Thank you very much thank you for the invitation to speak here this afternoon and I'm going to begin by sharing a little anecdote with you and we just recently opened a new gallery at the Museum in Greenwich on the East India Company and when we were doing some research for that with our audiences and our visitors and themed common to all museums around around the world and in the city at the moments and we were Doing some consultation with a group of students and I asked them about the East India Company what they thought of
when they thought of the East India Company and why did they not think that it still existed and one chap came up to me afterwards he was scratching his head and he said I think I've got a reason and East India Company had a very pure big business model very intelligent prescient perceptive remark so I tried to push him a little bit further I mean why was this well they hired all of these ships they went on these two-year long voyages using your sailing ships going around the Cape of Good Hope I wonder why they
didn't just transport all of this stuff back to Britain on jumbo jets Society that is a true a true story and but it just makes the point and about cargoes about trade about the maritime importantly important of the maritime in Britain's Britain's history and pretty in Britain's trading and Imperial history and that's really the theme that I want to concentrate on this afternoon and from one might say the ridiculous to something bit more sublime I hope and quotation from reader Kipling in his poem the merchant men and you can see and he is well aware
of the importance of the maritime in Britain's history that Britain has been fundamentally shaped by its relationship with the sea coast wise cross seas around the world and back again and all To bring a cargo up to London town and as some of you might know Kipling was not only indelibly linked with the British Raj in India he was also instrumental in founding and naming the Maritime Museum in Greenwich so that's what I want to look at this afternoon I want to explore how Britain's overseas trade went hand-in-hand was Britain's global Empire in the 18th
and 19th century days of the sailing ship now the importance of the sea and trading Possibilities was not lost on contemporaries bings talking when I suppose that the steamship has really almost overtaken the sailing ship but in the 18th century at the beginning of the 18th century one of the most perceptive social commentators of the day Daniel Defoe remarked on the role played by commerce in defining Britain's place in the world and he said in 1729 I think I need not tell them that they live by trade that's The British people but their commerce has
raised them from what they were to what they are and may if cultivated and improved raised them yet farther to what they never were now Britain's commercial success was built on complex foundations and commercial maritime links with continental neighbors were already well established by that the 15th century traders from across the British Isles were doing business in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea in the Mediterranean Further afield and there were early English voyages in the North Atlantic expanding the fishing grounds there there was a challenge to the Spanish hold on Central and South America
and further north and England managed to establish colonies in Virginia New England and the Caribbean and by the early and to mid 17th century now by the mid 17th century as I said an overseas trade was tightly controlled by something called the Navigation Acts a Series of laws that restricted the use of foreign shipping and merchant enterprise was often controlled in the 17th century by a series of royal charters that granted monopoly trading rights to groups of investors so companies such as the Muscovy Company the Levant Company and so on had responsibility for conducting trade
as the name suggests with particular regions as well as the privilege of harvesting results of that trade the Profits coming from that and the Atlantic Ocean companies such as the Royal African society the Hudson's Bay Company and the South Sea company were involved in in trade there and in the Indian Ocean world the East India Company was really the major trading company trading from London England to Asia to India and to China and all of this trade depended on ships and ship which relate in turn on protection from the Royal Navy the systems of global
Connections and international trade created by these circumstances really laid the basis for Britain's global Empire and I think continued to affect the world today and one of the central themes that will come across this afternoon is how Britain's trade was linked to Britain's Empire in complex wares not just about pink colored maps or Imperial Durbar they're very much late 19th early 20th century characteristics and and preconceptions If you if you will and but the maritime Empire of free trade that British people felt so distinguished their imperial ambitions and achievements needs to be seen in the
context of the great days of the of the sailing ships so and we're going to have a brief look at some of the ships that actually made this and trading trading worlds that Britain was to become the master of then I want to look in a bit more detail at what was happening in the Atlantic Ocean and in The Indian Ocean looking at - in some ways contrasting systems of trade and finally and briefly look at how the military power of the Royal Navy was used to buttress and support and sustain these commercial concerns now
it's an oft quoted adage that boats boats built Britain and but what were they what were they building and what type of British state emerged as a result of all this maritime activity facilitated by boats ships and other vessels of a great age Of sail and now unsurprisingly this lecture is an overview I'm looking at several centuries of history thousands of vessels tens of thousands of voyages and millions of people but here in a sort of curatorial sleight of hand is an image of one of the building of one of those boats that built Britain
as it were and she was a Royal Navy ship being built on the stocks here but to be floated out at Deptford and Deptford is one of those classic cases in point in The 17th century it was the 13th most populous urban center in England and relied absolutely on the maritime trade and the shipping and shipbuilding and maritime services that were faded along along the Thames and ships like this provided employment for thousands of people in debt for at the time here's another image of a Royal Navy ship and Deford because the Royal Navy is
the largest the single biggest and patron of shipbuilding at the time And that's something that as I say hopefully we get a chance to explore at the end of of the lecture and it's not just paintings that you're going to see incidently all these images and objects are in the collection of the National Maritime Museum and hopefully you can search for them and look at them on our website and but it's not just images it's also ship models this was actually built in 1770 and 2 to 7 to 77 and built to convince the King
