Chapter Eight India's Merchants Become Commercial Capitalists1 As soon as manufacture gains sufficient strength, and particularly large-scale indus- try, it creates in its turn a market for itself, by capturing it through its commodi- ties. At this point commerce become the servant of industrial production, for which continued expansion of the market becomes a vital necessity.2 "Merchant capitalists" were the world's first commodity traders. From ancient times, they wandered among separated regions buying cheaply and selling dearly the few surpluses grown or manufactured by peoples who produced mainly for subsistence.3 Marco Polo-like travelers of the feudal era, these early capital- ists transferred what appeared superfluous goods in one land to some other land where their wares surfaced as exotics. In the earliest days of international trade, they functioned more as peddlers than businessmen. After 1500, with the establishment of chartered Western trading companies such as the Portuguese Estado da India or the English and French East India Companies, they managed "redistributive agencies" between Eastern empire shopping centers and Western emerging nation states.4 These companies specialized in buying quantities of Asian goods inexpensively, and redistributing them to European customers at whatever price their home market (and their monarchs) would bear. They did not exploit the workers who grew, wove, or spun the spices, cottons, and silks that their East India ships hauled thousands of miles to sell. They bought these commodities from native merchants, and they profited from the geographical price differentials between purchase and sales ports. Merchant capitalists never increased the wealth of nations: they merely changed its loca- tion. Although this form of trading dominated most European socie- ties into the eighteenth century, it disintegrated in England with the Glorious Revolution. After 1689, Parliament legislated the creation of merchant brotherhoods that would behave in what its Members conceived a more accountable "commercial capitalist" manner. Unlike merchant traders, who profited by merely moving goods, commercial capitalists prospered from their role as agents of specific productive capitalists. In the sugar industry, for example, they were the partners or fee commissioners of individu- al West India growers, and their task was to facilitate the delivery of their partner's crops to specific English refineries. Commercial capitalists distinguished themselves from the cen- turies-old merchant traders by renouncing mere shopping. They bound their business fortune to one or two industries and its producers: they became corn, beer, leather, cattle, sugar, tobac- co, slave, or timber merchants who returned repeatedly to the same growers and manufacturers for marketable commodities. Their enterprise included pre-negotiated contracts with particular growers, industrialists, or mine owners for a share of profits arising from selling their produce, manufactures, or ores.5 Rather than buying cheaply and selling dearly (the primary objec- tive of merchant capitalists) commercial traders advanced their fortunes by distributing quantities of goods at lower prices than their competitors. Their share of industrial profits was largest where they were most able to reduce the unit costs of transfer- ring commodities from producers to consumers.6 The Glorious Revolution clarified the distinction between merchant and commercial capitalism, but it did not eliminate the former. Each operated in a post-Revolutionary political and economic setting where Parliament, and not the Crown, designed trading regulations for international companies. However, legis- lators passed statutes that converted merchant capitalists into commercial capitalists whenever they could to create an environ- ment where the cheap prices of English goods might defeat their European competitors in worldwide markets. This chapter explores how England's post-Revolutionary legislators transformed (at least partially) an old East Company of merchant traders into a new United East India Company of commercial capitalists. Merchant Capital and East India trade, 1660-1689 If East Indian merchants traded in dramatically different ways after 1689, they operated just as distinctly before 1660. The Company, or properly put, East India "Companies," that exist- ed from Elizabeth's last days to the Restoration were primitive when compared to the single corporation that arose after 1660.7 Before the Civil Wars, groups of merchants periodically united to buy a royal charter for an exclusive voyage to the Far East. Possessed of a Crown monopoly to buy and sell Asian goods, these merchants set sail for India where they bought as much Eastern spices or textiles as they felt they could sell profitably on their return to England. Once home, they disposed of their entire stock, and ended their corporate relationship. The most characteristic trait of these early East India Companies was that they ceased to exist as companies after each voyage, a corporate inconsistency best explained by the perfidy they faced when negotiating charters with early seventeenth-century rulers. In 1601, for example, Elizabeth Tudor granted a 15 year trading charter to "'The Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies.'"8 After only eight years, her successor James I, eager to gain revenue that Parliament would not grant, forced the Company to renegotiate a more costly char- ter. In this 1609 patent, James promised Company merchants that their privileges would last indefinitely. Struggles between the Stuarts and their Parliaments over finance continued, and he and his son Charles I coerced and blackmailed India merchants into buying new and often more expensive charters with increasing regularity. The ongoing battle between kings and their Parlia- ment over taxation created this perpetually unstable (but still profitable) East India trade during the Company's first forty years: the Civil Wars and the Interregnum only added to those forces inhibiting the development of a more durable corporate trade.9 The Stuart Restoration closed this peripatetic chapter of East India Company history, and turned its sporadic traders into a long-lasting joint stock company of "merchant capitalists" trading to India. In 1661, Charles II chartered an East India Company that operated for the first time "with a united and permanent capital."10 Despite Parliament's protestations that Charles lacked the prerogative to grant such charters, the East India Company prospered under five royal renewals from Charles and his brother James II.11 The return of the Stuarts never meant the end of merchant capitalism, but it did mean the conver- sion of a periodically reconstituting trading operation into a perpetual corporate powerhouse. By royal charter, the East India Company became a virtual state: Charles II "found the Company a trading body; he left it a nascent territorial power, with the right of coinage, the command of fortresses and of English and Indian troops, the authority to form alliances and to make peace or war, the jurisdiction over subjects, and other attributes of a delegated sovereignty."12 By Crown fiat, the post-Restoration East India Company became the wealthiest ongoing corporation in the England of its day. To make profits for its shareholders, the East India Company had to spend a fortune on the Stuart kings who gave it life. The Company protected its royal privileges by lavishly rewarding Charles and James II with loans and gifts. Charles borrowed L170,000 over a period of sixteen years, and both brothers re- ceived additional thousands in gifts between 1660 and 1689.13 These "involuntary contributions" from the Company to the Crown amounted to three hundred and twenty-four thousand pounds for the reign of Charles II alone.14 This Company largess continued throughout the reign of James II, and it added costs to trading which the Company in turn passed on to consumers of its monopoly protected imports. East India Company overhead did not cease with loans, bribes, and