John Keay - The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company

For Alexander and Anna

A hundred years ago the high-minded rulers of British India regarded merchants as a lesser breed in the hierarchy of imperial pedigree. To gentlemen in trade, as to servants, ladies, natives, dogs, the brass-studded doors of Bombays and Calcuttas more exclusive clubs were closed. Like social climbers raising the ladder behind them, the paragons of the Raj preferred to forget that but for the gentlemen in trade of the East India Company there would have been no British India.

The Honourable Company was remembered, if at all, only as an anomalous administrative service; and that was indeed what it had become in the early nineteenth century. But before that, for all of 200 years, its endeavours were seen as having been primarily commercial, often inglorious, and almost never honourable. Venal and disreputable, its servants were believed to have betrayed their race by begetting a half-caste tribe of Anglo-Indians, and their nation by corrupt government and extortionate trade.

From those 200 years just a few carefully selected incidents and personalities sufficed by way of introduction to the subsequent 150 years of glorious British dominion. Occasionally greater attention might be paid to the Companys last decades as an all-conquering force in Indian politics, but still the perspective remained the same: the Company was seen purely as the forerunner to the Raj.

Closer acquaintance reveals a different story. The career of the Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe spans as much geography as it does history. To follow its multifarious activities involves imposing a chronology extending from the reign of Elizabeth to that of Victoria upon a map extending from southern Africa to north-west America. Heavy are the demands this makes on both writer and reader. (And hence perhaps the dearth of narrative histories of the Company in this post-imperial age.) But the conclusion is inescapable. The East India Company was as much about the East as about India. Its Pacific legacies would be as lasting as those in the Indian Ocean; its most successful commercial venture was in China, not India.

Freed of its subservient function as the unworthy stock on which the mighty Raj would be grafted, the Company stands forth as a robust association of adventurers engaged in hazarding all in a series of preposterous gambles. Some paid off; many did not but are no less memorable for it. Bizarre locations, exotic produce, and recalcitrant personalities combine to induce a sense of romance which, however repugnant to the scholar, is in no way contrived. It was thanks to the incorrigible pioneering of the Companys servants that the British Empire acquired its peculiarly diffuse character. But for the Company there would have been not only no British India but also no global British Empire.

Every overseas empire had to begin somewhere. A flag had to be raised, territory claimed, and settlement attempted. In the dimly perceived conduct of a small band of bedraggled pioneers, stiff with scurvy and with sand in their hose, it may be difficult to determine to what extent these various criteria were met. There might, for instance, be a case for locating the genesis of the British Empire in the West Indies, Virginia, or New England. But there is a less obvious and much stronger candidate. The seed from which grew the most extensive empire the world has ever seen was sown on Pulo Run in the Banda Islands at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago. As the island of Runnymede is to British constitutional history, so the island of Run is to British imperial history.

How in 1603 Runs first English visitors ever lit upon such an absurdly remote destination is cause for wonder. To locate the island a map of no ordinary dimensions is needed. For to show Pulo Run at anything like scale and also include, say, Darwin and Jakarta means pasting together a sheet of room size and still Run is just an elongated speck. On the ground it measures two miles by half a mile, takes an hour to walk round and a day for a really exhaustive exploration. This reveals a modest population, no buildings of note, and no source of fresh water. There are, though, a lot of trees amongst which the botanist will recognize Myristica fragrans. Dark of foliage, willow-size, and carefully tended, it is more commonly known as the nutmeg tree.

For the nutmegs (i.e. the kernels inside the stones of the trees peach-like fruit) and for the mace (the membrane which surrounds the stone) those first visitors in 1603 would willingly have sailed round the world several times. Nowhere else on the globe did the trees flourish and so nowhere else was their fruit so cheap. In the minuscule Banda Islands of Run, Ai, Lonthor and Neira ten pounds of nutmeg cost less than half a penny and ten pounds of mace less than five pence. Yet in Europe the same quantities could be sold for respectively 1.60 and 16, a tidy appreciation of approximately 32,000 per cent. Not without pride would James I come to be styled King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway [Pulo Ai] and Puloroon [Pulo Run]. The last named, thought one of its visitors, could be as valuable to His Majesty as Scotland.

True, the island never quite lived up to expectations. Indeed it would become a fraught and expensive liability. But as it happened, the importance of Run for the East India Company and so for the British Empire lay not in its scented groves of nutmeg but in one particular nutmeg seedling.

A peculiarity of the Banda islands at the beginning of the seventeenth century was that thanks to their isolation they owed allegiance to no one. Moreover, the Bandanese recognized no supreme sultan of their own. Instead authority rested with village councils presided over by orang kaya or headmen. In the best tradition of south-east Asian adat (consensus), each village or island was in fact a self-governing and fairly democratic republic. They could withhold or dispose of their sovereignty as they saw fit; and whereas the inhabitants of neighbouring Neira and Lonthor had already been bullied into accepting a large measure of Dutch control, those of outlying Ai and Run had managed to preserve their independence intact.

By 1616 Run and Ai valued their contacts with the English and, when menaced by the Dutch, voted to pledge their allegiance to the men who flew the cross of St George. They did this by swearing an oath and by presenting their new suzerains with a nutmeg seedling rooted in a ball of Runs yellowish soil. As well as the symbolism, it was an act of profound trust. Seedlings were closely guarded, and destroyed rather than surrendered. Who knew what effect the naturalization elsewhere of a misappropriated seedling might have on the Bandanese monopoly?

The recipients of this gratifying presentation were, like all the other doubleted Englishmen who had so far reached Run, employees of the East India Company. But therein lay a problem. For in this, its infancy, the Company was not empowered to hold overseas territories. Its royal charter made no mention of them, only of trading rights and maritime conduct. It was therefore on behalf of the Crown that Runs allegiance had to be accepted. And when, after an epic blockade of the island lasting four years, the Company would eventually decide that it had had enough of Run, it was in fact the British sovereign who stood out in favour of his exotic windfall and of his Bandanese subjects.