George the 3rd and Parliament that it was useful important absolutely necessary to invest in this sort of technology to make Britain strong and powerful and to protect it's an island fortress from competing continental rivals but it's not just the Royal Navy or naval vessels that built Britain its auto ships of which this is a logbook logbook of the Betsi which was a merchant ship a merchant vessel captained by a man called Nicholas Pocock and and Pocock also happens to be A very important and famous maritime artist and you can see here that he's managed to
adorn his his logbook with some very nice vignettes of the Betsy's sailing through various wind conditions not every logbook in a museum's collection this is interesting is this one I can assure you and but it makes the point I think that M merchant ships such as merchant ships such as the Betsy and provide the basis of Britain's mercantile fleet that spread around the World and if trade was the lifeblood of the English near to the British economy and that idea of the circulation of blood started to be used in metaphor as it was only in
the 17th century that and the circulation of blood began to be understood by physicians and and doctors and that metaphor was used again and again to make a correspondence a relation parallel with trade and John Dryden for example remarks if blood flowing through the body kept It alive so trade flowing around the world kept individual countries alive sustained and developed their economies you can see here in this quote and the top one the quote from Defoe that I mentioned earlier I'm making an appeal in some ways to this newly United em country of Britain and
about the importance of commerce and trade and this rhetoric that we can see in Defoe and Dryden and in the William Fleetwood quote em underneath there this is a Rhetoric of an empire of free trade as opposed to the sort of tyrannical empires of settlement developed by the Spanish in the Portuguese in the Americas and where people who live and maintain ourselves by trade and have trade be lost or over much discouraged we are ruined so it was merchant ships then and who were equally as important as the Royal Navy in developing Britain's role as
an imperial and power things like this and This is from the very end of the 17th century and East Indiaman so one of the ships of the East India Company pictured in around the 1690s and it depicts and two views a typical maritime and convention a broadside view of the ship and then an image of the stern of the of the ships says is it the same ship about eight or nine hundred tons displacement we think and one of the largest East Indiaman of its day and that's the type of ship that went back and
forth between London and the East bringing back all sorts of commodities spices textiles and tea and on the behalf of the East India Company as indicated by its its flag here so ships made London the Emporium of world trade and here is another image of Deptford there's global hub of empire in the 17th century here it is in the 1660s at the height of its and maritime power and you can see east india company ships on on the water here and also on the stocks being being built and this Pattern grows from the late 17th
century through the 18th century and by virtue of commercial expansion also by virtue of military and dominance and we get to that at the end of the lecture and but you can see the importance and the expansion of this of this trader just and a statistic to make that more concrete for you in 1794 and Britain exported about 20 1.7 million pounds worth of goods and 20 years later in 1814 that figure was 44 million so that's a growth of over a hundred percent and over five percent per year that's a pretty strong annual growth
rate something we might be thankful for and in this day and age and this is you can see that by 1830 Britain's share of world trade was 45% which is something that not even the Chinese for the Americans have at the moment so 45 percent of world trade carries on British ships London becomes the Preeminent capital market of the world and all of this commercial success relies on these things and well ships and all of the services that go around ships this is an image of as you can see Brunswick dock at Blackwall built by
the Perry family and it accommodated up to 30 East Indiaman so 30 East India Company ships 30 ships sailing to the east and they're serviced here this is the mast Alice wear masks you can see two little and chaps up there fitting Amassed into a ship and this grips of the river of of of the world in some ways the tens providing that arterial route way out to the to the rest of the world and just to make the point that Perry's yard at Blackwall was the largest private shipyard in the world in the late
1790s and early eighteen 1800's and they're building things like this this is the famous black an image or as a model of a black wall frigate built by perry's at black wall in a private Shipyard sold to private merchants and also to the East India Company to facilitate the transport of large quantities of goods back to back to Britain some other image from a slightly different viewpoint here's the mast house here and we've got lots of these in the collection of the muse as you can as you can well imagine and just to make the
point that and ship building and ship technology is not static in this great age of sailors not As if somebody suddenly imagines a sailing ship in the 1660s and this day are the same right up until the advent of steam here it's an image of I think seven East Indiaman in the South China Seas and all ships serving the East India Company bringing tea essentially back to back to Britain and these are massive ships these are twelve hundred fourteen hundred ton beer myths so fifty percent bigger than the one I showed you in the time
of William the third and of Course the volume of ships going to and from Asia on trading and trading expeditions increases increases rapidly so um ship technology does improve it's not as radical a shift I think that's what happens between the sailing ship and the steamship but nevertheless these vessels are adept at playing that route back and forth to to Asia and it's not all an Asian trade I might add and it's not all based on London - and this is a packet a sailing ship coming back to Liverpool and that's invariably and a ship
coming back from the Americas so private and merchants private investors developing this Atlantic world and when the basis of Liverpool's wealth does some of you will no doubt know is based on private merchants shipping to West Africa and the British colonies of North America and and the Caribbean and even just to make it slightly more complicated or intriguing depending on your point of view and even Captain Cook This of patron navigator of enlightenment science so to speak plays a part in our story of trade and empire his voyages to the South Pacific here is on
