Download or read book The Dutch East India Company and British East India Company written by Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts of the companies *Includes a bibliography for further reading From classic grilled meat to exotic and savory 5-star dishes, pepper has long been the ultimate staple spice. While bulk pepper may be readily stocked in supermarkets and convenience stores today, there was once a time when the common spice was considered one of the most valuable commodities in the world. Merchants tripped over one another to get their hands on the tiny black beads, which live in colorful clusters of berry-like shells reminiscent of Christmas lights. They were so precious that an uncountable number of men crossed the turbulent and uncharted seas for them. In fact, the tropical spice was so highly sought after that blood was shed over the edible gold. To many, the mention of maritime merchants evokes an imagery of growling pirates donned in their stereotypical hats and a colorful parrot perched upon their shoulders. These nautical rascals wander the high seas in search of treasure and adventure. Though that imagery may be inaccurate, the real life companies that once dominated international waters operated on a similar thirst for conquest and riches. Perhaps the most famous - or as many would put it, infamous - of these naval corporations was the Dutch East India Company, also known as VOC. Established around the beginning of the 17th century, this nautical behemoth of a corporation was determined to squeeze everyone else out of the market. Vested with the power to wage war and exterminate any who dared stand in their way, the rest of the world stood by as the unstoppable force took over the whole of international maritime trade. The company would crush its opponents on the way to the top, establishing a monopoly on the global spice trade that would not only rock the world but forever change the course of modern business history. The British East India Company served as one of the key players in the formation of the British Empire. From its origins as a trading company struggling to keep up with its superior Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish competitors to its tenure as the ruling authority of the Indian subcontinent to its eventual hubristic downfall, the East India Company serves as a lens through which to explore the much larger economic and social forces that shaped the formation of a global British Empire. As a private company that became a non-state global power in its own right, the East India Company also serves as a cautionary tale all too relevant to the modern world's current political and economic situation. Beyond its obvious influence in areas like trade and commerce, the East India Company also served as a point of cultural contact between Western Europeans, South Asians, and East Asians. Quintessentially British practices such as tea drinking were made possible by East India Company trade. The products and cultural practices traveling back and forth on East India Company ships from one continent to another also reconfigured the way societies around the globe viewed sexuality, gender, class, and labor. On a much darker level, the East India Company fueled white supremacy and European concepts of Orientalism (See Said, Orientalism). One of the major reasons that the East India Company remains the subject of intense interest is that the consequences of its influence remain visible in India, Britain, and other parts of the world to this day. While the British Crown eventually replaced the East India Company as the governing authority of India, the systems of production they had established remained intact. More than half a century after India declared independence from the British Empire, the economic and cultural effects of this colonial system of production remained apparent. The disparities in wealth and power between the Global North and the Global South may not stem from the East India Company alone, but the company played an indisputable role in imperial processes.

Download or read book The History and Legacy of the British Empire s Most Famous Trading Companies Across the World written by Charles River Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading After the Englishman Henry Hudson, under the aegis of the Dutch East India Company, sailed by Manhattan in 1609, he returned home with good news and bad news. Like the other explorers before him, he hadn't been able to find a water route to the Orient. He had, however, returned with maps (confiscated by the English) and beaver pelts. With that, it became clear that the region around the bay that would take Hudson's name was a very promising new territory for trade and settlement, which would become a serious bone of contention between the Dutch and the English for the rest of the century. In 1614, another Dutch East India merchant, Adriaen Block, entered through the narrows of the East River between Queens and Randall's Island, a difficult and dangerous passage that later sank numerous ships and that Block named Hell's Gate (Hellegat). The European world would know the name "Manhates" when Block returned to the Netherlands with new and improved maps. During the early 18th century, trade interests in South America led to the South Sea bubble, which economists have called "one of the most famous and dramatic episodes in the history of speculation." The South Sea Company's spectacular fall impacted not only its investors, but public confidence in corporations, investments, and even banking worldwide. How did the directors of one of the most successful joint-stock companies at the time, sought after in social circles as financiers and masterminds, come to be called before Parliament to testify? The anger over the dishonesty of the directors of the company resulted in one member of the House of Lords suggesting that the South Sea Company directors "be sewn up in sacks, along with snakes and monies, and then drowned." Though the history of the South Sea Company is obscure and unfamiliar to most, the regular references to the company and the scandal that surrounded it have lead it to be regularly referenced by economists, historians, and even investors today. It is a story centered around England's history of debt, loans, and banking, all against the backdrop of modern history's most famous empire. Perhaps the most famous trade company in all of history, the East India Company served as one of the key players in the formation of the British Empire. From its origins as a trading company struggling to keep up with its superior Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish competitors to its tenure as the ruling authority of the Indian subcontinent to its eventual hubristic downfall, the East India Company serves as a lens through which to explore the much larger economic and social forces that shaped the formation of a global British Empire. As a private company that became a non-state global power in its own right, the East India Company also serves as a cautionary tale all too relevant to the modern world's current political and economic situation. On its most basic level, the East India Company played an essential part in the development of long-distance trade between Britain and Asia. The trade in textiles, ceramics, tea, and other goods brought a huge influx of capital into the British economy. This not only fueled the Industrial Revolution, but also created a demand for luxury items amongst the middle classes. The economic growth provided by the East India Company was one factor in Britain's ascendancy from a middling regional power to the most powerful nation on the planet. The profits generated by the East India Company also created incentive for other European powers to follow its lead, which led to three centuries of competition for colonies around the world. This process went well beyond Asia to affect most of the planet, including Africa and the Middle East.

