Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T14:15:10.418Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Inhabitants of the universe’: global families, kinship networks, and the formation of the early modern colonial state in Asia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

David Veevers
David Veevers*
Affiliation:
School of History, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NX, UK E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

New research on the early modern colonial state in Asia has emphasized the agency of actors and their networks in a process of state formation, while the rise of global history has similarly highlighted the importance of global connections in forming sites of empire. This article seeks to contribute to this growing literature. It does so by revealing that the families of English East India Company servants, following their counterparts in other European East India companies in Asia, underwent a global transition in which they established Asian-wide networks of kinship, transcending the local and regional spaces in which they had previously operated. Through their increasing ability to operate across the social, cultural, economic, and political borders of Asia, Company kinship networks facilitated the formation of a politically amorphous colonial state. Furthermore, while previous scholarship has confined colonial state formation to the later eighteenth century, this article challenges the historiography by relocating this process to the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Keywords

agencyEast India Companyfamilynetworksstate formation
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 99 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Pratik Chakrabarti and Will Pettigrew for their support, encouragement, and guidance. I also thank the editors for their invaluable comments and utmost professionalism, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for the expert and generous feedback they provided on the draft of this article. Finally, I would like to thank seminar audiences at the Colonial/Postcolonial New Researchers’ Workshop at the Institute of Historical Research and in the School of History at the University of Kent, all of whom provided insightful comments during the preparation of the article.

References

1 Stern, Philip J., The company-state: corporate sovereignty and the early modern foundations of the British empire in India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 3.

2 Wilson, Kathleen, ‘Rethinking the colonial state: family, gender, and governmentality in eighteenth-century British frontiers’, American Historical Review, 116, 5, 2011, pp. 1295–1299CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For the state as a monopoly over the means of violence, see Weber, Max, ‘Politics as a vocation’, reprinted in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: essays in sociology, Chippenham, Wiltshire: Routledge, 2009, pp. 77–128Google Scholar.

4 Braddick, Michael J., State formation in early modern England c.1550–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Goldie, Mark, ‘The unacknowledged republic: officeholding in early modern England’, in Tim Harris, ed., The politics of the excluded, c.1500–1850, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001Google Scholar, p. 154.

6 Ibid.

7 Withington, Phil, ‘Public discourse, corporate citizenship, and state formation in early modern England’, American Historical Review, 112, 4, 2007, p. 1036CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Joyce, Patrick, ‘What is the social in social history?’, Past & Present, 206, 1, 2010, p. 238CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Benton, Lauren, A search for sovereignty: law and geography in European empires, 1400–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010Google Scholar, p. 292.

10 For the importance of networks in studying empire, see Glaisyer, Natasha, ‘Networking: trade and exchange in the eighteenth-century British empire’, Historical Journal, 47, 2, 2004, pp. 451–476CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Armitage, David and Braddick, Michael, eds., The British Atlantic world, 1500–1800, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 5.

12 Games, Alison, The web of empire: English cosmopolitans in an age of expansion, 1560–1660, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Mukherjee, Rila, ed., Networks in the first global age, 1400–1800, New Delhi: Primus Books, 2011Google Scholar, p. 6.

14 Parker, Charles H., Global interactions in the early modern age, 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 78–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Ibid., p. 78. For social capital and trust in global mercantile kinship networks, see Aslanian, Sebouh David, ‘Social capital, “trust” and the role of networks in Julfan trade: informal and semi-formal institutions at work’, Journal of Global History, 1, 3, 2006, pp. 383–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Burke, Edmund, ed., The works of the right honourable Edmund Burke, London: Ballantyne, Hanson & Co., 1887Google Scholar, vol. 1, p. 534.

17 Stern, Company-state, p. 9.

18 Rothschild, Emma, The inner life of empires: an eighteenth-century history, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 121.

