British East India Company

• Established: 1600
• Operated in Japan: 1613-1623
• Abolished: 1857
• Japanese: イギリス東インド会社 (Igirisu higashi indo kaisha)

The British, or English East India Company was a joint-stock company which was the chief agent of British mercantilist activity in South, Southeast, and East Asia in the early modern period. Unlike the Dutch East India Company, which remained active in Japan throughout much of the Edo period, the British presence in early modern Japan was limited to a period of only ten years, from 1613 to 1623.

The Company

Founded in 1600 by 101 English subscribers who pooled their funds into a joint-stock company (in which each owned equal shares of the capital), the EIC was soon afterwards granted a royal charter granting it a monopoly on importing goods from the East Indies. Like the Dutch East India Company which would be founded two years later, the EIC was granted a monopoly on all trade “East of the Cape of Good Hope but also in and beyond the straits of Magellan,” and (so far as English authorities had power to enforce it) access to all “Islands, Ports, Havens, Cities, Creeks, Towns, and Places” in that vast region; though they faced competition from the Dutch, Portuguese, and various groups of Asian merchants, the EIC were to have no competition from other English organizations. Also like the Dutch East India Company, the EIC was empowered to “make Peace or War with any Prince or People that are not Christians, in any Places of their Trade" - in other words, to engage in diplomatic and military actions as if they were a state unto themselves.

Initially at least it claimed only one-tenth the capital of the Dutch East India Company, which was based at Amsterdam, a far more active center of banking and mercantile activity. The EIC moved into the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf and soon displaced Portuguese agents as the dominant European powers there. The Company traded chiefly in indigo, saltpeter, pepper, and cotton textiles. By the end of the 17th century, it had acquired control of ports on both coasts of India, including Fort St. George (Madras, 1639), Bombay (1661), and Calcutta (1690).

The Company gained official permission to trade at Canton in 1699, marking the beginning of its trade activities in mainland China. Though at first the Chinese insisted on silver and gold as payment, later on the EIC managed to substitute opium, grown in Bengal and other regions controlled by the Company. This (in)famously led to considerable addiction problems in China, tensions between the Chinese and British Courts, and the eventual outbreak of the so-called Opium War in 1840.

The Company was disbanded in 1857, following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, after which India came under the direct control of the Crown.

In Japan

Though the Englishman William Adams had come to Japan some years earlier, it was not until 1613 that the first official British East India Company vessel arrived in the islands. Captained by John Saris, the Clove arrived at Hirado on 1613/4/23 (June 11), and after meeting with Tokugawa Ieyasu, presenting to him their credentials and a gift of the first telescope believed to have ever left Europe, they established a headquarters, known as a factory, at Hirado sometime in the 9th or 10th month (November). Richard Cocks served as the first factor, overseeing a staff of roughly one dozen men, though branch offices were also established in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo at that time.

The following year, a ship captained by William Adams was denied supplies at Naha; the Company complained to Shimazu Iehisa and also requested permission from the shogunate to trade with Ryûkyû, but were not granted it.

Sold cannon to Tokugawa Ieyasu, as did the Dutch, which were then used in the Siege of Osaka.

In 1616, Europeans were restricted to Hirado.

By 1623, violence between the British and Dutch East India Companies in the region, vying for economic dominance and otherwise, reached a climax with the Amboyna massacre in the Dutch East Indies, in which twenty men in service to the EIC were killed by agents of the VOC. The English factory in Japan was closed in the 11th month that year, marking the end of any official British presence or involvement in Japan up until the Bakumatsu period over two hundred years later. One exception was the Phaeton Incident of 1808, in which a British ship, the HMS Phaeton, entered Nagasaki harbor in search of Dutch ships to attack; not finding any, it eventually was persuaded to leave.