ABSTRACT
WILLIAM BRAUND had his ventures in the Portugal woollen trade and the bullion trade, and underwrote his risks at Lloyd's. He would not, however, have been a representative London merchant of that time had he not touched two other spheres of activity; the concerns, political and speculative, of the East India Company, and those of the London shipping interest, which had become so important in the eighteenth-century rise of the mercantile marine. He did both, and in ways which were closely interconnected. Besides his other shipping concerns, Braund was a member, and (since he was for eight years a Director of the East India Company) an important member, of the famous East India shipping interest. This close body was then in its prime. It was scarcely yet troubled by the attacks, political and economic, which were to harass it during the last quarter of the century, when it shared in the dissolution of a dying East Indian system.