his is an image from his second voyage the South Pacific when he's looking to find the terror incognita Australia's he doesn't find it surprisingly enough and but all of his voyages undertaken ostensively on scientific for scientific reasons but he's also looking to expand Trade and to explore the oceans in order to develop trading connections and that's where we get the mutiny on the bounty and William Bligh texts the bounty to the South Seas looking to bring breadfruit to transplant breadfruit from the Pacific to the Caribbean and essentially to feed they enslaved populations of of the
Caribbean part of a late 18th century drive to apply the discoveries of science to the problems of Agriculture horticulture and Feeding a slave population in in the Caribbean so even something as ostensibly disconnected from trade and empire as cook and his voyages of exploration do play em some part in our story I'm just good to focus on for starters the Atlantic Ocean and make the point very briefly that the focus of and colonial expansion there from most of the European countries and Spain and Portugal at the beginning was on South America and Britain was no
different I Mean 17:11 the South Sea company was established and as some of you will know that was nothing to do with the Pacific is to do with South America and established partially to as a wheeze to pay off the debts incurred over the previous two decades of war with France and Spain and but you can see on its coat of arms and two herrings to do was expanding fishery fisheries in South America it was also to do with and providing slaves to South American Colonies and you can see and South America relatively prominent on
this this globe here and and it's quite interesting that the mussel for the South Sea company was essentially taken from a poem and by the Latin poet Juvenal which referred to the wealth of the Western world and that was the muscle that and the South Sea company adopted the poem had an alternative name however the vanity of human wishes which I think might be more appropriate motto For the South Sea company which is as most of you will know famous really only because of the bubble and that it lent its name to and one of
their great financial collapses of previous centuries however let's not spend too much time on the south American continent let's and focus our attention in North America because that's the focus of of Britain's imperial and commercial expansion and partially as I said because the Spanish And the Portuguese weren't terribly interested in the wastelands of of North America but Britain had succeeded her England in 1607 had succeeded in establishing a colony a permanent settlement at Jamestown in Virginia and on the eve of the American Revolution in the 1770s and there were 26 British colonies in North America
or from Newfoundland all the way up here all the way down to Jamaica and Montserrat in the Caribbean so 26 in colonies so if You think about it only 13 of them went rebel in 1775 and I said she Britain managed to hold on to the 13 North American colonies even after the war of American independence and this medal tells you everything you need to know about Britain's views of its colonial territory in North America well it's the other side of it really that tells you everything and ships colonies and unfortunately this is not life-size
it'd be wonderful for a museum if it was but It's only this size so it's great difficult to make the point but it's all about ships colonies and commerce now and we're going to get to the East India Company its monopoly in a moment it's actually the difference between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean is that in the Atlantic it's private merchants private investors that are developing this Atlantic trade the East Eastern world the Indian Ocean and Asia is essentially developed by the East India Company a monopoly concern but almost in a feat of
self defeating peak I'm going to now mention a few monopolistic companies in the Atlantic because we're a few companies that had monopolies on particular areas of Atlantic trade one of them is the Hudson's Bay Company which essentially did a lot of furring and trapping in the interior of what became Canada so the the Hudson's Bay Company was very important in the development of the Interior of Canada you can see that here it's also important for moderating and mediating links with indigenous people in the interior of Canada this is a shock pouch collected in the interior
of Canada made by one of the indigenous groups there and it's absolutely classical an indigenous Metis style art but you can see here on the front of this shop pouch is what we think is some Boniface church the first European church to be built in in Canada So giving you a sense of how and trade and European expansion came into contact with indigenous people and the effect that that had the sort of cultural encounters cultural engagement that went handin had hand-in-hand with commercial and transactions and but it's really further south that drives the Brit the
british atlantic economy it's the caribbean that is at the heart of that dynamo of britain's Atlantic trade and my colleagues who Work on the 19th century British Empire and like to India is the jewel in the crown of the Empire and for the 18th century well it's Jamaica I don't hear anyone talking about India in the 1830s really Jamaica that is the jewel in the crown of the British Empire in the 18th century and and when it is captured from the Spanish in 1655 and the available land to British settlers and expands six-fold ok so
they had a number of colonies in Kitts Nevis and Barbados Bermuda and but it's really Jamaica that sets the seal on British ambitions and the Caribbean and all of this commercial success for them and suggesting was based on plantation economies relying on the unpaid labor of millions of Africans millions of slaves who produce em tobacco sugar and other crops for consumption in Europe and of course part of this Atlantic trades that made Britain wealthy was of course the slave trade and slaves captured in Africa and Traded for British made goods like firearms metal wares and
alcohol and it was really it was only abolished in in 1807 so and for a very large portion of the great age of the sailing ship the slave trade was one of one of the the major parts of the Atlantic em economy and just to give you a sense of how important that Atlantic economy was this pistol was awarded to a man who captured a French privateer off scent kits so in other words and this Trade from individual islands is important enough for the French to send privateers and to capture the cargoes to capture the
