The long history of the East India Company illustrates major developments affecting relations between Europe and South Asia in the period: the growth of global capitalism, the emergence of the “colonial state” as Britain assumed sovereignty of India, and the growth of racial ideologies. The East India Company not only ran a global trading network but also grew in power until it governed territories that far exceeded the size of the British Isles. A clear-sighted view of the company's achievements and failings is therefore essential to an understanding of the rise of Britain as an imperial power in Southern and Eastern Asia. Ian Barrow's concise The East India Company 1600–1858: A Short History with Documents is carefully structured for student readers and provides an engaging and well-rounded introduction to the company's history.
Barrow prefaces his book with a chronology of the most important events in this history and a useful glossary. To help to orient the reader, Barrow also includes maps of India comparing the company's holdings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a world map indicating the routes taken by its vessels and the goods carried on each leg of the journey to the East and back. He opens the book proper with a striking account of the execution in 1775 of an important Indian official in Bengal who had unwisely crossed the company's governor general, Warren Hastings. The description of this ruthless act effectively sets the tone for the balanced and unsentimental history to follow.
In three chapters, Barrow neatly covers the rise and fall of the company from its foundation at the beginning of the seventeenth century to its fall in the mid-nineteenth century. Footnotes alert the reader to useful background reading. Six, well-chosen black-and-white illustrations, integrated into the text, add interest and help to convey contemporary British attitudes to the company, which were often mixed. The final third of the book consists of selections from original documents, given with modern American spellings. Most of these documents are mentioned in earlier chapters and are specifically chosen because they are sufficiently complex to provoke discussion.
Barrow states unequivocally that the company's commerce was, from the first, created, sustained, and expanded by force. However, he teases out difficult topics such as the extent of the company's power to govern in India at different periods in its history. He scrupulously outlines the extent of the company's unpopularity at home. (Its monopoly over trade with India and China was fiercely resented; the fact that it exported silver—thought to be essential to British wealth—was criticized; its import of exotic goods was said to promote luxury and undermine British industries.) He also asks key questions, not just about the company's own trajectory but also whether the company itself was an agent of change and whether it encouraged people to behave differently.
The history of the company informs many aspects of British and world history. For example, its textile trade was important to eighteenth-century Britain's imperial economy. Though it did not itself trade with Africa or the American colonies, Indian cloth was exported to Africa as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Barrow clearly explains contemporary economic theory and sets his history of the company firmly in context. He also gives a lucid account of the financial pressures that encouraged the company to wink at the illicit trade in opium with China.
Barrow is careful to signpost important historical debates about the company's history, while making his own position clear. For example, he supports the view that the company gradually transitioned into a colonial state during the second half of the eighteenth century. However, for those seeking a turning point, he advances the Regulating Act of 1773 (when the British Parliament intervened in the running of the company's Indian territories), as an event that marks the beginning of that trend.
While Barrow offers little scope for empathy with the aims of the company and those who worked for it, he gives an effective insight into the experience of serving in its army, which was beset by disease, divided ethnically between Indian recruits and British officers, and riven by jealousies (the three armies of the company's different presidencies or administrative areas in India were not joined in one army until 1895). The distinction between the company's troops and regular British forces serving in India was another source of tension. It is no surprise that the decisive factor in enabling company troops to gain the upper hand over Indian forces was the British Navy, which controlled the Indian Ocean.
Barrow also gives a perceptive account of the force of religion on the history of the company. Religion became an important issue after the 1790s when British Baptist missionaries entered Bengal. A fierce debate followed about whether the company had a responsibility to introduce Christianity into its territories, given that eager missionaries were likely to stir up rebellion among the company's Indian subjects. In his conclusion, Barrow sets out Victorian ideology with respect to British rule in India, which came into full force after the company was effectively closed in 1858.
If Barrow's account offers a rigorously impartial history of the company, his extracts from contemporary documents offer color. They vividly indicate the strong contradictions and passions elicited by British affairs in India, and underline the role of the company in helping to effect social change. Unfortunately, Barrow includes no documents that give an Indian perspective.
