Europe’s Asian Centuries
English East India Company Orders Database
1. General Introduction
This new database details the orders sent out by the East India Company to its four principal
commercial centres in Asia – Madras, Canton, Bombay and Calcutta – between 1708 and 1753.1 The
four Excel workbooks, one for each of these commercial centres, are based on the annual lists of
goods to be procured that were conveyed to the Company’s Asian ‘factories’, contained in the India
Office Records series IOR/E/3 (‘despatches to the East’). Specifically, the spreadsheets have been
compiled from the Lists of Investments in books IOR E/3/96 to E/3/111.
The spreadsheets list not only the amount, different types and qualities of goods ordered from London
over this period, but also include references to additional contextual information in the E/3 letters.
These are detailed in the ‘comments’ columns, as explained below.
The following introduction explains the format of the database and provides some historiographical
background and relevant contextual information related to the East India Company’s system of trade
in the eighteenth century.
2. Summary of the Database
The data are arranged into four spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel 2007 format (‘.xlsx’ files). These are
locked (password protected) for editing by default. If a whole sheet is copied, it will remain locked;
however, any portion of a sheet can be copied to a new sheet and be edited freely.
List of Workbooks
english_eic_order_lists_madras_1706-53
english_eic_order_lists_bengal_1708-53
english_eic_order_lists_bombay_1707-51
english_eic_order_lists_china_1707-51
1
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the
European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement no. 249362, as part
of the “Europe's Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia 1600-1830” project at the University of Warwick.
1
For each of the spreadsheets, the type, quantity (including the unit of measurement) and quality
(where specified) of the goods ordered from London each year are listed. There was frequently more
than one order sent out each year, as well as years where no order was sent, or no list is available in
the E/3 series. The rows at the head of each spreadsheet give the details of each Company order used
to compile the database:
Name of row
Description
‘book, EAC ref’
Gives the British Library India Office Records
catalogue reference (e.g. E/3/99), followed by a
reference number we have used to catalogue each
order.
‘pages’
Gives the page range of the volume where the
letters comprising each order can be found. The
page number ranges given may not necessarily
include each individual page in that range.
‘date of letter’
Gives the date of the order letter/s. These have
generally been rendered, identically to the records
used, in Julian or ‘Old Style’ form (calendar year
beginning 25 March) and years in brackets
express the date using the ‘New Style’ Gregorian
form (year beginning 1 January).
‘ship’
Gives any names of ships on which the order was
sent out, where mentioned. Where likely dates of
voyages are given, these are rendered in
Gregorian form.
‘destination’
Gives the destination of the ship/s used to carry
the order letter/s, where mentioned.
Any figures in italics in the spreadsheets indicate where the division between different specifications
(place of origin, lengths, colours etc.) in the lists was not given precisely. Where an unspecified
amount of a particular good was ordered, this is indicated as ‘unspecified’.
a. Additional Comments Columns
The ‘comments’ columns in each of the principal worksheets refers to specific and relevant comments
in the Company’s letters that are related to their orders for goods. These have been categorised
2
thematically so as to provide easy access to passages in the E/3 letters related to particular aspects of
Company orders and ordering, as follows:
Single letter reference for each comment
Refers to comments related to:
Q
Quality of goods
A
(Amount) Quantity of goods
C
Colour/s (of piece goods)
D
Design, pattern and shape (primarily of
textiles) including length and width.
P
Purchase price of goods.
S
Sale price or saleability of goods.
R
Comparison with or reference to goods
previously received by the Company.
T
Trade in general; markets, competition and
duties.
References to comments in bold indicate those that may be of particular relevance, interest, or extent.
References to comments in italics indicate the repetition of an earlier comment.
The references are followed by page numbers or other indications of where they can be found in the
letters.
b. Note on Chinese Wrought Silks
The workbook for China includes a separate set of spreadsheets which calculate the quantities of each
colour, according to the sortments provided with the lists. A complete list of all colours ordered is
given in the final sortment for 1750. There will sometimes be small rounding errors in the total
quantities of wrought silks where they have been divided according to colour.
