3 - ‘Not as Absolute Lords and Kings of the Place’

Summary

Following its incorporation as a permanent joint-stock in 1657, and the institutional and financial stability this brought to the Company, this chapter explores the corporate leadership’s attempts to re-centralise power in the Company and regain control over its servants and settlements in Asia. As the court of committees restructured the Company’s organisation, and sought to erect new regulatory frameworks in Asia that would more effectively realise metropolitan interests by dismissing refractory servants, disrupting transcultural networks and squeezing out private interests, the powerful confederacy of Anglo-Indian elites that controlled Madras violently rebelled against these centralising impulses and seized the city. Although the Company sent a powerful force to recapture Madras, nonetheless the coup de force exposed the reconstituted dynamic of the Company, in which the success of Madras was largely due to the integration of Company servants with surrounding economic and political constituents. The subsequent legalisation of private trade and the restoration of the rebels to their positions of power demonstrated the Company’s future willingness to accommodate the expansive transcultural networks of its servants and their Asian allies. The rebellion of Madras represented the complete decentralisation of the Company by the later seventeenth century, and the critical role played by Indian elites in driving the expansion of the Company.