The East India Company's servants working abroad knew how easy it was to manipulate books, presenting partial truths, inaccurate numbers, and blank silences when it served their purposes. When a reply to a given letter or set of records was a year or more away, it was a relatively simple matter to “forget” to write something, slip into an undecipherable personal shorthand, or just neglect to send an account to the masters at all. “Beware,” one factor living in the East Indies counseled another, “of sending home imperfect accounts; better it were in my opinion to send none.” Such deception and neglect were part of a set of practices that developed among the mariners, factors, and other servants of the East India Company abroad, in which they implicitly rejected the nascent capitalist insistence that those with only labor to sell bear nearly all the risk while those with capital reap nearly all the rewards. Their persistent but muted rebellion against their masters participated in a larger debate spurred by the spectacular profits produced by the new long-distance trade: who should benefit from this wealth, who should bear the costs associated with fetching it from halfway across the globe, and who should have control over these decisions?