How the East Was Won

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
British Raj ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
India And China

How did upstart outsiders forge vast new empires in early modern Asia, laying the foundations for today's modern mega-states of India and China? In How the East Was Won, Andrew Phillips reveals the crucial parallels uniting the Mughal Empire, the Qing Dynasty and the British Raj. Vastly outnumbered and stigmatised as parvenus, the Mughals and Manchus pioneered similar strategies of cultural statecraft, first to build the multicultural coalitions necessary for conquest, and then to bind the indigenous collaborators needed to subsequently uphold imperial rule. The English East India Company later adapted the same 'define and conquer' and 'define and rule' strategies to carve out the West's biggest colonial empire in Asia. Refuting existing accounts of the 'rise of the West', this book foregrounds the profoundly imitative rather than innovative character of Western colonialism to advance a new explanation of how universal empires arise and endure.

John Company Armed: The English East India Company, the Anglo-Mughal War and Absolutist Imperialism, c. 1675–1690

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

During the 1670s and 1680s, the English East India Company pursued an aggressive programme of imperial expansion in the Asian maritime world, culminating in a series of armed assaults on the Mughal Empire. With important exceptions, most scholarship has viewed the Company's coercive imperialism in the later seventeenth century and the First Anglo-Mughal War as the results primarily, if not exclusively, of political and economic conditions in South Asia. This article re-examines and re-interprets this burst of imperial expansion in light of political developments in England and the wider English empire during the later Stuart era. The article contends that the Company's aggressive overseas expansion was pursued for metropolitan and pan-imperial purposes as much as for South Asian ones. The corporation sought to centralise and militarise the English presence in Asia in order both to maintain its control of England's trade to the East and in support of Stuart absolutism. By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Company's aggressive imperialism formed part of a wider political project to create an absolute monarchy in England and to establish an autocratic English empire overseas.

Pirates and Pilgrims: The Plunder of the Ganj-i Sawai, the Hajj, and a Mughal Captain’s Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 93-122
Author(s):  
Tyler Joseph Kynn
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
History Of

Abstract The pirate attack by Henry Every in 1695 on a Mughal ship carrying travelers returning from pilgrimage to Mecca has received some attention by historians trying to fit this incident into a larger history of European piracy using mainly the English sources related to the incident. Drawing from this literature the aim of the present paper is to combine it with the Mughal Persian material available to demonstrate what this incident reveals about the early modern hajj – which is to say, pilgrimage to Mecca – and the makeup of the Mughal-sponsored ship carrying pilgrims and goods between Mecca and Surat. A previously unstudied Mughal letter related to the incident, by the captain of the Mughal ship in question, reveals the ways in which the Mughal Empire understood this encounter with European piracy and provides evidence for why the Mughal Empire was so quick to place the blame for this attack upon the English and the East India Company.

Building borders in a borderless land: English colonialism and the Alam Minangkabau of Sumatra, 1680�1730

2021 ◽  
Vol 9s4 ◽  
pp. 58-89
Author(s):  
David Veevers
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
West Coast ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
The People ◽  
The Creation ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Trading Networks ◽  
Kinship Ties

This article adopts the concept of securitisation to understand the failure of the English East India Company�s attempt to build a territorial empire on the island of Sumatra in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Securitisation formed a key component of European colonialism, involving the creation of fortified and militarised borders both to exclude groups from entering newly defined territorial spaces, but also as a way to control goods, labour and resources within those spaces. Ultimately, this form of imperialism failed on the west coast of Sumatra, where a highly mobile society participated in a shared political culture that made any formal boundary or border between Malay states too difficult to enforce. Trading networks, religious affiliations, transregional kinship ties, and migratory circuits all worked to undermine the Company�s attempt to establish its authority over delineated territory and the people and goods within it.

With Eyes on the East and Ears on the West: Handel's Orientalist Operas

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen T. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Royal Academy ◽  
East India Company ◽  
George Frideric Handel ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
The West ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
The Arts ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Formal Establishment

After the formal establishment of an Austrian competitor to the English East India Company (eic) in 1722, the English drew on every resource available to force the Austrian company to close down—not only political pressure and extensive pamphleteering but also the arts. Of the fifteen operas presented by the Royal Academy of Music from 1724 to 1728, twelve, including seven by George Frideric Handel, featured settings in the Orient. Chosen by the directors of the Academy, who were also eic directors and investors, these Oriental settings kept the image of the East in front of aristocratic audiences, including important Members of Parliament, who had the power to assist the East India effort.

