Originally published in 1940, this '.is the first detailed study and appraisal of the relations between the Court of Directors and the Board of Control during the fifty formative years after Pitt set up this government office to direct and control the Company's Indian administration. it was an extremely intricate system of dual government with checks and balances and interlocking factions and interests.' Contents Include: The East India House, 1784-1834 The Opposition of the Indian Interest, 1784-88 The Ascendancy of Dundas, 1788 94 The Revolt of the Shipping Interest 1794-1802 The Triumph of the Shipping Interest, 1802-06 The India House Divided Against Itself, 1806-12 Buckinghamshire Versus The India House, 1812-16 Canning's East India Policy, 1816-22 The Failure of the Private Trade Interest, 1822-30 The Company's Surrender, 1830-34 Concluding Remarks
Empires have usually been founded by charismatic, egoistic warriors or power-hungry states and peoples, sometimes spurred on by a sense of religious mission. So how was it that the nineteenth-century British Indian Raj was so different? Arising, initially, from the militant policies and actions of a bunch of London merchants chartered as the English East India Company by Queen Elizabeth in 1600, for one hundred and fifty years they had generally pursued a peaceful and thereby profitable trade in the India, recognized by local Indian princes as mutually beneficial. Yet from the 1740s, Company men began to leave the counting house for the parade ground, fighting against the French and the Indian princes over the next forty years until they stood upon the threshold of succeeding the declining Mughul Empire as the next hegamon of India. This book roots its explanation of this phenomenon in the evidence of the words and thoughts of the major, and not-so major, players, as revealed in the rich archives of the early Raj. Public dispatches from the Company's servants in India to their masters in London contain elaborate justifications and records of debates in its councils for the policies (grand strategies) adopted to deal with the challenges created by the unstable political developments of the time. Thousands of surviving private letters between Britons in India and the homeland reveal powerful underlying currents of ambition, cupidity and jealousy and how they impacted on political manoeuvring and the development of policy at both ends. This book shows why the Company became involved in the military and political penetration of India and provides a political and military narrative of the Company's involvement in the wars with France and with several Indian powers. G. J. Bryant, who has a Ph.D. from King's College London, has written extensively on the British military experience in eighteenth-century India.
First published in 2004. The purpose of this reference work is to offer a range of materials covering the history of the East India Company during the two and a half centuries of its existence. Volume 6 includes C. H. Philips' The East India Company, 1784-1834, a classic study first published in 1940, examines the final struggle between the directors of the East India Company and home governments in Britain for ascendancy over management of the company as a state in India.
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 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.
