Chapter 1 - The Provincial World and Global Encounters

Summary

During the long eighteenth century thousands of men and women made their way from the British Isles to the East Indies. Most were appointees and licensees of the East India Company: factors, company and free merchants or military men and their wives and daughters. A few arrived in the East Indies through routes unregulated by the East India Company and established themselves as traders, shopkeepers, soldiers of fortune and providers of services from hairdressing to portraiture to the expatriate communities. It was on the entrepreneurship, experiences and ambitions of these sojourners that British India was to be built. Without them, there would have been no India to substitute for the loss of the American colonies. There would have been no jewel in the British imperial crown.

The provincial origins, motivations and activities of these sojourners have been largely ignored in the history of the empire and emergence of the global world. Our understanding of the global world and imperial expansion has been principally framed by one of three concerns: the evolution and operations of the East India Company; the establishment and dynamics of British rule in India through the development of British official families; and cultural and political impacts of Anglo-Indian families, particularly nabobs. Those narratives situate eighteenth-century sojourners to the East Indies from the British Isles as either part of an emerging company state, servants pursing the interests and logics of a transnational company or part of a national imperial project in which Britain's empirebuilding was inextricably entwined with nation-building. Either way, the experiences, origins and motivations of eighteenth-century sojourners have been considered primarily within the interface between the global and the national.

Similarly, histories of regional and provincial change have given almost no attention to the East Indies. Yet the men and women who ventured to the East Indies came from somewhere, and that somewhere was, for many, the provincial world. Counties beyond London, provincial towns and rural villages made an enormous commitment of human, financial and social capital to ventures in the East Indies. For instance, the British Library India Office Family Search Index identifies close to a hundred men from Yorkshire over the long eighteenth century appointed or licensed by the East India Company. Similar numbers of entries are identified as originating from Devon and Lancashire.