gifts to kings and courtiers. Parliament refused to recognize the Company's Crown-granted charters as legally sound, and East India merchants had to defend their prerogatives against English interlopers seeking Asian riches. The potential for vast wealth from East India trade prompted unlicensed merchants, smugglers, and pirates to sail into the Company's charter-granted seas. Even one time East India Company officials, such as Thomas Papillon when he was no longer a Company Director, employed their money and trading skill to outfit interloping voyages to India. To protect its trade on the oceans and its charter in the courts, the Company spent a sizable part of its treasury on arming ships, hiring lawyers, and bribing judges.15 Although it won most of its sea wars and court cases from 1661 to 1689, its corporate victories were costly. To reassure investors and creditors after any lengthy combat at home or abroad, the Company directors returned to the Crown for even more explicit charter guarantees. Each recurring visit to Charles or James II required greater expenditures on lawyers and additional royal bribes. Once fortified for trade, the East India Company of roughly 550 stockholders during the Restoration era pursued the profit of their exclusive investments. However, to do so they had to spend even more money. Company Governors and their Committees arranged loans, bought commodities to trade in India, and hired ships to carry goods to their factories in Surat, Bombay, Madras, and later Calcutta. As gold and silver traded better than any other commodity, the Company contracted with English and Dutch bankers for bullion.16 It also bargained with domestic merchants for cargoes of lead, tin, and cloth that it hoped to sell in Asia. Quite often, stockholder shortage of cash made it necessary to offer bankers or merchants bonds in exchange for bullion or manufactured goods. Finally, the Company issued interest bearing bonds to cover freight, shipping, and insurance costs.17 These preliminary expenses were high, but they paled before the costs of establishing and maintaining trading centers in Persia, India, and Southeast Asia. The Company feared for its existence on the seas and in East Asia. Thousands of miles from home, it found other nations ready to challenge its dearly bought Crown rights to an exclusive trade. This is not the place to detail all the financial burdens of East Indian merchants, but it will help to highlight several to understand why the Company required a monopoly to recoup its costs. It was expensive to struggle against pirates and interlopers, to defend against the Dutch and French Companies, and to maintain factories and armies in Madras and Bombay. The Company records contain detailed accounts of costly sea voyages followed by exorbitant bribes for Mogul emperors, Hindu rajahs, and the long lines of dependents leading to their doors. The East India Company financed a com- plex relationship with the thousands of indigenous Hindu and Muslim merchants who acted as its bankers, middlemen, transla- tors, and guides in the Far East. It invested millions for a myriad of services and a mountain of commodities. It spent money on licenses to English merchants and Asian traders who became its buyers throughout the Far East. It hired servants and exported a few English commodities and much gold and silver to maintain links with the most productive emporium of the seventeenth cen- tury. India trade could only reward the Company if it spent money. Josiah Child wrote that, wherever "The English or any Europeans settle a Factory in India they must presently build them large Houses, Ware-house, etc. take many Servants, and maintain the appearance and splendour of a petty court: and in many places where the company have not fixt Garrisons, they are forced to fortifie their Houses, or else they will be despised and trampled upon by the Natives."18 Despite these sizable expenditures, Restoration-era East Indian trade paid handsomely, even benefiting the Company cheats that trafficked illegally in its name and often with its money.19 Armed with the sole right to sell English exports in India and Indian imports in England, the East India Company profited in an old fashioned way: it bought inexpensive calicoes, spices, teas, and coffees in Asia, and it sold them at exclusive prices in England. The Company constituted an independent state trading by multiple contracts between and within separate kingdoms. Its directors saw to it that its merchants collected salable Indian surpluses for distribution in a Western world crazed to consume Eastern staples. Its agreement with English monarchs gave it its most rewarding market: a monopoly of England's growing appetites for Indian spices, drinks, and textiles, even if these imports drove down sales of competing English commodities. In the early years of its history, the Company traded mostly pepper, saltpe- ter, silk, and sugar.20 As the price of pepper and sugar declined during the 1630s and 40s, it added new Indian commodities to pay the costs of trading. Government demand for saltpeter made that a profitable import, but the Company's largest late seventeenth- century gains came from importing Indian textiles into England. These included painted, printed, and plain calicoes, embroider- ies, pile carpets, silk fabrics, raw silk, and even woolen cloth.21 As long as the Company had a Crown monopoly, it worried little about recouping the costs of its East Indian trade. Merchant capitalists throve in the days of Charles and James II because these monarchs provided their Company with an exclusive right to sell alluring India foods, textiles, drinks, and drugs in England. There was nothing revolutionary about the Restoration East India Company that functioned essentially as a refurbished Eng- lish version of the fifteenth century Hanseatic League. A combi- nation of wealthy merchant capitalists paid an assortment of world princes dearly to trade the products of different lands. Once established as the only legitimate carriers of goods to and from Asia, the Company concentrated on legally and militarily protecting its contract rights. It exploited its noncompetitive trade by dealing on its own, or, even more parasitically, by leasing its Crown privileges to non-Company merchants who were eager to trade in Asia. In either case, its stockholders gained from the price differentials between buying inexpensively in one market and selling dearly in the other. On either side of its trade, the Company bothered little about cutting costs of commod- ity production to increase sales through cheaper prices. As Asians had little interest in buying English commodities, the company brought American silver and gold to exchange for the abundant amounts of cheap Indian spices and textiles that it sold at monopoly prices in England, the colonies, and, where possible, on the continent. The sale of English commodities in Asia was never a princi- ple East India Company goal, but its directors found it politi- cally wise to boast that national prosperity flowed from their Asian trade, and they cited contemporary economic theorists to prove these claims.22 During the Restoration, Company defenders insisted that India trade stimulated English manufacturers to produce goods for Asian markets, and that its merchants were always opening new opportunities for the sale of English goods throughout Asia. They denied that India imports competed with English manufactures at home, and asserted that the Company brought India goods to England only because the Navigation Acts required it to do so. Their spokesmen claimed that the Company reexported most of these goods, and that reexports brought more bullion to England than the Company ever sent to India. Pundits concluded their pro-Company defense with ample evidence that East India Trade paid so much in customs dues that it lessened the taxpaying burden of all other English rate payers.23 Although these arguments convinced Company sympathizers, a hostile association of English businessmen rejected them as spurious, and