British East India Company

Portugese traders with routes to the East China Sea smoked opium with tobacco in long-stemmed pipes. They reintroduced the practice to the Chinese who had frowned on its use. The British East India Company... 

In England, the British East India Company had a monopoly on trade with the East. An established sailing pattern for the British East India Company ships was to leave, in midwinter, from London for Canton, China, and return 13-14 months later. Meticulous records of this company s trade, as a result of silk being an important commodity imported directly from China, are housed at the India Office Library and Records in London. These records provide valuable information and documentation for several of the Chinese silk characteristics. 

Such errors were not peculiar to the Portuguese. In 1628, Peter Mundy, an employee of the British East India Company, wrote that bangue had the same effect as opium "soe that most commonly they [ the natives] will call a druncken fellow either Amphomee [opium eater], Postee [opium drunkard] or Bangguee [hemp eater]..."... 

Sometimes, however, despite the most stringent economic, social, and political regulations imposed on the native peoples of another country, business ventures failed. Such was the case with the British East India Company. The problem was not that the company did not make money - its profits were enormous. But many of the company s top executives were not adverse to pocketing a little extra money at the company s expense. Consequently, while the fortunes of the company s managers skyrocketed, the profits of the company and its stockholders plummeted. By 1770, the finances of the British East India Company were in such a dismal state that it was forced to ask Parliament for a loan so that it could avoid bankruptcy. 

The Opium War, circa 1840, was a valiant struggle by the Chinese to prevent the British East India Company from creating opium addicts in China, due to its need to unload all the opium it had purchased in other areas of the st. The Chinese lost, and ever since, for some reason, the public in the West has carried around the idea of "the Chinese opium addict" as some sort of vague foreign threat As Watson reputedly used to say, "Holmes, I really wish you wouldn t smoke so much of that stuff."... 

Opium was addictive, and its addiction caused wars. Tobacco was introduced to China toward the end of the sixteenth century, and its use quickly became a habit. Once tobacco was banned by the Chinese in 1644, opium took its place as a recreational drug among the Chinese merchants, much of this being supplied by the British East India Company. Its export offset the cost of tea imports to Britain. Chinese attempts to stop the opium trade led to the Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1856, following which Hong Kong became a British Crown Colony until 1997. 

The pummelo was brought from its native home of Malaysia to Barbados in the 17th century by Captain Shaddock of the British East India Company. The grapefruit (C. paradise), which was discovered in Barbados in 1 750, is believed to have arisen as either a mutation or a natural hybrid of this fruit. 

For the countries of Europe, opium was a critical product for trade with the countries of the Far East. The problem for the Europeans (a problem Americans eventually encountered as well) was that while they increasingly required goods from the Far East, such as tea and especially silk, countries like China were not equally interested in Western goods. But the Chinese were interested in opium, an interest that provided Europe with the leverage for effective trade. For Europeans, especially the British, this meant that they had to control the trade in places where opium could be grown, such as India. This need for control lead to the creation of Britain s infamous East India Company. 

The "Secret Committee" of the East India Company — under the direction of Lord Shelburne and company chairman George Baring — coordinated British secret intelligence s campaign of subversion and economic warfare against the newly constituted American republic even before the ink had dried on the Treaty of Paris (1783). (3)... 

Who founded the Hongkong and Shanghai Corporation The same circle of merchant banking, trading, and shipping families — centered around the British monarchy — who opened the East India Company s opium trade as an instalment of British state policy during the previous century. 

The British-Chinese expatriate link goes back as long as the British have been in the Far East. The British organized the systematic colonization of tens of thousands of Chinese expatriates throughout the area, and started them out in the lower levels of the business otherwise conducted by the East India companies and their successors. (5)... 

In 1796, when Ceylon was taken from the Dutch by the English, the cinnamon trade became a monopoly of the East India Company, and when the kingdom of Kandy fell under British control in 1815, the wild cinnamon produced there was added to the cultivated kind, but the annual export did not usually exceed 500,000 lb. The monopoly granted to the company was abolished in 1833, and the mei chants Galle and Colombo were allowed a share in the trade. But a heavy export duty of one-third or one-half its value, and the competition of cinnamon grown in Java, and of cas from China and other countries, decreased the cultivation in Ceylon. This duty was not removed until A.D. 1853. 

The Ministry of I ransport also had an enduring commitment to transport British troops overseas for as long as the government maintained its east of Suez policy. The older Bibby and British India vessels were dispensed with. In their place captured German liners were converted into dedicated troop carriers while two new ships, the Nevasa and Oxfordshire, were ordered from Barclay. Curie Company and the Fairfield Shipbuilding Company respectively. 

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