Was it the Titanic of its age?
Christened by an optimistic King James I in December 1609, the Trades
Increase was the greatest English merchant vessel of the Jacobean
era--a magnificent ship embodying the hopes of the nascent East India
Company to claim a commanding share of the Eastern trade. But the ship's
launch failed when it proved too large to exit from its dock, an
ill-fated start to an expedition that would end some three years later,
when a dangerously leaking Trades Increase at last reached the shores
of Java. While its smaller companion vessel would sail home with
handsome profits for investors, the rotting hull of the great ship
itself was beyond repair. The Trades Increase and nearly all who
sailed it perished wretchedly on the far side of the world.
The terrible pattern proven by this voyage, with profits to an elite few
in London stained by catastrophic losses in equipment and personnel
abroad, ignited rancorous controversy in England over the human, moral,
and economic costs of such commerce. In The Loss of the Trades
Increase Richmond Barbour has written an engrossing account of the
tragic expedition and of global capitalism at its hour of emergence.
Its sources fragmented among journals, minutes, and letters in the
archives of the East India Company, the full story of the Trades
Increase is told here for the first time. Earlier writers minimized the
loss as a temporary setback and necessary sacrifice on the road to
empire. In a work informed by corporate history and postcolonial theory,
Barbour sees the saga of the voyage, and all that produced and justified
it, differently: as an expression of the structural conflicts,
operational risks, and material incapacities that haunted and ultimately
unraveled the British Empire--and that destabilize multinational
corporations, global markets, and our common biosphere to this day.