denounced the East India Company as the economic enemy of the English people.24 Bullionists denied Company argu- ments that reexportation of India goods returned lost capital, and they accused its directors of depleting England's wealth by exporting mountains of gold and silver. Manufacturers berated the Company for destroying England's woolen and silk industries with its imports of cheaply produced Asian cottons and silks. Non-Company merchants, unwilling or unable to pay the Company's tariff to trade in India, denounced its Crown privileges, and joined critics demanding a free trade in East Indian goods. Financial speculators and landlords, especially during the peri- ods of economic distress in the late 1670's and early 1680's, were among the most vociferous of Company enemies. Investors reproached the Company stockholders for monopolizing England's most lucrative trading investment, and landlords blamed Company imports for their declining rentals. Landowners contended that Indian cotton imports devastated woolen sales, and forced English farmers to abandon their sheep farms. Finally, all opponents of the East India Company held it accountable for the mounting poor relief paid to the unemployed woolen and silk workers who lost their jobs when Asian cottons and wrought silk replaced domestic textiles on English, colonial, and continental markets. These diatribes against the East India Company's destructive impact on rents and manufacturing, blended into more trenchant protests against the Company's fiscal support of Stuart monarchy. Because the Company bought Crown charters, the opposition accused it of financing and perpetuating Stuart tyranny. Led by an increasing- ly contentious Whig party during the 1680s, Company enemies asserted that corporate gifts and loans to Charles and James II freed the monarchy from reliance on Parliamentary revenues. When James II employed the throne to revitalize English Catholicism, economic complaints against the Company melded with political arguments to unleash what often amounted to an Anglican summons for civil disobedience. In the 1680s, the merchants of the Levant Company became the center of a five-year assault on the East India Company trading monopoly.25 Although the origins of Levant Company hostility arose from its inability to compete with the India Company in silk trading, these Turkish merchants focused public debate on the Crown's grant of monopoly rights to a joint stock Company trading to India. The Levant Company pamphleteers inflamed the economic and political fears of East India Company enemies. Their broadsides heralded familiar themes: Indian textile imports destroyed domestic industries, increased unemployment, raised parish poor rates, and limited investment opportunities. Levant supporters demanded Parliamentary protection from what they characterized as an East India Company national betrayal, and they urged an all-out struggle against the Company's monopoly privileges. What began as an esoteric debate between two equally privileged companies opened a much wider national battle about royal power and East Indian merchant responsibility to the na- tion. Spearheaded by the Levant Company, this powerful anti-East India Company merchant alliance came together in the early 1680s presaging the still more potent coalition against the Company that arose in the next decade. It would be incorrect, however, to see this coalition as a confederation of monopoly busting free traders.26 Although it protested the Company's exclusive trading rights, the Levant Company opposition desired more to profit from than to destroy East India trade. From the days of its first charter in 1601, East India commerce produced spectacular prof- its, and non-Company merchants yearned to partake of this lucra- tive Eastern trade. These newcomers to Asia business contended that any English trading company with such wondrous returns had to open, and reopen regularly, its wealth-making opportunities to the widest possible community of English investors. None of these outsider merchants wished to see Indian trade castrated. The Stuarts displeased them because they protected the monopoly privileges of one small group of London merchants who would not allow them to participate as equals in East India trade. Al- though Company insiders argued back that those who risked their capital earliest deserved these privileges, they did not persuade the growing community of eager outsiders with capital to invest.27 The opposition tried to bring its case before Parlia- ment, but the Crown stifled legislative discussion of its rights to grant charters. When the India Company refused to rewrite its rules for redistributing stock in a way that would have shared corporate profits more equitable among insiders and outsiders, the losers sought more direct redress. From 1680 to 1684, seven- ty-three prominent merchants tested the Company's charter rights by trespassing in East Indian trade.28 In early 1680, this band of disgruntled Englishmen from inside and outside the Company, began trading within East India Company waters. Commanded by an ex-Company director, Thomas Papillon, and many of his supporters who had lost an earlier intra-corporate battle to take control of the Company from its powerful director, Josiah Child, this group united to hire ships and to invade the Company's Asian trade.29 Knowing how and where to trade, these interlopers bribed customs commissioners, and flooded English markets with Indian textiles, spices, and raw materials. Their competition with the Company produced wealth for many, but it had a disastrous impact on England's economy. Trade warfare lowered prices of India imports, upended the Eng- lish silks and woolens industries by dumping too many textiles on an already surfeited market, and dropped the value of East India Company stock.30 Faced by successfully competition, the Company began to fight back against the transgressors in 1683. In that year, its Directors bought a new charter from Charles II reaffirming their monopoly and they had Thomas Sandys, a prominent interloper and London merchant, indicted for illegal trading.31 During the two year trial that followed, supporters and opponents focused public attention on the decade's most intense business controversy. The economic issues debated included ones of free trade versus pro- tection, domestic industries versus foreign imports, and kingly prerogatives versus the political nation's right to legislate international trade. At the heart of the matter was a simple question: Could the monarch grant monopoly trading privileges without Parliamentary approval?32 East-India Company v Sandys settled this issue until after the Glorious Revolution. Judge Jeffries' decision gave James II, by the law of the land, na- tions, and nature, the exclusive "Power of making Companies to manage Traffic."33 The Company won its case.34 By 1686, the East India Company had silenced its adversaries in the courts. To celebrate Jeffries' verdict, the Company gave new gifts to James II and received still another charter. The courts reconfirmed the East India Company's preeminence in the India trade and its rights to fine interlopers if they trans- gressed against the Company's monopoly. The Company had defended its right to buy and sell, import and export, without competition from domestic entrepreneurs, even if its imports threatened to destroy English industries. The Crown's sale of its prerogative rights to the East India Company had successfully nourished a form of trading that throve not primarily by its efficient busi- ness practices, but by buying inexpensive exotic goods in India and selling them at monopoly prices in England and its colonies. Thus, the East India Company routed its enemies before 1689. If the Company harmed English producers of silks and woolen goods, the latter could protest to the King. If it exasperated investors or merchants, they could negotiate with the Company for inclusion on terms determined by Josiah Child and his supporters. If East Indian trade in wrought cottons and silks threatened