Download or read book The Corporation That Changed the World written by Nick Robins and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles, and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company's practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. The Corporation That Changed the World is the first book to reveal the Company's enduring legacy as a corporation. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance, and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall. For decades, the Company was simply too big to fail, and stock market bubbles, famines, drug-running, and even duels between rival executives are to be found in this new account. For Robins, the Company's story provides vital lessons on both the role of corporations in world history and the steps required to make global business accountable today.

Download or read book The East India Company written by Tirthankar Roy and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study examines how the East India Company founded an empire in India at the same time it started losing ground in business. For over 200 years, the Company’s vast business network had spanned Persia, India, China, Indonesia and North America. But in the late 1700s, its career took a dramatic turn, and it ended up being an empire builder. In this fascinating account, Tirthankar Roy reveals how the Company’s trade with India changed it—and how the Company changed Indian business. Fitting together many pieces of a vast jigsaw puzzle, the book explores how politics meshed so closely with the conduct of business then, and what that tells us about doing business now. ‘One of the first major attempts to tell the company’s story from an Indian business perspective’—Financial Express

Download or read book Slavery written by Page DuBois and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' is perhaps the most famous phrase of all in the American Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson's momentous words are closely related to the French concept of 'liberte, egalite, fraternite'; and both ideas incarnate a notion of freedom as inalienable human right that in the modern world we expect to take for granted. In the ancient world, by contrast, the concepts of freedom and equality had little purchase. Athenians, Spartans and Romans all possessed slaves or helots (unfree bondsmen), and society was unequal at every stratum. Why, then, if modern society abominates slavery, does what antiquity thought about serfdom matter today? Page duBois shows that slavery, far from being extinct, is alive and well in the contemporary era. Slaves are associated not just with the Colosseum of ancient Rome but also with Californian labour factories and south Asian sweatshops, while young women and children appear increasingly vulnerable to sexual trafficking. Applying such modern experiences of bondage (economic or sexual) to slavery in antiquity, the author explores the writings on the subject of Aristotle, Plautus, Terence and Aristophanes. She also examines the case of Spartacus, famous leader of a Roman slave rebellion, and relates ancient notions of liberation to the all-too-common immigrant experience of enslavement to a globalized world of rampant corporatism and exploitative capitalism.

Download or read book A History of the Global Economy written by Joerg Baten and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In co-operation with the International Economic History Association."

Download or read book British Imperialism written by P.J. Cain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A milestone in the understanding of British history and imperialism, and truly global in its reach, this magisterial account received numerous accolades from reviewers in its first edition. The first to coin the phrase "gentlemanly capitalism", Cain and Hopkins make the strong and provocative argument that it is impossible to understand the nature and evolution of British imperialism without taking account of the peculiarities of her economic development. In particular, the growth of the financial sector - and above all, the City of London - played a crucial role in shaping the course of British history and Britain's relations overseas. Now with a substantive new introduction and a conclusion, the scope of the original account has been widened to include an innovative discussion of globalization.

Download or read book The East India Company at Home 1757 1857 written by Margot Finn and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.

Download or read book The Honourable Company written by John Keay and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2010-07-08 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the English East India company.

