European markets and were traded throughout Asia and
even eastern Africa. The main agent that carried them to
the British Isles was the English East India Company.
Founded in 1600, two years before its Dutch version, the
English East India Company spent the seventeenth century
trying to establish a monopoly on the valuable exports from
India. It had to compete with the Portuguese, who had
bases in Goa, Chittagong, and Bombay, and the French
with bases at Pondicherry, Chandernagore, Yanam, and
Karaikal. Worse still for the East India Company was the
Glorious Revolution, as we saw in chapter 7. The monopoly
of the East India Company had been granted by the Stuart
kings and was immediately challenged after 1688, and
even abolished for over a decade. The loss of power was
significant, as we saw earlier (this page–this page),
because British textile producers were able to induce
Parliament to ban the import of calicoes, the East India
Company’s most profitable item of trade. In the eighteenth
century, under the leadership of Robert Clive, the East India
Company switched strategies and began to develop a
continental empire. At the time, India was split into many
competing polities, though many were still nominally under
the control of the Mughal emperor in Delhi. The East India
Company first expanded in Bengal in the east, vanquishing
the local powers at the battles of Plassey in 1757 and
Buxar in 1764. The East India Company looted local wealth
and took over, and perhaps even intensified, the extractive
taxation institutions of the Mughal rulers of India. This
expansion coincided with the massive contraction of the
Indian textile industry, since, after all, there was no longer a
market for these goods in Britain. The contraction went
along with de-urbanization and increased poverty. It
initiated a long period of reversed development in India.
Soon, instead of producing textiles, Indians were buying
them from Britain and growing opium for the East India
Company to sell in China.
The Atlantic slave trade repeated the same pattern in
Africa, even if starting from less developed conditions than
in Southeast Asia and India. Many African states were
turned into war machines intent on capturing and selling
slaves to Europeans. As conflict between different polities
and states grew into continuous warfare, state institutions,