1 Introduction A Confederacy of Little Platoons In his Reflections on the French Revolution published in 1790, the British statesman, political theorist and philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.’1 Burke was not merely concerned with expressions of public or national devotion or fealty. Rather, he was commenting on the crucial role played by non-state actors in the larger processes of state formation. When Burke spoke at the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the English East India Company’s first governor-general of India between 1772 and 1785, he further articulated his idea of ‘the little platoon’. He used the intensely public trial to attack what he perceived to have been Hastings’ disenfranchisement of those ‘little platoons’ which had for so long comprised the Company’s political foundations in Asia. Burke argued that to remove the individual, the personal and the intimate from colonial governance and replace them with the disinterested, the impersonal and the autocratic, as Hastings allegedly had done during his governor-generalship, was to see ‘Nature violated in its strongest principles.’2 In other words, by subverting the private with the public and replacing traditional forms of governance with modern, bureaucratic ones, Hastings had brought ruin upon the Company, evidenced in the political and financial troubles which had engulfed it during his government.3 1 Edmund Burke, ed., The Works of Edmund Burke (London, 1887, 12 vols.), vol. 1, p. 534. 2 Burke, Works, vol. 11, pp. 422-3. 3 Ibid. 2 This thesis is an exploration of the early modern colonial state in Asia before the time of Hastings, Burke and the theatrical politics of the English East India Company which played out before London high-society in the later eighteenth century. It aims to uncover a more traditional process of state formation that was subtly but dynamically underway far beyond the courts of the Company’s metropolitan headquarters in East India House and the impeachment trials of the House of Commons in London in which the Company’s affairs in Asia were subject to the increasingly long arm of parliamentary accountability and the encroaching centralisation of the nation-state. It is a study of the agency of colonial actors on the so-called ‘peripheries’ of empire in the early modern period. It explores the process through which these actors established expansive social networks in an effort to integrate themselves into a wider global community between c. 1650-1750, and the decentralising dynamic this autonomous agency had upon the emergence of the colonial state in Asia. Colonial actors, in this case the Company’s servants, exercised powerful political agency in their own right, laying the foundations of a colonial state which was less Hastings’s centralised fiscal- military bureaucracy and more Burke’s traditional groupings of ‘little platoons’. By making the distinction, in Burke’s words, between ‘the body of the Company and the bodies of the Company’, this thesis seeks to make three important contributions to the study of the English East India Company and the formation of the early modern colonial state more widely. First, by demonstrating the autonomy of colonial actors from so-called ‘centres’ and the decentralisation of political authority and decision- making through their agency, it argues that explorations of global networks are more useful in explaining the development of early modern empires and the emergence of colonial polities than traditional centre-periphery models; second, it demonstrates that the foundations of the colonial state were laid gradually, in a far more contested manner 3 and over a much earlier period than the traditionally accepted period of the later eighteenth century; finally, it situates the colonial family at the heart of colonial state formation through an exploration of the role of the kinship networks they established across Asia by the early eighteenth century in transforming the political landscape around them. In doing so, this thesis follows Burke’s perception of the early modern state which rested on more traditional political models comprised of smaller groups or bodies of political, social and economic authority. For Burke, politics required a regime or system ‘other than the hierarchical bureaucratic government’ which he believed had been built in Asia by