ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the history of the East India Company's shipping pass regime on the west coast of India during the first half of the eighteenth century and the role of Anglo-Indian interactions in the progress of that system. It shows that merchants at Surat and other Indian Ocean ports negotiated the terms under which they took out company passes and illustrates how the protective value of the pass encouraged the intermixing of British and Asian commercial interests. The chapter examines the relationship between the development of the Bombay pass regime in the opening decades of the eighteenth century and its emergence as a system of imperial power in the latter half of the century. Merchants in Surat negotiated the terms under which they took out British passes, and Maratha commanders at the end of the 1730s forced the Bombay government to accept treaty terms that substantially reshaped the nature and workings of the British pass regime.
