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Geber, Jill Louise. "The East India Company and southern Africa : a guide to the archives of the East India Company and the Board of Control, 1600-1858." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1998. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1349288/.
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This study's purpose is to locate, select and separate out from the wider India Office Records, the extensive archives of the East India Company and its supervisory state body, the Board of Control, those classes, series, volumes and documents which contain sources on the history of the southern African region. 'Southern Africa' is taken to be the region including those countries which form modern South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Angola and Mozambique. An extensive survey of the archives was undertaken to address the previous lack of investigation of these sources. The analysis and synthesis of the survey seeks to explain why the sources are there, their extent, and what they are about. The study aims to draw researchers' attention to the range and depth of the sources in these archives, spanning the period of the combined existence of the East India Company (1600-1858) and the Board of Control (1784-1858). The finding aid produced from the survey results aims to improve accessibility to and facilitate greater use of these archives. The thesis begins with a brief description of the context - the history and organisation of the East India Company and the Board of Control. It then focuses on the Company's interest in southern Africa, particularly its agencies at the Cape of Good Hope (1793- 1858). A general presentation of the evolution, arrangement and extent of the India Office Records follows. This leads into a core discussion of sources contained within the relevant classes of the archives. The appendix comprises a detailed descriptive listing of the East India Company's archives on southern Africa. The listing presents the results of the survey of these disparate records in an intellectually accessible form, in order to submit an extensive body of evidence in support of the main part of the study.
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Baumann, Désirée Marie. "The English East India Company in British colonial history (1599-1833) trading company - territorial power." Essen Verl.Die Blaue Eule, 2007. http://deposit.d-nb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=3018237&prov=M&dok_var=1&dok_ext=htm.
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Ratledge, Andrew James. "From promise to stagnation : East India sugar 1792-1865 /." Title page, table of contents and abstract only, 2004. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phr2366.pdf.
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Howard, Andrew T. "Problems, Controversies, and Compromise: A Study on the Historiography of British India during the East India Company Era." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1492789513835814.
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Widell, Celicia. "The Fighting Man and the Beginning of Professionalism : The East India Company Military Officer 1750–1800." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Historiska institutionen, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-414054.
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Earlier research has claimed that the British officer corps did not go through professionalization until the emergence of institutionalized education for military officers in the 19th century. This study argues that British officers in service of the East India Company in India showed signs of professionalization before 1800, contrary to earlier claims. The theoretical framework is composed in many respects by opposite roles of the officer, representing the pre-paradigm ideal of “the fighting man” and the post-paradigm role of the professional and bureaucrat. By processing letters, official documents and accounts on armed conflicts in India using digital methods, verbs performed by military officers have been extracted, categorized and analysed to find patterns in their actions. From these patterns conclusions have been drawn about the different roles of the officer, and how they relate to officers as fighting men as well as professionals. The results show that officers had roles regarding movement, employment, subordination, independence, non-military roles regarding military law and diplomacy, being gentlemen, advancement, skill and showed significant indications of the a priori roles of fighting men, bureaucrats and professionals.
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Good, Peter. "The East India Company in the Persian Gulf : the view from Bandar Abbas." Thesis, University of Essex, 2018. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/22381/.
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The Persian Gulf represents a vital, yet unexplored region of the East India Company’s sphere of influence. By considering the Gulf as an important space of interaction between the Company and successive Persian regimes, a new relationship can be revealed. From the Company’s foundational action in assisting Shah Abbas I in the capture of Hormuz in 1622, to the creation of a fleet by Nader Shah in the 1730’s, the Company’s experience with Persia represents a different angle on wider trends in Company history. The Company’s factory at Bandar Abbas was a nexus for Indian Ocean trade, as well as the living quarters for a small community of Europeans, whose lives and livelihoods depended on the recognition of rights granted by successive Persian Shahs in the Farman; a legal document of great influence and longevity, originally granted by Abbas I, which lasted for more than a century.
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Ayler, Scott. "The evangelical chaplains in Bengal, 1786-1813." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683249.
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Newman, Richard. "The Dangers of Corporate Champions: The East India Company's Devastating Impact on Britain." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1694.
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This paper argues against the common historical belief that the British East India Company’s actions benefited the British Public. While many recent historical works argue that the Company had detrimental effects on India, the common consensus believes that the Company’s actions while pillaging India benefited Britain through economic treasures and access to luxuries.
In the first section of the text, the author describes the British East India Company’s corruption, propaganda, and lobbying efforts to enrich individual members of the Company and protect personal and corporate profits. The next section describes the Company’s impact on Britain and argues that the Company was an overwhelmingly negative investment for the British taxpayer.
The author compares the East India Company’s historic actions and impacts on Britain to the impact of modern big corporations on their own nations. The text concludes with an argument that the popular narrative, which holds that large corporations’ interests coincide with that of the nation’s public interest, is both inherently mistaken and fraught with danger. The author argues against a zero-sum worldview and for a corporate sector with checks and balances.
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Osborn, Jeremy Richard. "India, Parliament and the press under George III : a study of English attitudes towards the East India Company and empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.313037.
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Banks, Rachel M. "A Proper Cup of Tea: The Making of a British Beverage." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2016. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3033.
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Tea is a drink the Western world associates with Britain. Yet at one time tea was new and exotic. After tea was introduced to Britain, tea went through a series of social transformations. The British gradually accepted tea consumption as a sign of gentility and all social classes enjoyed the drink. After 1834, when the East India Company lost their monopoly on the trade with China, a new tea industry began in India and control passed to British entrepreneurs. Faced with difficulty in their efforts to make their industry into a facsimile of Chinese methods, the British reconstituted their tea industry from the ground up. British ingenuity flourished under the guidance of innovators with machines reshaping the industry. As tea became part of British society and industry, an image of tea formed. Advertising brought that image to the public, who accepted the concept of a proper cup of tea.
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Holmes, Donna Leanne. "Old company records the effect of custodial history on the arrangement and description of selected archival collections of business records /." Connect to thesis, 2008. http://adt.ecu.edu.au/adt-public/adt-ECU2008.0020.html.
