Empire Of Free Trade

Indian Economic History of Trade, Markets and the East India Company’s Expansion into Colonial Power

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On the eve of British rule in India, bustling marketplaces of the lower Ganga plains and coastal Bengal served as the nodes of an extensive and dynamic network of inland and maritime trade. Indigenous commerce was embedded in intricate social, political and religious practices, which the officials and agents of the English East India Company began to infringe and subvert to advance their own mercantile and political interests.

In Empire of Free Trade, Sudipta Sen shows how such marketplaces became the early sites of conflict between the Company and the ruling Nawabs of Bengal—regional heads of the Mughal Empire,
whose authority the British would ultimately usurp. After it took over the reins of administration, the Company was able to extend its control over trade routes and market exchange by reinforcing the
departments of police and customs.

The book challenges current histories of the period that describe the Company as a trading corporation drawn unprepared into the exigencies of warfare and taxation or portray early British rule as
just another version of a regime founded on the participation of local landed elites and mercantile groups. It argues instead that the Company, encouraged by its military victories in the second half of the eighteenth century, began to build a powerful and intrusive state in India. It was able to undermine, through stringent fiscal and legal measures, the hierarchies and norms of Indian market culture, justifying their intervention in the name of economic reform and ‘free trade’. The chaos and disorder that resulted from this dismantling
helped prepare the way for the eventual assimilation of Bengal and northern India into the British Empire.