New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 11, 1 (June 2009): 49-59.

BRITISH TRADE TO SOUTHEAST ASIA IN THE

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
REVISITED

DIANNE LEWIS1
Independent Scholar

The role of trade in the shaping of insular Southeast Asia cannot be stressed
too much. The islands form a natural sea route between two great
civilizations, China and the Indian peninsula, and their pepper, nutmegs,
cloves, gold, rare dye-woods and other jungle produce have for centuries past
attracted visitors from all over the world. These visitors changed, and were in
turn changed by the islands; changes that sometimes influenced the whole
world. British traders, drawn first to the spices of Southeast Asia, were
deflected to India and there, a century later, gained a market which fuelled
the growing changes in British manufacture that in turn led to the industrial
revolution. This paper shall examine the effects of trade in Southeast Asia.
Notable works have been written on this subject matter from J.C. van
Leur’s Indonesian Trade and Society (1955), to Anthony Reid’s Southeast
Asia in the Age of Commerce (1988 and 1993) that marked a coming of age
of sorts in the historiography of the area that placed the Asian merchant and
polities centre stage in their own history. I first encountered the history of
Southeast Asian trade as an undergraduate in Brisbane in a course taught by
Nicholas Tarling, and later pursued it as a doctoral student at the Australian
National University in Canberra in 1966. My goal then was to learn more
about the states of the Malay Peninsula in the eighteenth century specifically
what had caused them to be painted as degenerate, ‘piratical’ states by the
British authorities of the Straits Settlements a century later. 2 Like other
students of my generation, I found that direct evidence of the history of
Southeast Asia was mostly not available. The hot and wet tropical climate
and the nature of the materials on which information was recorded, and the
1
Dianne Lewis (tradewinds3@gmail.com) first studied Southeast Asian history as an
undergraduate at the University of Queensland. She received her PhD from the Australian
National University in 1971 for a study of the effects of the Dutch occupation of Malacca
on trade and politics of the Malay States in the region.
2
P.N. Tarling, ‘British Policy in the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago, 1824–1871’,
Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS), XXX, 3 (1957),
p. 20.
50 Lewis

disturbed recent history of the area left behind few local sources. I was
forced, like other historians then, to explore materials from records of visitors
to the region. I found a vast reserve of data in the archives of the Dutch East
India Company (VOC) in The Hague, where letters written in the archipelago
and sent to Europe had been preserved, whereas copies of similar letters
stored in Melaka had disappeared. These materials afforded me an indirect
view at least into my field of interest.
I discovered that Europeans had penetrated albeit lightly into the
political life of the Malay polities before the end of the eighteenth century. In
the 1770s and even later many of these Malay kingdoms remained vigorous
and prosperous, and carried on a thriving trade exchanging the local tin,
pepper and jungle products of the peninsula, for cotton cloth and opium from
India.3 They seemed a far cry from the dens of piracy which the British
authorities of Singapore painted in the next century. I became convinced that
it could not have been the VOC, from their outpost at Melaka, who had
destroyed the economic life of these states to the point that they were forced
to resort to piratical raids. The Dutch had realized the futility of attempting to
monopolize trade soon after their occupation of Melaka in 1641.4 Even after
the VOC had finally exerted itself, with the aid of a fleet from Europe, to
capture the entrepôt of Riau in 1784, Malay rulers still managed to defy it.
The Malay states had declined only after the British set up free ports at
Penang (1786) and, most importantly, Singapore (1819), ports which
attracted the bulk of the private trade. The diversion of this trade, which had
previously sought out the Malay ports, deprived the Malay rulers of their
main source of revenue–customs from merchants–and drove them to
unusually violent lengths in their attempts to regain their past prosperity.5
Here I found that my work on Dutch trade intersected with that of
David Bassett, who had written extensively about the English trade to
Southeast Asia. His articles, based on the accounts of British merchants who
travelled to the region, and the records of the Dutch and English East India
companies, reinforced my own findings in the Melaka records, especially in
Melaka’s shipping records (Boomboeken) for the eighteenth century.6 By the
eighteenth century English private traders were operating from ports in India