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Rørtveit, Tore. "An imperial tradition offering more faith than science : 70 år med britisk imperiehistorie : en historiografisk analyse av behandlingen av Det østindiske handelskompanieti tre britiske historieverk på 1900-tallet /." Bergen : Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and the History of Religions, University of Bergen, 2008. https://bora.uib.no/bitstream/1956/2915/1/45488517.pdf.
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Young, Tom. "Art in India's 'Age of Reform' : amateurs, print culture, and the transformation of the East India Company, c.1813-1858." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/285900.
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Two images of British India persist in the modern imagination: first, an eighteenth-century world of incipient multiculturalism, of sexual adventure amidst the hazy smoke of hookah pipes; and second, the grandiose imperialism of the Victorian Raj, its vast public buildings and stiff upper lip. No art historian has focused on the intervening decades, however, or considered how the earlier period transitioned into the later. In contrast, Art in India's 'Age of Reform' sets out to develop a distinct historical identity for the decades between the Charter Act of 1813 and the 1858 Government of India Act, arguing that the art produced during this period was implicated in the political process by which the conquests of a trading venture were legislated and 'reformed' to become the colonial possessions of the British Nation. Over two parts, each comprised of two chapters, two overlooked media are connected to 'reforms' that have traditionally been understood as atrophying artistic production in the subcontinent. Part I relates amateur practice to the reform of the Company's civil establishment, using an extensive archive associated with the celebrated amateur Sir Charles D'Oyly (1781-1845) and an art society that he established called the Behar School of Athens (est.1824). It argues that rather than citing the Company's increasing bureaucratisation as the cause of a decline in fine art patronage, it is crucial instead to recognise how amateur practice shaped this bureaucracy's collective identity and ethos. Part II connects the production and consumption of illustrated print culture to the demographic shifts that occurred as a result of the repeal of the Company's monopolistic privileges in 1813 and 1833, focusing specifically on several costume albums published by artists such as John Gantz (1772-1853) and Colesworthy Grant (1813-1880). In doing so, it reveals how print culture provided cultural capital to a transnational middle class developing across the early-Victorian Empire of free trade. Throughout each chapter, the gradual undermining of the East India Company's sovereignty by a centralising British State is framed as a prerequisite to the emergence of the nation-state as the fundamental category of modern social and political organisation. Art in India's 'Age of Reform' therefore seeks not only to uncover the work and biographies of several unstudied artists in nineteenth-century India, but reveals the significance of this overlooked art history to both the development of the modern British State, and the consequent demise of alternative forms of political corporation.
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Cook, Andrew Stanley. "Alexander Dalrymple (1737-1808), hydrographer to the East India Company and the Admiralty, as publisher : a catalogue of books and charts." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2634.
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This is a study of the publications and publishing practices of Alexander Dalrymple (1737-1808). Dalrymple was cumulatively a private publisher of nautical charts and plans (from 1767), the ''examiner of ships' journals'' and chart publisher for the East India Company (from 1779), and Hydrographer to the Admiralty (from 1795). The core of the study is a catalogue of the known publications of Alexander Dalrymple, defining and establishing his oeuvre. The catalogue is in two parts, Catalogue A for the letterpress publications, numbering 257, and Catalogue B for the engraved charts, plans of ports, views of land, and other Illustrations, numbering 1116. The entries in each part of the catalogue are arranged chronologically by date of publication, with full bibliographical and technical descriptions, and notes of attribution, dating and inter-relationships. The introduction gives a short account of Dalrymple's life, focussing on his publishing activity, and introducing his geographical and political pamphlet publishing. Four phases of activity in his nautical publication are identified: the decision to publish charts and memoirs from his own voyages in the Eastern Archipelago (1769-1772); the private publication of charts and plans with grants or subscriptions from the East India Company (1772-1779); the annual series of charts, plans, views and memoirs issued from 1779 onwards for the East India Company; and the organisation and output of the Admiralty Hydrographic Office which he ran in parallel with his East India Company work after 1795. This is supplemented by a discussion of the continuing use made of Dalrymple's charts after his death in 1808. An investigation of Dalrymple's engraving and publishing practices follows, with a brief survey of his technical leaflets and manuals on nautical surveying and chronometer use, and an account of Oriental Repertory, his chief non-nautical publication. The study emphasises the close personal control Dalrymple exercised over his publications, and the consequent problems in the Admiralty and East India Company in developing arrangements to continue publishing charts after his death.
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Le, Pichon Alain. "Le fonds de commerce de jardine, matheson & co : aspects de la civilisation commerciale a canton : 1829-1839." Paris 4, 1997. http://www.theses.fr/1997PA040046.