19 Ibid., pp. 132, 269.

20 Finn, Margot, ‘Anglo-Indian lives in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33, 1, 2010, pp. 49–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Ibid., p. 54.

22 Ghosh, Durba, Sex and the family in colonial India: the making of empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 249.

23 Adams, Julia, The familial state: ruling families and merchant capitalism in early modern Europe, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005Google Scholar, p. 29.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., p. 34.

26 Ibid., p. 35.

27 Stern, Philip J., ‘British Asia and British Atlantic: comparisons and connections’, in ‘Forum: beyond the Atlantic’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 63, 4, 2006, p. 694Google Scholar.

28 Horn, James, ‘British diaspora: emigration from Britain, 1680–1815’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford history of the British empire: the eighteenth century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001Google Scholar, p. 29.

29 Furber, Holden, Rival empires of trade in the Orient, 1600–1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976Google Scholar, p. 302. For the Levant Company, see Mather, James, Pashas: traders and travellers in the Islamic world, London: Yale University Press, 2009Google Scholar, p. 59, pp. 80–5.

30 Philopatris [Sir Josiah Child], A treatise wherein is demonstrated, I. that the East-India trade is the most national of all foreign trades, London, 1681, p. 23.

31 Finn, ‘Anglo-Indian lives’, p. 56Google Scholar; Rothschild, , Inner life, p. 27Google Scholar.

32 Marshall, P. J., East India fortunes: the British in Bengal in the eighteenth century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976Google Scholar, p. 11.

33 British Library, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (henceforth BL, APAC), India Office Records (henceforth IOR), E/3/92, court of directors to Madras, London, 16 April 1697.

34 Games, , Web of empire, p. 9Google Scholar; Rothschild, , Inner life, p. 27Google Scholar.

35 Hejeebu, Santhi, ‘Contract enforcement in the English East India Company’, Journal of Economic History, 65, 2, 2005, p. 502CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D546/1, Joseph Walsh to John Walsh, Fort Marlborough, 21 June 1718.

37 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/2, Thomas Dixon to John Scattergood, Bengal, 1 January 1718.

38 For the persistence of family ties in global merchant families, see Grassby, Richard, Kinship and capitalism: marriage, family, and business in the English-speaking world, 1580–1740, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001Google Scholar, p. 190.

39 Finn, , ‘Anglo-Indian lives’, pp. 54–55Google Scholar; Rothschild, , Inner life, p. 15–33Google Scholar.

40 Dodwell, H. H., The private letter books of Joseph Collet, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1933Google Scholar, pp. 11–15.

41 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/1, Joseph Collet to John Bedwell, Cape of Good Hope, 12 February 1712.

42 For this dynamic in the Johnstone family, see Rothschild, Inner life, p. 51.

43 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/3, Joseph Collet to Mary Collet, Fort Marlborough 8 September 1716; BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/2, Joseph Collet to Mary Collet, Fort Marlborough, 10 October 1715.

44 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/1, Joseph Collet to Edward Harrison, York Fort, 15 June 1714; BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/3, Joseph Collet to Ann Bedwell, Fort St George, 13 July 1717.

45 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/2, Joseph Collet to Edward Harrison, York Fort, 2 June 1714.

46 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/2, Joseph Collet to Lady Wills, Fort Marlborough, 1 April 1715.

47 Grassby, Kinship. For the number of dissenting merchants, see table 6.5, p. 258; for the number of merchants born outside Britain, see table 7.1, p. 272.

48 For the Powney and Barnaval families, see Love, Henry Davison, Vestiges of old Madras, 1640–1800, traced from the East India Company's records preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office, and from other sources, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1996Google Scholar, vol. 2, pp. 314–18.

49 Parker, , Global interactions, pp. 78–79Google Scholar.

50 McGilvray, Dennis B., ‘Dutch burghers and Portuguese mechanics: Eurasian ethnicity in Sri Lanka’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24, 2, 1982, p. 237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Taylor, Jean Gelman, The social world of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in colonial Indonesia, 2nd edn, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009Google Scholar, p. 19.

