ABSTRACT
In the period 1793-1801, Dundas was too preoccupied with the war against France to maintain a close scrutiny and control of the Directors’ activities; coincidently, a group of Directors, representing the long-established monopoly of the Shipping interest, began sporadically to attack Dundas’s management of Indian affairs. The members of the Shipping interest resented Dundas’s ascendancy at the India House, so much the more because they suspected that he was encouraging William Devaynes, David Scott, Charles Grant and others to criticise their management of the Company’s shipping. Until the War of the American Revolution the shipping system worked fairly successfully and fulfilled its main function, the provision of a special type of ship at a not unreasonable rate of freight considering the risk and initial expense involved. In 1793 the “New” Shipping group invited Dundas to settle the shipping controversy in Parliament, but, hesitating to fall foul of either of the opposing parties, he ignored the proposal.
