The third volume of Dutch Sources on South Asia mentions that there are some late-eighteenth-century Marathi letters, written in the Modi script, preserved in the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia.1 Scanned copies of the same were obtained by Lennart Bes (Leiden University) with the kind permission of the Indonesia Archives. Using these scanned copies, this paper gives the complete Roman transliteration of the two letters as well as their translation, and contextualizes the letters within Maratha documentary practices as well as within the contemporary political scene of the late-eighteenth-century Coromandel Coast. In addition, this article provides a commentary on the Maratha perception of Europeans in general and of the Dutch in particular, arguing that the Marathas had an unusually positive opinion about the trade-oriented Dutch, especially when contrasted with the territorially ambitious English and the Portuguese.

This article deals with Malay letters and documents from the archives of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—VOC), dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collection of “golden” Malay letters, which belonged to the governor- general of the VOC in Java (1704–1709) Joan van Hoorn, made a long voyage on the ship Sandenburg from Batavia to Cape Town and Amsterdam in 1710. Its cultural and historical value was firstly estimated by the outstanding Russian scholar and antiquarian N. P. Likhachev, who purchased it for the Paleographical Museum in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1910. The pages of the fifty-seven diplomatic letters cover one of the most controversial periods of VOC history on the Archipelago, 1683 to 1710, the establishment of its relationships with local nobility and states. The collection represents the original letters of the sultans of Palembang, Gowa, Buton, Bone, Tallo, Banten, and Cirebon, and of prominent historical figures of Malay states as well as the famous Indian merchant from Surat, Abdul Ghafur. They are written in Malay (in Arabic graphic: Jawi and Pegon), Arabic, Javanese (in two scripts: Pegon and Carakan), Dutch, Spanish, Persian, and Chinese. Their investigation will contribute to the academic scholarship on the famous records, reconstructing the history of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) on the Malay Archipelago, and on the peculiarities of Malay letter writing in different languages, scripts, and regions.

While this special issue raises a significant number of questions, constraints have dictated that only some of these questions are actually answered. The pioneering work presented consequently remains a modest attempt to initiate a more general discussion about the causes and the social and economic consequences of business failure in the early modern period, particularly with regard to colonial enterprises.

Among the solutions devised by early modern Western European states to engage with the private sector in the governance of their overseas empires, the adjudication of revenue farms and colonial monopolies was often dismissed by historians on the grounds of being coercive, inefficient, and risk-exempt for the contractors. In reality, however, the threat of financial hardship and insolvency was very real, and not infrequently led to contractual removal, the seizure of collateralized assets, and even the imprisonment of the concessionaires.

This article approaches the neglected topic of failure in big business in early seventeenth-century Portugal, an overlooked case of a contractor state that relied extensively on the adjudication of government contracts to finance and rule its overseas empire. By looking into the downward trajectories of two tax-farmers and the collapse of their contractual dealings, light will be shed on how the Crown and private entrepreneurs reacted to the repercussions of failure in these early modern public-private partnerships. It will also be shown how the road leading to termination was very much shaped by the political relationships between the Crown and its contractors and can only be understood in the context of wider relationships of brokerage, credit, and service between the two.

The Dutch West India Company (WIC), founded in 1621, was, in the words of the States General, “disbanded and destroyed” in September 1674 due to bankruptcy. In its stead, a second West India Company was founded, with a charter largely taken over from the first. This article explores how the dissolution of the first company and the conflicting interests of stockholders, bondholders, and company directors were managed. As it turns out, the old company was not actually liquidated; instead, its assets were simply handed over to the successor company, while an intricate financial construction was devised to take care of the debt burden and to capitalize the new company. The reasons for this unusual arrangement must be sought in the company's great political, and particularly geopolitical, importance. Since the Dutch state was unwilling and unable to handle colonial governance and defence itself, it needed a placeholder in the form of a chartered company. However, the bankruptcy of the WIC, coming at the time it did, had major consequences for the shape of the Dutch Atlantic of the eighteenth century.

Although French chartered companies operating on the west coast of Africa and in India followed a similar model of organization, their liquidation processes differed depending of the area of their monopoly. As well as exploring the reasons for the distinction between these two regions of exclusive trade, this article demonstrates that the differing liquidation processes negatively impacted company shareholders in the two regions. Taking the perspective of shareholders farther, it explores the case of a specific investor and the informal economic profits he benefitted from. This approach contributes to deepening our understanding of the French early modern companies’ bankruptcies by examining informal aspects that would not be readily visible from an exclusively institutional point of view.

By examining how a Dutch firm in Lisbon operated two Portuguese tobacco tax farms from 1722 to 1727 and failed subsequently, this article brings together, on the one hand, research on the relationship between state and business groups through a monopolistic rent provided by the empire and, on the other hand, a growing literature discussing institutional and economic variables, as well as human agency, in business failure in early modern Europe. The article aims to achieve two goals. The first is to shed light on the perspective of the Dutch tax farmers, highlighting why they chose to incur the risks of managing a nationwide sales monopoly and the business model they implemented to maximize profits and mitigate risks, while the second is to examine the general and specific reasons behind their ultimate downfall. It concludes that, despite the organizational innovations they introduced and that led them to exploit interconnected businesses, the Dutch partners were unable to overcome the negative effects of conjunctural and contingent factors that temporarily squeezed the domestic consumption of tobacco.

By weaving the political economy of the Portuguese empire into business history, this article highlights the role of metropolitan and colonial tax farming in the rise and fall of an elite that dominated the business scene in both mainland Portugal and colonial Brazil between roughly 1730 and 1760. It takes the Torres family business as a case study and argues that, while tax farming undoubtedly represented an opportunity to accumulate private wealth, it was also a risky business. Adding to the irregularity of fiscal income, tax farming imposed strict rules on tax farmers, deriving from the legal framework for public finance, while the Crown's policy of seeking to maximize revenue through competitive bidding also increased the risks to which they were exposed. While being highly concentrated on tax farming in Portugal and the South Atlantic empire allowed the Torres family business to amass extraordinary wealth, it also proportionately increased the firm's exposure to those risks, which were then further compounded by a succession problem that eventually led to its demise.