Habsburgs in the Indian Ocean. A Commercial History of the Austrian East India Company and its Colonies and Bases in East Africa, India, and China, 1775–1785

Abstract

The study of the Habsburg monarchy’s colonial past and global interconnections is a comparatively young field of research, traditionally understudied as it did not fit into the Austrian narrative of colonial disentanglement. The following paper offers new understandings of the history of the Habsburg monarchy within a global framework by focusing on the Habsburg East India Company of Trieste-Antwerp (1775–1785). In contrast to previous studies of their political dimensions, this article focuses mainly on the commercial actions of the company. Ship inventories, invoices, logbooks, letters, diaries, reports, and petitions from the archives of Vienna provide valuable insights into the everyday life of the Company. Raw materials and products can serve as probes of transcontinental linkages to bring into focus the economic and political contexts and the histories of people who produced, cultivated, processed, transported, and traded with them. But beyond that, the company trade of enslaved people constituted a key part of the company’s commercial endeavors. Based on these theoretical and methodological considerations, the goods and people shipped by the Company sheds light on aspects of global trade and colonization projects of the Habsburg monarchy and can be used as a touchstone by which the national-historical perspective is challenged.

Ship inventories, invoices, logbooks, letters, diaries, reports, and petitions from the archives of Vienna and Trieste provide valuable insights into the everyday life of the Habsburg East India Companies. Raw materials and products can serve as probes of transcontinental linkages to bring into focus the economic, political, diplomatic, and cultural contexts and the histories of people who produced, cultivated, processed, transported, traded with, and researched about them. Based on these theoretical and methodological considerations, the materiality of the Habsburg East India Companies sheds light on aspects of global trade and colonisation projects of the Habsburg monarchy and can be used as a touchstone by which the national-historical perspective is challenged by the investigation of global flows of goods, information channels, and entanglements with East Africa, the East Indies and China