Private Fortunes and Company Profits in the India Trade in the 18th Century (Variorum Collected Studies)

This collection of essays, two of which appear in print for the first time, documents the late Holden Furber’s discovery that private ventures, most manifestly deployed in the ’country trade’ between Asian ports, played a major role in the European expansion in India before the age of empire. Furber vividly describes how individual entrepreneurs used their positions with East India Companies to build personal fortunes, and how these private endeavours, for which the English East India Company gave more latitude, ultimately worked to the benefit of British power in India. One of the continuing strengths of his work remains its use of archival sources, not only British, but also other archival records, in particular those of The Netherlands and Scandinavia. The essays also highlight important connections, between chartered and ’clandestine’ trade, and piracy; of multinational private investments in the increasingly dominant East India Company; and between the trade of the Indian Ocean and Pacific worlds. Cover Series Half Title Title Copyright Contents Preface Acknowledgements I An Abortive Attempt at Anglo-Spanish Cooperation in the Far East in 1793 II The Beginnings of American Trade with India 1784–1812 III The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies 1783–96 IV Madras in 1787 V The Overland Route to India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries VI The East India Company's Financial Records VII In the Footsteps of a German "Nabob": William Bolts in the Swedish Archives VIII Bombay Presidency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century IX Glimpses of Life and Trade on the Hugli 1720–1770 X Madras Presidency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century XI The Growth of British Power in India 1708–1748 XII The India Trade in the Pacific through Two Centuries 1600–1800 XIII Major Forbes Ross MacDonald and the Arab World: Britain, India, and the Middle East 1791–1798 XIV The History of East India Companies: General Problems Index Holden Furber ; Edited By Rosane Rocher. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.