ships and it's also important enough for the people who are defending that trade protecting that profit to be awarded things that this dis pistol II know then as I say the plantation economies of the Caribbean were absolutely essential to Britain's growth in the Atlantic world and it's the cultivation of sugar as well as Cotton indigo coffee and tobacco that really drove this Atlantic economy of all of this slave trade and the results of slave grown and commodities dependent on the shipping industry and this is a log book again from the museum's collection just showing you
the process of how the slave had operated and it starts very far away from and to see this is a what's known as a slave coffin to taking slaves from the interior of Africa they've been driven to the coast By an African slave traders see one here and whether they'll be exchanged for things like firearms and metal where's that I mentioned and before and it's worth saying that everyone mentioned sugar as this driving commodity of the Atlantic world well that's because two-thirds of all of the slaves and carried on British ships were put to work
on sugar plantations so 66 percent of the slaves brought across the Atlantic were essentially put to Work on these plantations growing sugar and not surprisingly that meant that the consumption of sugar in Britain increased tenfold over the course of the 18th century so that the British sweet tooth is not based entirely on myth and again a land-based activity the growing of sugar or a difficult land-based activity 18 hour days and very difficult crop to grow but again dependent on ships and shipping these small and these very small boats used to take the Unrefined sugar off
off the island to be loaded onto larger vessels and then taken back to Britain to be refined and sold and sold on and and it is worth making the point that between 1750 and 1820 sugar was the single largest import into Britain so it did have a major impact on the British economy and before we leave the Atlantic world that's worth saying that ships were crucial in sustaining the slave trade yes but they also played a part in abolishing that Trade and it's because people were so used to ships were so familiar with the idea
of ships nobody mentioning the East India Company and jumbo jets in this era everyone knew how to read a ship plan knew that ships were at the at the heart of Britain's economy that's something like this was so successful this is the famous image of the Brooks in a slave ship out of Liverpool used as a piece of essentially propaganda by the Society for abolishing the slave trade and they Used what is effectively a technical drawing showing a ship plan and what they've done so successfully is to introduce em human figures into this to make
the point that this is you know any old ship plan it's a technical drawing but if you look closely you get to see how human beings are forced to interact with this with this this technology with this ship so I think that is it gives you a sense of the sort of cultural cachet that ships had at the time Everyone recognized and they could read ship ship plans and and of course the Atlantic trade was never hermetically sealed and this is a trying to provide myself with a springboard to go to the Asian and world
to go to the world of the East India Company but if you think about something like in the British cup of tea in classic and characteristic defining and quality almost of of Britain the tea is sweetened by sugar coming from the Caribbean grown by the Slaves that we've talked talked about and a tea comes from China and so this this world of the Atlantic Ocean is I'm ethically sealed and it's interacting with all of the other creating em networks and trading possibilities that Britain has developed at this at this time and I'll just make the
brief point about this that this is a Punchbowl and made for mr. Barnard yard Deptford mr. Barnard is making ships to go to the Atlantic he's making Slave vessels he's making Royal Navy vessels but the ball is coming from China it's decorated by a Chinese artist this is meant to show these ships in mr. Barnard's yard off with on the Thames this is supposed to be Deptford in the background but I think you get the sense that the Chinese artist has very much used his own local knowledge rather than relying on anything else to depict
Deptford just gonna move on now to talk about and the Asian were the world of The Indian Ocean and essentially I want to do this to provide a sense of contrast with this Atlantic world that I've mentioned the Atlantic world based essentially on private private merchants and private investments people investing in parts of our whole ship voyages individual people individual ship owners and and finance ears but in the indian ocean world britain's trade with Asia is controlled by this thing called the East India Company and and we get to this Image in a minute but
it's I think worth making the points that as one historian has called it was a company a corporation that changed the world and and it's something that went from very small beginnings to become a huge corporation something beyond a company it essentially became the government of large swathe of India it controlled about a fifth of humanity it collected taxes from 90 million people that's four times the size of the British population It had its own army its own Navy and absolutely crucial to defining Britain's trade and Britain's Britain's Empire and we'd get to that in
in a moment and but just to make the point that again just as the Spanish and the Portuguese led the way in the Atlantic and it's the Dutch and the Portuguese leading the way in the Indian and England gets there late and Scotland isn't even in the race just to placate any Scot story yeah It's the Dutch who are leading the way here is the return of a very wealthy and wealth Laden expedition from Asia coming back to Amsterdam and the Dutch are plowing that for a long before the English managed to get a charter
from Queen Elizabeth at 1630 first of December 1600 and before Queen Elizabeth the first manages to grant a charter to the East India Company and she's giving this charter to a group of 218 merchants of the city of London allowing them the Monopoly giving them in the monopoly monopoly and all of English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope okay there is about sixty eight thousand pounds of capital they send for smaller ships commanded by this guy so James Lancaster on the very first voyage and and it takes him upwards of nine hundred and
forty days to get from London to Asia and back again okay he takes in three months to get from London to Dartmouth he's already run out of money and one of Run out of supplies before he gets to Dartmouth he was sending to a wiring back for another sort of credit card booster by the time he gets to the south of course never mentioned by the time he gets to Cape Town and which doesn't even exist when he gets there he loses a couple of hundred men to scurvy before he even gets into the Indian