rents, English landlords could petition Parliamentary for redress of grievances. After Sandys' case, England's landlords and capitalists understood that James II, receiver of substantial financial support from the East India Company, would reject anti- Company petitions. Protected by a still potent Stuart absolut- ism, the East India Company could import Eastern cottons and silks even if they destroyed English industries. The Crown gave privileges to a Company that functioned by the golden rule of merchant capitalism, "Buy cheaply, sell dearly." Those outsiders dissatisfied with petitioning James II could attempt revolution. Commercial Capital and East India Trade, 1689-1721 James II lost his throne, and the East India Company lost its best protector in 1688.35 The Revolution made the Company's expensive charter almost worthless. Without Crown defense, a rejuvenated anti-charter opposition assaulted the Company's vulnerable prerogatives; liberated from James II and Judge Jef- fries' decision in the Sandys' case, the losers in the 1680s mercantile struggles reentered East India trade triumphantly. For more than ten years after 1689, an "Old" and "New" group of East Indian merchants struggled among themselves to own India's trade. Eventually, after a decade of intraclass infighting, Parliament would legislate that they share the baby by becoming a United East India Company.36 For the time being, they remained trading adversaries. Because it received its charter from James II, the Old East India Company expected little protection from William III, Par- liament, or the courts after the Revolution. For several years, it fought rear guard battles against enemies who sought both its trade and revenge for the Company's pre-Revolutionary victories. The interlopers petitioned the House of Commons for reparations of fines paid to the Company after 1680s court decisions. Charles Price, John Joliffe, and Edmund Harrison were among those who demanded compensation for the Company's "great oppressions" during the reign of James II.37 Samuel White also claimed "great losses" because the Company had "seized" his estate in the East Indies. The House of Commons responded by establishing a special committee of landlords, financiers, merchants, and manufacturers to consider these petitions and the entire "Affairs of the East India Company."38 The committee included rentiers and capital- ists with a variety of investment experience. One such committee member was the financier, Sir John Banks, who raised cattle on his Aylesford estates and "drew half his income from trade, shipping and exchange dealings, but thereafter land and public finance."39 Another Member was the banker, Sir Robert Clayton, who owned Royal African stock, collected annual rents of L3,869, and sold timber to shipbuilders from his Surrey estates.40 Other interested members included Thomas Papillon, previous East India Company officer and holder of a victualing commission and Hugh Boscawen, who would become, by 1720, controller of the household, groom to the Bedchamber, and a member of the House of Lords.41 Anti-East India Company petitions of 1689 contained an outline of the economic aims of the New East Indian coalition. What became quickly evident was that the New traders' goals differed little from the Old Company's aims. Although the New Company denounced "the manifold Abuses of the present East India Company both at home and abroad," they did not demand free trade for India.42 The New syndicate simply called on Parliament to transfer the monopoly rights that James had given to the Old Company to itself; their petitions condemned Josiah Child and other directors for management style rather than for having flooded English markets with cheap Asian goods. The "New men" claimed that the "Old men" ran India trade for "private Gain without any Regard to the publick Good."43 They maintained that a Parliamentary constructed East India Company would be more "conducing to the Preservation of so beneficial a Trade to the Kingdom," but, during these first debates after the Revolution, they never proved how their actions in India trade would have differed from those of their rivals.44 Because the New syndicate wished only to run rather than to reform India trade the Old Company leaders revived, and they began to plead their case for a Parliamentary statute that would renew and strengthen their prerogatives. Led by Josiah Child and Thomas Cooke, Old East India Company stockholders insisted that they had always desired a Parliamentary-sanctioned trade, and they contended that they could bring much more Asian wealth to England than their adversaries, offering their 90 year history as evidence.45 They also threatened disaster if Parliament founded a New Company.46 Their spokesmen accused the New syndicate of producing only "Troubles and Losses" since the Revolution, and they claimed that England's East India trade no longer had pro- tection "equal to their [continental] Neighbours," in Asia.47 "European Nations," they contended, took advantage of the quarrel between New and Old Companies "to the Hazard, if not the utter Ruin, of the English Commerce to those Parts."48 Without protec- tion from foreigners and interlopers, the Company promised that India's trade would deliver less revenue to the treasury than it once provided. The Company maintained that it, not the New syndicate, had pacts with princes, and that only its forts truly protected India's trade against French intrusion in the Far East. The Company appealed for a statute that reaffirmed its monopoly trade in Asia, and pledged to reform all pre-Revolutionary Compa- ny practices that Parliament condemned. The Company also prom- ised more cash to Parliament than it had given to the Stuarts. These two consortia of East India merchant capitalists crystallized their arguments for a Parliamentary-authored trading contract in 1691.49 However, the audience for these debates was no longer Crown-dominated. The Companies debated their cases before a Parliament made up of a newly freed political nation of English landlords, investors, merchants, and manufacturers. The Glorious Revolution had not destroyed merchant capitalism in East India trade, but it had established Parliamentary preeminence in determining the terms for all English trade. After 1688, English landlords and manufacturers demanded that India merchants, wheth- er Old or New, conform to an agenda that served the economic interests of those who lived from rents and industrial profits, as well as those who lived from trading. Soon after the Revolu- tion, Josiah Child wrote that, "Such Commerce as serves purely to the support of Luxury, and tends in all other Respects to the impoverishment of the Nation," should be "restrained by Law."50 Even Child, the most outspoken defender of Old East India Company privileges during the reign of James II, realized that, after 1689, Parliament's pronouncements of national interests took precedence over any East India Company stockholder's desire for profits. The battle to fashion a more landlord and industry-directed East India trade began with demands from silk and woolen manufac- turers that the first principle of India trade be consideration of the sale of English commodities. Textile manufacturers long held East India Company importers responsible for their depressed markets.51 When these manufacturers petitioned Parliament, they found allies in the many landlord-legislators who linked their empty rentals to the same surfeited woolens markets. Cheap Indian cotton imports alarmed landowners because failed sheep farmers meant abandoned farms. In addition, any unemployment in the countryside increased the landholder's payment of parish poor rates to sustain the jobless.52 Years of uninhibited silk and cotton importing by the East India Company and interlopers threatened unemployment in English industries that hired as many as 100,000 workers in some areas of the country.53 In woolen manufacturing, constantly falling prices and lost markets affect- ed England's economy, producing lost jobs in textiles