Download or read book The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company written by K. N. Chaudhuri and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-23 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First published 1978"--T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Download or read book Merchant Kings written by Stephen R. Bown and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-12-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers, or competitors. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people. The merchant kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life men who, for a couple hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a sizable portion of the world. They include Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the violent and autocratic pioneer of the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged governor of the Dutch West India Company, whose narrow-minded approach lost Manhattan to the British; Robert Clive, who rose from company clerk to become head of the British East India Company and one of the wealthiest men in Britain; Alexandr Baranov of the Russian American Company; Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers and Rhodesia; and George Simpson, the "Little Emperor" of the Hudson's Bay Company, who was chauffeured about his vast fur domain in a giant canoe, exhorting his voyageurs to paddle harder so he could set speed records. Merchant Kings looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the centuries before colonialism, when nations belatedly assumed responsibility for their commercial enterprises. A blend of biography, corporate history, and colonial history, this book offers a panoramic, new perspective on the enormous cultural, political, and social legacies, good and bad, of this first period of unfettered globalization.

Download or read book Events That Formed the Modern World 5 volumes written by Frank W. Thackeray and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 1908 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive five-volume set contains readable essays that describe and interpret the most important global events since the European Renaissance, some accompanied by related document excerpts and primary source materials. What were the effects of the Age of Exploration on today's ethnic groups and social structure? How did the development of moveable type pave the way for Facebook and Twitter? Why is the Reformation so critical for understanding today's religious controversies? This set will help readers answer these questions by exploring the most significant historical events of the modern world. This five-volume set covers times from the Renaissance to the present. Each volume focuses on a specific historic period and examines 12 events within those time frames that changed the world. Each entry provides an introduction that lays out factual material in a chronological manner, an in-depth essay interpreting the event's significance, and an annotated bibliography of the most important current works on the topic. Select entries are followed by primary sources pertaining to the event under consideration, such as diary entries. Targeted to both general readers as well as entry-level university students, this book also directly supports high school and undergraduate curricula, allowing students to identify and contextualize events in order to think critically about their causes, aftermath, and legacy.

Download or read book Trading Places written by Anthony Farrington and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Economic History of Colonialism written by Leigh Gardner and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debates about the origins and effects of European rule in the non-European world have animated the field of economic history since the 1850s. This pioneering text provides a concise and accessible resource that introduces key readings, builds connections between ideas and helps students to develop informed views of colonialism as a force in shaping the modern world. With special reference to European colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in both Asia and Africa, this book: • critically reviews the literature on colonialism and economic growth; • covers a range of different methods of analysis; • offers a comparative approach, as opposed to a collection of regional histories, deftly weaving together different themes. With debates around globalization, migration, global finance and environmental change intensifying, this authoritative account of the relationship between colonialism and economic development makes an invaluable contribution to several distinct literatures in economic history.

Download or read book Empire of Booze written by Henry Jeffreys and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Fortnum and Mason Best Debut Drink Book Award 2017 From renowned booze correspondent Henry Jeffreys comes this rich and full-bodied history of Britain and the Empire, told through the improbable but true stories of how the world’s favourite alcoholic drinks came to be. Read about how we owe the champagne we drink today to seventeenth-century methods for making sparkling cider; how madeira and India Pale Ale became legendary for their ability to withstand the long, hot journeys to Britain’s burgeoning overseas territories; and why whisky became the familiar choice for weary empire builders who longed for home. Jeffreys traces the impact of alcohol on British culture and society: literature, science, philosophy and even religion have reflections in the bottom of a glass. Filled to the brim with fascinating trivia and recommendations for how to enjoy these drinks today, you could even drink along as you read... So, raise your glass to the Empire of Booze!

Download or read book How the East Was Won written by Andrew Phillips and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-14 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book After Abolition written by Marika Sherwood and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2007-02-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the Emancipation Act of 1833, Britain seemed to wash its hands of slavery. Not so, according to Marika Sherwood, who sets the record straight in this provocative new book. In fact, Sherwood demonstrates that Britain continued to contribute to the slave trade well after 1807, even into the twentieth century. Drawing on government documents and contemporary reports as well as published sources, she describes how slavery remained very much a part of British investment, commerce and empire, especially in funding and supplying goods for the trade in slaves and in the use of slave-grown produce. The nancial world of the City in London also depended on slavery, which - directly and indirectly - provided employment for millions of people. "After Abolition" also examines some of the causes and repercussions of continued British involvement in slavery and describes many of the apparently respectable villains, as well as the heroes, connected with the trade - at all levels of society. It contains important revelations about a darker side of British history, previously unexplored, which will provoke real questions about Britain's perceptions of its past