3
D. N. Lewis, ‘The Growth of the Country Trade to the Straits of Malacca, 1760–1777’,
JMBRAS, XLIII (1970), pp. 115-18.
4
Dianne Lewis, Jan Compagnie in the Straits of Malacca 1641–1795, Athens, Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 1995, pp. 19, 24, 25.
5
Dianne Lewis, ’British Policy in the Straits of Malacca to 1819 and the Collapse of the
Traditional State Structure’, in Brooke Barrington, ed., Empires, Imperialism and
Southeast Asia, Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia Institute, 1997, pp. 17-33.
6
For instance, William Dampier, Alexander Hamilton, Lockyer and Thomas Bowrey all
published accounts of their travels and trading ventures.
British Trade to Southeast Asia 51

throughout the island world of Southeast Asia, and as far eastwards, as

China. But how had this come about?
The formal face of British trade to Asia, the English East India
Company (EEIC), had seemingly retired from the competition for trade to
Southeast Asia a century before. In most accounts of Southeast Asian history
that I had read the English played no noticeable part in the area until the
establishment of Penang in 1786. A book published as recently as 1994 still
gives this impression.7 There had, of course, been the EEIC’s early, and ill-
fated attempt to compete with the much stronger VOC for the trade of the
Bandas and the Moluccas, which came to an ignominious (for the EEIC) end
with the ‘Amboina Massacre’ of 1623 when the English factors were driven
out by the Dutch. The leap from this retreat to the situation in the eighteenth
century in the Straits of Melaka, where English traders came and went at will,
remained unclear to me. If the Dutch had driven the EEIC from the East
Indies, why were the English the favoured trading partners of so many of the
rulers of the archipelago? Why did I now find them in all places in the Straits,
diverting Malay tin from Melaka, collecting pepper in Kedah, and, by the
1770s, supporting a Malay entrepôt in Riau, where pepper, tin, and even
spices from the Moluccas could be freely obtained?8
David Bassett’s published works were very valuable in enlarging my
picture of the influence of the ‘country trade’, as the English private trade
was called, but the works of his which I read at that time (1960s) referred
mostly to the late eighteenth century when the trade was thriving but did not
explain how it began. Not until later, when I was able to consult the full text
of David Bassett’s unpublished PhD thesis in the library of the University of
London, did I begin to see evidence of the origins of the British ‘country
trade’ to Southeast Asia.9
Bassett’s thesis traces the beginnings of British trade from the initial
entry of English ships to the archipelago at the end of the sixteenth century
until the expulsion of the EEIC from the area’s major trading centres in 1682.
I will briefly give some impression of the scope this work. The thesis is a
detailed study of the history of the EEIC’s factory in the Javanese port-city of
Bantam from its inception in 1602 to its forced closure following the VOC’s

7
John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company,
New York: Macmillan, 1994.
8
Lewis, ‘Country Trade’, p. 115.
9
D. K. Bassett, ‘The Factory of the English East India Company at Bantam, 1602–1682’,
PhD thesis, University of London, 1955.
I have been editing Bassett’s thesis in an attempt to find a publisher, an attempt that is
kindly supported by a colleague of Bassett’s, Professor V. T. King formerly of the Centre
of South-East Asian Studies (CSEAS), University of Hull, presently at the University of
Leeds.
52 Lewis