3
3. Historiographical Context
K.N. Chaudhuri’s seminal quantitative work in The Trading World of Asia and the English East India
Company (1978) remains the most comprehensive body of statistics detailing the overall level of the
Company’s imports and exports between 1660 and 1760.2 Thanks to Chaudhuri we have detailed
tables showing the import and export values, and quantities, of the principal commodities the EIC
traded in. He also calculated overall import and export levels in terms of weight and invoice value for
this period, using the Company’s commerce journals (BL, IOR L/AG/1/6).
Huw Bowen’s more recent work, compiled in his East India Company Trade and Domestic Financial
Statistics, 1755-1838 dataset (2007) extended Chaudhuri’s research into a later period.3 Bowen’s
dataset contains statistics on the volume and value of the Company's trade in silver and commodities
between Britain and Asia, providing information on a range of different commodities including
textiles, tea, and metals. The data details the changing value, volume, and geographical structure of
the East India Company’s overseas trade for the period when the Company began to exert imperial
control over large parts of the Indian subcontinent. Until the appearance of Bowen’s dataset,
quantitative data on the Company’s trade derived from original papers had only been available for the
years before 1760.4 Bowen also made use of the Company’s ‘commerce journals’ to build the
database.
We therefore have valuable and extensive information on the Company’s exports and imports over a
substantial period, covering both India and China. We know much less about what was actually
ordered by the Company in the lists sent out to their Asian establishments every year. Very often,
what was ordered differed quite considerably from what was in fact received in London on homeward
shipping; Chaudhuri recognised this inexact relationship between Company orders and Company
imports.5 This discrepancy is discussed in more detail below. The Europe’s Asian Centuries database
therefore provides important information regarding what Asian goods the Company desired, and what
they believed were rising commodities. The database can be used to discern the changing composition
of Asian goods the Company ordered, both in terms of commodity type and geographical origin, and
reveals when new kinds of goods appeared in the Company’s portfolio of commodities. It also draws
attention to the wide range of different types and qualities of each sort of commodities the Company
ordered. We envisage the database will be useful for historians seeking information on the shifting
commercial realities of Eurasian trade, on the challenges associated with procuring Asian luxury
goods for European markets, and on changing fashions. Comparing our database with existing work
on the Company’s imports also has the potential to shed further light on how effectively the Asian
factories were able to deliver what goods were ordered.
2
See K.N.Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge:
CUP, 1978).
3
Bowen’s database is available to download here: http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue?sn=5690 along
with an extensive explanation of its scope and content.
4
As well as Chaudhuri’s work, P.G.M. Dickson’s, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the
Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967) contains statistics related principally to
the EIC’s domestic affairs.
5
Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia, pp. 88-89.
4
a. The EIC’s Factory System and Ordering Goods from Asia
By the eighteenth century, the English East India Company had established a string of trading
establishments stretching from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to the Indian subcontinent, across the
Bay of Bengal to the straits of Malacca and the China seas. The Company possessed three main
trading settlements in India – Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta – each with subordinate factories
belonging either in the ‘upcountry’ or up and down the coastline. The Company had no regular
settlement in China and all trading had to be carried on from on board the ships at Canton through
supercargoes. It was these Asian settlements and factories that supplied the Company with a wide
range of trading commodities; ‘cotton and silk piece goods from India and China, bulk goods such as
saltpetre, pepper, indigo, and coffee, raw silk, tea, and various exotic articles such as dyed wool from
the Kirman district of Persia, Chinese lacquered ware and porcelain, and cowries used in West
African trade.’6
The general letters to the East, from the Company’s Committee of Correspondence, and the replies
received from Asia constituted the main vehicle through which the EIC’s commercial operations were
carried out. By 1709, the Company had developed a standardised method for the letters which
continued unaltered until the very end of its trading activities. The annual general letters to each major
commercial establishment, which were often as long as one hundred folio pages, were put under eight
classified headings, each with numbered paragraphs.7 The lists of goods to be ordered from each
presidency each season usually followed immediately after these general headings. EIC ships to China
were managed by supercargoes, who received detailed instructions on what goods were to be bought
from China each season, and who dealt with the Hong merchants (the guild of merchants responsible
for foreign trade) in Canton.
