The East India Company (EIC) inevitably dominates the study of the English in Asia. But it was the leadership of the short-lived Guinea Company that actually secured the English presence in the Indian Ocean basin, ironically at the expense of the imperial vision of those leaders. In the mid-1630s, English overseas interests existed in a parlous state. The Guinea Company had first received a charter to trade along the Atlantic coast of Africa in 1618, but mismanagement in the boardroom and on the ground had left it moribund while the Dutch had driven the East India Company, first chartered on 31 December 1600, from eastern Indonesia. The EIC had fared rather better in India, but its dissolution seemed practically certain without Crown intervention by 1635.

Image: Seventeenth century map of India. Blaeu, Joan, and Blaeu, Cornelis. "Magni Mogolis Imperium." Map. 1640. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82kq28j (accessed July 03, 2020). Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

Sir William Courteen, a vastly wealthy Anglo-Dutch merchant, moved to recover the Asian situation. In 1636, his Courteen Association obtained Crown approval for an expedition into and beyond the Indian Ocean that would cultivate commercial opportunities in India, China, Japan, even California and places in between where the EIC had no presence. The Association established factories at Carwar (Karwar) and Bhatkal on the Malabar Coast, at Aceh in Sumatra, and at Rajpur in Gujarat. Sir William died shortly after his fleet departed London, a blow from which the Association never really recovered although Courteen’s son, also William, sent a second voyage to the Indian Ocean in 1644 with an additional charge to establish a colony in Madagascar.

This foray, though, ran afoul of the deep hostility of the Dutch and the EIC while Courteen junior was obliged to flee his creditors. The EIC directors were roused to direct their agents to deny assistance to Courteen vessels when they appeared at their factories—in contravention of royal instructions—and to extend the company’s presence on the Coromandel Coast. It received a farman to establish a post at Madras (Chennai) in 1639.

Maurice Thompson, perhaps the preeminent English overseas merchant between 1625 and 1675, picked up the pieces. Thompson had amassed substantial experience in overseas endeavours along with the connections and the capital to pursue a commercial agenda linking Asia to America with Guinea at the centre, the scale of which transcended even that of Courteen. Having been heavily involved in supplying Anglo-America with labour since the 1620s—he himself had been an indentured servant in Virginia at the end of the 1610s—Thompson, in conjunction with various partners, recognised the opportunity afforded to those who could provide labour to American colonies on a reliable basis. Between 1638 and 1645, these associates established sugar plantations in Barbados and became further involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Dutch had captured (with vital local assistance) the Portuguese citadel of Saõ Jorge da Mina on the Gold Coast (in modern Ghana) in 1637. This allowed much easier access for English merchants—and their Dutch competitors—to slave markets in Lower Guinea (the Atlantic Coast of Africa between Sierra Leone to Cape Lopez in modern Gabon). To acquire enslaved Africans as well as ‘elephants teeth’ and hides, however, also required access to commodities that local traders, such as the Akrosan brothers, John Ahenakwa and John Claessen (a/k/a John Cloyce), who dominated the commerce with Europeans in the Gold Coast kingdom of Fetu (a/k/a Afetu), valued.^[1] English traders were well aware that merchants in Guinea desired ‘East Indies stuff’: fabrics for which African gold and ivory were exchanged.^[2]

In order to better control this traffic, as well as further their involvement in the lucrative spice trade, the Thompson group turned their attention eastward. In January 1649/50, the ‘Assada Adventurers’, as the partners styled themselves here, presented a plan for a ‘national settlement’ of English Indian Ocean interests that would connect Asia and America via Guinea that included a proposed colony on the island of Assada (Nosy Be) off Madagascar as well as permit free trade.^[3]

Image: Jansson, Jan. "Guinea." Map. 1636. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82ks653 (accessed July 03, 2020). Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

Meanwhile, the adventurers had taken control of the Guinea Company whose position had plummeted still further after its leading light, Sir Nicholas Crispe, backed the losing king in the Civil Wars. In 1651, the revamped company had its monopoly renewed for fourteen years—although it covered a smaller area than previously—and made preparations to improve its position by reinforcing its trading factory at Cormontine in Fetu, by planning a new plantation colony for Santa Cruz (St Croix) in the West Indies, and by sending a trading fleet to the Gambia River.^[4] However, these best-laid plans went awry: the inhabitants of Assada destroyed the attempted colony; the Spaniards at Puerto Rico did the same for Santa Cruz; the fleet of the man who would be king, Charles Stuart, led by Charles’s uncle, Prince Rupert, surprised the traders in the Gambia causing an alleged £10,580 loss; and, last but by no means least, Dutch competitors routinely harassed the company’s factories.^[5]