Shāh ‘Abbās, the English East India Company and the Cannoneers of Fārs

Itinerario ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Paul Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Profit Sharing ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
Relative Ease ◽  
Preliminary Step ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
European Technology

To nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship, the early modern expansion of powers like Spain, Portugal, England and Holland, was a necessary preliminary step towards Europe's ultimate domination of the Asian and African continents. Moreover, the relative ease with which colonial powers manhandled regions like North Africa and the Indo-Pak subcontinent suggested that their early modern ‘pioneering’ counterparts must have shared similar experiences. While some historians highlighted superior business concepts (joint-stock companies, profit-sharing) or superior shipbuilding and navigation techniques as the means with which trading powers like the Estado da India and the English East India Company penetrated and overwhelmed Indian Ocean commerce, other scholars boiled it down to the European affinity for using ‘men-of-war, gun, and shot’. The critical underlying assumption of any of these teleological explanations s i that ‘encountered’ cultures were unable to adequately respond to European technology, of course hinting at some deeper and more profound deficiency. Scholarship in recent decades has shorn such confidence and begun to scrutinise this seedling period of interaction between Europe and non-Europe, suggesting that the initial playing ground between ‘encounterer’ and ‘encountered’ was perhaps more level than previously portrayed.

The Imprint of the Imprints: Sojourners, Xiaoshuo Translations, and the Transcultural Canon of Early Chinese Fiction in Europe, 1697-1826

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Sieber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Book Market ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Textual Authority ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
The One

Abstract This paper posits that the circulation of the earliest items of Chinese fiction in early modern Europe was indebted to the popularity of certain titles within the Qing-dynasty book market on the one hand and to the participation of educated Chinese in the process of purchase, selection, and translation on the other. It further argues that European translations deployed specific features of Chinese imprints in order to differentiate translations from the hugely popular pseudo-Chinese transcreations, thereby seeking to establish textual authority for a philologically grounded Chinese voice. The paper terms this convergence of conceptual, material, and social factors in producing transculturally mediated texts “biblioglossia,” in order to capture aspects of textuality neglected or obscured in standard discussions of “orientalism.”

English Private Trade on the West Coast of India, c. 1680–c. 1740

Itinerario ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Davies
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
West Coast Of India ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Indian Ocean World

This article explores the private trade networks of English East India Company merchants on the west coast of India during the first half of the eighteenth century. Existing studies of English private trade in the Indian Ocean have almost exclusively focused on India's eastern seaboard, the Coromandel Coast and the Bay of Bengal regions. This article argues that looking at private trade from the perspective of the western Indian Ocean provides a different picture of this important branch of European trade. It uses EIC records and merchants' private papers to argue against recent metropolitan-centred approaches to English private trade, instead emphasising the importance of more localised political and economic contexts, within the Indian Ocean world, for shaping the conduct and success of this commerce.

Managing Expertise: The Problem of Engineers in the English East India Company, 1668–1764

Itinerario ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Tim Riding
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early History ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Knowledge Network ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
English East India Company

Abstract This article challenges the assumption that the early modern engineer acted as a reliable agent for colonial authorities. Far from acting as trusted mediators between colony and metropole, experts could exacerbate tensions. The English East India Company knew this, and avoided engineers throughout its early history. This article considers the interplay between authorities in London and their subordinates in Bombay. The company's directors saw engineers as untrustworthy agents who increased expenditure and disrupted the company's system of consultative governance. For much of its early modern history, the company's fortifications and built environments relied on a knowledge network of informal expertise. Examining these experts-in-context reveals how expertise was managed and built environments maintained in colonial settings. When the company did turn to experts in the mid-eighteenth century, it struggled to utilise and incorporate them. This demonstrates that in some colonial contexts experts could be profoundly disruptive.

Researching Chinese History in Russia: A Guide to Archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg

Itinerario ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 196-199
Author(s):  
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The West ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
The Soviet Union

It is already a cliché that the fall of the Soviet Union is providing an archival bonanza to historians. Naturally most attention is on sensational revelations from previously-inaccessible collections about Russia's own past. Yet those interested in other nations can also profit from the new openness of Moscow's and St. Petersburg's archives. This is particularly true for specialists in nineteenth-century Chinese history: Tsarist diplomats, officers and geographers actively studied their Asian neighbour, and their documents provide a fascinating perspective on the latter years of the Qing Dynasty. At the same time, the years before 1917 mark the golden age of Russian Sinology. While their accomplishments are largely ignored in the West, St. Petersburg's Orientalists produced much original and important work.

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