successful overthrow of Sultan Abdul Fatah in March 1682. Bassett breaks

up the story of British trade to Asia into eight chapters.
In the first chapter, he recounts the coming of the English to Bantam,
the early years of exploration and learning how best to manage the trade in
Asia, then the growing awareness of Dutch ambitions in the eastern
archipelago, and the area of the production of cloves and nutmegs. The
EEIC’s abortive efforts to compete ended in a frustrating—for the officials of
both the EEIC and the VOC in Java—period of ‘cooperation’ negotiated by
politicians in Europe, beginning with the EEIC relocating its headquarters
from Bantam to Batavia, and ending with the final expulsion of English
factors from the spice producing areas in 1623.
The second chapter deals with the return of the EEIC to Bantam in
1628. The subsequent twelve years were a period of relatively stable and
successful trade, though some problems arose. Purchase of pepper—now
centre stage as the most important spice cargo for the EEIC in the islands—
was difficult in Bantam itself, because the directors refused to allow
purchases to be made in cash, preferring to use Indian cloth as currency. This
practice was unacceptable to the sultan of Bantam. Adequate cargoes were,
however, collected from the outpost at Jambi in east Sumatra, where a factory
was established. Moreover it was discovered that an increasing amount of
cloves, smuggled from the Moluccas by Malays, could be obtained annually
by factors at Makassar. Cargoes of sugar and ginger were also sent to Europe
from Bantam at this time. Thus though the trade of Bantam itself did not
amount to any great volume, the factory there served as a valuable collecting
point for the trade further east.
After 1640 conditions changed. The Dutch had returned to the port of
Makassar and entered the trade there, at the expense of the English and
Portuguese merchants, and the amount of cloves which could be bought
began to decline. At the same time the EEIC began to see their investment in
the town of Madras, on the Coromandel Coast of India, bear fruit, resulting in
the availability of large amounts of cotton cloth for investment in Bantam.
The directors became ever more reluctant to allow the use of specie for the
purchase of goods in the archipelago. Madras cottons were used to obtain an
increased pepper crop, not from Bantam itself but from the west coast of
Sumatra. Nevertheless, the Sumatran port of Jambi remained the EEIC’s
chief supplier of pepper.
As the century progresses this large pepper collection became less
welcome. ‘In subsequent years, as the supply of cloves, benzoin or ginger
failed and imports into England from the East Indies consisted only of black
pepper and a little sugar, the Company directors became even more alarmed
at the single crop trade with which they were confronted.’10 This was, in time,

10
Bassett, ‘English East India Company at Bantam’, p. 163.
British Trade to Southeast Asia 53

to become a major problem for the factors at Bantam. But from 1653 to 1659
the problem was superseded by another, of greater danger: England’s war
with the Netherlands.
War was destructive to commerce then as now, especially in an area
where the enemy possessed superior forces, the position in which the English
found themselves in Java. The EEIC was by no means a match for the Dutch
forces in the archipelago. English trade in Southeast Asia at this time was
conducted without the help of fortresses or soldiers, and the factors relied for
protection on the local ruler. Communications depended on wind and weather
and luck, as this incident illustrates:

The English factors (having heard of the war before the Dutch) had
almost exactly one month in which to warn the captain of the 'Dove' to
remain safely in Makassar. Unfortunately, the westerly winds which
had carried the 'Dove' to Makassar in February were rapidly giving
way to the easterly monsoon, which would enable the pinnace to return
towards Bantam but which would prevent hired praus from Bantam
delivering their message. The first prau tried to reach Makassar for five
weeks before the attempt was abandoned (26 March to 2 May). On 3
May a second prau, with the advantage of both sail and oars, was
dispatched with orders to divert the 'Dove' since the Dutch by this time
had six ships to watch for her. On 20 June the second prau returned
because of the refusal of the Javanese fishermen to stay any longer at
sea. A third prau was prepared by 1 July but the Javanese . . . refused
to set sail. The 'Dove' sailed from Makassar on 3 July and was captured
in sight of Batavia, the ‘unwelcome news’ reaching Bantam on 15
July.11

The years of war were unprofitable for the Bantam trade. But it was
not just the unequal war with the Dutch which damaged the EEIC’s trade in
the 1650s and 1660s; conditions in England were equally unfavourable to
success. The English Civil War (1642-58) had resulted in the execution of
King Charles I (1600-49), and the ascension of Oliver Cromwell (1599-
1658). The directors of the EEIC were uncertain whether he would renew
their charter, and for several years (the years of the ‘interlopers’) English
trade to the east was carried on as if the EEIC possessed no charter at all. The
factors were not slow to join in this free-for-all where they could, and
profited by their own ventures within Asia and the archipelago. Moreover,
the year 1657 to 1661 was a period of economic crisis and depression in
England. All in all this was a very troubled time for the EEIC.

