British Traders in the East Indies, 1770–1820

The role of ‘country trade’ in the British activities in Asia before the mid-nineteenth century, that is, trade between ports around the Indian Ocean or the China Sea by privately owned British ships, has been delineated in many distinguished studies. While the main outlines of how this system developed seem to be clearly established, individual voyages by country ships are hard to reconstruct and relatively little is known of the captains who took their ships from port to port throughout Asia. In a deeply researched book, W.G. Miller seeks to remedy this deficiency for the operations of the country traders in the Malay Archipelago. Country traders based in British settlements in India, chiefly at Calcutta and Bombay, and also sailing from Bencoolen in Sumatra, were responding to two developments that produced what Holden Furber long ago described as a ‘revolution’ in inter-Asian seaborne trade, shifting its emphasis from India to the westward, that is, towards the Middle East, to voyages from India eastward, that is, towards China. The rising British demand for Chinese tea and the British conquest of Bengal, bringing with it greatly increased resources and access to commodities with which to purchase the tea, drove this revolution. The ports of the Malay Archipelago lay on the routes from India and China and in return for Indian goods, such as textiles or opium, they provided commodities such as tin and pepper for the Chinese market. While the East India Company’s own great ships took British exports to China and transported tea to Europe, the Company largely left it to the country ships to supply China with Indian or Southeast Asian goods whose sale provided funds with which to purchase tea

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