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Alcohol and the Ambivalence of the Early English East India Company-State

Part of: Intoxicants and Early Modern European Globalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2021

Philip J. Stern Open the ORCID record for Philip J. Stern [Opens in a new window]
Philip J. Stern*
Affiliation:
History Department, Duke University, USA
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Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the various roles that alcohol played in defining the governance of East India Company fortifications and settlements in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that, much like elsewhere in Europe, Asia, and the colonial world, alcohol was absolutely crucial to political and social life, as well as a source of great revenue and profit for both the Company and individuals who worked for it. At the same time, it was a cause of immense anxiety and concern for Company government, which understood the use (and overuse) of alcohol as a principal sign of potential disorder and disobedience. Far from a contradiction, this ambivalence towards alcohol formed a foundation for a variety of regulatory instruments, from tavern licences to taxation, that were crucial to the establishment of early Company governance and a prime reflection of the Company's very own ambivalent nature as both merchant and sovereign.

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Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 65 , Special Issue 1: Intoxicants and Early Modern European Globalization , February 2022 , pp. 185 - 201
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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10 An essay on tea, sugar, white bread and butter, country alehouses, st[r]ong beer, and geneva, and other modern luxuries (Salisbury, 1777), pp. 13–14. The literature on this subject is far too extensive to summarize here. For a start, see selected essays in Philip Lawson, A taste for empire and glory: studies in British overseas expansion, 1660–1800 (Brookfield, VT, 1997); James Walvin, Fruits of empire: exotic produce and British taste, 1660–1800 (Washington Square, NY, 1997). For a recent appraisal of these concerns in the early modern Netherlands, see Wouter Ryckbosch, ‘From spice to tea: on consumer choice and the justification of value in the early modern Low Countries’, Past & Present, 242 (2019), pp. 37–78.

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17 Or, at least, this is what I have argued: see, among other things, Philip J. Stern, The company-state: corporate sovereignty and the early modern foundations of the British empire in India (New York, NY, 2011).

18 See, e.g., Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, ed., A calendar of the court minutes etc., of the East India Company, 1635–1639 (Oxford, 1907), pp. 22, 28, 30, 108, 148, 151, 195, 255, 286.

19 Roger Braddyll to Thomas Woolley, 9 Dec. 1709, BL, IOR, E/1/1, pt 4, fo. 423.

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49 Stern, Company-state, p. 108; Gillian T. Cell, English enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660 (Toronto, 1969), p. 112; Resolution of the Tangier commissioners, 30 June 1669, TNA, Colonial Office records (CO) 279/12, fo. 163v; Roney, Jessica Choppin, Governed by a spirit of opposition: the origins of American political practice in colonial Philadelphia (Baltimore, MD, 2014), p. 54Google Scholar.

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51 Chatterjee, ‘Lives of alcohol’, p. 189; James McHugh, ‘Alcohol in pre-modern South Asia’, in Fischer-Tiné and Tschurenev, eds., History of alcohol and drugs, pp. 29–44, at p. 40.

52 London to Madras, 30 Sept. 1684, BL, IOR, E/3/90, fo. 227; Winterbottom, Hybrid knowledge, p. 79.

53 Chatterjee, ‘Lives of alcohol’, p. 193.

54 Materials towards a statistical account, pp. 308, 336–7, 345–6.

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