Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles ― The English and Dutch East India Companies 1700-1800

In Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, Holden Furber attributed the success and failure of East India Companies to the way they organised their trade in Asia. This new study expands this focus to cover the East India Companies' global empires in a comparison of the rivalry between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the East India Company (EIC) in their trade in tea and Indian textiles. The reasons for the success and failure of both companies in this fierce competition need to be found in Europe, Asia and the wider Atlantic. Although the impact of this trade is already visible in events such as the opening of Western trade with China, the Boston Tea Party, the establishment of British Empire in Bengal and the Industrial Revolution, this book also puts the rivalry in the perspective of difference in the varieties of tea and textiles both companies brought back to Europe.

Chris Nierstrasz, Lecturer at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, is the author of In the Shadow of the Company: The Dutch East India Company and its Servants in the Period of its Decline (1740-1796) (2012). He has also contributed to the editing of Goods from the East, 1600-1800 (2015) for the Europe's Asian Centuries project.