The East India Company: The World's Most Powerful Corporation (The Story of Indian Business) by Tirthankar Roy

England, routinely took part in private trade. Other merchants, called voluntaries, paid money to the court to buy the right to trade in the eastern waters. A cash-strapped Charles I, committed to expensive warfare at home and abroad, was ready to grant such privileges for a consideration.
    Realizing that there was little that it could do to suppress and punish so many rebels, the Company settled on a compromise. It allowed private business except in a few goods reserved for exclusive trade, on the condition that the traders would take a licence. It was also more tolerant of private transactions between ports within the same territory, as opposed to overseas trade.
    In 1635, a leading silk and linen merchant of London, William Courten, along with an influential courtier Endymion Porter, approached the king to obtain a charter for a new East India Company. The mission of the new company was to conduct trade in the Portuguese spheres of influence, Goa, Malabar, China and Japan, establish trading stations in Australia, and start a colony in Madagascar. The new partnership, financed by a leading merchant of the city Paul Pindar, received permission to carry gold and was justified as an enterprise that operated in areas neglected by the old company. The old company was furious at the commission, but could not do anything to stop it. Funded by a massive investment of £120,000, the first voyage of the new company set out under the captaincy of John Weddell.
    This voyage included Peter Mundy, whose account of the expedition remains an important source on Weddell and the regions that he went to. The firstexpedition went to a number of places, the most important of which was Canton. It was a mixed success, which Courten did not live to see. Pirate raids and shipwrecks led to huge loss of cargo. Yet, what was brought home was sufficient to alarm the directors of the old company. The first voyage was also significant for being one of the first English visits to coastal China. When returning from the next voyage to Goa and Masulipatnam, Weddell mysteriously disappeared. An ‘eyewitness’ stated that he had been invited to a Dutch ship, and after being entertained there, was thrown overboard. The Dutch might have wanted to do this to him, but the more likely explanation of the disappearance was a shipwreck off the Cape of Good Hope in the winter of 1639.
    The story of the new company was disastrous from this point onward. Saddled with inherited debt, the second son of Courten, also called William, continued his father’s mission. But the son’s personal fortunes plummeted despite sympathetic assistance from the king. The old company left nothing undone to obstruct the new company’s enterprise. He petitioned the Parliament against these actions without success. In 1643, the Dutch captured some of his ships off the Straits of Malacca. Courten fled from his creditors to Italy, where he died bankrupt in 1655. By then the new company had been merged into the old.

    Major maritime and overland trade routes in the Indian Ocean, c. 1700.

Madras, Bombay and Calcutta
    HORMUZ HAD BEEN a dubious prize from a trading point of view. Already in decline, English victory over the Portuguese more or less sealed its fate. On the other hand, the conquest of Hormuz escalated hostility in the Konkan. In 1626, after several years of uneasy truce, the Dutch and the English conducted a joint operation to raid Bassein, located on ‘the Bay of Bumbaye’. A well-situated but almost unused port in Portuguese possession, Bumbaye contained no more than a poorly defended fort and a settlement of fishermen. The Portuguese command escaped to Goa before the forces arrived, and the invaders had to be happy with a few bags of rice they left behind. The intensity of Anglo-Portuguese conflicts in the Indian waters died downfrom then onward. A truce was signed between the English and the Portuguese in 1634, ushering in an unusually long-lasting peace.
    As a result of