The coromandel trade of the Danish East India Company, 1618–1649

Abstract

The conspicuous and enduring success of the English and Dutch East India Companies, created respectively in 1600 and 1602, has caused numerous historians to focus their attention on an important set of trans-national enterprises in the early modern world: the chartered trading Companies. As has been discussed in several collections of essays, symposia and works of a general character, the two Companies mentioned above were not unique, but only the most successful among a whole host of such institutions of that period. These included companies formed to exploit the trade from Europe to the West Indies, North America, Central Asia, the Levant and Brazil, as also other East India Companies. Holden Furbcr, in a masterly synthetic study of Company activity in Asia in the period form 1600 to 1800, argues that most of these East India Companies other than the Dutch and English “arc of interest more as ‘cover’ for infringers of the great East India companies' monopolies than as company organizations themselves”. But, he goes on to note, this was not true of the Danish company, which — in his words — “had the longest history and the best record of efficiency”.¹