A short venture
Charles VI chartered the company at Ostend in 1722 to give the Austrian Netherlands a share of the Asian trade. It established a factory at Covelong south of Madras and another at Bankibazar on the Hooghly, and for a few years traded tea from China and textiles from Bengal profitably enough to alarm the Dutch and English companies.
That alarm was its undoing. Britain and the Dutch Republic made the suppression of the company a condition of diplomatic settlement in Europe, and Charles VI suspended its charter in 1727 and abandoned it under the Treaty of Vienna in 1731 in exchange for recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction — the succession of his daughter Maria Theresa.
The episode is a small but exact illustration of how European commerce in India was governed by European politics: an Indian trading settlement was traded away for a dynastic guarantee in Vienna.
Further reading
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
- Bayly, C. A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1988
- Brown, Judith M. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. Oxford University Press, 1994
- Champakalakshmi, R. Trade, Ideology and Urbanization: South India. Oxford University Press, 1996
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.