o_19heefouak9i9v4do11ac41pi7a.pdf

ANTONELLA VIOLA
especially those of the major seaports– reveals the rise of India as the most important
site for British business activities overseas. From 1830 onwards the presence
of British private traders in South Asia grew remarkably, with a significant acceleration
after 1858. 10 In nineteenth-century India, British commercial and economic
activities mainly took one of two forms: British-registered companies, and Indianregistered
companies. 11 The former were companies headquartered in Great Britain
which handled several business activities abroad, usually in no more than one
county; 12 the latter were companies established by Britons resident in India. In
addition to these two categories, in nineteenth-century India there were also British
overseas banks, multinational companies which had partly outsourced their
activities to the colonies, and other business enterprises. There were also some international
trading companies (forerunners of present-day multinationals), which
operated through a network of agents and branch offices all over Asia and owned
assets in India as well as in other Asian countries. All these firms had close links
with the London credit market and with British overseas banks, and generally
speaking their activities were profoundly embedded in the British imperial system.
London, the core of the empire, was also the hub of those firms’ business. By
looking at the flows of capital between Great Britain, its colonies and the rest of
the world, Chapman has defined these companies, and above all the merchant
elite behind them, as ‘investment groups ’, 13 stressing their ties with the British
financial environment of the mid-nineteenth century. Jones has proposed a more
comprehensive definition centred around the concept of ‘business groups,’ 14 regarded
as groups which did not perform a mere financial function, but rather a
set of economic and commercial activities within the territories of the empire.
These groups were defined by an array of similar socio-economic attitudes and
practices, which made them an easily identifiable category of economic operators.
Anglo-Greek companies which moved to India joined the club of British business
enterprises, participating fully in the prosperous and profitable Anglo-Indian trade.
Very often these Greek companies were true multinationals which handled activities
not only in India or in Great Britain, but in many other places. The most well-known
10 In 1858 the British parliament passed the Government of India Act, which dismantled
the East India Company and devolved the administration of the Indian territories to the British
crown.
11 M. Wilkins has defined British expatriate firms as ‘free-standing companies’. See Wilkins,
M. and Schoter, H. (eds), The Free-standing company in the world economy, 1830-1996,
Oxford, 1998.
12 These economic operators were often country-oriented firms.
13 Chapman, S.D, ‘British-based investments groups before 1914’, in The Economic History
Review, Vol. 38 (May 1985), pp. 230-51; ‘Investment groups in India and South Africa’, The
Economic History Review, Vol. 40. (May 1987), pp. 275-80.
14 Jones, G. and Wale, J., Merchants as business groups: British trading companies in Asia before
1945, University of Reading Working Papers, 1998; Jones, G., Merchants to Multinationals:
British trading companies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Oxford, 2000.
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