52 Ibid., p. 15.

53 Ghosh, Durba, Sex and the family, p. 46Google Scholar.

54 For example, see Andaya, Barbara Watson and Andaya, Leonard Y., ‘Interracial marriages and the overseas family: the case of the Topas of Timor’, in Geoff Wade and Li Tana, eds., Anthony Reid and the study of the Southeast Asian past, Singapore: ISEAS, 2012, pp. 221–240Google Scholar. For a later period, see also Kratz, E. Ulrich, ‘Like a fish grasping for water: the letters of a temporary spouse from Bengkulu’, Indonesia and the Malay World, 34, 100, 2006, pp. 247–280Google Scholar.

55 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/2, Joseph Collet to Elizabeth Collet, York Fort, 5 May 1714.

56 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/2, Joseph Collet to Henry White, York Fort, 13 March 1714.

57 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/2, Joseph Collet to Samuel Collet, York Fort, 23 August 1714.

58 C. R. Boxer, Race relations in the Portuguese colonial empire, 1415–1825, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963, pp. 57–85.

59 Andaya, Barbara Watson, To live as brothers: southeast Sumatra in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i, 1993Google Scholar, p. 50; Bethencourt, Francisco, ‘Political configurations and local powers’, in Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto, eds., Portuguese oceanic expansion, 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007Google Scholar, p. 214.

60 Andaya, Leonard Y., ‘The “informal Portuguese empire” and the Topasses in the Solor archipelago and Timor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 141, 3, 2010, pp. 391–420Google Scholar.

61 Drayton, Richard, ‘Maritime networks and the making of knowledge’, in David Cannadine, ed., Empire, the sea and global history: Britain's maritime world, c.1763–c.1840, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007Google Scholar, p. 73.

62 Marshall, P. J., The making and unmaking of empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 229.

63 The classic account of the ‘Indian Ocean World’ is, of course, Chaudhuri, K. N., Trade and civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an economic history from the rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the developments in this historiography, see Bhattacharya, Bhaswati, Dharampal-Frick, Gita, and Jos Gommans, ‘Spatial and temporal continuities of merchant networks in South Asia and the Indian Ocean (1500–2000)’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 50, 2/3, 2007, pp. 91–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Pearson, Michael, The Indian Ocean, London: Routledge, 2007, p. 51Google Scholar. See also Seland, Eivind Heldaas, ‘Networks and social cohesion in ancient Indian Ocean trade: geography, ethnicity, religion’, Journal of Global History, 8, 3, 2013, pp. 373–390CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Hall, Kenneth R., ‘Ports-of-trade, maritime diasporas, and networks of trade and cultural integration in the Bay of Bengal region of the Indian Ocean: c. 1300–1500’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 53, 1/2, 2010, pp. 109–145Google Scholar.

66 Roy, Tirthankar, Company of kinsmen: enterprise and community in South Asian history, 1700–1900, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 89.

67 For example, see Ratanapruck, Prista, ‘Kinship and religious practices as institutionalization of trade networks: Manangi trade communities in South and Southeast Asia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 50, 2/3, 2007, pp. 325–346CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Nadri, Ghulam A., ‘The maritime merchants of Surat: a long-term perspective’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 50, 2/3, 2007, pp. 235–258CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raman, Bhavani, ‘The familial world of the Company's kacceri in early colonial Madras’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 9, 2, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Crosbie, Barry, Irish imperial networks: migration, social communication and exchange in nineteenth-century India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 37.

70 Ibid., p. 10.

71 Ward, Kerry, Networks of empire: forced migration in the Dutch East India Company, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 9.

72 Ibid.

73 Aslanian, Sebouh David, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: the global trade networks of Armenian merchants from New Julfa, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011Google Scholar, p. 211.