Image: Blaeu, Joan. “Insula S. Laurentii, vulgo Madagascar.'“ Map. 1662. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82kx92t (accessed July 03, 2020). Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

Thompson and his associates responded to Dutch hostility by prodding the government, first, to enact a Navigation Act to curb Dutch trading in English colonies and, when the Dutch predictably objected, by encouraging the outbreak of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-1654). But to little avail: by the end of that conflict, the Guinea Company ‘had ceased to function as an effective trading body’ while the continuing dispute between the Assada Adventurers and the East India Company, over the desirability of a joint-stock format, compounded by further Dutch ‘insolencies’, had brought English interests in Asia to the wall yet again.^[6]

To prevent a collapse, the government intervened by compelling the two factions to merge into a new East India Company. In abandoning their battle with the EIC, though, the ever-resilient Thompson partners gained another chance to put their dream of connecting the Indian Ocean trade with America into effect; Thompson himself assumed the governorship of the united venture and the EIC assumed control of the Guinea Company.^[7] This time, the plan entailed the colonisation of St Helena in the South Atlantic, which the Thompson group envisioned as a transit nexus for goods transported from Asia to Africa, along with the pursuit of its longstanding claim to Pulau Run in the Moluccas which would serve as the eastern terminal of company operations.

The Dutch again repelled English designs on Pulau Run while the Restoration put paid to this global comprehension of English overseas trade and colonisation. Several of Charles II’s confidantes, well aware of the prospects that the Guinea trade afforded, asked the new king to force the East India Company to cede its African interests to a new Royal Company of Adventurers Trading into Africa.

L.H. Roper is SUNY Distinguished Professor History at the State University of New York--New Paltz (USA), a Fellow of the New York Academy of History, and the author/editor of seven books on English overseas trade and colonisation in the long seventeenth century. He tweets @RoperLou

This post is drawn from L.H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). All dates from the sources are rendered ‘old style’ in accordance with the Julian calendar in effect in the Anglophone world until 1752.

[1] Kwame Yeboa Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600-1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 107-111.

[2] Clobery v. Lamberton, 4 May 1636, Deposition of Thomas Brooks of Wapping, Middlesex, boatswain’s mate on the Patience, for George Lamberton, HCA series 13/52, ff. 381v-384r, The National Archives, Kew.

[3] Papers of ye Merchants trading to Assada giving reasons why they refuse to join with the East India Company in a 5-year voyage upon the old joint stock, 10 November 1649 (old style), CO series 77/7, ff. 66, 70-72, 76, The National Archives, Kew.

[4] Order of the Council of State. Approving report of the Council of Trade concerning the trade to Guinea, and recommending to Parliament a grant being passed as is therein expressed, ‘America and West Indies: April 1651’, in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 1, 1574-1660, ed. W Noel Sainsbury (London, 1860), pp. 354-355. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/america-west-indies/vol1/pp354-355 [accessed 28 June 2020]; Deposition of Thomas Crispe, London merchant, 15 March 1664/5, T series 70/169, ff. 35-36, The National Archives.

[5] Petition of the Guinea Company to the Council of State, 21 June 1652, CO series, 1/11, f. 152, The National Archives; To the Right Honorable Council of State The humble petition of the Guinea Company, 25 September 1652, CO 1/11, f. 187; Governor Daniel Searle to Council of State, 30 June 1652, CO 1/11, f. 159; The personal answer of Robert Hardinge made to the petitions made ‘on the part and behalf of’ Rowland Wilson, Maurice Thompson, John Wood and company, 27 March 1651/2, HCA series 13/124 (unfoliated).

[6] P.E.H. Hair and Robin Law, ‘The English in West Africa’, in ed. Nicholas P. Canny, The Origins of Empire, vol. 1 in ed. Wm. Roger Louis, The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 241-263 at 254.

[7] Margaret Makepeace, ed., Trade on the Guinea Coast, 1657-1666: The Correspondence of the English East India Company (Madison, Wisc.: African Studies Program, 1991).