Ocean he loses a couple of ships and I knew he eventually makes his way back to London 939 days later to find that the New King James the first has actually bought all of the pepper he needs to the next ten years from the Dutch so and very inauspicious beginnings it takes the East India Company this is their first voyage it takes them something like nine years to realize all of the profit from this first voyage in other words they they sell off the pepper that he brings back and in installments it takes them nine
years to get shot of everything and they make a profit of about ninety five Percent which actually isn't terribly much if you think about it and it works at us but eight percent less than eight percent and per year so you could have got a lot more return for your money and with a much less risky investment if you happen to be a merchant in the City of London in 16 or 1 when lancaster leaves so very inauspicious beginnings you know he doesn't have much business sense he goes to Asia with a hold full of
heavy English tweed because he thinks that when he gets to Indonesia that that's what the Indonesians are likely to want and I can't remember exactly when he lands but even in the deepest darkest coldest Indonesian winter I can't imagine that Harris tweed or whatever was terribly and was looked upon terribly favorably by the Indonesians he also brings spectacles with him the last of the last time you went to the optician and he presented with you as a Pair of spectacles before you had your eye test well and you'd probably think of changing your supplier and
again Lancaster going only partially prepared and for his for the sort of commercial challenges that awaited him on the East India Company in Asia and yet for all of this for all of the East India Company's inauspicious and tentative beginnings and it does take a hundred years before it really becomes a stable stabilized and competent organization it does rise To become this huge commercial venture between 1600 and 1833 when it eventually stops and trading there are about four and a half thousand voyages made from London to Asia as I say it ends up ruling a
fifth of humanity and it generates revenue in excess of the domestic British economy at the time it has the monopoly on things like pepper on text size on tea it imports enough tea into the British economy in one year that the taxes the taxes raised on that Tea by the British government are enough to pay for the entire Royal Navy for a year but 10% of the British Exchequer's revenue came from tea in one particular year in the middle of the 18th century so it's a huge cooperation a huge a huge concern and three years
after eventually went out of business in the eighteen 1850s the Illustrated London News call it the most celebrated commercial association of ancient or modern times and I think that is a reasonable Assessment and no it's not just Lancaster he's at the very beginning as you can see and incidentally I must get my plug in here for our new gallery on the East India Company in Asia he is this is the only portrait of James Lancaster that we know of in existence and it's in the gallery in Greenwich so not that I want to take any
business away from Museum of London thank you for having me but do come do you come to Greenwich and have a look at em James Lancaster or look at this this is a model of 350 year old model of a Dutch ship the type of ship that carried spices and peppers back to and back to Europe you can see that it once hung in a church it's a votive model a spectacular piece of piece of kit and and a local story and I've talked a lot about the local stories for Greenwich Deptford being a case
in point but here is Captain Robert Knox born on Tower Hill and and he is a merchant he sails on leasing the accompanied ship like many people before and after him his claim to fame however is that he is shipwrecked and ends up on sale on is kept as a will kept at the pleasure of the king of candy the local ruler and salon and he's not just kept for a couple of months and he's kept for 19 years and he ends arising so long at the age of 19 he leaves at the age of
38 and he brings back lots of things to England When he eventually comes back to London one of which is cannabis he's we think the first man to bring us a Class A drug back to back to Britain and not the Newark from looking and looks very respectable but then don't they all and he also brings back lots of knowledge lots of information and you can see he's writing some of it down he's just made a start on memoirs of my own life so he called it it was published in 1681 absolute bestseller published in
Dutch And French in German and read by practically everyone including a young man called Daniel Defoe and who thought that a story of a man shipwrecked on a desert island or a remote island at least discovering himself as well as lots of other things and actually might provide the basis for every interesting story and then some people and suggest that Knox is one of the inspirations for Robinson Crusoe and I think that's a Relatively fair point to make mmm interestingly this has never been on display before in the museum we've had it since 1934 and
we've never put it on display so um worth coming to see I hope and now moving from the 17th century of the East India Company when its beginnings are shaky small voyages people can get captured and kept by the king of candy essentially the East India Company is coming into an Indian Ocean world that Is well developed it's already got lots of masters and people in charge of it the East India Company is doing a small player in this world but the 18th century the East India Company is becoming more and more important people like
the money brothers here and one of them trades at Calcutta which is helpfully pointing the other trades at Canton and the company starts becoming as I say an Asian trader it starts trafficking goods between India and China and around the Indian Ocean not just between London and India London Asia and back again and here it is in China and trading at Canton the only place in China where the Emperor allows them to trade and they're trading in tea from from China and you know the restrictions are so tight that they have to lure their ships
eight miles upstream at a place called Whampoa they have two individual merchants the so-called super cargoes are loaded onto Chinese vessels And then taken all the way up the river to to count on so the East India Company doesn't get its own all of its own way in in Asia it does become a big player but it's it's still meeting and having to deal with an encounter local local groups and here's the thing that it's looking to China for if it goes to Indonesia for for spices and the famous Spice Islands in the 17th century
it goes to India I think to become the textile merchants of the world that gets All sorts of wonderful elaborate printed and colored textiles from India and really changes what people how people dress in Britain but it's tea that really has the major impact on on people back in Britain and also in the company's finances by 1801 the company is importing enough T to make 950 million pots of the stuff and every year in Britain so it does change domestic ritual and it also changes what people and how people perform that Domestic ritual things like
