The decentred dynamics of political authority within the Company by the early eighteenth century was a reflection of the decentred nature of the metropole itself. Indeed, the metropolitan or central authority of the Company was, in theory, East India House in Leadenhall Street, London. From here, discourse, authority, orders, letters and material objects radiated out to settlements and servants in Asia in support of the public interest of the chairman and the court of directors. Although the limits of the early modern metropole’s ability to determine the development of colonial regions has been an issue of ongoing historical debate, historians nonetheless continue to regard the metropole itself as a single social, political and geographic construct.42 To the Company
servant, the metropole was not a unitary or monolithic source radiating its authority outwards. Rather, East India House was just one of many strands of the metropolitan web which shaped and informed the policies and practices of Company servants across Asia. Particularly in the context of state building, East India House had to contend with a multiplex of other, more private and personal metropolitan sources, all of which presented alternative models of state formation for Company servants to put into practice. These included a wide range of
Figure 2 Diagram of the plurality of metropolitan influences upon Company servants
groups, people and communities, including households, kin, friends, religious institutions, social clubs and political patrons. The connections which Company servants maintained with these metropolitan sources as they travelled out to Asia served to undermine the authority of East India House. Indeed, the contest between public and private metropolitan sources shaped the practice of colonial state building on the West Coast of Sumatra in the early eighteenth century.
The plurality of metropolitan sources of authority was particularly evident during the deputy-governor of Joseph Collet between 1712-16. A prominent merchant in London, Collet had been tasked by the court of directors with subordinating Company servants on the West Coast of Sumatra into a public hierarchy which would establish the public interest as supreme, once and for all. Appointed in 1711, Collet seemed an ideal choice to centralise political authority on the West Coast. As an agent of the court of directors, Collet appeared dedicated to the public interest. Having declared bankrupt two years before, Collet was personally obligated to the Company’s chairman, Gregory Page, for his new appointment. ‘As to my future Conduct respecting both the Company’s affairs and my own’, Collet declared to Page as he rounded the Cape of Good Hope, he would look to emulate the governor of Madras and ‘obey him
as my Superiour’.43 Professing himself a loyal servant of his new masters, Collet
reiterated his commitment to uphold the interests of East India House. Indeed, the social, economic and political turmoil he witnessed on the West Coast reinforced the importance of his commission to bring the settlements under a firm, centralised government.
Arriving in the Toddington in 1712, Collet touched at the northern subordinate settlement of Bantal, some one-hundred miles up the Coast from Bencoolen. Sailing into the Bantal road on 23 July, the new deputy-governor stepped ashore to find ‘all in confusion’.44 Penning a quick letter to the directors in London, Collet reported how ‘by
ignorance or otherwise’, the servants there had neglected all of the Company’s official commercial business, while the general books, in which every official act and transaction was supposed to be recorded, had laid untouched for months.45 With ‘The
Northern parts in Confusion’, Collet continued his journey down the Coast and arrived at Bencoolen on 10 August to be installed as deputy-governor.46 His commitment to putting into practice the state building discourse of his employers at East India House, one that would consolidate the public interest through the provision of centralised government, was made clear in one of his first official letters to a local Malay ruler. One private interest which had drained the Company’s finances had been the military intervention of deputy-governors in the civil wars and succession disputes of surrounding Malay states. The public interest therefore demanded a cessation of hostilities with the Malay and a reduction of the West Coast military establishment. This was something the directors had ordered Collet to carry out immediately upon his arrival. Thus, when Sultan Gulemat, ruler of the large neighbouring state of Anak
43 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/1, Joseph Collet to Gregory Page, 12 February 1712. 44 BL, APAC, IOR/G/35/7, York Fort General, 22 October 1712.
45 Ibid.
Sungai, requested military assistance from Collet during a succession dispute, the latter wrote back accordingly: ‘I am obliged to acquaint you that my Hon’ble Masters are resolved to have their affairs on this Coast managed in a manner very different from what they have been of late years.’47 To Malay and European alike, Collet’s arrival thus
appeared to signify a break with previous decentralised regimes of private interest, heralding a new political system constructed indirectly by East India House through their loyal agent.