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En 1832, date de sa fondation officielle, jardine, matheson & co. Etait, a canton, l'une des rares maisons de commerce anglo-ecossaises independantes. Comme ses concurrentes, elle exercercait ses divers metiers dans le sillage du commerce officiel de la compagnie des indes orientales britannique : commerce international des denrees -- principalement de l'opium, mais aussi des autres produits orientaux; commerce des instruments financiers; et commerce de l'argent-metal. Neanmoins, cette firme familiale de taille encore tres modeste au debut des annees 1830, fut la seule parmi toutes ses concurrentes a passer sans encombre apparent le cap de la decennie extremement difficile qui preceda immediatement la premiere guerre de l'opium. Mais entre la legende d'un succes facile, et la realite d'un succes commercial authentique, quoique aprement dispute aux deboires et aux erreurs, la difference est considerable. Ce fut seulement grace a son assise commerciale solide, a des appuis politiques habilement recherches puis entretenus par les fondateurs, et a des benefices toujours accrus dans le commerce de l'opium, que la firme reussit a assurer sa perennite et sa croissance jusqu'a l'oree de la cinquieme decennie du xixe siecle. Cette longevite, inhabituelle parmi les firmes cantonaises exercant leur activite a cette epoque, trouve sa principale explication dans les caracteristiques particulieres du fonds de commerce de la firme, tel que le developperent deux fondateurs aux talents complementaires, william jardine et james matheson. Le present travail, essentiellement fonde sur une analyse des archives comptables et discursives de la firme pendant la periode consideree, met en lumiere les caracteristiques du fonds de commerce de la firme a cette etape de son developpement, et l'habilete des fondateurs a reparer les breches repetees qu'y entamerent tour a tour les retentissantes faillites internationales, de meme que la plus grande dereglementation commerciale de l'epoque -- l'abolition par le parlement britannique du monopole de la compagnie des indes orientales pour l'importation du the de chineIn 1832, the year of its official foundation, jardine, matheson & co. Was one of the few scottish independent agency houses operating in canton. Like its competitors, it plied its different lines of business in the wake of the official trade conducted by the british east india company. Its business was made up of trades for which there was international demand -- principally opium, as well as other oriental products; financial instruments; and bullion. The family firm, however, which had remained very small up to the early eighteen thirties, was the only one among its competitors to sail through the extremely stormy waters of the ten years immediately preceding the first opium war with no apparent harm. But there is considerable difference between the legend of an easy success, and the reality of this hard-won commercial success, which was reached only through a constant fight against repeated misfortunes and human errors. A stable commercial foundation, political alliances developed with flair and assiduity by the founders, and ever increasing profits from the opium trade, were among the main reasons which combined to ensure that the firm survived, grew and prospered into the eighteen forties when others faltered and disappeared. This unusual longevity for a canton firm of the period is best explained by the special characteristics of its constituency, as it was developed by two founders endowed with complementary talents, william jardine and james matheson. The current work, which is essentially based on an analysis of the archives of the firm for the relevant period -- both its accounts and its correspondence -- highlights the characteristics of the firm's constituency at that stage of its development, and the founders' skill at organising, and sometimes at improvising, repair-work against the repeated onslaught of international bankruptcies and of the most important commercial deregulation of the time -- the vote by the british parliament to abolish the monopoly of the east india company for china-tea imports
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Elgin, William Blanke. "The Itinerary of Jan Huygen van Linschoten: Knowledge, Commerce, and the Creation of the Dutch and English Trade Empires." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1617724657737613.
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Holmes, Donna Leanne. "Old company records: The effect of custodial history on the arrangement and description of selected archival collections of business records." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2008. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/23.
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This thesis takes up Terry Cook's idea that through their work, archivists are active shapers rather than passive keepers. In taking this idea further, this thesis discusses case studies comparing the custodial history of the records of four companies that were created in the seventeenth century. Consideration is given to how archival practitioners influenced the arrangement and description of the records of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the English East India Company (EIC), the Royal African Company (RAC) and the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) during critical periods of their custodial history.
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Philips, Cyril Henry. "The East India company, 1784-1834 /." London ; New York : Routledge, 1998. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37035447x.
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Winterbottom, Anna E. "Company culture : information, scholarship, and the East India Company settlements 1660-1720s." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2010. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/376.
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I explore how knowledge was created and circulated in and between the settlements of the early English East India Company. I aim: to demonstrate connections between scholarship and early colonialism; to highlight the role of non-elite actors in transferring skills and techniques; and to map global knowledge networks based on systems of patronage that cut across national, ethnic, and social boundaries. Chapter 1 uses the life of Samuel Baron, a half-Dutch, half-Vietnamese factor, spy, and broker for the EIC, client of the rulers of Siam and Tonkin, and author of the Description of Tonqueen to examine the importance of passeurs culturels or go-betweens to both the European trading companies and Asian rulers in the period and their role in transmitting geographical and ethnographic information. Chapter 2 examines the local and international botanical and medical networks of two Company surgeons in Madras, based on collections in the Natural History Museum and the surgeons' correspondence with the apothecary James Petiver. Chapter 3 looks in detail at the development of English scholarship on the Malay language: moving from wordlists and manuscript grammars to the first bilingual English-Malay dictionary, published in 1701. I use the texts to examine the early Company's policies of language-learning and teaching and the theoretical and practical basis of linguistic projects in the period. Chapter 4 follows the movement of a travel text, Robert Knox's Historical Relation of Ceylon, with its author on a series of later voyages. I explore the practical uses of such texts to inform bio-prospecting and the transplantation of crops in the Company's search for island bases in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Chapter 5 examines slaves' roles in the transmission of botanical, medical, and cultural knowledge between the 'plantations' of St Helena (South Atlantic) and Bencoulen (Sumatra), through both their work and their resistance.
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Bowen, Huw Vaughan. "British politics and the East India Company, 1766-1773." Thesis, Aberystwyth University, 1986. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.548079.
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Between 1766 and 1773 issues related to the East India Company were a dominant theme in British politics: in 1767 and 1772-3 there were major parliamentary inquiries into the affairs of the Company. This thesis is a study of why this was so. It is a study of the response of politicians and those within the Company to the changing nature of British activity in India. Attention is focussed upon two legislative bodies: Parliament and the General Court of the Company. Such an approach is necessary as much of the East Indian legislation enacted during this period originated in the General Court. The nature of this political proceHS is reflected in the organization of the thesis. Part one is devoted to a consideration of the political structure and decision-making machinery of the Company. Particular attention has been given to the factional struggle for control of the Company, and to the growth of a ministerial 'interest' in the executive body, the Court of Directors. Part two is a study of the intrusion of Company issues into parliamentary politics. It is argued that shortcomings in the Pratt-Yorke legal opinion of 1757 conditioned the nature of parliamentary intervent ions into the Company's affairs. The motives behind, and scope of, the first inquiry of 1767 are examined, as are the failures to reform the Company between 1768 and 1772. Finally, in the wake of the financial crisis of 1772, detailed consideration is given to the second parliamentary inquiry and the passage of Lord North's East Indian legislation in 1773.
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Bérubé, Damien. "The East India Company, British Fiscal-Militarism and Violence in India, 1765-1788." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/40965.