and a host of dependent industries. In a nation where most manufacturing took place in the countryside, landlords and manufacturers lived amidst distressed, and sometimes dangerous, unemployed workers during periods of market downturns. Blended with the landlords' desire to protect their rents, and the manufacturers' desire to increase their profits, was a wish by both classes to avoid industrial unrest. Shortly after the Glorious Revolution, the House of Commons received petitions from the "Silkthrowsters, Weavers, and Dyers" of London demanding that the importation of manufactured silk be halted.54 In 1689 and 1690, Parliament responded with its first post-Revolutionary statutes that discouraged the "Importation of Throwne Silke," and increased duties on wrought silk to limit its entrance into England.55 These bills, together with the war against France, interrupted the inflow of manufactured Indian garments and protests ceased for a time. After the war they would begin again, but before that Parliament readied its agenda for East India trade. In December 1691, the House of Commons adopted 15 portentous East India trade resolutions containing stipulations that legislators incorporated in the East India charters and statutes that they wrote after 1698.56 These pro- nouncements included demands that any East India Company lend the nation at least 1,500,000 pounds (which would later become part of the National Debt), that its voting procedure must be demo- cratic, and that it must aid domestic industries. Another reso- lution required Eastern traders to buy a specified amount of English commodities: it "is the Opinion of this [Parliamentary] Committee, That the Company to trade to the East Indies shall be obliged to export every Year, in their Trade, Goods, being the Growth and Manufacture of this Nation, to the value of One hun- dred thousand Pounds, at least."57 Although the category and quantity of the manufactures to be exported varied in subsequent legislation, for the first time in the East India Company's history it had to buy English products before Parliament would permit it to trade in Asia.58 The New and Old East India Company now outbid one another for the right to live by these House of Commons' resolutions. The New Company encouraged friendly woolens manufacturers to petition Parliament complaining that the Old Company went years without buying their manufacturers. These petitioners demanded that legislators rescue their industry by chartering a more responsive East India Company that would "be obliged to transport a certain Quantity of Woolen Manufactory of this Kingdom."59 The Old East India Company directors called on supporters to petition Parliament on their behalf. They encouraged Gloucestershire textile manufacturers to swear that the Old Company aided their economic recovery and to explain that the war, and not the Compa- ny, interrupted their trade. They, and their fellow petitioners from Wiltshire, assured legislators that the Old East India Company intended "to revive their ancient Commerce to China, and other Places, [and] have, within Three Months last, bought most of the Petitioners said Manufactures, and encouraged them to make more."60 The two Companies vied aggressively for Parliamentary permission to bring spices and silks to England, even if they had to carry away heavy woolen cloth that no one in India wanted to buy. These resolutions, petitions, and promises redefined English East Indian trade policy over the next two decades. Any Company trading to India must now prove that it benefited a multiplicity of domestic interests. By 1693, Parliament interrogated Old Company representatives to ascertain whether they exported the minimum of L100,000 of English goods annually. Suspicious of the Old Company business practices, Members required William III to produce yearly proof of Company compliance: he was to report to Parliament on "the nature, quantity, quality, value, and prime costs of all such goods, of the growth, product, or manufacture of this our kingdom of England" sent to Asia in the previous year.61 English manufacturers, supported by their landlord allies, were evening the score for the Company's previous neglect of English exports. In 1696, the House of Commons, responding to petitions from English silk manufacturers, threatened even great- er restrictions on India trade when it debated a Bill to ban all imports of wrought silks and painted calicoes. Manufacturers maintained that their English made silk garments were "now brought to that Perfection, that [they] can cope with any Market in the World, save that of the East-Indies; where they [i.e., the English products] are, and must always be, undersold by the cheap and inconsiderable Wages of the Natives there."62 If Parliament had passed this new India Bill, it would have prohibited the import of all manufactured silk wear and assortments of dyed and printed calicoes. More to the point, the Act would have recap- tured the home market for domestic textiles by banning "the Wearing of all wrought Silks, Bengals, and dyed, printed, or stained, Calicoes, imported into the Kingdom."63 Intraclass warfare stopped Parliament from passing this 1696 statute. Although the silk and woolens manufacturers supported the bill because it forbade the entrance of India calicoes and Persian silks into England, the importers of these goods attacked the statute as a threat to their industries and trades. On one side stood English manufacturers, such as the Japanners, who "complained that the lacquered ware imported by the East India Company" ruined their manufacture, and on the other side stood all businesses that profited from transporting, unpacking, fin- ishing, and selling Indian silk and calico imports.64 In the end the importers persuaded a majority in the House of Lords to block the bill's passage in the upper chamber. Despite demonstrations by London weavers outside Parliament, and strong Whig support in the House of Commons, the bill failed to pass. However, this first attempt to keep India's manufacturers out of England was but a harbinger of the future; before many years, Parliament legislated protection for the burgeoning domestic silk producers and their woolen manufacturing allies. Legislators began, after 1698, to reformulate East India trading rules by passing a series of remarkable statutes geared to fuse the economic interests of English landlords, manufac- tures, Old and New East India traders, and a wide variety of independent investors. These acts transformed what had once been a limited merchant trading company operating under a royal char- ter into a blue-chip investment and commercial giant that lent great sums to the state and ruled India. These statutes eventu- ally produced an East India merchant community that conformed to the economic desires of England's amalgamated ruling class as it expressed those desires in Parliamentary acts. Merchants who received legislative endorsement to trade in India after this date had to prove that their Company satisfied four national objectives: 1) protection of domestic industries from foreign competition, 2) sales abroad of a set quantity of English goods, 3) a more democratic corporate organization, that included equi- table opportunities for stock ownership among all investors, 4) and loans to aid England in fighting its French wars. In short, Parliament promised East India merchants monopoly trade to Asia in exchange for money and pledges to behave as "commercial capi- talists," at least while they did business in England. Members wrote these ideas into a 1698 statute that revoked the Old Compa- ny's Crown charter, and replaced it with an agreement between itself and a reconstituted group of its merchants.65 By its "Act for raising a Sum not exceeding Two Millions upon a Fund for Payment of Annuities after the Rate of Eight Pounds per Centum per Annum and for settling the Trade to the East Indies," Parlia- ment granted the Old Company a three year extension of its exist- ence, but it would have to share its trading rights with New Company merchants.66 