In late 1760, the Board of Trade and Plantations received a requested document from the Privy Council. The news could not have been worst. The Seven Years’ War was exacting a heavy toll on trade and the East Indies Company was bearing the brunt of it.

The Privy Council sent over the EIC’s losses calculated from 1756 to 1760 using 1755 (the year before the war) as a baseline. According to the Privy Council, the previous five years had proved that the London-based company had lost ‘Four hundred thousand Nine hundred Sixty two pounds fiveteen Shillings and Sixpence three farthings per year’, to which they added was ‘a very considerable Diminution of that species of Export’. The loss was so great that the council considered it a breach to the ‘national Interest.’[1]

The document interests me on a couple of levels. At this moment in the war, both the Privy Council and the Board of Trade were aware (via Robert Clive who had returned to England) that the battle for India between the U.K. and France was yet ongoing. Britain’s Siege of Pondicherry, which began in September of 1760, was unknown to London and its outcome would not be known for some time.[2]

But more important was the money. The EIC had lost, on average, £400,962 per year for five years - over two-million pounds in all. And though there is no true monetary calculator that can show what that sum means in current monies, it was nonetheless a considerable sum. Also lost were the raw materials from India that supported thousands of manufacturing jobs throughout England’s mainland.

Third, when the Carnatic Wars first erupted (1746), the role of the Royal Navy in India had been minimal at best. But by the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the Royal Navy had sent two fleets under Charles Watson and George Pocock to protect British interest in India.

I bring up the final point because of logistics - two fleets in India meant two less fleets anywhere else. Because the EIC could not prevent the Bengal invasion of Calcutta, nor fight a combined French and Moghul forces without naval assistance, ministers at London, particularly the Admiralty, chose to send fleets. Thus operations elsewhere; Admiral Edward Boscawen’s failed attempt to prevent France from reinforcing Canada, Admiral John Byng’s failed attempt to resupply Minorca in the Mediterranean, and the lost opportunities to attack French holdings in the Caribbean, all had been hampered.

Clive, in 1760, likely portrayed Britain’s battles in the best of light. That the Board of Trade requested from the king’s Privy Council the losses incurred, may have meant that the Board did not trust the numbers from the East India House in London. There is intrigue behind these numbers.

[1] Privy Council to the Board of Trade, 11 December 1760, TNA, PC 1/6/97/3

[2] Eyre Coote and William Monson had pinned and confined French forces at the city of Pondicherry after a battle at Vandavasi. French genenerl Thomas Arthur, comte de Lally, surrendered 15 January 1761.

Above Image Source: Johann Baptiste Bouttats, An Honourable East India Company Flagship Returning to Home Waters in Triumph, (1726).