11
Ibid., p. 177.
54 Lewis

When the charter was finally renewed in 1657, the EEIC turned back to
its eastern trade with new vigour. But, ‘the paralysis of the English Company
between the years 1652 and 1659 in a sense determined the pattern of the
East Indies trade for the following twenty years. During the remaining period
of their residence at Bantam the Agent and factors were absolutely dependent
upon the Sultan for their purchases of pepper.’12 Bassett makes it plain that he
believes that this period of inaction had much to do with the final collapse of
the EEIC’s trade in Southeast Asia.
If the East Indies trade is considered, as it should be, so as to include
investments in pepper, sugar, ginger and aromatic dye-woods as well as in
cloves, mace and nutmegs, the crucial years (for the trade of the EEIC) were
those of the Commonwealth and the first years of the Restoration. Until that
time, the English adventurers, despite their unending difficulty in finding
capital to continue the trade, had retained in every respect the position they
had taken up in the South Seas after 1623 and the Dutch had made no attempt
to encroach upon it by force.13
The 1660s started out well. The decade between 1669 and 1679 was
probably the most prosperous the English ever enjoyed in Bantam. A new
agreement with the sultan of Bantam ensured satisfactory pepper cargoes; for
the English director finally agreed to the payment for pepper in specie. But
the prosperity came at a cost. By coming to rely solely on the sultan of
Bantam, and failing to make contact with other pepper producing states as the
directors had urged, the factors of the EEIC allowed the trade to Southeast
Asia to be placed in a straightjacket. The EEIC’s trade was not only reliant
on one product, namely pepper, it was also reliant on one source—the sultan
of Bantam, who now controlled the pepper crop of west Sumatra. The
situation was further aggravated by the war in Jambi.
Moreover it coincided with a period of expansion of VOC trade, when
the Dutch made inroads into the pepper areas such as Banjarmasin and
Indragiri, and, more importantly for the English, Makassar. Victory there in
1667 allowed the VOC to expel English and Portuguese merchants. Once
more Bassett points out that the expulsion merely sealed the fate of a trade
already dwindling, for ‘it can be claimed with some justification that the
Dutch conquest merely put into a concrete political form a commercial
domination that was already theirs’.14
In Makassar, as in Bantam earlier in the century, strictures placed on
the method of trade by the directors had injured English commerce. Whereas
the Dutch were allow to ‘trust out’ materials ( that is allow goods out on
credit) the English factors were supposed to trade for hard cash, instructions

12
Ibid., pp. 228-9.
13
Ibid., pp. 85-6.
14
Ibid., p. 292.
British Trade to Southeast Asia 55

which, if they were obeyed, made it almost impossible to compete in the

open market at Makassar. But inevitable or not, the failure of the Makassar
trade placed ever greater pressure on the pepper trade.
Worth noting here is the reference in this chapter to the important
private trade conducted by the factors of the EEIC to the archipelago. This
was first mentioned during the period of the ‘interloping’ trade and the
EEIC‘s great weakness in the 1650s. ‘It is apparent that the weakness of the
Company's control over its servants in India, which had been so noticeable
since the first Anglo-Dutch war, was still unredressed, and that the factors at
Surat and Madras persisted in extensive private trade to Makassar in 1659,
1660 and 1661.’15 Efforts were constantly made to suppress this trade. ‘In
September of that year the Company placed an absolute ban on the freighting
of any private goods to the East Indies.’16
The growing dependence on a single crop, pepper, affected the sultan
of Bantam as well as the EEIC. His ability to retain the Lampong and Silebar
pepper depended on his success in compelling the English to buy that
commodity. In the event of a radical change in the overall trade position in
Europe or in Bantam, the liberty of manoeuvre which remained to both to the
sultan and the English factors was singularly small.
In an attempt to open more commercial options, the factors were
ordered to investigate all avenues which seemed to offer profitable trading
opportunities. A further motivation to expand the trade at Bantam, if one was
required, was the need for heavier goods to help ballast the ships returning to
England with a large amount of pepper in their hold. Pepper was a bulky but
light, therefore dangerous, cargo. The possibility of purchasing dyewoods,
thought to be available at Bima east of Java, was investigated, and an attempt
was made to set up a trade for the EEIC to Ayuthia in Siam. These attempts
to expand the EEIC’s trade, however, failed.
Success came in another direction. The next two chapters, following
the theme of attempting to broaden the trading base, detailed the series of
expeditions to Japan and then China which resulted in the opening of the
EEIC’s China trade. These expeditions were originally undertaken partly to
satisfy the directors’ perpetual demands that the factors find a market for
British goods. The directors persisted in this quest to silence their critics who
saw their trade as a drain on the country’s supplies of specie. The factory at
Bantam, as the most easterly of the EEIC’s bases, initially played an
important part in these expeditions, which were to give rise to one of the
EEIC’s most profitable investments, namely the ‘China trade’. But the
success of this trade did not help the situation in Bantam in the long run, as
that port, which was in an unhealthy location and where the factory was at