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The grant of the diwani to the East India Company in August 1765 represents a climacteric moment in British imperial histories. Vested by the Mughal Emperor Shah Allam II, this newfound right to collect revenue saddled the Company with the broader and formal economic, judicial and military responsibilities of a territorial empire. Wherefore, in the era of post-Mughal political splintering, the EIC, as an emerging subcontinental state had to contend with internal revolts abetted by ethno-religious and socio-economic crises, but also because of threats posed by the Kingdom of Mysore and the Maratha Confederacy. Nevertheless, in the midst of the American Revolution, the EIC’s contentious and contested conduct of imperial governance in India became an ideological, philosophical and pragmatic point of domestic and imperial contention. Thus, confronted with the simultaneous internal and external implications of the crises of Empire between 1765 and 1788, the role of the Company’s fiscal-military administration and exercise of violence within the spheres British imperial governance was reconceptualised and in doing so contemporaries underwrote the emergence of what historians have subsequently called the ‘Second British Empire’ in India. Alternatively, the reconceptualisation of the EIC’s fiscal-military administration served to ensure the continuity and preservation of the British imperial nexus as it was imposed upon Bengal. This work, therefore, traces the Company’s fiscal-military administration and dispensation of violence during the ‘crises of empire’ as a point of genesis in the development and reformation of British imperial governance. Moreover, it will show that the interdependent nature of the Company’s ‘fiscal-military hybridity’ ultimately came to underwrite further the ideological, philosophical and pragmatic consolidation of imperial governance in ‘British India’. Accordingly, this dissertation examines the interdependent role between Parliament’s reconceptualisation of the East India Company’s fiscal-military administration of violence and the changing nature of British imperial governance in ‘British India’.
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Steadman-Jones, Richard. "Colonialism and linguistic knowledge : John Gilchrist and the representation of Urdu in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/272827.
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Travers, Thomas Robert. "Contested notions of sovereignty in Bengal under British rule, 1765-1785." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2001. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/272067.
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Al-Qasimi, S. M. "Arab ?piracy? and the East India Company encroachment in the Gulf 1797-1820." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.353800.
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Singha, Radhika. "A 'despotism of law' : British criminal justice and public authority in North India, 1772-1837." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1990. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/273424.
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Förster, Stig. "Die mächtigen Diener der East India Company : Ursachen und Hintergründe der britischen Expansionspolitik in Südasien, 1793-1819 /." Stuttgart : F. Steiner, 1992. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37017626k.
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Hopkins, Ben D. "The making of modern Afghanistan /." Basingstoke ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb41456708g.
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Al-Khalifa, K. K. "Commerce and conflict : The English East India Company factories in the Gulf, 1700-47." Thesis, University of Essex, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.380560.
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Van, Lent Wim. "Managing an early modern giant : issues and initiatives at the Dutch East India Company." Thesis, Cergy-Pontoise, Ecole supérieure des sciences économiques et commerciales, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014ESEC0005.
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La crise financière récente a réveillé l’intérêt du monde académique pour les préceptes qui sous-tendent le comportement économique “rationnel”. En réponse au besoin d’une meilleure compréhension des fondamentaux du capitalisme, cette thèse prend une perspective historique sur XV quelques considérations managériales essentielles, parmi lesquelles la coordination principal-agent, la redistribution des bénéfices et la maximisation de la fiabilité et de l’efficience. Elle le fait par le biais de multiples analyses longitudinales de la Compagnie Néerlandaise des Indes Orientales (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, la VOC), qui opéra pendant la première vague de mondialisation et fut une pionnière des principes managériaux modernes. Se basant sur une combinaison de données quantitatives et qualitatives, et instruite par la théorie de l’agence et par l’institutionnalisme, cette thèse fait deux contributions théoriques larges. En premier lieu, en soulignant la réactivité de la Compagnie à l’évolution des exigences d’un monde en mutation, elle enrichit l’état des connaissances sur la VOC, qui était jusqu’à présent fortement orienté vers la contextualisation historique et minimisait l’importance de l’action managériale. En deuxième lieu, elle démontre que la gestion de la VOC, bien que guidée par des objectifs organisationnels modernes par essence, tels que le contrôle, la maximisation des revenus, ou l’optimisation opérationnelle, était formatée par des situations politiques et culturelles prémodernes. Ceci confirme de nouveau la thèse selon laquelle les racines de l’action économique “rationnelle” se trouvent d’avantage dans le pragmatisme et la construction sociale que dans une logique économique autonome. Sous cet angle, la lutte de la VOC pour réconcilier les objectifs de long terme et les exigences de court terme éclaire les problématiques stratégiques d’industries dynamiques ou émergeantes, et alimente le débat sur les facteurs, culturels ou politiques, qui ont contribué à l’état actuel du capitalisme occidentalThe recent financial crisis has reinvigorated an academic interest in the precepts upon which “rational” economic behavior is based. Answering to the need for a better understanding of capitalism’s fundaments, this dissertation takes a historical perspective on a number of core managerial issues, including raising capital, controlling agents and improving reliability / efficiency. It does so by means of multiple longitudinal analyses of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie – VOC), which operated during the first wave of globalization and pioneered modern management principles. Together, the chapters cover all of the Company’s three important domains of activity: the Asian branch, the metropolitan upper echelons and the shipping between Europe and Asia. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data and drawing on agency theory and institutionalism, the dissertation depicts the VOC as an actively governed organization that consciously addressed trade-offs and dilemmas. Elaborating how social and organizational processes contributed to the modernization of international business, the dissertation suggests that the roots of capitalism and “rational” economic coordination, which are often assumed to obey an autonomous economic logic, can be found in pragmatism and social construction. As such, the VOC’s struggle to reconcile long-term goals with short-term exigencies speaks to current strategic issues in dynamic or emerging industries and feeds into the debate on the factors (culture or political) that have contributed to the current state of western capitalism
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Kumagai, Yukihisa. "The lobbying activities of provincial mercantile and manufacturing interests against the renewal of the East India Company's charter, 1812-1813 and 1829-1833." Connect to e-thesis, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/367/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008.Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of Economic and Social History, Faculty of Law, Business and Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.
