An excellent detail-packed and jaunty history

These 17 hours range over the one hundred years between 1550 and 1650, from the early merchant trading ships embracing tremendous risks in their search for new trade routes and lucrative rewards, to the emergence, development and bitter war-torn rivalries of what became the English East India Company established in 1600 (the EIC) and the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) established two years later in 1602. Some purist economic historians might require closer examination of the Companies’ financial records, but as a non-specialist I was riveted by Howarth’s mass of extensive and vibrant detail with which his account is crammed, and impressed by the clarity of his overall historical narrative .


The details are rich in their diversity - whether it’s the terrible deaths suffered by men in the caves collecting salt petre for the essential on-board gunpowder; a fearful tempest endured off the coast of Japan;. or the tastes of discerning Londoners as ships (mostly criminally unsafe, vermin- infested and having suffered the loss of vast numbers of crewmen) returned to England stuffed with their vast fashion-changing cargoes.

The whole book cracks along at a tremendously energetic pace without losing depth or clarity, packed with the ironic metaphor and dramatic wordplay which Howarth obviously loves. The Armada was made “splinter out of splendour”; the targeted Spice Island Amboyna was “the richest jewel in the jewellers window”. He contrasts the English and the Japanese at a time when “the English were painting their bottoms with woad whilst the Japanese were decorating their porcelain with blossom’. This jaunty style certainly keeps the text racing along, although it can become a little tiresome. The narrator is excellent and injects appropriate energy into an already packed text.

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