The kinds of goods the Company ordered, and therefore the composition of its import cargoes,
changed a great deal over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pepper was the
dominant commodity in the 1600s; it was an attractive cargo due to light weight, easy transportation
and high value. Other spices besides pepper came to the fore after 1630. Indian goods – indigo,
saltpetre, calicoes and silk, later became the most common items imported into Britain. After the great
surge of spice imports in the early seventeenth century, calicoes, cotton piece goods (such as Madras
prints) and silks took over as the most profitable trade products for the Company. Later in the
eighteenth century, Calcutta, and the province of Bengal, became the core centre of East India
Company activity. The Company’s China trade increased in importance as the tea trade dramatically
expanded in the second half of the eighteenth century.8
This was the result of the Company constantly striving to divert most of its resources into the most
profitable commodities. As Lawson explains, ‘The Company itself also took a hand in ensuring its
own prosperity through what would be seen in the late twentieth century as diversification of its
product lines. In 1621 for example, pepper, indigo and other spices made up the bulk of East India
Company cargoes; by 1677 calicoes, chintz, cotton-piece goods and raw and manufactured silks
K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘The English East India Company in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Pre-Modern Multinational
Organization?’ in Patrick Tuck, ed., The East India Company, 1600-1858, Vol. 4: Trade Finance and Power
(London: Routledge, 1998), p. 89. This article originally appeared in Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra eds.,
Companies and Trade (Leiden, 1981), pp. 29-46.
7
Chaudhuri, ‘The English East India Company’, p. 90.
8
Phillip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London, New York: Longman, 1993), pp. 25, 61, 66-67.
See also Maxine Berg, ‘Cargoes: The Trade in Luxuries from Asia to Europe’, in David Cannadine (ed.),
Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c.1760-c.1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007),
pp. 66-67.
6
5
dominated. By the end of this period, in 1709, tea, obtained through a rapidly expanding China trade,
then appeared as a prominent commodity in Company cargoes.’ The result of diversifying into these
favourable markets, together with a buoyant oceanic trade structure, was the amassing of ‘immense
profits’ over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.9
The Company’s Directors relied on very detailed commercial instructions to their servants in India
and China to procure the goods they required. Although much depended upon the commercial acumen
and methods adopted by the Company’s representatives in Asia, in the hope that they would purchase
goods of sufficient quantity and appropriate quality, the Directors sought to leave as little as possible
to chance by very precisely defining the goods they wished to bring to the market in London. They
regularly assessed the Company’s sales figures, calculated rates of profitability on different
commodities and gathered feedback from buyers. For textiles, the directors defined the number,
weight, length, width, colour, and pattern of cloth they required; while for tea they prescribed the type
and qualities of the varieties they wished to receive.10 The Company’s calculations of the profitability
of particular goods or trade products from a particular area was inexact but had an understandably
important influence on future orders. The Court of Directors regularly advised their servants to reduce
investment in particular goods if they ‘turn[ed] but to little advantage’. The Company also regarded
the level of bidding in the auctions as a most sensitive indicator of the demand conditions which
subsequently influenced their own pricing policy and the orders sent to Asia.11 They adhered to these
practices throughout the eighteenth century, and regularly provided those in Asia with details of sales,
prices, and samples of goods sold by all of the European East India Companies.12
Yet, despite all this, because of the complicated time schedule and difficulties in forecasting the
quantities which were to be contracted for, there was ‘considerable discrepancy between planning and
performance’.13 Notwithstanding the relatively sophisticated nature of the East India Company’s
operations, long-distance maritime trade in the early modern period was a complex business. The
Company was well aware of the fluctuating nature of Eurasian trade and the delays and
misinformation that frequently arose when conducting commerce over vast distances. The Company
relied on its complex system of information exchange between London and its Asian settlements to
try and overcome these difficulties. The time-lag in communication between Europe and the East
obviously still placed a large amount of strain on how effectively the Company could engage with its
servants overseas, monitor their work, and order goods.14
The Company could never guarantee that the quantity and types of goods they ordered would be sent
back to London. The system of trade relied on intricate communication and information networks, but
also required Company servants in Asia to exercise considerable amounts of discretion and initiative.
