Biography and business history of wealthy British merchant in India reveals much about the nineteenth-century Empire.

A volume in the Worlds of the East India Company series, edited by Huw Bowen The events of 1857-58 in India are seen here through a series of untold stories which show that they were much more complex than hitherto thought. Drawing on sources in Britain and India, including contemporary East India Company records, together with oral memories from India illustrated with a number of nineteenth century photographs, the author tells of the murder of the British Resident in the princely state of Kotah; of Indians who opposed the Mutiny, and suffered at the hands of the -mutineers-; of a small, but...

Structured around the lives and careers of two Scottish scholar-administrator brothers, Sir William and Dr John Muir, who served in the East India Company and the Raj in North-West India from 1827-1876, this book examines cultural, especially religious and educational attitudes and interactions during the period. The core of the study centres on a detailed examination of the brothers' seminal works on Vedic and Islamic history and society which, researched from Sanskrit and Arabic sources, became standard reference works on India's religions during the Raj. The publication of these works...

Awarded the prestigious Anderson Medal by the Society for Nautical Research for the best volume published on an aspect of maritime history for 2010. This book covers every aspect of the East India Company's trade during the final century of its commercial life as the focus moves steadily eastwards, driven by Britain's unquenchable thirst for China tea. The whole spectrum of the trade, physically and temporally, unfolds through the careers of three generations of an important East India shipping family. Starting as second mate in Salisbury in 1746, William Larkins gained a command, then...

The East India Company, which was by 1800 a commercial organisation of unrivalled size and complexity managing a vast empire in Asia, also played a crucial role in the British economy, particularly in London, where the Company was the largest employer of civilian labour in the early nineteenth century, with thousands of workmen in its metropolitan warehouses. This book provides a detailed examination of the management strategies used by the Company to control its London warehouse labourers and to maintain acceptable levels of commercial and corporate efficiency. It shows how benevolence...

When war broke out with France in 1793, there immediately arose the threat of a renewed French challenge to British supremacy in India. This security problem was compounded in 1795 when the French overran the Netherlands and the extremely valuable Dutch trade routes and Dutch colonies, including the Cape of Good Hope and what is now Indonesia, fell under French control. The task of securing British interests in the East was a formidable one: the distances were huge, communication with London could take years, there were problems marshalling resources, and fine diplomatic skills were needed to...

Most books on the colonisation of India view the subject in Eurocentric imperial terms, focusing on the ways in which European powers competed with each other on land and at sea and defeated Indian states on land, and viewing Indian states as having little interest in naval matters. This book, in contrast, reveals that there was substantial naval activity on the part of some Indian states and that this activity represented a serious threat to Britain's naval power. Considering the subject from an Indian point of view, the book discusses the naval activities of the Mahratta Confederacy and...

Following Napoleon's defeat of Prussia in 1806 and his treaties with Russia and Persia in 1807, the French threat to Britain's position in India seemed real and strengthening. At the same time, Napoleon's economic warfare with Britain and the success of French privateers in disrupting British trade in the Indian Ocean were having a severe impact. This book, based on extensive original research, relates in detail how Lord Minto, a Cabinet-level politician who was appointed Governor-General of Bengal in 1807, steadily and successfully worked to counter the French threat. It examines how he...

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Shows how it was not just the London elite and City merchants who had connections to British India.