THE HONOURABLE COMPANY: HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH EAST INDIA COMPANY PDF, EPUB, EBOOK John Keay | 496 pages | 11 Oct 1993 | HarperCollins Publishers | 9780006380726 | English | London, United Kingdom The Honourable Company: History of the English East India Company PDF Book Shelfmark: Foster Williams, Roger Achievement of the Company, about Manchester University Press. Seems like all of the events very much could have gone the other way. The company achieved a major victory over the Portuguese in the Battle of Swally in , at Suvali in Surat. Jul 15, Nate Rabe rated it really liked it Shelves: history , india , pakistan , asia. Professor Richard B. Who knew what effect the naturalization elsewhere of a misappropriated seedling might have on the Bandanese monopoly? Similarly, the Earl of Mornington , an East India Company packet ship of only six guns, also sailed under a letter of marque. Historical Dictionary of the British Empire. Fordham University. There were also allowances for outfit and for a small quantity of private trade goods. Work began in on the first railway, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway , running for 21 miles He had, however, done nothing to persuade merchants and investors that expeditions in search of eastern trade were worthwhile. Of these, were dead by the time they reached the Cape. I kept calculating how many pages were left, but I did appreciate my burgeoning understanding of the times and places. If the idea was approved, a target figure was set and a subscription book was opened. Even supposing it had been self-evident which party it was politic to support he had neither the authority nor the ships to engage in hostilities. It was then only a matter of time when the Company assumed the onus of ruling large areas of the Indian subcontinent by itself. Malaria was unavoidable; so was dysentery. But then the Dutch were only emulating the Portuguese who had been trading with the Indies for nearly a century; and although it was the Portuguese who had discovered the sea route round the Cape of Good Hope, even they had not invented the spice trade. As yet Indian cottons could not be expected to command much sale amongst fustian-clad Englishmen but they were extremely popular in south-east Asia and were more acceptable as barter for spices than any other commodity. Its next landfall was at the Nicobar Islands off Sumatra. It may have seemed like a good swop but the little nutmeg of Run had arguably more relevance to future empire than did the Big Apple. Four years later Henry Hudson, cast away by his mutinous crew in the bay that bears his name, probably died believing that he had cleared the north-west passage. Demand for Indian commodities was boosted by the need to sustain the troops and the economy during the war, and by the increased availability of raw materials and efficient methods of production. Legalisation stimulated domestic Chinese opium production and increased the importation of opium from Turkey and Persia. In brines and marinades nutmeg proved a vital preservative; in stews and ragouts pepper masked the smell of ill-cured meat and improved its flavour; and the clove, as well as its culinary uses, was credited with amazing medicinal properties. International trade , drug trafficking mainly opium [1]. Lancaster repaired to the Comoro Islands where a further thirty of his followers were massacred by the natives. If your only constitution is a fiduciary duty to increase profits for the shareholders, you'll be much more oppressive than a state with a robust constitution detailing its powers and the rights of its subjects. For the EIC the occupation of these islands meant not only a curtailment of Dutch and French trade and power in the East Indies but also an equivalent gain to the company of the rich trade in spice. After frantic preparations Lancaster sailed from Woolwich with four ships in February The fact that that same Papal bull gave the Iberian powers a monopoly over their respective routes which might be enforced by any available means was also good reason for Tudor seafarers to find their own route. You Tube. Chartered companies. In a Mughal fleet commanded by Sidi Yaqub attacked Bombay. The Honourable Company: History of the English East India Company Writer Dirks, Nicholas Macmillan Publishing Company, New York p. Imitation remained the only sincere form of competition and it is a measure of the English success that within a decade the Levant Company, instead of importing spices from the Middle East, would be exporting them from London to the Middle East. An excellent book. Keay spent substantial portions of his text describing the history of trade and conquest of India, maybe too much, yet, it is China that becomes the biggest trading partner of The Company. Sen, Sudipta Many interesting things emanate from these pages, among them was the fact that the Far East had more developed societies than Western Europe and in much bigger cities than London. In the best tradition of south-east Asian adat consensus , each village or island was in fact a self-governing and fairly democratic republic. Lancaster may well have been serving under Drake at this time. The Act recognised the company's political functions and clearly established that the " acquisition of sovereignty by the subjects of the Crown is on behalf of the Crown and not in its own right". But, as he readily appreciated, these Indian cottons more than doubled the value of his stock. General William Keeling , a captain during the second voyage, led the third voyage aboard the Red Dragon from to along with the Hector under Captain William Hawkins and the Consent under Captain David Middleton. Escape Artist. British influence continued to expand; in , Great Britain purchased the Danish colony of Tranquebar. The last few pages on Raffles and Singapore are especially relevant given is the th anniversary of Singapore's acquisition by Raffles as it includes the not-very-well-known tale of why Penang, at one time the front runner to be England's Southeast Asian coastal port, didn't make the final cut. Such rights, if granted, would be interpreted as tantamount to a surrender of sovereignty. On 10 February he concluded an agreement with the Portuguese to load his ships with cloves but on 11 February five Dutch ships entered port and proceeded to pound the Portuguese into surrender. Sep 02, Vik rated it it was amazing Shelves: reviewed , india , history. Observing how, although the Portuguese sailed into the sunrise and the Spanish into the sunset, both had successfully found a path to the Spice Islands, Englishmen had concluded that they too could expect to discover their own corridor to the East. Having sailed around Cape Comorin to the Malay Peninsula , they preyed on Spanish and Portuguese ships there before returning to England in It was slightly curious how much the company struggled at first to get going, yet by the end of the seventeenth century it had managed to turn a number of corners and accounted for a substantial part of British customs revenues, perhaps that simply indicates quite how massive and exciting the profits from trade in Far eastern trade were. In March , Sir Henry Middleton commanded the second voyage. But for the Company there would have been not only no British India but also no global British Empire. But around the year other interested parties had appeared on the scene. The book dispels the myth that the East India Company was formed solely to deal with Indian spices. Large-scale transportation of slaves by the company was prevalent from the s to the early s and ended in the s. This resulted in the First Opium War — Now our ship drove up and down in the sea like a wreck so that sometimes we were within three or four leagues of the Cape Buena Esperanza [Good Hope], then cometh a contrary wind and drove us almost to forty degrees to the southwards into the hail and snow and sleetie cold weather. The Honourable Company: History of the English East India Company Reviews Hearing their story Middleton must have found it hard not to sympathize with the beleaguered Bantam factors. There were many things which I found new. It failed to find the Cape of Good Hope, let alone cross the Indian Ocean; this was less encouraging. This is in effect the whole of the world except Europe, Africa and the Asian landmass. Hence the search for the Spice Islands threw up the discovery of America, of the Pacific archipelagos, of sub-Saharan Africa, and of the Indian and south-east Asian coastlines. Under the Act's most important provision, a governing Council composed of five members was created in Calcutta. With the Napoleonic wars raging across Europe, the British returned to the Bandas in the early 19th century, temporarily taking over control from the Dutch. In the minuscule Banda Islands of Run, Ai, Lonthor and Neira ten pounds of nutmeg cost less than half a penny and ten pounds of mace less than five pence. The fact that that same Papal bull gave the Iberian powers a monopoly over their respective routes which might be enforced by any available means was also good reason for Tudor seafarers to find their own route. This increased competition for the Chinese market led to India's reducing its opium output and diversifying its exports. Folded in the pages of my copy was an article from the December 17, Economist entitled "The Company that ruled the wars: As state-backed firms once again become forces in global business, we ask what they can learn from the greatest of them all.