East India Patronage and the British State
East India Patronage and the British State

Author: George McGilvary

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2008-07-30

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0857712284

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Act of Union in 1707 brought with it a new 'Great Britain'. How did the English bind the Scottish elites to the new British State, ensuring the stability of this new power in the face of possible Jacobite and international threat? From 1725 a patronage system existed in Britain enabling government ministries to use posts in the East India Company and its shipping to secure political majorities in Scotland and Westminster. Scots went to India as Company servants, ships' crews, soldiers and free-merchants, bringing back exceptional wealth to a land starved of money and providing for commercial and industrial advances throughout Great Britain. The importance of the system of patronage which enabled so many Scots to go to the East has not hitherto been recognised and cannot be overestimated. It bound the Scots with their English neighbours in business, political management and empire, with consequences going far beyond the eighteenth century.

The Business of Empire
The Business of Empire

Author: H. V. Bowen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-12-22

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1139447882

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Business of Empire assesses the domestic impact of British imperial expansion by analysing what happened in Britain following the East India Company's acquisition of a vast territorial empire in South Asia. Drawing on a mass of hitherto unused material contained in the company's administrative and financial records, the book offers a reconstruction of the inner workings of the company as it made the remarkable transition from business to empire during the late-eighteenth century. H. V. Bowen profiles the company's stockholders and directors and examines how those in London adapted their methods, working practices, and policies to changing circumstances in India. He also explores the company's multifarious interactions with the domestic economy and society, and sheds important new light on its substantial contributions to the development of Britain's imperial state, public finances, military strength, trade and industry. This book will appeal to all those interested in imperial, economic and business history.

How the East Was Won
How the East Was Won

Author: Andrew Phillips

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-10-14

Total Pages: 662

ISBN-13: 1009064193

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How did upstart outsiders forge vast new empires in early modern Asia, laying the foundations for today's modern mega-states of India and China? In How the East Was Won, Andrew Phillips reveals the crucial parallels uniting the Mughal Empire, the Qing Dynasty and the British Raj. Vastly outnumbered and stigmatised as parvenus, the Mughals and Manchus pioneered similar strategies of cultural statecraft, first to build the multicultural coalitions necessary for conquest, and then to bind the indigenous collaborators needed to subsequently uphold imperial rule. The English East India Company later adapted the same 'define and conquer' and 'define and rule' strategies to carve out the West's biggest colonial empire in Asia. Refuting existing accounts of the 'rise of the West', this book foregrounds the profoundly imitative rather than innovative character of Western colonialism to advance a new explanation of how universal empires arise and endure.

The Richest East India Merchant
The Richest East India Merchant

Author: Anthony Webster

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1843833034

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Biography and business history of wealthy British merchant in India reveals much about the nineteenth-century Empire.

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857
The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857

Author: Margot Finn

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2018-02-15

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 1787350282

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.

The British Fiscal-Military States, 1660-c.1783
The British Fiscal-Military States, 1660-c.1783

Author: Aaron Graham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-26

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1317039858

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The concept of the 'fiscal-military state', popularised by John Brewer in 1989, has become familiar, even commonplace, to many historians of eighteenth-century England. Yet even at the time of its publication the book caused controversy, and the essays in this volume demonstrate how recent work on fiscal structures, military and naval contractors, on parallel developments in Scotland and Ireland, and on the wider political context, has challenged the fundamentals of this model in increasingly sophisticated and nuanced ways. Beginning with a historiographical introduction that places The Sinews of Power and subsequent work on the fiscal-military state within its wider contexts, and a commentary by John Brewer that responds to the questions raised by this work, the chapters in this volume explore topics as varied as finance and revenue, the interaction of the state with society, the relations between the military and its contractors, and even the utility of the concept of the fiscal-military state. It concludes with an afterword by Professor Stephen Conway, situating the essays in comparative contexts, and highlighting potential avenues for future research. Taken as a whole, this volume offers challenging and imaginative new perspectives on the fiscal-military structures that underpinned the development of modern European states from the eighteenth century onwards.

