Abstract
The power of the English East India Company (EIC) epitomizes aspects of state formation, with a monopoly to trade in Asia granted by the crown. Resistance to such monopolies was also a feature of this era. This chapter examines the extensive “extralegal” trade that dogged both the EIC and the state, activities justified by mariners through what E.P. Thompson termed a “moral economy,” with features specific to seafarers. Seamen risked dangerous ocean voyages for the possibilities of “private trade,” a customary perquisite that was dearly valued, and aligned with smuggling. Sailors shared a powerful sense of a “just” reward for the risks they assumed, a moral economy of action that authorities could not eradicate. This chapter employs the concept of “extralegality,” to avoid “seeing like a state” and to understand the effects of such practices in early modern Britain. Sailors resisted regulations seen as arbitrary, and many Britons, driven by customary values, showed strategic sympathy.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
A richly figured silk fabric, sometimes in a variety of colors, made in China and other parts of Asia, as well as Europe.
- 3.
A type of silk (satin) fabric made in China.
- 4.
Handkerchief fabric, often cotton, was printed in the piece in India, later to be cut and hemmed in individual units.
- 5.
‘Tutaneg’, described as “a sort of Tin”, in a description of the region of Malacca in present-day Malaysia (Dampier 1705, p. 169).
- 6.
Used to make fan sticks, button, parts of jewelry and decorative notions of different sorts.
- 7.
Initially the name given the finest quality of black teas imported from Asia at the beginning of the 1700s, later referencing the lowest quality (Oxford English Dictionary Online).
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Lemire, B. (2023). Monopoly Claims and Moral Economy: Extralegal Practice in British Global and Local Trade c. 1660–1800. In: Hyden-Hanscho, V., Stangl, W. (eds) Formative Modernities in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8417-4_7
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