Company Affairs

Great Britain has long provided a paradigm for analyzing the modern empires that gave birth to a Eurocentric international capitalist economic system. From the sixteenth century onwards, royal charters created trading and plantation companies, such as the Levant Company, the East India Company (EIC), the Virginia Company, and the African Company, which fought off bitter European rivals (and local traders) for control of trade networks and colonial possessions in the Caribbean and the Americas, in the Spice Islands and Asia, as well as in Africa. British ships trafficked in spices, cloth and textiles, tobacco, sugar and rum, indigo and opium, gold and silver bullion, and indentured labor and slaves. A growing network of fortified trading posts encouraged greater ambition, and even though domestic politicians often questioned the increasing centrality of the trading companies and their agendas to the nation's policies, none of this opposition, in the long term, hindered their growth. As the trading companies prospered, and key colonies were established, the structures of imperial governance and resource extraction were put into place.

Both the books reviewed here recognize the importance of company affairs, as it were, to the making of the nation, and the culture, of "Great Britain." For Betty Joseph and Nick Dirks, crucial economic, political, social, and intellectual developments in eighteenth-century Britain were driven by the progress, or the difficulties, of overseas expansion. British social practices and self-conception changed or were understood differently in response to overseas experiences. Imported commodities transformed the textures of daily life, but equally, the flood of information about peoples and places far away caused the reorganization of knowledge systems, produced new conceptions of political sovereignty, and widened the horizons of imaginative writing and art. As hundreds of thousands of people left Britain, their experiences as sailors, soldiers, traders, and colonists generated volumes of formal and anecdotal reports whose transformative effects linger today. They, and some of those they interacted with overseas, became bit players on a new global stage, and their dramas were avidly consumed—after suitable framing and rewriting—by fascinated audiences at home.

Betty Joseph analyzes one signal instance of this complex process in the second chapter of her sensitive, intelligent book, Reading the East India Company, 1720-1840. By the mid eighteenth century, she argues, it was impossible to ignore the large-scale violence accompanying the spread of British mercantilism in India, an idea at odds with the perception that doux commerce refined the human passions and brought equal benefits to all. The EIC's military campaigns in south and east India had led to successes against both French traders and Indian rulers, but one casualty was the idea of a pacific trading mission devoid of political intrigue. Joseph shows how a series of narratives managed this problem, largely by transforming the British merchant into the soldier forced to do his national, indeed civilizational, duty by the obduracy of Indians who were not as receptive as they should be to the bounties offered to them by British systems of commerce. Central to this rewriting were stories of the Black Hole of Calcutta, publicized, in an extremely sentimental manner, by John Holwell's A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen (1758). Holwell's sensational account of the suffering of English prisoners taken by the nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Dawlah, made it possible, Joseph argues, "to believe that British rule in India was born not out of naked English aggression but out of justifiable actions taken to punish the Indian perpetrators of the Black Hole" (65). (This is an idea that Dirks develops at some length too).

Holwell's narrative drew upon the conventions, and sentimental moral authority, of British stories of North American captivity, particularly those featuring women abducted by Native Americans (as with some of these narratives, [End Page 121...