Trade & global routes

Topics represented

British Empire (32) · Companies, trade & extraction (23) · Trade & global routes (20) · Colonization & sovereignty (15) · Slavery & coerced labor (12) · Law & imperial government (11) · Oceans, navigation & cartography (11) · Empire, trade & power (8) · Resistance & colonized agency (8) · Ocean navigation (7) · War & conquest (6) · Nautical cartography (5)

Records and sources

Ordered by start date. Long lives and processes may begin before the period you want to study.

1. c. 1650–c. 1800

   Atlantic circuits of enslavement, credit, and marine insurance

   Atlantic slave-trading voyages were financed through credit, investors, ships, and insurance that could cover both the vessel and captive African people on board. This financial infrastructure was not impersonal exchange: it helped turn human lives into legally insurable claims and sustained capture, forced transport, and sale. Merchant ledgers chiefly show the perspectives of traders and insurers; they do not by themselves recover the experiences of enslaved people, whose resistance also shaped the voyages.

2. c. 1650–c. 1800

   VOC: Dutch armed monopoly and Asian commercial regime

   During the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) maintained a Dutch monopoly on trade and navigation in its chartered zone, backed by powers to make treaties, maintain forces, and wage war. Those powers intertwined commerce, diplomacy, and violence, but did not make the VOC an independent sovereign state or give it complete control over Asian economies. Asian authorities and merchants negotiated, resisted, and conditioned the regime in different places and moments.

3. 1655

   English conquest of Jamaica and Maroon resistance

   An English expedition seized Jamaica from Spain. Formerly enslaved Africans formed and reinforced Maroon communities that resisted for decades while the colonial regime expanded sugar plantations and enslavement

4. 1670

   Hudson’s Bay Company charter over Rupert’s Land

   Charles II granted a company exclusive trade and authority over the vast Hudson Bay watershed without the consent of the Indigenous nations living there. The fur trade created relations of cooperation, dependence, and conflict while turning a corporation into a territorial authority

5. 1672

   Royal African Company receives an African trade monopoly

   Charles II rechartered the company with an English monopoly in West Africa. Although it traded gold, ivory, and other goods, it became a central institution in Britain’s trafficking of enslaved Africans and Atlantic finance

6. 1685

   1685 ordinance and a slave-based colonial commercial order

   The 1685 French ordinance, later known as the *Code Noir*, initially applied to Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint Christopher and ordered aspects of the regime sustaining plantation and colonial commerce based on slavery. This entry identifies its function within a coercive colonial economy; it does not repeat its legal analysis or present it as a uniform code for the whole French empire: later extensions, compilations, and local regulations modified or even contradicted its initial scope.

7. 1698–1700

   Failure of Scotland’s Darien colony

   The Company of Scotland attempted to establish “New Caledonia” on the Darién isthmus. Disease, poor planning, Spanish resistance, and the lack of English support destroyed the colony, and its financial losses weighed on union negotiations

8. 1707

   Creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain

   The English and Scottish parliaments ratified an incorporating union with one Parliament and market. Scotland gained access to English colonial trade and financial compensation through the “Equivalent,” while retaining distinct legal and religious institutions

9. 1713

   Utrecht: Gibraltar, Atlantic territories, and the slave-trading asiento

   The treaties confirmed British possessions such as Gibraltar and Atlantic advantages while granting Britain the asiento to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America. European diplomacy thus expanded both territory and coercive imperial commerce

10. c. 1745–c. 1797

    Olaudah Equiano

    Equiano survived Atlantic enslavement, purchased his freedom and became a sailor, merchant, writer and abolitionist activist. His 1789 autobiography turned a life spanning Africa, the Caribbean, America and Britain into public evidence against the slave trade. Historians continue to debate his birthplace; this profile separates that uncertainty from his extensively documented travels, writings and abolitionist campaign

11. 1750–1799

    Tipu Sultan

    Ruler of Mysore from 1782, Tipu Sultan modernized military forces, sought foreign alliances and fought the East India Company in a series of wars whose outcome was not predetermined. He died defending Seringapatam in 1799 when a Company-led coalition captured his capital. His career shows South Asian states deploying their own strategy, diplomacy and technology against British expansion

12. 1757

    Plassey and the East India Company’s territorial turn

    Company forces led by Robert Clive defeated Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah through battle, conspiracy, and defections. Plassey did not conquer all India, but it opened the political and fiscal control of Bengal consolidated by Buxar and the grant of the diwani in 1764–1765

13. 1765–1800

    The 1765 Diwani and the Company’s Bengal revenue regime

    In August 1765, a Mughal imperial grant assigned the English East India Company the *Diwani*, or revenue administration, of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. Revenue collection linked territorial resources, trade, and Company government, but was not a simple transfer of sovereignty or an administration without intermediaries: it depended on local structures, officials, and conflicts. This entry records that commercial-fiscal mechanism without reducing the region’s societies to a source of revenue.

