ABSTRACT
T HE first serious attack on the Company's monopoly came from the handful of merchants living in India under the Company's own protection. The story of the
campaign for Free Trade begins with the effort of these merchants to obtain admission to the trade with Europe. The basis of their prosperity was, as we have seen, the wealth of the Company's servants at Calcutta and, to a lesser extent, at Bombay. In the later years of our period there were, Wathen points out, ... five houses of agency ... in Calcutta, circulating through their many ramified channels the life-blood of commerce, and at once affording an employment for native capital, yielding a large interest of eight per cent. to such Company's servants as left the produce of their hard-earned labours to increase in their hands, and making at the same time the rapid and princely fortunes of many an enterprising merchant, who has returned to his native land a prince in revenue, himself the architect of his fortunes ...•
Some idea has already been given of the wealth made in India by individuals; and especially those in the Company's service. This wealth having been further increased by the type of investment Wathen describes, the problem arose as to how to send it to England when the time came for the owner to retire there. Originally, the transmission had been a very simple matter, for the fortunes acquired in India were neither numerous nor large. Before the days of the English power in that country, there had been no difficulty in sending home the wealth of individuals in the form of bills drawn on the Company. During the latter half of the eighteenth century,
however, some other method had to be devised; and that for two reasons. In the first place, the Company placed limits on the amount to be transmitted in this way. And, in the second place, not all individuals were anxious that the Company should know how much they had made. Some other way, then, was needed, by which these fortunes could be sent to England. And yet some other method was not easy to find. It was absurd or impossible to send bullion to Europe, and the sending of goods was the Company's monopoly. A solution to the problem had to be found in the trade carried on by Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, and above all by the United States. It was to the ships of these countries that these individual fortunes were illegally entrusted in the form of goods. The goods so transmitted to Europe-tea, for instance -often ended up in England. Before the duties on tea were reduced there was a great deal of English capital behind the smuggling carried on from Hamburg and Dunkirk and other ports; and it was with English capital that the tea had been, in the first instance, purchased. This transmission of AngloIndian wealth from India to Europe in foreign, and chiefly American, ships was called the' Clandestine Trade'. According to Joseph Cotton, it was a trade organised by 'a great commercial arrangement and combination ... between houses in Copenhagen, or Hamburg, London, Philadelphia and India'.