The New and Old Company now struggled with one another to buy and sell in India. During the next two decades, Parliament wrote even more transforming acts that restructured East India trade. A 1699 bill placed prohibitive tariffs on "all Wrought silks and . . . all Bengalls and upon all Callicoes painted dyed printed or stained."67 In the same session, Parliament wrote a companion piece for this statute in its "Act for the more effectuall im- ploying the Poor by incourageing the Manufactures of the Kingdom."68 With these two statutes, and those that followed, legislators freed English "Manufacturers of this Nation" from the East India merchants' ability to take "away the Labour of the People." These protectionist acts, and those that reinforced them, eventually outlawed the wearing of Asian silks or calicoes in the "Kingdom of England Dominion of Wales or Town of Berwick upon Tweed."69 By 1722, Parliamentary legislation mandated that English people buy and wear English, or where equity existed, continentally made clothing. Merchants trading to India after passage of these several acts, whether they traded as representa- tives of the London Company (i.e., the Old East India Company) or merchants in the English Company (i.e., the majority of New Company subscribers), adjusted to Parliament's terms for India trade.70 Although both Companies found difficulty in disposing of English woolens in Asia, they dutifully carried specified quantities of these English goods Eastward. They also adjusted to the new prohibitions against Indian imports. Smugglers and pirates might practice merchant capitalism in England, but the Parliamentary-designed India Companies capitulated to statute requirements. Legislators wielded their lawmaking power to modify East India trade, but they also monitored those acts over the next decades. They reacted swiftly, for example, when their late 1690s statutes disappointed investor, manufacturer, and merchant expectations. During the first years after Parliament destroyed the Old Company's monopoly, the two Companies traded separately and rivaled one another in economically suicidal ways. The struggle between an Old Company that refused to die and a New Company that never established its credentials in India produced only market chaos. While the Companies fought between them- selves, interlopers, rajahs, and foreign competitors took advan- tage of their combat to steal trade and reduce profit. The falling prices of the New English Company stock, the relatively poor trading statistics of both Companies, and the increased agitation by England's weavers over cotton imports fueled demands that Parliament amalgamate the two Companies, and that it write new legislation banning India textile imports. When East India trade threatened English prosperity in 1702, Parliament legislat- ed to unite all merchants. Members engineered an "Indenture Tripartite" agreement signed by Queen Anne and the two Companies amalgamating the stock of both East India Companies.71 In 1707 and 1710, Parliament codified this settlement in two statues that "United Companies of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies."72 In exchange for more loans to the government, and an agreement to carry out Parliament's economic objectives for Asian trade, the United East India Company of merchants received a monopoly to trade in the Far East. Collectively, these stipulations within acts passed between 1698 and 1722 transformed East India merchant behavior in Eng- land. When the English Company discovered that it must pay duties of fifteen percent on all manufactured Indian goods im- ported into England, it ordered its India buyers to reverse a century-long India merchant shopping habit: in Persia and India, the Company directed its Presidents to buy "as much raw-silk and cotton-yarn as could be procured."73 Both East India Companies, before and after they united, specialized in bringing home raw materials for English silk and cotton manufacturers rather than importing already processed garments from India. This reversal of roles had revolutionary implications for English and East Indian workers. England's working class increased the amounts of silk and cotton clothing they produced for domestic and interna- tional markets during the next century. India's workers, once a major producer of clothing for Europeans, became the growers of raw materials for England's "dark satanic" cotton mills.74 By the close of the eighteenth century, Great Britain was well on its way to converting India from being a society based on sub- sistence and manufacturing to being its premier colony for raw cotton. India, which had once fed, clothed, and housed itself (and much of the world), was on its way to becoming one of the poorest nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Conclusions The Glorious Revolution settled the constitutional debate over the Crown's prerogative to sell India's trade to merchants of its choosing. From 1689 to 1722, Parliament replaced the monarchy in writing laws to govern the behavior of those who exchanged commodities between Asia and England. As land owner- ship was a prerequisite for holding a seat in Parliament, it was, in one sense, the landlord class that transcribed the laws that redesigned the social relationship between England's merchants and the state. However, England's legislators were not mere landlords when they grasped statute power in 1689. The typical English landowner had long experience with mortgages, bills of exchange, stocks, farming, mining, renting, leasing, and manufac- turing on their estates. These experiences compelled them to view their world as landlords who were also capitalists: 1689 made them landlords, capitalists, and politicians. Uncommon interest in rents and profits led men such as Walpole, Harley, Bolingbroke, and Stanhope to promote English industrial development from 1689 to 1722. Whether contemporaries labeled them landlords, merchants, bankers, manufacturers, or statesmen, as members of the ruling class they fit all these categories. The Finches, Cavendishes, and the Wortley Montagues were landlords, but their account books contained investments in urban real estate, coal mines, mortgages, and stock. Daniel Finch, for example, "belonged to a cadet branch of a landed family long established in Kent" that acquired "substantial es- tates by a series of lucrative marriages."75 After he became the second Earl of Nottingham, he also invested profits from his estates and marriages in mortgages and government tallies.76 By that time, Finch was little different from the Dukes and Duchess- es of Devonshire, who put their capital into lead mining, coal mining, Bank of England, and East India stock.77 Other landlord- capitalist members of the House of Lords, the "Dukes of Chandos and Devonshire with the Earl of Nottingham supported the York Building Waterworks Company against the New River Company," and "When the Earl of Sunderland dropped dead in 1722 he had about seventy-five thousand in stocks and shares."78 The Wortley Montague family grew rich from their Durham coal mines, but they also held stock valued at 3000 pounds in the United East India Company.79 Thomas Cooke, Josiah Child, and James Bateman were known in their world as merchants, but they also owned stock, rented ships, leased mineral lands, and collected rents.80 Applauded by other Members of Parliament for their financial wizardry John Banks, Richard Hoare, and John Hopkins also developed sugar plantations, traded wine and tobacco, and dealt in real estate.81 Celebrated for their roles as "landlords," "financiers," "mer- chants," "manufacturers," or "mine owners," Commoners such as Owen Buckingham, Abraham Elton, and Richard Foley played all these parts, and they deserved all these titles. They collected rents, traded stock, imported tobacco, produced cloth sails, smelted iron, and wrote statutes for all these industries.82 They also brought their diverse business experiences to the writing of East India statutes. These legislators gave the East India Company trading privileges