15
Ibid., p. 281.
16
Ibid., p. 282.
56 Lewis

the mercy of the sultan in all matters, was not considered a proper base for
the conduct of the China trade once it was established.
By 1682 the nature of the markets in Tongking, Formosa and Amoy
had been fully investigated and any further information could be better
obtained from the men established there than from Bantam. The Agency had
therefore ceased to serve any useful purpose in that respect. The wholesale
introduction of freighted ships in the Far Eastern trade and the ending of the
Indian-Bantamese trade as unprofitable meant that the southern Agency
would henceforth be little more than a revictualling station on the outward
route to China, unless it could produce commodities of its own that were
worth sending to England; that, as the next chapter will show, was something
the Agency could not do.17
The seventh chapter relates the collapse of the Bantam trade. The
1670s saw new arrivals at Bantam; Danish, French, Indian, and Chinese from
Manila helped turn Bantam into the major indigenous port in the archipelago.
Sultan Abdul Fatah, became active in trade himself, building his own ships
and hiring English sailors to carry cargoes to Manila, Macao and Mocha.
Bantam’s prosperity did not spell prosperity for the EEIC’s trade. The
English factors found it hard to sell their Indian cloth in the growing open
market, and the decreasing price of pepper in Europe made the EEIC’s
Bantam investments unprofitable. The factors were ordered with increasing
urgency to find a way to lower the cost of pepper purchases, if possible by
persuading the sultan to drop his customs tax on exported pepper. The
directors went so far as to send a strongly worded letter to the sultan, and to
replace their chief factor known to be favoured by the sultan. The new chief
factor, new both to Bantam and to the east, may have handled the
negotiations too bluntly; for whatever reason he and another English factor
were deliberately murdered by Bantamese officials in 1677.
The English Company’s response was typical of their procedure
throughout their stay in Bantam. Verbal representations were made to the
sultan to punish the offenders. The sultan ignored them. No other recourse
was available. The directors decided to cut the volume of trade to Bantam.
‘On 15 February, 1678, a Court of Committees resolved to reduce the
shipping and tonnage to be chartered to Bantam in the coming season.’18
Matters were made worse by the murder of the factors at Jambi in a raid on
that place by Johor in 1679. Continuing poor pepper sales in London gave
additional cause for gloom, and the directors confessed openly that unless
‘the Sultan will take care wee have an abatement in the price or in the
Customes, wee shall have no encouragement to prosecute that trade’.19

17
Ibid., p. 363.
18
Ibid., p. 403.
19
Ibid., p. 403. Emphasis added.
British Trade to Southeast Asia 57

It was at this nadir of the EEIC’s commercial and political relations

with the sultan of Bantam that the VOC was given the opportunity, by a
struggle between Abdul Fatah and his son, to intervene and conquer Bantam.
The Dutch immediately expelled all foreign traders. After initially declaring
they would retaliate and re-establish a factory in a friendly Malay state such
as Aceh or Johor, the directors of the EEIC accepted the decision of their
servants to settle in Benkulen, in west Sumatra, where they erected a fortress
of their own from which they conducted a desultory trade in pepper until
1824.
I have attempted here a mere sketch of Bassett’s work. It was his
contention, and I believe he substantiated it, that the EEIC showed no lack of
interest in the trade of Southeast Asia after 1623, rather that it pursued it as
enthusiastically as circumstances allowed. These circumstances were not
always favourable, and the style of trade pursued by the EEIC was
necessarily very different from that of its Dutch rival. The English, of
necessity, sought trade, not domination. They were seeking to replace the loss
of the spice trade. They found their replacement, whether or not this was
totally apparent at the time, in the China trade, pioneered from Bantam, and
dependent in part at least on goods from Southeast Asia. When the directors
of the EEIC were forced to withdraw their factory from Bantam, they chose
in the end not to place their trade once more at the mercy of the ruler of an
indigenous entrepôt, for they had found it impossible to compete on equal
terms in such a situation.
But this was not the end of British trade to Southeast Asia. The
products of the area were too important for its China trade for one thing, and
the area provided an outstanding market for Indian cloth. British factors in
India had the capital and British sailors the experience, to profit from this
trade. British trade did not disappear from Southeast Asia after 1682. It went
private.
The private ‘country trade’ had already begun before the EEIC was
forced from Bantam, and it was to continue and thrive in the following
century.20 Remember the success of the forbidden private trade of the Indian
(and Bantam) factors in the 1650s? Both the English and the Dutch
Companies were plagued with this private trade by their servants in Asia, and
neither had any great success in controlling it. With its effective withdrawal
from Southeast Asia in 1682, the EEIC no longer had any objection to the
trade its servants pursued in that area. It probably encouraged the activity.
English private trade was to come into its own as a method of obtaining the