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Wilson, Jon E. "Governing property, making law : land, local society and colonial discourse in Agrarian Bengal, c.1785-1830." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.368131.
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Tammita-Delgoda, Asoka SinhaRaja. "'Nabob, historian and orientalist' : the life and writings of Robert Orme (1728-1801)." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 1991. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/nabob-historian-and-orientalist--the-life-and-writings-of-robert-orme-17281801(1b07b46e-f262-4424-b139-d268b416f66a).html.
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Crerar, Anne. "Commerce and constitutionalism : the English East India Company and political culture in Scotland and Ireland, 1681-1813." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2013. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=201855.
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The examination of Scottish and Irish links with the Atlantic realm of the British Empire has made an important contribution to national histories and imperial historiography. This thesis concentrates on an underdeveloped field of eighteenth- century historical studies of Scotland and of Ireland. Eighteenth-century perceptions of the English East India Company (EIC) in Scotland and Ireland have been analysed throughout this study, an approach offering a number of advantages. By shifting the geographic focus, established conceptualisations of Scottish and Irish provincialism, formulated within the field of Atlantic history, have been reviewed using evidence relating to the Asian Empire. This dissertation also contributes to Scottish and Irish comparative historiography. It exposes distinct similarities and subtle differences in the reactions of Scottish and Anglo-Irish societies to the EIC. Factions within both societies sought access to global trade, particularly once the parliaments of their respective countries had been constitutionally liberated. The monopoly posed fundamental questions in the politics of union and empire in both Scotland and Ireland. It prominently featured in Irish debates over union at the end of the eighteenth century, just as it had in Scotland in 1707. Nonetheless, Scottish and Anglo-Irish societies remained sensitive to the extra- commercial character of the EIC. Proposals for participation in the East Indies trade offer insights into the complexities of their respective political cultures. Responses to the EIC have been used throughout this thesis to test influential theories in imperial historiography, regarding the political culture which promoted overseas expansion. Accepted ideas regarding the role of the British Empire in the construction of North British and Anglo-Irish identity have been challenged. The hypothesis that provinciality was a product of the Atlantic Empire is also contested. This dissertation questions certain aspects of the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ thesis. The notion that East India patronage inhibited Scottish debate should also be reassessed. Furthermore the thesis contends that the importance of the Eastern Empire to contemporaries has been underestimated in both Scottish and Irish historiography.
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Jacobs, Els M. "Merchant in Asia : the trade of the Dutch East India Company during the eighteenth century /." Leiden : Research School CNWS, 2006. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0712/2007385439.html.
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Sehgal, Manu. "Politics, state and empire : colonial warfare and the East India Company State, c.1775-1805." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.744760.
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The political economy of late eighteenth warfare is a relatively under researched theme in the debates over the establishment of a colonial dispensation in South Asia. This thesis seeks to engage with the changing politics of colonial warfare over the period c. 1775-1805. It is being argued here that the ubiquitous and incessant warfare of the period was productive of a specific early colonial order. The efforts at re-ordering civilian control of the military, effectively exercised by the civilian councils at Madras and Bombay, thus provide a useful entry into contested political terrains where early colonial state formation was transacted.
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Wilkinson, Callie Hannah. "The residents of the British East India Company at Indian royal courts, c. 1798-1818." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/269319.
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Generations of historians have looked to Bengal, Bombay, and Madras to detect the emergence of the legal and administrative mechanisms that would underpin Britain’s nineteenth-century empire. Yet this focus on ‘British’ India overshadows the very different history of nearly half the Indian subcontinent, which was still ruled by nominally independent monarchs. This dissertation traces the increasingly asymmetrical relationships between the East India Company and neighbouring Indian kingdoms during a period of intensive British imperial expansion, from 1798 to 1818. In so doing, it sheds fresh light on the contested process through which the Company consolidated its political predominance over rival Indian powers, setting a precedent for indirect rule that would inform British policy in Southeast Asia and Africa for years to come. The relationship between the Company and Indian governments was mediated through the figure of the Resident, the Company’s political representative at Indian courts, and the Residents therefore lie at the heart of this dissertation. Given their geographical distance from British administrative centres and their immersion in Indian political culture, the Residents’ experiences can be used to chart the growing pains of an expanding, modernizing empire, and to elucidate the dynamics of cross-cultural interaction and exchange. Based on the letters and papers of the dozen Residents stationed at major Indian courts, this dissertation shows how practical and ideological divisions within the Company regarding the appropriate forms of imperial influence were exacerbated by mutual suspicions resulting from geographical distance and the blurring of personal and public interests in the diplomatic line. This process was further complicated and constrained by the Residents’ reliance on the social and cultural capital of Indian elites and administrators with interests of their own. The Company’s consolidation of political influence at Indian courts was fraught with problems, and the five thematic chapters reflect recurring points of conflict which thread their way through these formative years. These include: the fragility of information networks and the proliferation of rumours; questions about the use of force and the applicability of the law of nations outside Europe; controversies surrounding political pageantry and conspicuous consumption; ambivalent relationships between Residents and their Indian state secretaries; and the Residents’ embroilment in royal family feuds. Ultimately, this dissertation concludes that the imposition of imperial authority at Indian courts was far from smooth, consisting instead of a messy and protracted series of practical experiments based on many competing visions of the ideal forms of influence to be employed in India.
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Le, Fourn-Weeks Joëlle. "Les représentations européennes de l'Inde à l'époque de l'East India Company (1658-1857)." Paris 10, 2001. http://www.theses.fr/2001PA100054.