74 Records of Fort St George, Diary and consultation books 1672–1756, Madras: Madras Records Office, 1910–43 (henceforth RFSG Consultations), vol. 8, p. 48, 28 July 1679.

75 RFSG Consultations, 31 May 1698, vol. 27, p. 61.

76 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/1, Elihu Trenchfield to John Scattergood, Calcutta, 13 December 1715,

77 Ibid.

78 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/1, Alexander Forbes to Francis Forbes, London, 11 March 1703. For this dynamic in the Johnstone kinship network, see Rothschild, Inner life, p. 55.

79 See Morse, Hosea Ballou, ‘The supercargo in the China trade about the year 1700’, English Historical Review, 36, 142, 1921, pp. 199–209Google Scholar.

80 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/1, John Scattergood to Bernard Wyche, Madras, June 1714.

81 Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005Google Scholar; Drayton, , ‘Maritime networks’, p. 79Google Scholar.

82 For the many conflicts and difficulties within kinship networks, see Hancock, David, ‘The trouble with networks: managing the Scots’ early-modern Madeira trade’, Business History Review, 79, 3, 2005, pp. 467–491CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/1, John Scattergood to Elihu Trenchfield, Madras, 13 November 1713.

84 For the importance of gift-giving among kin in Asia, see Finn, Margot, ‘Colonial gifts: family politics and the exchange of goods in British India, c.1780–1820’, Modern Asian Studies, 40, 1, 2006, pp. 203–231Google Scholar.

85 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/2, Edward Fenwick to John Scattergood, Fort St George, 10 October 1716.

86 Ibid.

87 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/2, Jack Trenchfield to John Scattergood, Tellicherry, 5 December 1717.

88 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/2, Elizabeth Fenwick to John Scattergood, London, 10 January 1719.

89 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/2, John Scattergood to Elizabeth Fenwick, Canton, November 1719; Elizabeth Fenwick to John Scattergood, London, 16 December 1719; John Scattergood to George Lewis, Fort St George, 25 May 1719.

90 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/2, ‘Shareholders in ship Amity, 1714’; see also Mentz, Soren, The English gentleman merchant at work: Madras and the City of London 1660–1740, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005Google Scholar, table 5.10, p. 206.

91 For information on each family, see Sir Richard Carnac Temple, ed., The Scattergoods and the East India Company: being a selection from the private letters and business correspondence of John Scattergood, East India merchant, 1681–1723, Bombay: British India Press, 1935, p. 33.

92 See ibid.

93 BL, APAC, MSS Eur C387/2, Jack Trenchfield to John Scattergood, Tellicherry, 5 December 1717.

94 Aslanian, , From the Indian Ocean, p. 213Google Scholar.

95 Yogev, Gedalia, Diamonds and coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and eighteenth-century trade, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978Google Scholar, p. 103.

96 Trivellato, Francesca, The familiarity of strangers: the Sephardic diaspora, Livorno, and cross-cultural trade in the early modern period, London: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 232–243Google Scholar.

97 For the dominance of English Company merchants in Indian diamonds, see Mentz, English gentleman merchant, pp. 110–25.

98 Prakash, Om, ‘The Indian maritime merchant, 1500–1800’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 47, 3, 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 449.

99 The decline of Masulipatnam corresponds roughly to the rise of Company kinship networks at Madras in the later seventeenth century. See Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘A note on Narsapur Peta: a “syncretic” shipbuilding centre in south India, 1570–1700’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 31, 3, 1988, p. 308Google Scholar.

100 For example, see BL, APAC, MSS Eur D546/1, Joseph Walsh to John Walsh, Fort Marlborough, 16 December 1717.

101 This was also the case in the western Indian Ocean in this period. See Prakash, Om, ‘English private trade in the western Indian ocean, 1720–1740’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 50, 2/3, 2007, p. 227CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 Bose, Sugata, A hundred horizons: the Indian Ocean in the age of global empires, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 14.