this and this creates for chinoiserie and the tea classic teapot and shape based on a Chinese example these sort of designs and patterns and careers for Chinese design that affects everyone from the queen of Naples who gave this so-called ginger jar and to Lady Hamilton to George the 3rd who had a pagoda built in his back garden in in Kew I'm just going to skip through some of these images just to make the point that again it's About the East India Company coming face to face with other cultures other systems of governance other creating worlds
and of course what happens when when there's a clash of cultures a clash of systems in everything inevitably or almost inevitably if this in this period leads to two war two battles for Empire this is a flag captured during the Second Opium War between Britain and China okay it's not the East India Company but it's essentially Britain and China going to war over trading rights and I might say a little bit more about that if I've got time and but I do want to just spend the last couple of minutes of the lecture looking at
some selective battles for trade and empire because I tried to make the point at the beginning that Britain's trading worlds in other words the world of the Atlantic Ocean the trading world of the East India Company are inextricably linked with the development of Britain's Empire and of Course Britain's Empire is real reliance on and on the Royal Navy it's reliant on the Royal Navy being able to protect and project power and I think there are a number of a couple of key examples that I want to focus on and execution of Admiral Byng well this
happens in the middle of the Seven Years War I mean the Seven Years War is a classic of a a worldwide war it's essentially the first global war and it's undertaken as a battle for I would suggest to you Mercantile supremacy it's and Britain and France the two superpowers of the day going head to head for military and political supremacy yes but also mercantile supremacy and in defeating them the French in the Seven Years War Britain essentially managed to lay the foundations of its global Empire in the late 18th and early 19th century I'm not
going to spend too much time on this except to say that 1759 is the year to watch out for Wars declared in 1756 but 1759 is this annus mirabilis this year of victories when everything seems to go right for the British Army and the British Navy and and just by giving you a brief synopsis of the battles that were won in 1759 you will I think get the sense as to how much this was a global war a war fought well I'd say the well away from and the channel and from the local home home
waters it was fought there too but and it's also got a global impact So in chronological order you'll be glad to know and gorae in West Africa is capital at the beginning of 1759 in May Guadeloupe in the Caribbean is captured and in the summer of 70 59 the French are defeated off Calais gosh in Portugal on to this man Edward Boscawen and keeper on Bay and defeat of the French by Admiral Hawke here happens in November again some more local battle and in the middle of all of this and this year Britain manages to
take Quebec In September of 1759 under this man and General James Wolfe who's buried at Greenwich just yeah a local a local plug in and you can get a sense of by looking at this bull which is on display in the museum you get a sense I hope of and how gloominess this battle for Empire was you can't see unfortunately the entire way around the ball but you've got Cape Breton here and after the North American coast on the other side you've got em Guadeloupe and inside you've got I think you've got Goryeo Center Senegal
in in Africa so the bull produced for consump in Britain produced to be consumed in Britain to be used in Britain but essentially it's am presenting this war as battle for empire as a global one or certainly an Atlantic one and a success against the Spanish in the Caribbean and this continues and not just in the Seven Years War it also continues through the other Wars at the end of the 18th century and the war of American independence is fought yes over American independence but also for control of trade the Battle of the saints one
of the most important battles in that war is fought for control essentially of Jamaica and Admiral Rodney defeats the French and prevents a French invasion of Jamaica and this happens again and again throughout the Revolutionary and the pull yannick Wars there are battlers close to home but also farther away so a guillotine blade Captured not in Paris not in France but captured it in the Caribbean so the French a French revolutionary idea ideas go into the Caribbean and Britain essentially defending its trading and position in the Caribbean by defeating the French there or Admiral Duckworth's
action of San Domingo the Trafalgar of the Caribbean if you will and San Domingo is only today as Haiti is a days sail away from Jamaica Duckworth defeats a French squadron Preventing a French assault on Jamaica as I said before the jewel in the British crime and he gets all sorts of things for his troubles like a sword and pretty spectacular sword or a tea kettle these and if you want and it's not just happening in have to make this point not just happening in in the Atlantic world Britain's a battle for trade and empire
happens in the Asian world and in the world of the East India Company right from the very beginning in the 17th Century the East India Company ships are relying on the Royal Navy and here one of their ships is taken by the Dutch in Indonesia during the anglo-dutch Wars by the 18th century the Seven Years War doesn't just impact in the Atlantic world this is William James he captures a series of thoughts of which this is one in western India he is fighting was the Bombay Marines the East India Company's Navy he's fighting with the
Royal Navy to prevent the French From taking Britain's trading supremacy in India and and you get the same sort of examples John Allen given this cup for defending an East India Company vessel in the river Ganges against a Dutch and 1782 in the middle of the war of American independence we've got one of the major sea battles of that war where is it happening off the southeast coast of India there are five sea battles of the south east coast of India so I was Trying to make my point that the war of American independence is
yes about independence for the American colonies but it's also about the French taking advantage of that to acquire trading rights needless to say they didn't achieve that aim in in India or even if we think about the Royal Navy and the classic battles of Lord Nelson the Battle of the Nile in in 1790 1798 you can see here and Nelson is essentially preventing the French from assaulting India from from gaining a foothold in Egypt to LA as a springboard to launch an attack on on India and it happens again even on the Indian subcontinent itself