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Dans quelle mesure le projet colonial est-il fondé sur la modernité qui structure les représentations européennes de l''Inde? C'est l'argument que nous développons en conclusion de cette analyse de l'altérité indienne. Son architecture est en réalité plus complexe, fluctuante et ambigue͏̈ comme nous le démontrons au cours de cette exploration. Les représentations pré-coloniales de l'Inde sont en effet loin d'être monolithiques. Elles sont en premier lieu structurées par la binarité identité-altérité : l'Inde est d'abord construite en fonction des problématiques qui agitent l'Europe philosophique et politique. Cette logique identitaire inclut d'autres mécanismes qui renvoient tour à tour à des schémas utopiques et à des modèles antiques. Cette dialectique ne rend pas compte d'une troisième construction de la vision de l'Inde plus globalement idiosyncrasique. Ces schémas se systématisent à partir de la prise de pouvoir de l'East India Company au Bengale sans toutefois se réduire à une dichotomie dominant-dominé. Car si la fin du Company Raj tente d'offir une scientificité des représentations qui ouvre la voie à une lecture et à une gestion coloniale de l'Autre, elle ne parvient pas à occulter les phénomènes d'hybridité. Ce concept post-moderne constitue en définitive l'essentiel de l'héritage colonialBy focussing primarily on the precolonial vision of India, this research offers an alternative perspective on colonial representations, as well as new contributions to the concept of otherness. It is argued that the 17th century european perception of India differs from colonial constructions, which is partly due to new power relations and the assertion of modernity. Representations are thus placed into several broad categories reflecting europe's quest for a political, social and religious identity. As a result, india is, either perceived as Europe's alter ego or its radical Other. There is nevertheless a third way which is seen to disrupt the rigid binarism of representations, as a new paradigm emerges to subsume otherness. With the East India Company's accession to the diwani of Bengal, the english attemppted to redefine their imperial identity and their power relations. Yet, the distinction between the reformist's ideals of assimilation and the orientalists' respect for indian culture was often very slight. The drive towards conciliation and the tension between differences and similitarities would eventually open up an area of hybridity, in which both the indian and english elite borrowed from each other's symbols and values. After the rebellion of 1857, the british were to adopt a radical approach to alterity, which would offer systematic and manageable representations of colonial subjects. Indo-English hybridity remains visible in post-colonial icons, however, whereas music and literature keep reinventing its complex architecture
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Krishnan, Eesvan. "Land acquisition in British India, c. 1894-1927." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3ba0652b-70b0-4407-ba85-14eddebdbcb6.
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This study offers the first instalment of a general history of land acquisition in British India, c. 1894–1927. It advances eight principal theses: (i) that the first law of land acquisition was enacted in 1668, as part of a political settlement by the East India Company with the Portuguese landlords of Bombay island; (ii) that, to a remarkable degree, land acquisition law was shaped in the interest of the sterling railway companies; (iii) that the state habitually used land acquisition not so much to effect non- consensual transfers but to ‘launder’ titles free of encumbrances and other claims; (iv) that the primary beneficiaries of land acquisition were public bodies, the sterling railway companies, and elite private interests; (v) that the executive was hostile to legislative and judicial oversight of land acquisition, and successfully resisted or co-opted attempts to impose such oversight; (vi) that the courts were in any event content with the role they were assigned under the 1894 Act, and generally deferred to the executive in land acquisition cases; (vii) that the land-acquiring executive, although hostile to and unencumbered by meaningful legislative and judicial oversight, as a general rule displayed a legal fastidiousness; (viii) that, despite an appearance of impartiality, land acquisition bore the stain of imperialism. These theses are advanced in the course of explaining the failure of the forgotten Kelkar Bill (1927), an attempt by the Maharashtrian nationalist N. C. Kelkar (1872–1947) to enact far-reaching amendments to the Land Acquisition Act 1894. Kelkar’s fellow nationalists withheld their open support from the measure and thereby guaranteed its failure: a counterintuitive choice that, it is argued, exemplifies the tactical compromises of nationalism.
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Bhattacharyya-Panda, Nandini. "The English East India Company and the Hindu laws of property in Bengal, 1765-1801 : appropriation and invention of tradition." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.307424.
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Persad, Rajesh Surendra. "A Passage from India: The East Indian Indenture Experience in Trinidad 1845-1885." NCSU, 2008. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-08132008-104154/.
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The purpose of this research has been to analyze the social relationships that developed during the formative years of East Indian indenture system in the Trinidad. This work is an attempt to explore how the East Indian indentured immigrants in Trinidad individually and collectively navigated through the experience of servitude to form a collective identity and become established in a foreign land as they evolved from transient laborers to permanent settlers. Without the Indian laborers the sugar industry and the islandâs prosperity faced ruin while the perceived prosperity of the Indians inspired resentment. Caught between the worlds of freedom and unfreedom, the Indians sought to establish themselves within Trinidadâs society.
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Patterson, Jessica. "Enlightenment, Empire and Deism : interpretations of the 'Hindoo religion' in the work of East India 'Company Men', 1760-1790." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2017. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/enlightenment-empire-and-deism-interpretations-of-the-hindoo-religion-in-the-work-of-east-india-company-men-17601790(f0f58aea-f425-4f0b-8407-7963e95beef8).html.
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In the latter half of the eighteenth century the British presence in India meant that East India Company servants were at the forefront of European researches into the region's history, culture and religion. This thesis offers an analysis of the work of four such Company writers, all of whom produced accounts of what they perceived to be India's native and original religion: J.Z. Holwell (1711-1798), Alexander Dow, (1735-1779), N.B. Halhed (1751-1830), and Charles Wilkins (1749-1836). It argues that their particular interpretation of what they termed the 'Hindoo' or 'Gentoo' religion was based on their own preoccupations with European religious debates, from a perspective that can loosely be described as deist. At the centre of this thesis is the claim that these British interpretations of Hinduism instigated an important shift in the way that Indian theology and philosophy was understood in eighteenth-century Europe. This new paradigm moved away from characterisations of the religion according to eye-witness accounts, towards a construction of Indian religion based on the claim of British researchers that they were penetrating the original philosophical origins of a much maligned and ancient system of thought. This new interpretation of a philosophic Hinduism was both based in and shaped Enlightenment intellectual culture, to the extent that by the turn of the century it had firmly cemented its place in not only the thought of prominent figures such as Voltaire and Raynal, but also constituted a significant topic in the emergent discourses of German idealism. The notion of a British interpretation of Hinduism has previously been discussed as both a marker in what some have termed the invention of Hinduism, and by those researching the history of Orientalism as an academic discipline. In the first instance, these authors are characterised as moments in a process, with some suggesting that the real invention occurred as part of the nineteenth-century imperialist project. In the second place, these authors are most often seen as unscholarly precursors to the work of the first true British Indologist, Sir William Orientalist Jones (1746-1794). This thesis will challenge these positions by positing these four authors as the architects of the shift towards a European conception of Hinduism as a rational and philosophical religion.