As deputy-governor, Collet was expected to replicate the state building practices of his counterparts at Madras in the later seventeenth century, which, as the previous chapter demonstrated, comprised the establishment of a judiciary, the reformation of the administration into a central bureaucracy and, most importantly, the subordination of servants into public hierarchies. However, Collet both carried his own private set of attitudes, beliefs and practices with him to Asia and also maintained connections with people, groups and communities in the metropole which consistently reinforced or refashioned these private discourses and practices. The orders and policies of East India House which were dispatched with, and to, Collet in Asia had to be constantly channelled, articulated, interpreted, and eventually implemented through a multiplex prism of private interests. Indeed, as with all Company servants who planted roots in Asia, Collet’s initial dedication to the public interest of his masters at East India House was reshaped by the private interests he quickly established on the West Coast of Sumatra, not just those of a pecuniary nature, but those also of a social, theological, cultural and political nature, too. Thus when Collet sought to gain the obedience of his subordinates or to centralise government, for example, he did so according to more
private understandings of obedience and governance, and the role these played in furthering his own increasingly considerable interests and ambitions in Asia.
For Joseph Collet, a devout Baptist and family-man, the task of establishing his hegemony over the West Coast of Sumatra was not just a public duty, but a matter of conscience, morality and religion. Before his departure for Asia, Collet regularly conversed with his spiritual mentor and teacher, Moses Lowman, the Presbyterian minister of Clapham, on a range of subjects, but mostly the spirit and morality of man. In these debates, Collet had argued that mankind was naturally ‘capable of being Influenced by Principles of Reason, Justice and Gratitude’, whilst the reverend ‘urg’d the Generall Practice of Mankind to the Contrary.’48 Indeed, the reverend emphasised the corrupt and disobedient nature of ‘Mankind’ and the need to forcefully reform and continuously govern people if they were to exist in any kind of social or political order.49 In Britain, Collet had contested these beliefs with the reverend. But upon arriving on the West Coast and experiencing the disorder and disobedience amongst servants there first-hand, he quickly conceded to the reverend’s arguments. ‘In short, English, French, Portugueze, Brasilians, Africans, Dutch, Moores, Indians of many Sorts’, Collet wrote to Lowman shortly after arriving at Bencoolen, ‘are (almost) all alike.’50 At the same time, Collet wrote to another friend in Britain that ‘I find here there
has been more villany and folly than I cou’d expect to have found amongst Englishmen’.51 Collet’s own private interests, in the form of his spiritual and moral
beliefs, were already beginning to subvert his commission to create a centralised, public government on the West Coast.
48 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/2, Joseph Collet to Moses Lowman, York Fort, 14 November 1712. 49 For example, see Moses Lowman, The Principles of an Occasional Conformist (London, 1718). 50 BL, APAC, MSS Eur D1153/2, Joseph Collet to Moses Lowman, York Fort, 14 November 1712. 51 Ibid., Joseph Collet to Francis Molineux, York Fort, 16 October 1712.
The new deputy-governor’s conversion to the ideologies of Reverend Lowman and the Clapham congregation Collet had frequented when in England, fundamentally changed his understanding of and approach towards the state, government and the role of individuals within that system. ‘I knew many were corrupted’, he wrote in a letter to Lowman about the West Coast servants, ‘but did not believe the Corruption so universall as you apprehended…you had a truer Notion of mankind than my Self.’52 After barely two months at Bencoolen, Collet’s private beliefs and values had diverged from the public interests of his masters at East India House. Indeed, the new deputy- governor already had little intention of establishing those public state institutions which an earlier generation of governors had attempted to erect at Madras. ‘This Experience has entirely alter’d my schemes of Government’, Collet admitted to Lowman in November.53 An indication of what these alterations were can be found in a range of
private metropolitan sources of social, cultural and religious thought.
