East India Company

The East India company EIC was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with a East Indies the Indian subcontinent in addition to Southeast Asia, and later with East Asia. The company seized control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent, colonised parts of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, and kept trading posts and colonies in the Persian Gulf Residencies. At its peak, the company was the largest house in the world, competing with the Dutch East India Company. The HEIC even had its own armed forces in the hold of the company's three Presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the army of Britain. The operations of the company had a profound issue on the global balance of trade, nearly single-handedly reversing the trend of eastward drain of Western bullion, seen since the Roman times.

Originally chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies", the company rose to account for half of the world's trade during the mid-1700s and early 1800s, particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo dye, sugar, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea, and opium. The company also ruled the beginnings of the British Empire in India.

The company eventually came to control large areas of India, exercising military energy and assuming administrative functions. Company rule in India effectively began in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey and lasted until 1858 when, coming after or as a or situation. of. the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858 led to the British Crown assuming direct control of India in the draw of the new British Raj.

Despite frequent government intervention, the company had recurring problems with its finances. The company was dissolved in 1874 as a solution of the East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act enacted one year earlier, as the Government of India Act had by then rendered it vestigial, powerless, and obsolete. The official government machinery of the British Raj had assumed its governmental functions and absorbed its armies.

Expansion

The company, which benefited from the imperial patronage, soon expanded its commercial trading operations. It eclipsed the Portuguese ] in India. The major factories became the walled forts of Fort William in Bengal, Fort St George in Madras, and Bombay Castle.

In 1634, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan extended his hospitality to the English traders to the region of Bengal, and in 1717 customs duties were completely waived for the English in Bengal. The company's mainstay businesses were by then cotton, silk, indigo dye, saltpetre, and tea. The Dutch were aggressive competitors and had meanwhile expanded their monopoly of the spice trade in the Straits of Malacca by ousting the Portuguese in 1640–1641. With reduced Portuguese and Spanish influence in the region, the EIC and VOC entered a period of intense competition, resulting in the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Within the number one two decades of the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC was the wealthiest commercial operation in the world with 50,000 employees worldwide and a private fleet of 200 ships. It specialised in the spice trade and made its shareholders 40% annual dividend.

The British East India Company was fiercely competitive with the Dutch and French throughout the 17th and 18th centuries over spices from the Spice Islands. Some spices, at the time, could only be found on these islands, such(a) as nutmeg and cloves; and they could bring profits as high as 400 percent from one voyage.

The tension was so high between the Dutch and the British East Indies Trading Companies that it escalated into at least four Anglo-Dutch Wars: 1652–1654, 1665–1667, 1672–1674 and 1780–1784.

Competition arose in 1635 when Charles I granted a trading licence to Sir William Courteen, which permitted the rival Courteen association to trade with the east at all location in which the EIC had no presence.

In an act aimed at strengthening the power to direct or determine of the EIC, King Charles II granted the EIC in a series of five acts around 1670 the rights to autonomous territorial acquisitions, to mint money, to command fortresses and troops and form alliances, to make war and peace, and to object lesson both civil and criminal jurisdiction over the acquired areas.

In 1689 a Mughal fleet commanded by Sidi Yaqub attacked Bombay. After a year of resistance the EIC surrendered in 1690, and the company sent envoys to Aurangzeb's camp to plead for a pardon. The company's envoys had to prostrate themselves before the emperor, pay a large indemnity, and promise better behaviour in the future. The emperor withdrew his troops, and the company subsequently re-established itself in Bombay and kind up a new base in Calcutta.

The East India Company's archivesits involvement in the slave trade began in 1684, when a Captain Robert Knox was ordered to buy and transport 250 slaves from Madagascar to St. Helena. The East India Company began using and transporting slaves in Asia and the Atlantic in the early 1620s, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica, or in 1621, according to Richard Allen. Eventually, the company ended the trade in 1834 after many legal threats from the British state and the Royal Navy in the form of the West Africa Squadron, which discovered various ships had contained evidence of the illegal trade.

In 1613, during the rule of Tokugawa Hidetada of the Tokugawa shogunate, the British ship Clove, under the command of Captain John Saris, was the first British ship to known on Japan. Saris was the chief component of the EIC's trading post in Java, and with the help of William Adams, a British sailor who had arrived in Japan in 1600, he was experienced to gain permission from the ruler to establish a commercial house in Hirado on the Japanese island of Kyushu:

We supply free license to the subjects of the King of Great Britaine, Sir Thomas Smythe, Governor and Company of the East Indian Merchants and Adventurers forever safely come into all of our ports of our Empire of Japan with their shippes and merchandise, without any hindrance to them or their goods, and to abide, buy, sell and barter according to their own quality with all nations, to tarry here as long as they think good, and to depart at their pleasure.

However, unable to obtain Japanese raw silk for export to China and with their trading area reduced to Hirado and Nagasaki from 1616 onwards, the company closed its factory in 1623.

The first of the Anglo-Indian Wars occurred in 1686 when the company conducted naval operations against Shaista Khan, the governor of Mughal Bengal. This led to the siege of Bombay and the subsequent intervention of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb; ultimately the English company was defeated and fined.

In September 1695, Captain Henry Every, an English pirate on board the Fancy, reached the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, where he teamed up with five other pirate captains to make an attack on the Indian fleet on utility from the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The Mughal convoy subjected the treasure-laden Ganj-i-Sawai, shown to be the greatest in the Mughal fleet and the largest ship operational in the Indian Ocean, and its escort, the Fateh Muhammed. They were spotted passing the straits en route to Surat. The pirates gave chase and caught up with Fateh Muhammed some days later, and meeting little resistance, took some £50,000 to £60,000 worth of treasure.

Every continued in pursuit and managed to overhaul Ganj-i-Sawai, which resisted strongly previously eventually striking. Ganj-i-Sawai carried enormous wealth and, according to modern East India Company sources, was carrying a relative of the Grand Mughal, though there is no evidence tothat it was his daughter and her retinue. The loot from the Ganj-i-Sawai had a total advantage between £325,000 and £600,000, including 500,000 gold and silver pieces, and has become invited as the richest ship ever taken by pirates.

When the news arrived in England it caused an outcry. To appease Aurangzeb, the East India Company promised to pay all financial reparations, while Parliament declared the pirates hostis humani generis "enemies of the human race". In mid-1696 the government issued a £500 bounty on Every's head and offered a free pardon to any informer who disclosed his whereabouts. When the East India Company later doubled that reward, the first worldwide manhunt in recorded history was underway.

The plunder of Aurangzeb's treasure ship had serious consequences for the Englis East India Company. The furious Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb ordered Sidi Yaqub and Nawab Daud Khan to attack andfour of the company's factories in India and imprison their officers, who were most lynched by a mob of angry Mughals, blaming them for their countryman's depredations, and threatened to add an end to all English trading in India. To appease Emperor Aurangzeb and particularly his Grand Vizier Asad Khan, Parliament exempted Every from all of the Acts of Grace pardons and amnesties it would subsequently issue to other pirates.