in exchange for loans that the state would repay as part of the National Debt. To safeguard and enhance the wealth of those who owned that debt and wished to grow rich from Asian trade, these statesmen transformed the Crown chartered London trading company into a United East India corpo- ration that carried out its business in a Parliamentary directed manner. When the political nation designed the United trade, it determined the rules that best benefited and protected England's landlords and capitalists. After 1702, English elites could confidently deposit their surplus capital, for short or long terms, into convenient, safe, and available East India securities because Parliament, not the Crown, guaranteed the East India Company's right to exist, to trade, and to own a substantial share of the National Debt. After 1689, the East India Company traded only by statutory permission, and these acts limited merchant capitalist trading privileges strictly to the Asian end of the trade. In the Far East, the United Company was free to operate by whatever rules it could negotiate with the Mogul Emperor or local princes, a lucrative bonus for obeying Parlia- mentary law. In Asia, those princes who employed the Company used its ships to carry goods between one Asian kingdom and another. Because the turnaround time in India trade was a full year, English merchants in India had ample time to prosper, as Thomas Pitt did, from old fashioned merchant trading. While they readied Parliamentary permitted goods for shipment back to Eng- land, they made great wealth doing business as merchant capital- ists among Asia's lands. Parliament, however, mandated different guidelines for East India Company trade in England. From 1689 to 1722, the East Indian merchants trading in English ports learned to haul woolens out and to bring home only those commodities that Parliament approved: in English waters East India merchants conducted them- selves as obedient commercial capitalists ready to worship the ideas that their trade should nourish efficiency, reduce the cost of producing commodities, and increase sales of British commodi- ties worldwide through cheaper prices than their competitors could match. Chapter Eight: Endnotes (1) This chapter is based on the following secondary works: John Bruce, Annals of the Honorable East-India Company, from their Establishment by the Charter of Queen Elizabeth, 1600, to The Union of the London and English East-India Companies, 1707-8, 3 vols. (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810); K. N. Chaud- huri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint Stock Company, 1600-1640 (London: Frank Cass, 1965; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965), and The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1978); Sir William Foster, "The East India Company, 1600-1740," in H. H. Dodwell, editor, The Cam- bridge History of India, vol. 5; Sir William Wilson Hunter, A History of British India, 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1966); William Robert Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols. (1912: reprinted, Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1968); and, Ian Bruce Watson, Foundation for Empire: English Private Trade in India, 1659-1760 (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980). (2) Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3 of Capital. Book III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, ed. Frederick Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 331. (3) For a discussion of merchant capital that illuminates Marx's work on this subject see Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg and Harry W. Pearson (eds.), Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1957), and Niels Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). (4) See Steensgaard, The Asian Trade, 12-21, for an introduction and a bibliographical discussion of the distinction between peddling and redistributive trade in the pre-capitalist world. (5) Detailed studies on the relationship among commercial and productive capitalists are noted throughout my book, but this point is well illustrated in Russell R. Menard, "The Chesapeake Tobacco Industry, 1617-1730," Paul Uselding, editor, Research in Economic History: A Research Annual, 5:109-178 (Greenwich, Con- necticut: Jai Press, 1980). (6) "The Bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instru- ments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of commu- nication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civil- isation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artil- lery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 47 vols. (6:488). (7) Chaudhuri, Trading World, 412-413. (8) Foster, "The East India Company," 5:77. (9) Scott, The Constitution, 2:128-130. (10) Hunter, British India, 2:184. (11) Charters Granted to the East-India Company from 1601, also the Treaties and Grants Made with, or Obtained from, the Princes and Powers in India from 1756-72 (London: 1773). (12) Hunter, British India, 2:185. (13) Ibid., fn 1, 182, and fn 1, 183. (14) Watson, Foundation for Empire, 35. (15) Foster, "East India Company," 96-97. (16) For exchange operations see, Chaudhuri's Chapter, "The Export of Treasure and the Monetary System," in Trading World, 153-189. (17) For information on "the growth within the company of a privileged body of shipowners, known in later times as the 'shi- pping interest'," see Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 90, and A. L. Crowe, "Sir Josiah Child and the East India Company," Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1956, 17. (18) Sir Josiah Child, A Treatise Concerning the East-India Trade, in Sir Josiah Child: Selected Works, 1668-1697: A Collec- tion of Seven Works by, or Attributed to, Sir Josiah Child, Republished from Originals in the Goldsmith's Library of Economic Literature (1681; republished, Farnborough, Hampshire: Gregg Press, 1968), 36. (19) Watson, Foundation of Empire, 188-189. (20) Susil Chaudhuri, Trade and Commercial Organization in Bengal 1650-1720: With Special Reference to the English East India Company (Calcutta; Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1975), 155. (21) John Irwin and P. R. Schwartz, Studies in Indo-European Textile History (Ahmedabad, India: Calico Museum of Textile, 1966), 15-27. For a complete list of imports from South-East Asia, India, and Persia see Chaudhuri, Trading World, chapters seven and eight. (22) For a theoretical discussion of the contemporary debate about the economic value of India trade, see William Barber, British Economic Thought and India, 1600-1858: A Study in the History of Development Economics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), and William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought, 1600-1776 (London: Methuen, 1963). Seven- teenth and eighteenth century essays attacking and defending the Company are too numerous to list here, but, for an extended list of the most important pamphlets see, Scott, The Constitution 1:xli-lvi. A printed sampler of the discussion can be found in: East-India Trade: Selected Works, 17th century, A Collection of Five Rare Works Republished from Originals in the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature, The University of London, by Kind Permission of the Librarian (Farnborough, Hampshire: Gregg Press, 1968). (23) Charles Davanant, An Essay on East India Trade (1696; re- printed, Selected Works), 52-53. (24) Scott, The Constitution, 2:147-149. Most of these argu- ments are summed up in, The Allegations of the Turky Company and Others against the East-India Company, relating to the management of the that Trade (1681). (25) The Allegations of the Turky Company, 5. For the struggle between the two companies, see Scott, The Constitution, 2:134-149 and Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (1935: re- printed, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), 102-105. (26) Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 193-195. See also, Scott, The Constitution, 2:140- 