While the Company’s factors in India were in charge of procurement, they relied on numerous
merchants and brokers to supply goods and contract with producers too.15 Very often, orders from
London were not fulfilled due to difficulties with the supply of and access to the goods requested.
Company servants frequently just sent back what was available, or new goods they felt the Directors
9
Lawson, East India Company, p. 44.
H.V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756-1833 (Cambridge,
2006), p. 236.
11
Chaudhuri, ‘The East India Company’, pp. 95-96. See also IOR despatch books, 4 February 1709 vol 96 para
27, pp. 433-4, 17 April 1711 vol 97 Para 47 p. 221, 27 March 1713 vol 98 para 72 p. 78.
12
Bowen, Business of Empire, p. 236.
13
Chaudhuri, ‘The East India Company’, pp. 88, 93-94.
14
Chaudhuri, ‘The East India Company’, pp. 91-92; Santhi Hejeebu, ‘Contract Enforcement in the English East
India Company’, The Journal of Economic History, 65:2 (2005), pp, 496-523, esp. pp. 507-508.
15
Berg, ‘Cargoes’, p. 63.
10
6
would be happy to receive. With the trade in textiles, one result of this was a constant flow of new
varieties, colour combinations and patterns of textiles into London.16 Chaudhuri argued that ‘The wide
separation of markets and the perpetual risk of a disequilibrium between supplies and demand made
the East India Company specially aware of the problem of minimizing and monitoring the
discrepancy between planning and implementation… In spite of all the efforts made by the [Asian
factories] it just happened sometimes that the goods came in too late for the departing ships. If there
were many competitors in the market and the standard of sorting the cloth was too strict, short
deliveries were unavoidable.’17
4. The Import of Asian Piece Goods: Key Trends
There are a number of important shifts in the composition of the Company’s imports over the
seventeenth and eighteenth century that are well known, and have been much discussed in the existing
literature. Our database has the potential to shed new light on a number of these. The outcome of
some preliminary analysis is discussed below.
While Surat and Bantam were the most prominent ports for English East India Company trade in the
seventeenth century, it was Bengal that became the most important centre of trade in the eighteenth
century, overtaking both Madras and Bombay. The proportion of the Company’s Asian imports that
came from Bengal reached forty-seven per cent by 1700, and as much as fifty to sixty per cent after
1726. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the focus of East India Company trade shifted to
China. Tea became particularly important in the latter half of the eighteenth century and replaced
textiles as the primary Asian commodity imported. This growth of the China trade resulted in a slight
decline in Bengal’s share of imports into England. In 1717, the first year tea was regularly imported, it
accounted for just seven per cent of the Company’s Asian goods. By 1747, tea reached twenty per
cent of the total, and in 1760 it was no less than forty per cent. A concrete figure for the amount of tea
ordered is difficult to derive due to the large number of orders without specified quantities. Our
database nevertheless reveals that the Company ordered around 26,465 peculs of tea in the period
1721-26, rising to 73,200 peculs for the 1746-1750 period. This latter figure also excludes several
orders where the Company simply instructed the Canton supercargoes to buy up as much tea as could
be procured.18
The Company’s move towards goods from eastern India can be clearly discerned from our database.