The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III
The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III

Author: James M. Vaughn

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-02-26

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 030020826X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An important revisionist history that casts eighteenth-century British politics and imperial expansion in a new light In this bold debut work, historian James M. Vaughn challenges the scholarly consensus that British India and the Second Empire were founded in "a fit of absence of mind." He instead argues that the origins of the Raj and the largest empire of the modern world were rooted in political conflicts and movements in Britain. It was British conservatives who shaped the Second Empire into one of conquest and dominion, emphasizing the extraction of resources and the subjugation of colonial populations. Drawing on a wide array of sources, Vaughn shows how the East India Company was transformed from a corporation into an imperial power in the service of British political forces opposed to the rising radicalism of the period. The Company's dominion in Bengal, where it raised territorial revenue and maintained a large army, was an autocratic bulwark of Britain's established order. A major work of political and imperial history, this volume offers an important new understanding of the era and its global ramifications.

India In Edinburgh
India In Edinburgh

Author: Roger Jeffery

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-28

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1000556611

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Roger Jeffery in this book has brought together 10 original, well-researched and well-written essays which bring to life the presence of India in the capital city of Scotland, Edinburgh. On the surface Edinburgh is a purely Scottish city: its ‘India’ past is not easily visible. Yet, from the late 17th century onwards, many of Edinburgh’s young men and women were drawn to India. The city received back money and knowledge, sculpture and paintings, botanical specimens and even skulls! Colonel James Skinner, well-known for establishing Skinner’s Horse, brought his sons to Edinburgh for their schooling. Though Sir Walter Scott visited India only in his imagination (and tried to stop his own sons going there) he crafted a dashing India tale involving Tipu Sultan. The money from India helped create Edinburgh’s New Town, Edinburgh’s internationally-renowned schools (whose former pupils careers ranged from tea-planters to Viceroys) and people who came to Edinburgh from India established Edinburgh’s second women’s medical college. There are many such hidden stories of Edinburgh’s India connections. In this path-breaking book they are brought to life, using novel approaches to look at Edinburgh’s past, to see it as an imperial city, a city for which India held a special place. Focusing on the interactions between individual lives, social networks and financial, material, cultural and social flows, leading experts from Edinburgh’s history provide fascinating detail on how Edinburgh’s links to India were formed and transformed. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Human capital and empire
Human capital and empire

Author: Andrew Mackillop

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 152615532X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Human capital and empire compares the role of Scots, Irish and Welsh within the English East India Company between c. 1690 and c. 1820. It focuses on why the three groups developed such distinctive and different profiles within the corporation and its wider colonial activities in Asia. Besides contributing to the national histories of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, it uses these societies to ask how ‘poorer’ regions of Europe participated in global empire. The chapters cover involvement in the Company’s administrative, military, medical, maritime and private trade activities. The analysis conceives of sojourning to Asia as a cycle of human capital, with human mobility used to access a key sector of world trade. As well as providing essential new statistical information on Irish, Scottish and Welsh participation, it makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on the legacies of empire.

Scotland and the British Empire
Scotland and the British Empire

Author: John M. MacKenzie

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-02-24

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0192513532

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The extraordinary influence of Scots in the British Empire has long been recognized. As administrators, settlers, temporary residents, professionals, plantation owners, and as military personnel, they were strikingly prominent in North America, the Caribbean, Australasia, South Africa, India, and colonies in South-East Asia and Africa. Throughout these regions they brought to bear distinctive Scottish experience as well as particular educational, economic, cultural, and religious influences. Moreover, the relationship between Scots and the British Empire had a profound effect upon many aspects of Scottish society. This volume of essays, written by notable scholars in the field, examines the key roles of Scots in central aspects of the Atlantic and imperial economies from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, in East India Company rule in India, migration and the preservation of ethnic identities, the environment, the army, missionary and other religious activities, the dispersal of intellectual endeavours, and in the production of a distinctive literature rooted in colonial experience. Making use of recent, innovative research, the chapters demonstrate that an understanding of the profoundly interactive relationship between Scotland and the British Empire is vital both for the understanding of the histories of that country and of many territories of the British Empire. All scholars and general readers interested in the dispersal of intellectual ideas, key professions, Protestantism, environmental practices, and colonial literature, as well as more traditional approaches to politics, economics, and military recruitment, will find it an essential addition to the historical literature.