The prevention of private corruption and religious disobedience through the construction of providential and natural hierarchies was at the centre of ideas about the state for figures such as Reverend Moses Lowman. Indeed, according to the reverend, man’s disobedience could only be averted when ‘all Rights and Titles to Obedience are united’ in one supreme governor, the ‘Benefactor and Patron, our Master, Father, and King’.54 Investing absolute authority in a ‘Civil Magistrate’ would prove beneficial to
‘publick Society’.55 In fact, it was essential for those who sought ‘Union of Social Life
together’. According to Lowman, to grant a prince, governor or magistrate the ‘Power of directing the Actions of the Community’ was the ‘Soul of the Body Politick’.56 Thus,
only powerful, absolute authorities, like Deputy-Governor Joseph Collet, could expect
52 Ibid., Joseph Collet to Moses Lowman, York Fort, 14 November 1712. 53 Ibid.
54 Moses Lowman, A Sermon Preach’d to the Societies for Reformation of Manners (London, 1720), p. 6. 55 Ibid.
obedience from members of a community, such as the one formed by the Company’s servants on the West Coast of Sumatra. However, their obedience was not to be commanded through legal regulatory frameworks or centralised political systems, as East India House believed and hoped, but through nothing more than the natural right of governors to command subordinates. As Lowman declared,
The Right of the Magistrate to Obedience in…Acts of Government, must be the same as his Right to Government itself; and Men subject to Government, are held to answer this Right upon as high Obligations at least, as they are to answer the Duties of any other Relation they stand in to each other. So that this Civil Relation, once establish’d, induces a Moral Obligation. The Rights of Princes, and the Obedience of Subjects, become engagements of Conscience; in part, as the Duty of all Relations is bound upon Men by the Law of God; and further as the Order, Peace, and Happiness of Society, with the Means necessary to procure and preserve them, that is, the Institution and just Rights of Governours, is the Will and Intention of God himself; who is God of Order, and must certainly will the Peace and Social Welfare of Mankind.57
By legitimising political authority not through any public or legal power, but through providential and natural rights, Lowman placed the power of magistrates, governors and princes beyond constitutional, contractual or consensual frameworks. East India House had empowered Collet with considerable authority so that he would put into practice the state building discourses that would subordinate Company servants to the public
interest. But Collet understood his authority in more private terms: he had a natural right, as ‘supreme magistrate’, to subordinate those on the West Coast through a personal, moral and religious duty. Their submission and obedience would be offered to Collet directly, not to their masters at East India House.
Reverend Lowman’s political ideology was part of a lineage of contested English political thought which stretched back over a century and included such figures as Lancelot Andrewes, William Pyrnn, Robert Filmer and William Sherlock, all of whom acknowledged the legitimacy of political authority as deriving from natural law, particularly evident through the exercise of patriarchal governance. For instance, Lancelot Andrews, the Bishop of Ely, announced from his pulpit in 1610 that monarchs were ‘Fathers of their Countreys’.58 Present in the audience was King James I, who had
charged Andrews with commemorating the anniversary of a failed plot against his life.59
Known as the Gowrie sermon, Andrews used this opportunity to inform the king of the patriarchal nature of his royal authority. James would do well, Andrews preached, to look to his ‘fatherhood, and government’ as one and the same.60 The parallels between a
king’s divine right to rule and a father’s absolute power over his family was juxtaposed by England’s early modern natural law theorists to promote the practice of patriarchy as a political ideology, not just a social dynamic of the private household.61 In John Novell's 1662 book The Seditious Principle, it was argued that as head of the family, the patriarch was the 'Supreme Power' and therefore must command the absolute obedience of his subordinates. By this logic, he continued, the king's authority was therefore 'that
58 Lancelot Andrewes, A Sermon Preached before His Majestie On Sunday the fifth of August (London,
1610), pp. 12-13.
59 Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching
(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 116-19.
