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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2024
Abstract
This chapter explores how East India Company masters strove to manage the unavoidable emotional and sexual desires of its servants abroad, and how their servants ignored and evaded these efforts. It examines the debate over Captain Keeling's 1614 request to bring his wife on his voyage to the Indies and surveys the actions taken by other Company servants regarding wives and lovers. Denied the ability to bring their families with them, many engaged in romantic and sexual liaisons abroad, using Company resources and making marital alliances with local trading families to further their own private trading interests. These actions show the Company's failure to maintain monopoly control over the lives of its servants as well as its trade.
Keywords: East India Company, history of mixed marriage, women on ships, British Empire and women, gender and empire
“There are very few … who are able (not withstanding their best endeavors) to live without the company of women.”
How distinct are business and pleasure? The East India Company masters in London were certain that, in the case of their servants and the work they did for the Company abroad, these two things were quite separate and should remain so. Those servants, whose bodies were exposed to the risks and hardships journeying to the Indies for a minimum of three years at a stretch and often many more, felt differently. This chapter examines a second area of conflict between the will of the East India Company masters and their servants: the regulation of servants’ romantic and sexual relations while abroad. As the servants insisted and the Company's records bear out, this area of concern was closely tied to the private trading discussed in the prior chapter. As with the case of private trading, the East India Company's servants were able to use distance to attain some of their desires while pursuing the masters’ business, sometimes in direct contravention of the masters’ will. This chapter ultimately addresses the embodied nature of the trade and the inability to separate the generation of wealth from the desires of the men whose bodies labored to accumulate profit for their masters.
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