Our initial work compiling summary tables and charts has focused on textile piece goods as these can
easily be compared across different areas, and because they constituted the major part of the
Om Prakash, ‘The English East India Company and India’, in H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel
Rigby (eds.), The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 6.
17
Chaudhuri highlights some examples of this. In 1670 the Court of Committees drew up a table in which it was
shown among other things that in the preceding trading season the Company had asked for 50,000 pieces of
cotton textiles known as narrow baftas, but the Surat factory had supplied only 12,396. Out of 50,000 broad
baftas ordered only 13,504 were received; out of 40,000 dungarees on the list they had sent 7,866 pieces. See
IOR despatch book 88, 8 March 1676, p. 265, and IOR original correspondence 9 January 1671, Vol 31, No.
3358, p. 3. Cited in Chaudhuri, ‘The East India Company’, pp. 91-92. The Company was also seriously
disturbed by the continued discrepancy between what was asked for and what the servants supplied from Asia
numerous times in the 1720s and 30s. Chaudhuri, Trading World, p. 297.
18
Dr Chris Nierstrasz, one of the postdoctoral fellows on the Europe’s Asian Centuries project, is currently
working on the tea trade of the English and Dutch East India Companies, exploring quality distinctions and how
the import of different types of tea changed over the eighteenth century.
16
7
Company’s annual order from Asia. The Company ordered the vast majority (nearly sixty per cent
over this period) of its piece goods from Calcutta. The proportion of piece goods ordered from Bengal
also increased over the eighteenth century, generally at the expense of Bombay. The overall amount
of piece goods ordered from Bombay fell from a high of 930,000 in the 1717-1721 period to just
376,600 in the 1747-1751 period. Forty-seven per cent of all piece goods ordered were ordered from
Bengal in the period 1707-1711, rising to sixty-six per cent 1747-1751. The proportion of piece goods
ordered from Madras stayed generally between twenty and thirty per cent across the period.19 Whilst
these changes are well known, the level of detail in our database allows a closer focus on the
particular types of piece goods that were ordered from each of the Indian presidencies, how this
changes over time, and which goods remained in high demand even in years where overall demand
was depressed.
Another important trend in the Company’s trade that has been much discussed in existing scholarship
is the increasing ‘specialisation’ of the EIC in terms of its growing focus on just a few principal
commodities over the course of the eighteenth century. Certainly, when looking at piece goods orders,
and the myriad different types and qualities, early eighteenth century orders appear to have been
extremely diverse in their composition. There was a wide range of different types of piece goods
ordered from both Bombay and Madras in the first few years of the period. The Company came to
focus on guinea stuffs, chints, niccannes, and Anjengo textiles from Bombay, and longcloth and
salampores from Madras, by the 1740s and 1750s. The range of different types of piece goods ordered
from Bengal remained extensive however (comprising over 50 kinds of textiles, and myriad sizes and
qualities) including well-known goods such as ‘seersuckers’, ‘taffaties’, ‘romalls’, ‘sannoes’,
‘gurrahs’ and ‘chints’. Moreover, our database draws attention to the immense range of different types
and quality gradations within each of these categories of piece goods. As an example, whilst the
Company’s Madras orders came to predominantly focus on salampores and longcloth, a much broader
range of different types of these goods were ordered towards the middle of the eighteenth century.
The Company asked for just five different types of Madras longcloth in 1707, compared with ten
different kinds in 1715, and twenty-two in 1751. Four different kinds of salampores were ordered in
1707, compared to sixteen in 1752.
Further quantitative work on the raw data contained in our database promises to yield interesting
questions and new perspectives on the East India Company’s system of trade in the eighteenth
century.
19
See also Chaudhuri, Trading World, pp. 296-99, for an account of the major trends in textile imports in the
first half of the eighteenth century. During the half-century following 1713, the Company’s textile trade reached
a state of comparative stability, especially relative to the seventeenth century. The general direction of the
annual orders turned downward after 1721 until 1727, but thereafter demand began to rise and remained at a
fairly high level for the next twenty years.
8