20
See David Bassett, The British in South-East Asia during the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, Centre for South-East Asian Studies, University of Hull, 1990, p.1.
Also, see Serafin D. Quiason, ‘The English “Country Trade” with Manila Prior to 1708’,
Asian Studies (Quezon City), Vol.1 (1963), pp. 70-4.
58 Lewis

trade goods that the EEIC no longer had access to; pepper, jungle products,
dye-woods, and tin of the Straits, and, for the adventurous, the smuggled
spices of further east.
Bassett continued the story of British trade in the eighteenth century in
his published articles. One wishes he could have brought these studies of
British commercial influence in the archipelago together with his early work,
but it was only at the end of his life, that he was able to return to the subject
of Bantam. In his last published works he turned his mind to the origins of
the ‘country traders’, spelling out the differences between them and the
‘interlopers’ of the 1650s, and incidentally tracing the ‘country’ trade back to
a much earlier period than he had in his earlier articles. ‘The “interlopers”,’
Bassett explained, ‘were not domiciled in Asia and their purpose was to
compete with the Company in carrying cargoes to London, whereas the
“country” traders pursued legitimate inter-port commerce within Asia.
Favorite ports of the country traders were Madras and Bantam.21
These late works of David Bassett appear to me to have been moving
in the direction of an integration of his early study of Bantam into a more
comprehensive study of British trade in Southeast Asia. That work we will
never have, but we do have his thesis. ‘The Factory of the English East India
Company at Bantam’ is a work which answers many questions about early
British trade in Southeast Asia, but unfortunately it is accessible to very few
scholars. There is much more to be had from the thesis than the few articles
Bassett published on the early years of British trade, as he presumably always
meant to return to the major work. The field of early modern Southeast Asia
history has never been overcrowded, and does not appear to me to be gaining
in popularity. Of the papers offered for this conference, only two reached
back before the nineteenth century. Is this because we are not interested in
early modern history, or because we lack so many of the ‘bread and butter’
works, as Oliver Wolters used to call them, which lay the groundwork for
further study?
Trade played an important part in the ongoing drama of Southeast
Asia’s development. Of course no one would claim, at this point in time, that
Europeans played more than a supporting role; but even supporting roles
make their mark. Chaudhuri pointed out in 1978 that, however large the
European companies were relative to their Asian counterparts, they were
never substantial enough to ‘command the market’ without resort to
violence.22 Violence was a route denied the British by their weakness at the
time of their first attempts to establish their trade in the seventeenth century.
They chose, therefore, not to ‘command’ in Southeast Asia, but to trade, and

21
Bassett, The British in South-East Asia, p. 1. Emphasis added.
22
K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company,
1660–1760, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p.139.
British Trade to Southeast Asia 59

their increasing prominence in the markets in the course of the next century
showed how successful that choice was. The EEIC which returned to
Southeast Asia with the establishment of the base on Penang in 1786 would
have been unrecognizable to the rulers of Bantam; was perhaps also
unrecognizable to the rulers of the Malay states, for it bore a very different
aspect from that of the private British traders with whom they had been
accustomed to deal. In 1786 the Company returned to Southeast Asia; but
British trade had never left.