English relations with Siam in the seventeenth century
D.K. Bassett’s 1961 article revises the standard narrative of English-Siamese commercial relations in the seventeenth century, arguing that the East India Company’s factory at Ayuthia was never the product of sustained corporate interest but rather a series of fortuitous arrivals, private trading ventures, and systematic deception by the Company’s own servants in Asia. Drawing on the Company’s Letter Books, Court Minutes, and factory records, Bassett dismantles the interpretations of Anderson (1890) and Hutchinson (1940), who had portrayed the Company as maintaining a continuous and purposeful engagement with Siam throughout the period.
Summary
Bassett’s central intervention is methodological: he distinguishes between actions motivated by the London directors’ genuine commercial interest in Siam and those that were the accidental or self-serving outcomes of decisions made by the Company’s agents in Asia. The factory at Ayuthia, first opened by Peter Floris in 1612 and closed in 1623, was never formally re-established by the directors. The 1661 arrival of the Hopewell was a detour by a supercargo who could not reach Macassar against the monsoon; the 1675 arrival of the Return was the result of factors stranded after being refused entry to Japan. In both cases, the directors learned of the factory’s existence only months after the fact and initially ordered its closure.
The article traces how the directors’ consistent policy—articulated most clearly in December 1664, when they “forbidd” any factory at Siam—was repeatedly overridden by the representations of their own servants. The Bantam agent Arnold White, an inexperienced appointee, was persuaded by Harmon Gibbon’s promises of a Japanese trade via Siam and the possibility of selling English woollens to the Siamese court. On this basis the directors reversed their decision in October 1677, authorising a shipment of £5,000 in woollens and £4,000 in Spanish reals. Within a year the Bantam council conceded there was “noe likely means thereby to procure [the] Japan trade,” and the factors at Ayuthia proved to be, in Bassett’s words, “one of the finest collections of rogues in the East,” embezzling Company funds, selling its goods at a loss to private traders, and using the factory as a cover for their own commerce.
The final chapter of the narrative concerns the Strangh-Yale mission of 1682–1684, sent as a last-ditch investigation into whether the factory’s losses were due to local mismanagement. Bassett rehabilitates Strangh against Anderson’s condemnation, showing from the complete diary that Strangh was initially optimistic and only turned against Phaulkon after three months of evidence that the latter had imposed a de facto monopoly over trade at Ayuthia. The directors’ 1685 resolution vindicated Strangh, Potts, and Crouch, and resolved to close the factory and pursue reprisals against Siamese shipping.
Key Findings
- The Madras Merchant voyage of 1663 cost £2,800 in demurrage against only £240 collected for private goods carriage; Sir Edward Winter was required to make good the £2,560 loss (pp. 92–93).
- The directors’ categorical prohibition of a Siam factory in December 1664 stated: “for setling a Factory at Syam, at present wee have noe resolution or encouragement, and therefore wee forbidd ye same” (p. 93).
- The Unity was dispatched to Siam in July 1677 carrying £5,000 in woollen goods and £4,000 in Spanish reals of eight, on the strength of Arnold White’s assurances (p. 96).
- The Bantam council admitted in December 1678 that there was “noe likely means thereby to procure [the] Japan trade,” confirming the factory’s primary justification had evaporated within twelve months of its authorisation (p. 96).
- The directors’ final resolution of 1685 declared that “Mr. Potts, Mr. Strangh and Mr. Crouch did serve us worthily, and were true to our interest according to their abilities,” while Thomas Yale “behaved himself very ill at that place” (p. 104).
- Phaulkon imprisoned the supercargoes of the Delight in February 1684 and starved them for three days until they agreed to break open the ship’s cargo and supply him with nails (p. 103).
Conclusion
Bassett’s definitive takeaway is that the entire Siam venture was “a fraud from beginning to end, perpetrated on the Company by its own servants.” The directors, a commercial organisation whose primary concern was profitable trade, were repeatedly hoodwinked by factors who used the factory as a vehicle for private enrichment. The closure of the Ayuthia factory in 1684 was not, as Anderson and subsequent writers had claimed, a short-sighted rejection of Phaulkon’s overtures, but a rational commercial decision made after eight years of demonstrated losses and a final investigation that confirmed the absence of free trade under Phaulkon’s monopolistic regime.
Context
- Primary archival sources: East India Company Letter Books, Original Correspondence Series, Java Factory Records, Surat Factory Records, and Court Minutes, all held in the India Office Library, London (p. 105).
- Historiographical contribution: The article corrects the foundational misreadings in Anderson (1890) and Hutchinson (1940) by demonstrating that the Company’s connection with Siam was never a matter of sustained corporate policy but a succession of accidental and self-serving episodes, thereby reframing the entire narrative of Anglo-Siamese commercial history in the period.