60 Andrewes, A Sermon Preached, p.13.
61 See Gordon J. Schochet, The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in 17th Century England: Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975).
authority which a Father hath over his sons'.62 More than that, Novell argued, 'Civil Magistracy and Paternal Authority are really the same...in that Obedience is commanded to both…the People do no more authorize their King, than Children their Father, to have dominion over them.'63 Indeed, over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, political theorists placed patriarchal authority at the centre of discourses on the right to rule, not just the monarch’s right, but a plethora of authoritarian rights: nobility over tenants, men over women, civil magistrates over the localities and even England over its growing empire.64
Hundreds of so-called ‘conduct books’ were published throughout this period, mapping out the hierarchy of patriarchal householders which reinforced the father’s undisputed rule, in which dependents, such as wives, children and servants, had to offer complete obedience.65. Conduct books acted as manuals, providing instruction for the
organisation and effective management of a patriarchy. For instance, In 1621 A godly
forme of houshold government for the ordering of private families outlined 'the severall
duties of the husband towards his wife, and the wives dutie towards her husband, the parents dutie towards their children, and the childrens towards their parents, the maisters dutie towards his servants, and also the servants duty towards their maisters'.66
The model patriarchy was defined as one which enforced hierarchy through the
62 John Novell, The seditious principle viz. that the supreme power is inherent in the people, and that
perpetually as n the proper subject (upon which the late lawlesse actings against the King were grounded, and from which the long thraldom and misery of the three nations did ensue): examined and confuted (London, 1662).
63 Ibid., p. 21.
64 See Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England, 1680-
1714 (Manchester, 1999). For patriarchy as a justification of imperial rule over the American colonies,
see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: the American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority,
1750-1800 (Cambridge, 1982).
65 Waddell, God, Duty and Community, p. 114.
66 Robert Cleaver, A godly forme of houshold government for the ordering of private families (London,
obedience of its members to the father, master, and head of the household.67 The supremacy of the father within the family-household was acknowledged almost a hundred years later in Daniel Defoe's The Complete Family Instructor. The father, Defoe wrote in 1715, must constantly be aware of 'his duty in the future directing, teaching and governing his family.'68 Only by exercising his authority could a patriarch expect obedience from, and order within, the household. As Defoe's errant father informed his wife upon the disobedience of his children: 'it was my duty to have exercised the authority of a father and of a governor of a house...they are lost through my neglect!'69
The corpus of guidelines promoted in conduct books reinforced patriarchal models of governance, shaping private understandings of the state and state-building.70 As Robert Cleaver declared: 'An Houshold is as it were a little Commonwealth'.71 This
symbiotic relationship between political authority and patriarchal power was acknowledged by some of the most influential political theorists of the early modern period. The political jurist Jean Bodin emphasised this in his 1606 work The six books
of a commonweal. Bodin declared that ‘A Familie...is the true seminarie and beginning
of every Commonweal, as also a principall member thereof’.72 He blamed early
classical philosophers such as Aristotle for separating the ‘Oeconomicall government’, by which he meant the domestic management of a household, ‘from the Politicall, and a Citie from a Familie.’73 For Bodin, ignoring patriarchal authority as a model of
67 Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford,
1988), particularly pp. 34-66.
68 Daniel Defoe, The Complete Family Instructor: in five parts (London, 1715-1717, 2 vols.), vol. 1, p.
32.
69 Ibid., pp. 49-50.
70 A. J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson, 'Introduction', in A. J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson, eds., Order and
Disorder in Early Modern England, pp. 31-34.
71 Ibid., p. 5.
72 Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, M. J. Mooley, ed. (Oxford, 1955), p. 6. 73 Ibid.
government was akin to ‘if wee should pull the members from the bodie.’74 There was little doubt that ‘the government of an house or familie’ was ‘the true modell for the government of a Commonweal.’75 The structure of authority in the family was further
adopted as a model for shaping the early modern polity by James Harrington in his fictitious ideal commonwealth Oceana. 'Paternal Power is in the right of Nature’, declared Harrington, ‘and this is no other than the derivation of Power from Fathers of Familys, as the natural root of a Commonwealth.'76 Ground-breaking political theorists
such as Bodin and Harrington, then, placed patriarchy at the centre of English state formation from the early seventeenth century onwards.
Patriarchal models of political authority and the state were not without opposition, however. By the early eighteenth century, such discourse was highly