Abolition of the East India Company's monopoly, 1833

Abstract

The process initiated in 1793 of reducing the trading monopoly of the East India Company was completed in 1833 when the Company not only lost their special trading privileges but also the right to trade. In the latter year they lost the China monopoly which mainly concerned the tea trade, The decision to end the trade was influenced mainly by the noisy efforts of the free traders jn Britain who were both numerous and vocal. The outports and industrial centres who were responsible for influencing Parliament, never really understood the real nature of the Canton trade, but their numbers and influence were enough to ensure that the Company's monopoly of the tea trade was destroyed, Curiously enough much of the trouble and difficulty prophesied by the Company actually materialised within a short time of the removal of the authority of their Select Committee from Canton.

The East India Company had hoped that the existing monopoly might he continued and that the authority of their Select Committee might be strengthened by the grant of Consular Powers which would enable them to curb the activities of the private English and thereby improve relations with the local Chinese authorities. Fiad such a solution been adopted the problem of the illegal opium trade would still have existed: the Company could not see it destroyed, because that would have made the purchase of tea difficult, and sooner or later they would have bad to accept responsibility for its existence and control. Doubtless, with Consular control over the private English they felt they would be able to force a settlement upon the Chinese by the device of a stoppage of trade, Such tactics would have been doomed to failure because the stoppage of British trade alone would not have been sufficient to affect the Chinese there were by this time too many other foreigners trading at Canton to make a stoppage of British trade a catastrophe for Canton. As we have seen from the nature of the campaign against the mono poly there was little hope of such a course being adopted, social, economic and parliamentary ideas now considered monopolies to be out of date.

Though free traders in Britain wished to end the Company's trade completely, the private English at Canton were not particularly concerned about the elimination of the Company's trade; they believed that in open competition they had nothing to fear from the Company. The Canton English wanted to be free from the control of the Select Committee of the East India Company. In its place they wanted the strong backing of the British Government, provided that Government did not interfere in their affairs, in an attempt to break up the Canton trading syston and to destroy the monopoly of the Co . Hong, Unfortunately they did not always receive the support they hoped from the British Government.

The end of the monopoly was inevitable and the East India Company wisely relinquished their trading rights in order to continue as rulers of India. The removal of the Company's authority from China was only a stage in Anglo-Chinese relations and merely brought the ultimate clash between Chinese methods of trading and the Vestern system closer and perhaps served to determine the nature of that dispute. An even more important aspect of the abolition of the East India Company's monopoly was that henceforth the Company were free to devote all their energies to the important and difficult task of ruling India a task which was to enhance the name and the glory of John Company.