you've got people like this man Tipu Sultan who is an Indian Empire Builder he comes face to face with the East India Company and a young man called Arthur Wellesley future Duke of Wellington and he is he is defeated so Britons and trade and the guise of the East India Company is also part of Britain's Empire in the guise of expanded and interests in in India and I just briefly finished this survey of empire in the east by looking at this battle I've mentioned the Trafalgar of the Caribbean to the consternation of my naval colleagues
I can also come up with Trafalgar of the east on the 14th 15 that says here absolutely the 14th of February 1804 and you get Admiral in WA French leading a French squadron Attacking a convoy a very lightly armed East Indiaman and coming from China carrying a cargo of tea worth 7 million pounds how much is that in today's money well about 200 million pounds in today's money is a very lightly armed but the East India Company convoy by force by dint of I said with tactical supremacy managed to defeat the French they chased the
French away without losing a ship they lose only one one man lightly injured in the encounter and the leader Of the squadron Nathaniel dance unsurprisingly gets a knighthood gets a pension of I think two thousand pounds a year gets an award of 5,000 guineas from various insurance companies I think a cargo of 200 million pounds is worth a few shillings and the leader of the of the squadron but the point being that this is an East India Company convoy it's a convoy of merchantman of ships carrying trade goods and commodities back to Britain And yet
it plays a really important point a really important part in defeating the French maritime ambitions during the Napoleonic Wars in the early part of the 19th century so just another example of how these two things trade on the one hand an empire and the other went went hand-in-hand was securing India for for Britain - oh yeah and another sword quit I quite like my presentation so it's a serious point here though this is alloyed presentation Lodz presentation sword exactly the same type of sword that would have been given to people who fought was Nelson at
the Nile or with Nelson at Trafalgar so there's no distinction being made between people who serve on East India Company ships and protect cargo and people who fight at Trafalgar and essentially defeat the French and the Spanish there now I'm not going to have time to mention anything about this but you get the sense that I was mentioning At the beginning that exploration and scientific voyage of exploration are also connected to the world of M trade and empire and this is my cheesy slide to say that I've run out of run out of time and
but I have got one more anticipating perhaps vainly an encore and just to make this point that we've been talking about the sailing ship of course what happens at the end of the 19th century and when you get steam vessels and basically supplanting the The great sailing ships of of the age and I salute this is the point that steam ships and Technology supplant and replace sailing vessels and this is a the model of the Nonsuch which was a vessel particularly especially built to go through the Suez Canal and you get in this image sailing
a steamship yes but also a reminder of the Suez Canal technological innovation it cut 3,000 miles off and the journey to India from Britain and so as I say you get that Sense that communications are developing technology is developing and in some ways and you might say that the steamship entirely undercuts everything that went that went before and by 1890 by 1890 and Britain is carrying about 60% of the world's trade it's building two-thirds of the world's ships and now you might say that but you might also say that the patterns of overseas trade that
the steamship that the non-search and that others could tap into the sort Of patterns of trade developed em by the Suez Canal were things first laid down by the individual merchants and monopolies trading companies there were things that endured and were developed in later centuries and they weren't something that was sort of entirely originated or initiated by the steam ships it was something that I've already gone before the sudden that the sailing ship and the trading concerns the individual merchants and monopoly Companies had managed to set in train centuries earlier trade brought wealth as we've
seen and this commercial dominance also brought other things it created other powerful forces whose sequences went on to influence other areas of British life so insatiable demands for resources and markets and corrida greater encouraged greater exploration of the world's oceans and we saw that briefly Captain Cook commercial and business Links again set up by the great age of sale and facilitated transoceanic migration from the British Isles and a grand scale so it may have been steam ships that brought most of the British people to the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries but that pattern
had already been established and the defense of trading stations and shipping routes again lying at the root of so many conflicts in which Britain has been involved over the last last three Centuries or something these are things that have been already prefigured in the great age of the sailing ship and so I rest my case they are making the point and the sailing ship and the great age of sail was something that prefigured and helped to initiate and develop and Britain's trade and throwable dominance in the commercial sphere as well as its Imperial dominance in
the political sphere thank you very much was superb global coverage of a global subject that Was thank you very much indeed we do have some time for questions you said that Lancaster took took tweed to the Far East but was there a two-way trade what did ships go out Laden as a rule in the early days and yes they did I mean I think Lancaster had a plan in a plan B and he had to really had to fall back in his plan B most ships from that with with species species so in other words
silver that's what they went with ideally what they wanted to go with and They did at the beginning they went with things like woollen goods because essentially that's what Britain had to offer and and England Britain was used to trading in thing like will with the continent and essentially you went with wool you sold it to people in the Netherlands or in Hanseatic cities and you got money for it then you bought things on on the port on the key side as it were and brought goods goods back so you went with goods You sold
