Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company, 1550-1650
By David Howarth.
Yale University Press, 2023.
Hardcover, 480 pages, $35.00.
Reviewed by Jesse Russell.
One of the most popular phrases among Marxists during the long reign of Barack H. Obama was “Capitalist Realism.” This term, derived from English philosopher Mark Fisher’s 2009 book of the same name, essentially means that the only form of socio-economic structure that anyone in the West can imagine in the twenty-first century is capitalism; in fact, Fisher argues, as manifested in a host of twenty-first-century disaster films, Westerners can sooner imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Fisher and those who have followed in his wake, such as the Slovenian gadfly, Slavoj Žižek, obviously meant this to be a lament for capitalism’s triumph over its rivals. While democratic socialism and authoritarian socialism were other modes of social formation in the post-World War world, history did, in fact, end with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Fisher, however, was among an older breed of leftists who were concerned with economic issues. While Obama-era liberals and “Bernie Bros” still maintain some attachment to socialism, the left, by and large, has accepted consumerist late stage capitalism and now focuses primarily on race and gender issues.
In academia, “whiteness,” patriarchy, and “colonialism” are critiqued, but less and less is capitalism itself. Indeed, much of progressive scholarship now is in the process of creating historical and intellectual pedigrees of what has been called “woke” or inclusive capitalism, that is, capitalism that prioritizes the race and gender issues and takes a critical and even adversarial stance to Western Civilization. Global capitalism is now the dominant system, and many scholars are in the process of charting the simultaneous rise of both capitalism and globalism.
In his recent work from Yale University Press, Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company, 1550-1650, David Howarth, emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, provides an exploration of the earliest years of the formation the East India Company, one of the key organizations in the creation of global capitalism. Howarth’s work provides a rich and fascinating exploration of the creation of one of the modern world’s most important corporations. Some readers may be offended by his critiques of Catholicism as well as the West. Nonetheless, Adventurers provides a glimpse into the inception of the modern world, a time that was full of promise and, of course, adventure.
Like many recent works on Early Modern and Enlightenment history, Adventurers emphasizes the reality that modernity not only discovered but actually made a new world. This new world was increasingly secular and commercial and was focused on immediate pleasure and comfort. The British East India Company helped to bring this world into being, but it was not merely a corporation that served as an intellectual catalyst. The East India Company was the driver of a cultural and sociological sea-change across the globe.
The precedents of the East India Company include the Muscovy Company, chartered by Mary Tudor. One of the most important figures of the Muscovy Company was Anthony Jenkinson whose story begins the second chapter of Adventurers as well as the overall story of the exciting and adventurous exploration of the East India Company and the birth of the modern world. In December of 1558, Jenkinson was surrounded by raiders near the Caspian Sea. However, he was equipped with the four wheel-lock pistol. He was able to hold off the Tartar who agreed to negotiation. He then proceeded to Bokhara, where he attempted to sell English cloth to no avail. England’s dependence on cloth, Howarth notes, was one of its hindrances to economic growth. Moreover, paradoxically from the perspective of the post-British Empire twenty-first century, England during the early Tudor period had one of the smallest navies in the world. These economic and naval handicaps, however, would soon be overcome, and Britain would emerge as one of the largest and most powerful naval empires in the history of the world.
The British East India Company had its origins in Westminster in 1600. Its original name was the “Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies.” Among the initial members who formed the group were Sir William Cockayne, Sir Baptist Hicks, Sir Edwin Sandys, and Nicholas Ferrar, who founded the Little Gidding community, made famous by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes also sought to be adventurers. However, these were only the most famous founding members. As Howarth states, all it took was around £200 to be an “Adventurer” of the company.
The Adventurers wanted to reach the fabled East, but there was a problem with how they were to get there; they had the options of rounding the Cape of Good Hope or the North Pole. The East India Company had the example of the Levant Company which had begun transporting goods from the Middle East to Europe. Howarth notes the seeming lack of preparation for the East India Company’s maiden voyage, and argues that many scholars read the history of the East India Company backward, viewing its rise as being inevitable. One of the first ships the East India Company purchased was the Malice Scourge for £3,700. Howarth further traces the East India Company’s origins to the Tudor administrative state begun by Henry VII in 1485 and continued with Henry VIII and his children. One of the key catalysts of the East India Company is the Tudor attempt to dodge the Church’s prohibition of usury. Thomas Cromwell, one of the architects of the English Reformation, also created the new order of wealth under the Tudor State, which was largely drawn from funds seized from the Catholic Church. Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth I’s chief minister, helped create what Howarth calls “a culture of adventurism.”
Another key catalyst for the creation of the East India Company was the English victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588, which created a new sense of “Englishness.” There further was a stronger bond between the monarchy and Tudor state and the company, a bond that was stronger than any other European state. The English’s principal rival was the Dutch, who had their own Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC). The Dutch would eventually seize the Moluccas (part of modern day Indonesia), which inspired British interest in India. Howarth explores the company’s exploits in the Spice Islands, India, the Middle East, Persia, and Japan.
One of the major figures in Adventurers is Sir Thomas Roe, who was the East India Company’s ambassador to India. Thomas Roe’s adventures were so notable that they would inspire over a hundred epigrams from playwright Ben Jonson. The stories of the explorations of British men in the fabled east in search of spices, wealth, and adventure make a fascinating read, but this fascinating read serves also to highlight the fatigue and boredom of our own era.
In 2003, near the beginning of the long War on Terror, Disney released Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The film launched a franchise that would itself become a global cultural phenomenon. One of the most attractive elements of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise was the sense of exploration and adventure the film offered. If the postmodern 80s and 90s were marked by a sense of euphoria, then the twenty-first century in which the Pirates of the Caribbean films were born has been marked by a paradoxical feeling of both boredom and constant anxiety. Pirates of the Caribbean, however, enabled viewers to share in the adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and Hector Barbossa sailing throughout the high seas of the eighteenth century. The open world of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow was enabled by the exploits of the East India Company. Indeed, it can be argued that capitalism in its very essence has a globalizing effect. At the same time, the globalism of late capitalism has had a totalizing and homogenizing effect, making the world less interesting and diverse than it was at the birth of the East India Company or the eighteenth-century high seas world of The Pirates of the Caribbean. As we push deeper into the third decade of the twenty-first century, the sense of boredom and anxiety of the early twenty-first century only seems to increase. What is needed is a renewed sense of adventure, confidence, and patriotism—the same sense of adventure, confidence, and patriotism that propelled the East India Company to create the wealth and wonder of the modern world.
Jesse Russell has written for publications such as Catholic World Report, The Claremont Review of Books Digital, and Front Porch Republic.
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