103 Hancock, David, Citizens of the world: London merchants and the integration of the British Atlantic community, 1735–1785, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995Google Scholar.

104 Games, , Web of empire, p. 198Google Scholar. For an English diaspora in Asia, see Mentz, English gentleman merchant, esp. pp. 41–8 and 215–59.

105 Lester, Alan, ‘Imperial circuits and networks: geographies of the British empire’, History Compass, 4, 1, 2006, p. 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 Stern, Company-state; Wilson, ‘Rethinking’.

107 For example, see Benton, , Search for sovereignty, pp. 40–103Google Scholar.

108 Braddick, , State formation, p. 14Google Scholar.

109 Ward, , Networks of empire, p. 55Google Scholar.

110 Ibid., p. 57.

111 See Veevers, David, ‘“The company as their lords and the deputy as a great rajah”: imperial expansion and the English East India Company on the west coast of Sumatra, 1685–1730’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41, 5, 2013, pp. 687–709CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 BL, APAC, IOR/E/3/89, court of committees to Hugli, London, 5 January 1681.

113 Ibid.

114 Ibid.

115 BL, APAC, IOR/E/3/89, court of committees to Madras, London, 15 March 1681.

116 BL, APAC, IOR/E/3/90, court of committees to Madras, London, 20 September 1682.

117 The literature on European private trade in Asia is extensive. For the classic account, see Furber, Holden, John company at work: a study of European expansion in India in the late eighteenth century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951Google Scholar. For Bengal, see Marshall, East India fortunes; for Madras, see Mentz, English gentleman merchant; for Bombay, see Nightingale, Pamela, Trade and empire in western India, 1784–1806, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969Google Scholar.

118 For the pursuit of ‘private interest’ in India, see Watson, Ian Bruce, Foundation for empire: English private trade in India, 1659–1760, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1980Google Scholar.

119 Originally cited in Chaudhuri, K. N., The trading world of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 77. See also Adams, Julia, ‘Principals and agents, colonialists and company men: the decay of colonial control in the Dutch East Indies’, American Sociological Review, 61, 1, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 20.

120 For the importance of officeholders in displacing central sources of authority, see Lee, Daniel, ‘“Office is a thing borrowed”: Jean Bodin on offices and seigneurial government’, Political Theory, 41, 3, 2013, pp. 409–440CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121 Withington, Phil, The politics of commonwealth: citizens and freemen in early modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

122 BL, APAC, IOR/A/1/2, ‘Charter granted by Queen Elizabeth, to the governor and company of merchants of London, trading into the East-Indies’, 31 December 1600.

123 See Stern, Company-state, especially pp. 19–99.

124 Cited in ibid., p. 83.

125 Cited in Keay, John, The honourable company: a history of the English East India Company, London: HarperCollins, 1993Google Scholar, p. 177.

126 Wilson, C. R., The early annals of the English in Bengal, being the Bengal public consultations for the first half of the eighteenth century, London: Thacker & Co., 1895, vol. 1, p. 80Google Scholar. For Sumatra, see Veevers, ‘The company’, pp. 687–709.

127 William Hedges, The diary of William Hedges during his agency in Bengal, ed. Henry Yule, London, 1887–89 (henceforth WH, Diary), vol. 2, p. 64, Job Charnock to Sir Josiah Child, Little Tanna, 10 February 1687.

128 BL, APAC, IOR/A/1/40, ‘His present majestyes charter’, 12 April 1686.

129 Ghosh, Sex and the family, pp. 246–7. For the principle members of this network in the early eighteenth century, see the will of Jonathan White in 1704, in Wilson, Early annals, vol. 1, pp. 350–2.

