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The East India Trade, The Politicians, and the Constitution: 1689-1702

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

Henry Horwitz
Henry Horwitz*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
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Extract

The war against France was the most potent force for change in English government and politics in William III's reign, but during those same years the contest for control of the lucrative East India trade also set off strong reverberations at Whitehall, in parliament, and even in the constituencies. Ever since its reorganization in the 1650s, the East India Company had been subjected to intermittent attack from a motley array of foes: some questioned the desirability of the bullion-greedy trade to the Far East, others disputed the Company's exclusive commercial privileges held under the royal charters of 1661 and 1683 and argued for a regulated company, and from the early 1680s onwards a number of once prominent Company members (most notably, Thomas Papillon) challenged the directorate of Sir Josiah Child. In turn, the Glorious Revolution ushered in the decisive phases of the dispute between the Company and its enemies — a controversy finally brought to a peaceful conclusion only in the closing months of William's reign.

By 1689, the struggle for control of the East India trade had already developed a “constitutional” dimension and taken on a political tinge. On the one hand, there was the question, first raised by the critics of the early Stuarts, whether any group could be endowed with a commercial monopoly by virtue of royal charter alone. On the other hand, there was the issue of the Child clique's close identification with the Stuart Court during the 1680s — a “Tory” posture Sir Josiah and his associates had adopted in order to ward off challenges to their own predominance and to the Company's privileges.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Spring 1978 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1978

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References

1. The predominantly Tory associations of the Company's shareholders at the Revolution have been documented by G. S. De Krey in his doctoral dissertation on London politics, in progress at Princeton University. I also wish to thank Dr. D. W. Jones of the University of York for permission to read and to cite his “London Overseas-Merchant Groups at the end of the Seventeenth Century and the Moves against the East India Company” (D. Phil, thesis, Oxford, 1970).

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