them you bought other goods and you come back with goods and I think the thing that struck Lancaster and that really changed her the East India Company thought about things was that when they went to Asia the only thing the merchants there wanted was the color of Lancaster's money and we live in a we live in a post King's Ian world he says breaking into economists mode where you know people think that you can create wealth whereas in Lancaster's day they Thought wealth was finite if you take silver from the banks of the not yet
established Bank of England does it work if you take silver away from Britain you're essentially it's it's gone forever and you're only getting spaces using things that you shake on your on your dinner or tea that is going down the drain whatever way it goes down the drain and so essentially and they there was a they were trying to bring they were trying to barter goods but for the East India Company it didn't it didn't work it work much better in the Atlantic world of course and but that's because Britain had control over the colonies
so the colonies were growing raw goods Britain was selling them finished goods so that that's essentially the difference between the two systems where the East Indian boy is offering the great current of China and all sorts of things including the model of the Montgolfier balloon and the Chinese just Kind of looking there in kind of stunned the world and because of course all they want is silver the matter of course creates an enormous problem at have got to inflation in China which something I can only just getting over now the preempting of course that just
me to say you mentioned the South Sea Bubble and the South Sea company that is one of those subjects we'll be looking at in the cup sessions time yes sir if you think about All those ships I've set sail from London and Liverpool during the 17th and 18th centuries what proportion never came back good question M I can only answer that really for the East India Company because the East India Company being a finite set of archives and records about 5% of ships never came back that's a pretty low number actually if you think about
it and and they're sailing on the most dangerous route down this straight down That says Atlantic across and the sarong forties run the size of an of Africa very very dangerous seas and then of course you have to come back again so it's not just natural conditions both so the predations of the French and the Pirates if you think of Captain Kidd you know he's some word in the Caribbean and winter than the Indian Ocean I mean that's what they did and I only 5% of East India Company never came back so and I've very
very high success rate Actually and I guess it's the same generally for the others I do know that off the coast of Cornwall they're more than seven hundred wrecks of sailing ships over the year so the East India Company of course was the elite of actually because of course these thing their company being a private company was much quicker to latch on to this guy called John Harrison and stinging sanaa meters so they did all the early testing the Royal Navy was still a bit weary About these things much better to use lunar distance methods
actually showed the East India Company ships these vessels did the French completely Bluff the French if you had some anecdote in here and essentially the trick that Nathaniel danced my managed to carry off was twofold he had Eastern League championships lately armed of course what they did was they painted portal this gun holes on the sides of the ships to Make them look as if they were heavily armed so from a distance they look like warships and he managed to stay over the horizon so Lin hua thought that he was actually he was hadn't kind
of the much bigger fleet than he had so when he the first shots were fired Lin WASC operas and dance instead of staying where he was actually chased the French so he should have pushed home his advantage and pool in while was castigated in France as you can imagine for being Defeated by this new merchant ships disaster and only just about managed to recover his reputation went out to sea about two or three years later and was captured because he ran into a Royal Navy squadron thinking it was just you mentioned that how large the
East India Company was that it was armed were there ever any issues about who actually made foreign policy for the English government very very good very good question I could this is just given me The opportunity I'm going to go back to show this image of Sir William James passing as we do so William James and he is wearing a naval uniform it's actually the uniform of the Bombay marine not the Royal Navy the East India Company had and 250,000 people in its armies that's five times the size of British army very powerful and William
James arises to become the chairman of the East India Company and actually there are letters from William James to the secretary of States the Earl of Hillsborough and the 1780s saying oh you need to go and capture Buenos Aires and the Cape of Good Hope and we give you some ships to do that but you really do need to do this sort of stuff so you're absolutely you've hit the nail on the head that in some respects the East India Company becomes so big that people in Westminster starts thinking hold on a minute this is
quite dangerous that a group of private Merchants twenty-four men sitting in a room in Leadenhall Street control five times as many people as we do sitting in Whitehall and that's why you I think where you get Edmund Burke and Richard Sheridan essentially put in the East India opening the gaze of Warren Hastings on trail and saying well actually you know you pretend to be the government of a country but you're not doing the things that the government should do so you're Absolutely right there is a very very difficult to define blurred boundary between what the
East India Company is doing and how much the British government can affect foreign policy in India and you get two empires you get a British Empire an Indian empire and they're both based in London and it's a it's a fascinating two period of history so do come for the gallery and find out more he says that's really Frank the kizomba Is the number of questions you have afterwards the side of an excellent choice it gives me half a dozen ideas for future lectures so this really has been wonderful afternoon now while we are plugging things
there's a new publication for the National Maritime Museum which is available at a discount on presentation of one of these leaflets to the shop of the National Maritime Museum is called monsoon traders the maritime world of the East India Company Surfers with your particular interest do please pick up one of these leaflets for those of you coming with me into the National Maritime Museum this afternoon we're meeting just up by the Gresham College sign in the foyer in about three minutes time and because the gallery closes quite end this afternoon and we look forward to
seeing you all next week when we'll be talking about the Cutty Sark and why it's important to preserve it but in the meantime John thank you Very much