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Gialdroni, Stefania. "Per una storia giuridica della East India Company : responsabilità limitata e principio maggioritario nel 17. secolo." Paris, EHESS, 2009. http://www.theses.fr/2009EHES0162.
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Le 31 décembre 1600 la reine Elisabeth I ère d'Angleterre fonda la Governor and Company of merchants of London trading into de East-Indies (la Compagnie des Indes Orientales anglaise), mieux connue sous le nom de East India Company (BIC). Dans cette recherche nous avons poursuivi deux buts fondamentaux: combler une lacune et vérifier des lieux communs. La lacune était celle de la description de l'histoire juridique de la EIC pendant le XVIIème siècle. Les lieux communs étaient celui de la présumée responsabilité limitée des membres de la compagnie et celui du présumé caractère soi-disant « démocratique» de son organisation. En traitant de la première question, nous avons constaté que la solution adoptée par la compagnie était très pragmatique: en cas de besoin, on recourrait au prêt externe ou on obligeait les membres à faire des apports de fond au capital (leviations). Le patrimoine des membres, en conclusion, n'était pas attaqué directement par les créanciers, mais seulement par l'intermédiation de la compagnie elle-même. Quant au caractère démocratique de la EIC, nous sommes arrivés à la conclusion que la compagnie était effectivement une organisation démocratique, mais seulement pendant les 57 premières années de son existence. Après, le droit au vote fut lié au montant de la souscription: la transformation d'une majorité numérique à une majorité de capital avait commencéThe Governor and Company of merchants of London trading into the East Indies, better known as East India Company (BIC), was founded by a charter from Queen Elisabeth l on December 31st 1600. This research, which aims to analyse "the mother of the modern corporation" from a strictly legal historical point of view, focuses on two "historical commonplaces": the one of the supposed limited liability enjoyed by the company's adventurers and the one of the supposed "democratic" character of its organisation. About the first point, our conclusion is that the company provided a very pragmatic answer to the liability question: on the one hand it borrowed money from outside, on the other hand, to pay the company's debts, the adventurers were made liable to pay leviations to the company (but not directly to the company's creditors). About the second point, we arrived at the conclusion that the EIC was a democratic organisation, but only until the middle of the 171h century: the passage from a majority of number to a majority of capital didn't take place slowly, during the 19th century (as a number of scholars have sustained), but suddenly, starting from the year 1657, and it grew stronger during the second half of that same 171h century that saw the foundation of the EIC
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Mitchell, Peter. "The Centre of the Muniment’: the India Office Records and the Historiography of Early Modern Empire, 1875-1891." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2014. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/8767.
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archivists, antiquarians, geographers and civil servants within the India Office reorganised the records of the East India Company, the Board of Control and the India Office itself into what is now the India Office Records. My thesis focuses on the earliest materials of the East India Company - the records of its trading activities in the Indian Ocean from 1600 to 1623 - and how these materials were absorbed into the India Office Records between 1875 and 1891. I study the documents themselves as evidence of a complex early modern documentary culture; then I study the processes by which they were absorbed into the India Office Records, classified, edited, interpreted, and publicized. I argue that the creators of the India Office Records - civil servants, antiquarians and geographers such as George Birdwood, F. C. Danvers, William Foster and Clements R. Markham - organised and interpreted their materials in the service of a teleological historiography of empire. I situate the archive's creation within the contexts of nineteenth-century archival, antiquarian and historiographical practice, the crisis of 'high imperialism' in the late nineteenth century, and the development of the 'exhibitionary complex', and locate it within the scholarly and governmental formations of the time. Ultimately I hope to demonstrate how the archive itself, as an apparently neutral repository of historical information, was in fact instrumental in the production of imperial discourse and ideology
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Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice Claire Dominique. "Decolonisation and state-making on India's north-east frontier, c. 1943-62." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283938.
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Carlyon, Richard Maxwell. "The relationships between the English East India company, its succeeors, and the American diaspora in Asia, 1600-1886." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.529763.
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Veevers, David. "The early Modern colonial state in Asia : private agency and family networks in the English East India Company." Thesis, University of Kent, 2015. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/50701/.
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This thesis studies the formation of the early modern colonial state in Asia. Through an exploration of the English East India Company, it examines the dynamics which shaped political authority, colonial governance and the performance of state power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Specifically, the following research argues that a process of political decentralisation took place within the Company. This was driven by the pursuit of ‘private interests’ on behalf of the Company’s servants in Asia, who, as a result neglected, resisted or subverted the ‘public interests’ of their masters in London. Key to this reconfiguration of power were the family networks established by Company servants between Europe and Asia, and across Asia itself in this period. As constructs of exchange, circulation and movement, family networks allowed Company servants to exercise considerable political agency, distinct from metropolitan authorities. In so doing, they transformed the political landscape around them, laying the foundations of the early modern colonial state through a process of private state formation from the turn of the eighteenth century onwards.
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Pass, Andrea Rose. "British women missionaries in India, c.1917-1950." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4777425f-65ef-4515-8bfe-979bf7400c08.
