Abstract
In the early modern period, commodities imported from the East impacted European societies and political economies in a variety of ways. They reshaped consumer cultures, unsettled some long-established patterns of production and exchange, prompted favourable or reactionary responses among merchants, rulers, and governments, and, above all, caused inter-continental transmission of knowledge that impacted artistry and craftsmanship. A considerable body of literature examines many of these issues. Scholars have studied some of the major luxury and non-luxury commodities imported from Asia into Europe, identified the changes in European fashion and consumption cultures, and explored the arenas of technical, technological, and knowledge transfers between Asia and Europe.1 British responses to the large-scale import of Indian cotton textiles and its impact on consumption culture, for instance, are fairly well studied.2 Indigo, as an industrial raw material imported from India, has not featured much in the literature. This paper is an attempt to explore how indigo imports into Britain, and the knowledge that accompanied it, impacted on the commercial and market relationships among Europeans in India and Britain in the first half of the seventeenth century.
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See for example, John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); idem, Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800 (London: Macmillan, 1997); Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, (eds.), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, (eds.), How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo (London: British Museum Press, 1998), chapter 3. Robin J. H. Clark et al. ‘Indigo, Woad, and Tyrian Purple: Important Vat Dyes from Antiquity to the Present’, Endeavour, New Series, 17, 4 (1993), pp. 192–3.
As Chaudhuri has pointed out, imports from the Levant affected the Company’s indigo trade more than the imports of indigo by the Portuguese. K.N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1965), pp. 174–5; Balfour-Paul, Indigo, p. 47.
Om Prakash (ed.), Dutch Factories in India, 1624–27: A Collection of Dutch East India Company Documents Pertaining to India (hereafter DFI), (New Delhi: Manohar, 2007), pp. 119, 151–2, 155–6, 266–70.
Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 177–8; Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 1606–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 296, 432.
DFI 1624–27, Memorandum from Vapour at Agra to Batavia, 26 Oct. 1627, pp. 342, 352; J.A. van der Chijs (ed.), Dagh-Register gehouden int Casteel Batavia vant passerende daer ter plaetse als over geheel Nederlandts-India, 1637 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1899), 1637, pp. 270–71; Dag-Register, 1644–45 (1903), p. 232.
Indigo producers, too, felt the force of the imperial monopoly and joined the forces rallying against it. In protest, peasants reportedly uprooted their indigo plants. Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 87–8. A copy of the farman (imperial order) issued by the emperor withdrawing the monopoly can be seen in the collection of Persian documents in the Bibliothique Nationale, Paris, Blochet Supplementary Persian 482, f. 98a.
See the accounts of William Finch and Edward Terry in William Foster, Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921); Francisco Pelsaert, De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert over Mughal Indië, 1627: Kroniek en Remonstrantie, (eds.), D.H.A. Kolff and H.W. van Santen (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), pp. 255–65; Geleynssen de Jongh, De Remonstractie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh, ed., W. Caland (s’Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1929).
George Birdwood and William Foster, The First Letter Book of the East India Company, 1600–1619 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893), pp. 57–8; S. Arasaratnam, ‘Monopoly and Free Trade in Dutch-Asian Commercial Policy: Debate and Controversy with the VOC’, in S. Arasaratnam, Maritime Trade, Society and European Influence in Southern Asia, 1600–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1995), chapter VII. Indigo is not listed among commodities that the EIC officials and seamen were allowed to import into Britain by the Royal Proclamation issued in 1631. BL, A Proclamation for the Better Encouragement, and Advancement of the Trade of the East India Companie, and for Prevention of Excesse of Private Trade, 1631.
BL, A Proclamation for the Restraining all his Majesties Subjects but the East India Company, to Trade to the East Indies (London, 1681).
Ian Bruce Watson, Foundation of Empire: English Private Trade in India, 1659–1760 (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980), pp. 61–3.
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Nadri, G.A. (2015). The Indigo Trade of the English East India Company in the Seventeenth Century: Challenges and Opportunities. In: Berg, M., Gottmann, F., Hodacs, H., Nierstrasz, C. (eds) Goods from the East, 1600–1800. Europe’s Asian Centuries. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403940_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403940_4
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