The Worlds of the East India Company.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane
• Position: Book Review

The Worlds of the East India Company. Edited by H. V. BOWEN, MARGARETTE LINCOLN, and NIGEL RIGBY. Woodbridge, Suffolk: BOYDELL PRESS, 2002. Pp. xvii + 246, plates. $75.

This handsome volume constitutes the proceedings of a conference held in 2000 at the British National Maritime Museum, in collaboration with the University of Leicester, to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Company of London Merchants Trading to the East Indies, better known as the East India Company. The contributions cover a broad span from economic and naval history to the history of art, and have four main foci: the Company in Britain and Europe; the Company in Asia; the Company's maritime trade; and the cultural influences and legacies of the Company. P. J. Marshall provides, with his usual mastery, an afterword that encapsulates the lessons of the volume on how contact brought on by maritime trade for two long centuries, between 1600 and 1833, impacted both Britain and Asia.

The volume brings an important corrective to scholarship that has tended to focus on the territorial ambit of the Company Raj. Rather than on issues of power and government, the accent here is on trade and negotiation, and on maritime competition--and collaboration, as the essay by Femme Gaastra reminds us--primarily with the Dutch Company, but also with Chinese and other Asian traders, and the participation of Asian bankers, a pre-industrial world in which the British empire was all but assured. There is no attempt to reduce this era to what has been called "the age of partnership." Military muscle was an integral component of the Company's operations. Yet, the emphasis of the volume lies on interconnections, exchange, mutual influence, and a considerable degree of parity.

The essays are fresh, rich with data, thoughtfully and dynamically argued, engrossing. Humanists may be attracted first to the last two essays, by Geoff Quilley on the East India Company's patronage of British maritime art in the eighteenth century, and by Jeremy Osborn on the discussions about India and the East India Company in the late eighteenth-century...