14. 1789

    Olaudah Equiano publishes his narrative of enslavement and freedom

    The Interesting Narrative recounted Olaudah Equiano’s kidnapping, Atlantic passage, enslavement, purchase of freedom, and maritime life. Its success gave public authority to an African voice within abolitionism; some details of his birthplace remain debated, not his authorship or impact

15. 1792

    Black Loyalists found Freetown under the Sierra Leone Company

    More than a thousand Black settlers from Nova Scotia reached Sierra Leone and founded Freetown through negotiation and conflict with Temne leaders and an abolitionist company. It was not a simple “return to Africa”: Loyalist migration, corporate colonization, Black aspirations for autonomy, and local African sovereignty intersected

16. 1795–1806

    Britain occupies and retains the Cape Colony

    Britain occupied the Cape in 1795, briefly restored it, and retook it in 1806 to control the route to India. The change in sovereignty reordered relations among Dutch-speaking settlers, Khoikhoi, San, and Xhosa peoples, enslaved people, and the new colonial state

17. 1807

    Parliament abolishes the British slave trade

    The 1807 Act prohibited British subjects from participating in the transatlantic slave trade after decades of Black and abolitionist organizing. It did not emancipate enslaved people; slavery and illicit trafficking continued while the Royal Navy undertook an ambivalent, coercive interception campaign

18. 1819

    Raffles negotiates a British port at Singapore

    Stamford Raffles, the East India Company, Temenggong Abdul Rahman, and Hussein Shah signed an agreement permitting a British factory. A Malay succession dispute and the strait’s location made Singapore a migration and trade hub, with negotiated sovereignty under growing imperial asymmetry

19. 1839–1842

    The Opium War imposes the Treaty of Nanking

    China’s destruction of smuggled opium preceded a war in which British naval superiority forced open treaty ports, an indemnity, and the cession of Hong Kong. The treaty inaugurated an “unequal treaty” system and used force to protect a narcotics economy tied to India

20. c. 1847

    Maury turns logbooks into wind and current charts

    Matthew Fontaine Maury systematized observations from many logbooks to produce wind-and-current charts and sailing directions. The method shortened routes and turned data contributed by many mariners into operational knowledge, although institutional authorship should not hide that collective work.

21. 1853–1902

    Cecil Rhodes

    A diamond magnate, Cape Colony prime minister and founder of the British South Africa Company, Rhodes converted mining capital and a corporate charter into territorial expansion toward present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia. His government advanced dispossession and racial segregation, and his backing of the Jameson Raid destabilized the region. Scholarships, monuments and university debates now prolong a contested memory of wealth, violence and imperial supremacy

22. 1861

    Britain annexes Lagos

    Under naval pressure, Oba Dosunmu signed a treaty ceding Lagos to the Crown. British officials invoked suppression of the slave trade and commercial security while taking control of a crucial Yoruba port and opening a route inland that culminated in colonial Nigeria

23. 1875

    Britain buys Egypt’s Suez Canal shares

    Benjamin Disraeli’s government bought Khedive Ismail’s shares in the canal company, rapidly financed by Rothschild. The transaction did not make the canal British property, but it deepened strategic and financial stakes in Egypt and the route to India

24. 1882

    Britain occupies Egypt after the ʿUrabi revolt

    Naval intervention and the British victory at Tel el-Kebir defeated Ahmed ʿUrabi’s movement, which demanded limits on foreign control and khedival rule. Egypt remained formally Ottoman but was governed under British occupation, securing debt interests, cotton, and Suez

25. 1884–1885

    European powers regulate the partition of Africa

    European and US delegates—with no African representation—agreed rules for trade, navigation, and “effective occupation” in the Congo and Niger basins. The conference did not itself draw all African borders, but it accelerated claims and coercive treaties, including British expansion

26. 1885–1886

    The Third Anglo-Burmese War ends in annexation

    Following a commercial dispute and ultimatum, British troops occupied Mandalay, deposed King Thibaw, and annexed Upper Burma to India. The rapid seizure of the capital gave way to years of rural resistance and counterinsurgency

27. 1888–1895

    Chartered companies turn treaties into African rule

    Charters for the Imperial British East Africa Company and British South Africa Company delegated treaty-making, policing, extraction, and administration to private firms. Their agents obtained concessions of disputed meaning, and the government proclaimed protectorates when company rule proved costly or unstable

28. 1905–1911

    Partition of Bengal sparks the Swadeshi movement

    Viceroy Curzon partitioned Bengal in the name of administrative efficiency, but critics saw a strategy to divide anti-colonial politics. Boycotts, local production, national schools, songs, and protest widened mobilization; partition was annulled in 1911, though new political divisions endured

29. 1920–1922

    Mandates turn occupation into international trusteeship

    San Remo assigned Britain mandates over Iraq and Palestine, with Transjordan administered within the Palestine framework under the League of Nations system. In Iraq, a broad tribal, clerical, and urban revolt against occupation and taxation was suppressed; its cost encouraged monarchy and indirect rule under Faisal

30. 1932

    Iraq enters the League of Nations

    The formal end of the mandate and Iraq’s admission to the League made Faisal I’s kingdom an independent state. A treaty retained British bases, military transit, and influence, while oil and minority protections remained sites of power and conflict