The business of empire

Abstract

By the early eighteenth century the British Empire was already proving to be a great resource for Irish commerce and military entrepreneurs in the Atlantic world – an important economic platform that was used to foster and expand Irish mercantile activity in the burgeoning East Indian trade later in the century. This chapter examines a series of business connections and commercial exchanges between Ireland and India that have so far been elided by historians of empire as well as being neglected within the broader historiography of Ireland. The chapter begins by examining Irish involvement in colonial trade in the British Atlantic world in the eighteenth century before demonstrating how such links expanded eastward in tandem with a rapidly growing Empire. Irish involvement in colonial trade and commerce in the East was ultimately bound up in the evolving structure and shifting responsibilities of the East India Company over the eighteenth century, a critical period which witnessed a fundamental transition in the Company’s organisational structure from trading power to imperial authority on the subcontinent. The gradual transformation of the Company’s administrative role and function in India was in part reflected in the nature of much Irish participation at a commercial and business level.