IOR/A/2

The core of this collection relates to the scrutiny by Parliament of the Company’s activities between 1770 and 1813.

By the early 1770s, the East India Company had reached a state of crisis. The collapse of the Company’s finances in 1772 drove the government to set up two parliamentary committees of enquiry (a Select and a Secret Committee) that reported to the First Minister, Lord North, in 1773. Under North’s Regulating Act of the same year, the government lent £1,400,000 to the Company and reformed some of its administrative practices. By 1782 Henry Dundas (later Lord Melville), chairman of a Secret Committee investigating the causes of the Carnatic wars, concluded that the Company’s military activities had become detrimental to its trade. Dundas’s observations formed the basis for the India Act passed by William Pitt in 1784, by which was established the Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India (known as the Board of Control). This body, its members appointed by government, was charged with developing policy for civil, military and revenue matters. Dundas acted as President of the Board, being formally appointed to the post in 1793. He undertook a thorough review of the Company’s administration, eventually concluding that the Company’s dual administrative and commercial function should continue. During this period, however, the general public was becoming better informed about, and consequently more critical of, the Company’s activities. The government came under increasing pressure from both merchants and its own members to open up the trade to the east. When its charter was renewed in 1793, the Company was obliged for the first time to provide space on its ships for goods to be imported and exported by private traders. As a result of the Company’s renewed financial difficulties, a parliamentary Select Committee was set up in 1808 to examine Indian affairs and by 1812, Lord Melville was warning the Company’s directors that the existing system could no longer continue. The Company made strong representations to retain its privileges but by the Charter Act of 1813, its monopoly on the trade with India was removed. Further careful enquiries into the Company’s administration preceded the Charter Act of 1833; by this Act, the monopoly on the China trade was withdrawn and the Company’s commercial function was brought to an end.

Of those mentioned by name in the catalogue, William Russell was a Birmingham merchant who petitioned for the abolition of the Company’s trading monopoly. Sir Francis Baring was a director of the East India Company and Chairman of Directors from 1792 to 1793. Lord Cornwallis was Governor-General of Bengal from 1786 to 1793. Lord Hobart was Governor of Madras from 1794 to 1798 and President of the Board of Control from 1812 to 1816.