141. (27) Scott, The Constitution, 2:144. (28) D. W. Jones, "London Overseas-Merchant Groups at the End of the Seventeenth Century and Moves against the East India Company," (Oxford D. Phil., 1970), 324-327. (29) Scott, The Constitution, 2:146. (30) Ibid., 146-147. (31) Charters, 118. For the trial see, The Argument of the Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench concerning The Great Case of Monopolies between The East-India Company, Plaintiff, and Thomas Sandys, Defendant Wherein their Patent for Trading to the East-Indies, Exclusive of all others, is Adjudged Good (London, 1689). Scott, The Constitution, 2: 148-149 for a summary of Sandys' case. (32) William Holdsworth, A History of English Law (1924; second edition, London: Methuen, 1937), 6:326-327. (33) The Argument, 30. (34) The verdict was "followed by a new charter dated April 12th, 1686, in spite of further petitions of the Levant company. It is interesting to notice that in the following year James II. acquired L7,000 of East India Stock" (Scott, The Constitution, 2:149). This new charter increased the Company's fiduciary power by allowing it to coin any species of money usually coined in India (Charters, 139). (35) Chaudhuri, Trading World, 426. (36) D. W. Jones, "London Overseas-Merchant Groups," 335-336. (37) Journal of the House of Commons, 10:92. See also, Scott, The Constitution, 2:150-152. (38) Journal of the House of Commons, 10:92. (39) Richard Grassby, "English Merchant Capitalism in the Late Seventeenth Century: The Composition of Business Fortunes," Past and Present, 46 (February, 1970), 101. (40) Frank Melton, Sir Robert Clayton and the Origins of English Deposit Banking, 1658-1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4 and 6. (41) Romney Sedgwick The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715-1754, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1:475-477 (Boscawen) and 2:324 (Papillon). (42) Journal of the House of Commons, 10:541. (43) Ibid. (44) Ibid. (45) Ibid. (46) Ibid., 541-542. (47) Ibid., 363. (48) Ibid. (49) For analysis and further bibliography on the pamphlet war between the two companies, see Barber, British Economic Thought, 38-55. (50) Josiah Child, A Discourse of the Nature, Use and Advantage of Trade: Proposing some Considerations for the Promotion and Ad- vancement thereof, By a Registry of Lands, Preventing the Expor- tation of Coyn, Lowering the Interest of Money, and Inviting Foreign Families into England (1694), 13. (51) P. J. Thomas, Mercantilism and the East India Trade (1926: reprinted, New York: A. M. Kelley, 1965): Chapter 3, "The Dis- content of English Industries," 48-66, contains the most complete treatment of this subject. (52) Ibid., 54-56. (53) Ibid., 50. (54) Journal of the House of Commons, 10:280. (55) 2 W. & M., c. 9, and 2 W. & M., Sess. 2, c. 4. (56) Journal of the House of Commons, 10:591. (57) Ibid. (58) The codicil appeared for the first time as official policy in the second Charter granted by William III to the Old East India Company in 1693, Charters, 165. (59) Journal of the House of Commons, 10:710. (60) Ibid., 11:43. (61) Charters 176. (62) Journal of the House of Commons 11:496. (63) Ibid., 11:521. (64) Thomas, Mercantilism, 102. (65) William granted his fifth charter to the Company on Septem- ber 5, 1698. It was based on this agreement with Parliament, see Charters, 188-242, and 9 Will. III, c. 44. For a full list of subscribers to the a loan of two million pounds, see Charters, 196-206. (66) 9 Will. III, c. 44. (67) 11 Will. III, c. 3. (68) 11 Will. III, c. 10. (69) 11 Will. III, c. 10. (70) The legislation of 1698-99 established a New English Compa- ny trading to the East Indies, but this did not mean the demise of Old East India Company. The Acts gave the Old Company three years to wind up its affairs. They also allowed anyone who loaned money to the government the privilege to trade as part of the New Company. Members of the Old Company reconstituted them- selves as successful competitors of the New Company. They pur- chased L315,000 of the two million loan stock which permitted subscribers to trade to that amount in the East Indies, and in 1700 Parliament passed a statute extending the Old Company's life beyond 1701. At the same time, Parliament and William III urged that the two companies unite. For the full story, see Scott, The Constitution, 2:164-179. (71) Charters, "Indenture Tripartite between Her Majesty Queen Anne, and the Two East India Companies, for Uniting the Said Companies," 243-313 (dated 22 July 1702). (72) 6 Anne, c. 71, and 10 Anne, c. 34. (73) Bruce, Annals, 3:355. (74) Alfred P. Wadsworth and Julia De Lacy Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600-1780 (1931; republished, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 116-119. (75) H. J. Habakkuk, "Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham: His House and Estate," in Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan, ed. J. H. Plumb (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), 142. (76) Ibid., 162. (77) Bank of England stock ledgers 9 A-H 4605, 1713-1720, and East India stock ledgers, 1715-19, A-Z, 192. See also, J. V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England: 1660-1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) 223. (78) J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman, vol. 1 (1956; reprinted London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1972) 1:7. (79) East India Ledgers, 1719-1723, A-Z, 496, and Edward Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century: The North-East, 1700-1750 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952) 48, 167. (80) Thomas Cooke was a director of the Bank of England, a large holder of old East India stock, and a dealer in gold and silver; Sir Josiah Child was a navy victualer, a large landowner, an owner of ships rented to the East India Company, a timber mer- chant, and a dealer in mortgages; Sir James Bateman lived long enough to own stock and held office in the East India Company, the Bank of England, and the South Sea Company. He was a land- owner, wine merchant, and a prime warden in the Fishmongers' Company. Notes on the holdings of Cooke and Child in the East India Company and other adventures can be found throughout D. W. Jones, War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 287 and 330. For Bateman see, Gary Stuart De Krey, A Fractured Society:The Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688-1715 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 150-153. (81) Sir John Banks was involved in trade, shipping, government finance, Royal African trade, and the East India Company. He also had extensive landholdings and adventured in cherry orchards; Sir Richard Hoare, fleet street banker, inherited wealth gained from stock, trade in Rotterdam linen, and real-estate; John Hopkins a London financier and M. P. from St. Ives, made money as a tobacco contractor, and trader to Portugal. For John Banks see, Grassby, "English Merchant Capitalism," 101, and D. C. Coleman, Sir John Banks, Baronet and Businessman: A Study of Business, Politics and Society in Later Stuart England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 38-41, 47-50. For Richard Hoare, see Melton, Robert Clayton, 46, and De Krey, Fractured Society, 161. For John Hopkins, see P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967), 128, 182, 188, and 495; see also, Sedgwick, House of Commons, 2:148. (82) Sir Owen Buckingham manufactured sail cloths in Reading but was better known as a tobacco and hemp merchant. He held lands in Berkshire and traded to the Canaries and Barbados; Sir Abraham Elton owned a brass and iron foundry as well as copper works in Bristol. He rented church lands, manufactured cloth, and was treasurer of the Merchant Adventurers. The Foley family held land and iron works, produced nails and wire, and invested in the major stocks. For Buckingham, see De Krey, Fractured Society, 149. For Buckingham, Elton, and the Foley family, and Sedgwick, House of Commons, 1:504, 2:11, and 2:40.