Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables
- Figures
- Maps
- Abbreviations
- Notes on dates, contemporaneous spellings, currency, and weights
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The international economy and the East India trade
- 2 A formal theoretical model of the East India Company's trade
- 3 The structure of early trade and the pattern of commercial settlements in Asia
- 4 The evolution of the Company's trading system: operation and policy 1660–1760
- 5 Long-term trends and fluctuations 1660–1760
- 6 Politics of trade
- 7 Markets, merchants, and the Company
- 8 The export of treasure and the monetary system
- 9 The structure of country trade in Asia
- 10 Export of European commodities
- 11 The Company and the Indian textile industry
- 12 The Company's trade in textiles
- 13 Pepper
- 14 Import of bulk goods
- 15 Raw silk
- 16 Coffee
- 17 Imports from China
- 18 Financial results
- 19 Conclusion
- APPENDICES
- General glossary
- Bibliography
- Short titles cited in the reference notes
- Notes
- Index
5 - Long-term trends and fluctuations 1660–1760
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables
- Figures
- Maps
- Abbreviations
- Notes on dates, contemporaneous spellings, currency, and weights
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The international economy and the East India trade
- 2 A formal theoretical model of the East India Company's trade
- 3 The structure of early trade and the pattern of commercial settlements in Asia
- 4 The evolution of the Company's trading system: operation and policy 1660–1760
- 5 Long-term trends and fluctuations 1660–1760
- 6 Politics of trade
- 7 Markets, merchants, and the Company
- 8 The export of treasure and the monetary system
- 9 The structure of country trade in Asia
- 10 Export of European commodities
- 11 The Company and the Indian textile industry
- 12 The Company's trade in textiles
- 13 Pepper
- 14 Import of bulk goods
- 15 Raw silk
- 16 Coffee
- 17 Imports from China
- 18 Financial results
- 19 Conclusion
- APPENDICES
- General glossary
- Bibliography
- Short titles cited in the reference notes
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Methodological issues
The survival of the East India Company's account books from 1664 onwards makes it possible to reconstruct a complete quantitative picture of its main trading activities. The methods and the techniques of this reconstruction are discussed in some detail elsewhere and need not detain us here. However, it may be permissible to raise a fundamental question that will also concern us when we turn to an examination of the Company's financial history. It was noted earlier during the discussion of the theoretical model of the Company's trading system that its general controllers in London possessed a highly developed sense of corporate history. The careful preservation of historical documents, the frequent searches for past information, and the use of statistical data for periods often as long as thirty or forty years were all an integral part of a central decision-making process. To take some specific examples, in 1668 when the Company was considering the reopening of trading relations with Japan, a special committee was set up to examine the available historical evidence on the Far Eastern trade going back to the first half of the seventeenth century. The abstract of prices paid for imported goods and the quantities sold in the auctions, which are to be found in the papers of the Committee of Correspondence, indicate that statistical time-series had a monitoring role in the daily process of executive decisions. Finally, there is the curious episode relating to the purchase of a bond bearing the Company's seal by the Surat Factory in 1739.
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- Information
- The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company1660-1760, pp. 79 - 108Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1978
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