Description
Book SynopsisBiography and business history of wealthy British merchant in India reveals much about the nineteenth-century Empire. John Palmer was the most influential and wealthiest British merchant in British India for the first three decades of the nineteenth century. He ran an `agency house', a global commercial firm involved in banking, the opium trade,shipping, plantation agriculture and trade with Britain, Europe, China, south east Asia and the USA. When his firm went bankrupt in 1830, thousands of people, European and Indian, were ruined, triggering the worst commercial crisis in British India up to that time. This book, the first major study of a British agency house in India, presents an account of both of Palmer's business and personal life, showing how his personal relations and circumstances shaped his commercial strategies, with ultimately disastrous consequences for Anglo-Indian relations as well as his clients. ANTHONY WEBSTER is Head of Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire.
Trade Review[A] fascinating hybrid history-part personal biography, part business analysis. [...] It is in its rich evocation of the business context of early colonial Calcutta that Webster's study excels. [...] This is an illuminating, readable, and valuable study. * ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW *
An important addition to the sparse literature on British commercial activities in India during the first third of the 19th century. * ASIAN AFFAIRS, July 2008 *
Table of ContentsPreface The World of John Palmer The Prince of Merchants The Management of Palmer and Co.: Strategies, Structures and Problems Parenthood and Patronage: Race, Kinship, Society and Anglo-Indian Business Culture John Palmer and the Politics of the East India Company Ruin and Failure 1820-1830 John Palmer's Life and Legacy Appendices Index