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Although by 1900, over 60% of the British missionary workforce in South Asia was female, women’s role in mission has often been overlooked. This thesis focuses upon women of the two leading Anglican societies – the high-Church Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the evangelical Church Missionary Society (CMS) – during a particularly underexplored and eventful period in mission history. It uses primary material from the archives of SPG at Rhodes House, Oxford, CMS at the University of Birmingham, St Stephen’s Community, Delhi, and the United Theological College, Bangalore, to extend previous research on the beginnings of women’s service in the late-nineteenth century, exploring the ways in which women missionaries responded to unprecedented upheaval in Britain, India, and the worldwide Anglican Communion in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. In so doing, it contributes to multiple overlapping historiographies: not simply to the history of Church and mission, but also to that of gender, the British Empire, Indian nationalism, and decolonisation. Women missionaries were products of the expansion of female education, professional opportunities, and philanthropic activity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain. Their vocation was tested by living conditions in India, as well as by contradictory calls to marriage, career advancement, familial duties, or the Religious Life. Their educational, medical, and evangelistic work altered considerably between 1917 and 1950 owing to ‘Indianisation’ and ‘Diocesanisation,’ which sought to establish a self-governing ‘native’ Church. Women’s absorption in local affairs meant they were usually uninterested in imperial, nationalist, and Anglican politics, and sometimes became estranged from the home Church. Their service was far more than an attempt to ‘colonise’ Indian hearts and minds and propagate Western ideology. In reality, women missionaries’ engagement with India and Indians had a far more profound impact upon them than upon the Indians they came to serve.
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Johnston, Patricia Raeann. "The church on Armenian Street: Capuchin friars, the British East India Company, and the Second Church of Colonial Madras." Diss., University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1650.
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This dissertation applies ethnographic research to answer a question in the field of religious studies: to what degree does the prevailing world religions paradigm illuminate the interpretation of religious material that cannot easily be fit into a single major religious tradition. Indian Catholicism generally and Tamil Catholicism in particular have been deeply neglected both by scholars of India (who generally assume that Christianity in India is a "foreign" religion more-or-less indistinguishable from the Christianity of European missionaries) and by theologians and historians of Christianity (who often treat non-Western expressions of Christianity as somehow "compromised" by influence from alien religions such as Hinduism). By interrogating the early modern origins of the world religions paradigm and questioning its applicability to the particular case of Tamil Popular Catholicism, I intend to bring about a shift within religious studies and allied theological fields that will allow popular Catholicism to take a more central place within scholarship.
The major issue I pursue in this dissertation is the manner in which European expectations about the nature of Christianity as a world religion impede the understanding of non-conforming expressions of Christianity, such as Tamil Popular Catholicism. My primary research agenda is a matter of ethnographically surveying a representative Tamil Catholic site to determine the characteristics of Tamil Popular Catholicism which most differentiate it from European expectations, and later to integrate these these findings with the theological self-definition of Catholic Christianity. Methodologically, my approach combines ethnography with oral history, aiming at a "thick description" of Tamil Popular Catholicism in its various manifestations which can be later used as a basis for theological reflection. Drawing on extensive field research at the St. Antony Shrine at St. Mary's Co-Cathedral in Chennai, I argue that popular, non-Western expressions of Christianity in Tamil Nadu differ from elite interpretations primarily with respect to the questions of exclusivity, openness to other communities, and the place of "magical" or supernatural healing traditions.
There are concrete social and political consequences to the proliferation of Western religious categories in India, namely, the unraveling of the previously integrated Tamil religious culture into separate "Catholic" and "Hindu" identities and the social and political marginalization of Tamil Catholics. At the St. Antony Shrine, the local expression of Tamil Popular Catholicism defies description in terms of the prevailing world religions paradigm, which differentiates absolutely between "Christianity" and "Hinduism" and posits the existence of two hermetically-sealed religious communities ("Catholic" and "Hindu") where I argue there is but one (the popular religion of the Tamil people, in which "Hindu" and "Catholic" differ primarily by virtue of caste rather than religious classification or practice). The usual strategy within the world religious paradigm for describing non-conforming Catholic sites is to appeal to the concept of "syncretism," which refers to the mixture of two or more of the world religions into an incoherent third. This term carries heavy pejorative overtones and marginalizes religious phenomena so described, redirecting scholarly attention to religious phenomena that can be described using existing categories. By demonstrating how Western religious categories impede the understanding of a typical, non-eccentric Asian site, I show that the prevailing categories used by Western scholars to analyze religions are Orientalist in origin and logic and in need of drastic redefinition, which I provide in my conclusions by taking recourse to a premodern, Augustinian construction of "religion" which rejects the pluralization of "religions" in favor of a singular definition, circumventing the theological charge of "syncretism" and the legitimization of nationalist or communalist factions formed on the basis of pluralized religious identities.
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Brouwer, C. G. "Al-Mukhā : profile of a Yemeni seaport as sketched by servants of the Dutch East India company (VOC), 1614-1640 /." Amsterdam : D'Fluyte Rarob, 1997. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40149680s.
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Jordan, Calvin. "The English East India Company and the British Crown: c. 1795-1803, the first occupation at the Cape of Good Hope." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/63164.
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My thesis aims to investigate the relationship between the English East India Company (EEIC) and the British colonial administration at the Cape of Good Hope during the first British occupation (1795 to 1803). Studies and literature that concern the EEIC have rarely gone beyond the surface, detailing the presence of the EEIC at the Cape, and neglecting the Company’s involvement in the administration thereof. My thesis draws on prior works but attempts to address both temporal and spatial gaps in this literature on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, and the history of the EEIC. This study takes note of the seaborne related activity around the ports, bays and islands at the Cape – including the regulation of these spaces and issues related to securing British trade and colonial possessions more generally. I question the framing of the Cape primarily as a constituent of a national unit by locating the colony within a broader global and maritime context. A key interest is to determine the degree to which the EEIC influenced and participated in the British governance of the Cape, particularly by exploring the maritime dimensions of the relationship between the EEIC and colonial governance during this particular period. This involves understanding the embeddedness of the Cape in British (Crown and Company) networks and the constitution of a ‘British maritime zone’. This study uses archival sources drawn from the British colonial government records, Company records, and the private diaries and letters of Lady Anne Barnard that relate to the Cape. It is shown that a uniquely configured governance convention was constituted to secure the mutual commercial and imperial interests of both Crown and Company. By keeping the Cape secure, the British sought to keep their greater seaborne Empire secure. This study reveals that the EEIC was significantly involved in and influenced the way the British administration governed the Cape.