130 For an account of the careers of members of the Charnock network, see Wilson, Early annals, vol. 1, pp. 307–86.

131 For these demands, see Records of Fort St George, Letters to Fort St. George, 1681–1765, Madras: Madras Government, 1916–46 (henceforth LTFSG), vol. 8, pp. 35–6, Hugli to Madras, Hugli, 15 December 1684. For the pressure applied to marginal groups, see Prakash, Om, ‘Trade and politics in eighteenth-century Bengal’, in Seema Alavi, ed., The eighteenth century in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 140–141Google Scholar.

132 LTFSG, vol. 9, p. 39, Hugli to Madras, Hugli, 5 January 1685; WH, Diary, vol. 1, p. 52, Casimbazar, 30 November 1682.

133 BL, APAC, IOR/E/3/90, court of directors to Hugli, London, 12 August 1685.

134 BL, APAC, IOR/E/3/91, court of directors to Bengal, London, 12 December 1687.

135 BL, APAC, IOR/E/3/91, court of directors to Bengal, London, 27 August 1688.

136 Keay, , Honourable company, pp. 166–167Google Scholar.

137 Wilson, , Early annals, vol. 1, p. 117Google Scholar.

138 Cited in WH, Diary, vol. 2, p. 107.

139 Travers, Robert, ‘Death and the nabob: imperialism and commemoration in eighteenth-century India’, Past & Present, 196, 1, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 90.

140 Ibid.

141 Bruce, John, Annals of the honorable East-India company, from their establishment by the charter of Queen Elizabeth, 1600, to the union of the London and English East-India companies, 1707–8, London: Black, Parry and Kingsbury, 1810Google Scholar, vol. 3, p. 144; Wilson, C. R., Old Fort William in Bengal: a selection of official documents dealing with its history, London: John Murray, 1906Google Scholar (henceforth Wilson, OFW), vol. 1, p. 14, Bengal to court of directors, Calcutta, 14 December 1694.

142 BL, APAC, IOR/E/3/92, court of directors to Bengal, London, 6 March 1695.

143 Wilson, Early annals, vol. 1, p. 37, Calcutta, 14 April 1698.

144 Wilson, OFW, vol. 1, p. 8, Madras to court of directors, Fort St George, 25 May 1691.

145 BL, APAC, IOR/E/3/93, court of directors to Bengal, London, 20 December 1699.

146 Wilson, OFW, vol. 1, p. 49, Bengal to court of directors, Calcutta, 8 January 1702.

147 Stern, , Company-state, pp. 45–46Google Scholar, 65–6, 144–5.

148 See Horwitz, Henry, ‘The East India trade, the politicians, and the constitution: 1689–1702’, Journal of British Studies, 17, 2, 1978, pp. 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

149 WH, Diary, vol. 1, p. 30, William Hedges to Balasore, Balasore road, 18 July 1682.

150 BL, APAC, IOR/E/3/89, court of committees to Madras, London, 27 October 1682.

151 Ibid.

152 Ibid.

153 Ibid.

154 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 31, Balasore road, 19 July 1682.

155 See ibid., vol. 3, p. 163.

156 See Dalton, C. N., The life of Thomas Pitt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915, pp. 21–22Google Scholar.

157 Cited in ibid., pp. 27–8.

158 Cited in ibid., p. 30.

159 Cited in ibid., p. 29.

160 Cited in ibid., p. 35.

161 Cited in ibid., p. 36.

162 Ibid., pp. 37–8.

163 WH, Diary, vol. 1, p. 172, Hugli, 23 December 1684.

164 Dalton, , Thomas Pitt, p. 46Google Scholar.

165 WH, Diary, vol. 1, pp. 176–7, Balasore, 10 January 1685.

166 BL, APAC, IOR/E/3/90, court of committees to Madras, London, 21 December 1683.

167 Burke, Works, vol. 3, p. 240. See also Murray, Julie, ‘Company rules: Burke, Hastings, and the specter of the modern liberal state’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41, 1, 2007, p. 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

168 Lee, , ‘Office’, p. 410Google Scholar.

169 Philopatris, , Treatise, p. 26Google Scholar.