The first charter to the Indian merchants was granted in 1600, and made perpetual in 1609, a company being constituted under the title of the India Company, with the monopoly of the Eastern trade. During the Revolution a rival company was formed whose competition threatened to extinguish the older Company, but eventually the two were amalgamated in 1708. As the field of operations in India was extended, political questions became increasingly important, and such was the maladministration of the Company, that the Government was constantly forced to interfere. In 1773 a Regulating Act was passed, by which a new council was appointed and other administrative reforms introduced, but the consequent improvement was not marked, and in 1784 Pitt’s India Bill withdrew all political power from the hands of the Company, while leaving their trading rights intact, and established a Board of Control, to be appointed by the British Government. In 1813 the trading monopoly of the Company was broken, so far as India was concerned, by the admission of independent traders to the Company’s territories, but they still retained the China trade. In 1834, however, the restrictions on trade still afforded by the Company’s charter were felt to be out of harmony with modern commercial ideas, and the whole of the Company’s trading rights were swept away, in return for an annuity, payable for forty years, of £630,000, redeemable at the end of that period, at the Government’s option, for a sum of £12,000,000. Before that period was ended, however, the Indian Mutiny broke out, and on its suppression, in 1858, the Company was finally dissolved, and India passed under the direct rule of the United Kingdom.
Ecclesiastical Reservation.
A clause in the Religious Peace of Augsburg, of 1555, providing that any spiritual prince who changed his religion was to forfeit his office and the revenues of his see.
Ecclesiastical Titles Act.
An Act passed in 1851 in response to the agitation caused by the action of the Pope in appointing Cardinal Wiseman to the Roman Catholic Archbishopric of Westminster. The Act declared the assumption of such titles to be illegal, but provided no penalties for a breach of the law, and hence was never enforced. It was repealed in 1871.
Economists.
A philosophical school, or sect, founded in France about 1761 by a physician of Mantes, named Quesnay. He maintained that there was a natural order of human institutions, divinely ordained, and that, if this were adhered to, prosperity must ensue. He further argued that agriculture was the only true source of wealth. These doctrines largely influenced Turgot, the finance minister of Louis XVI.
Ecorcheurs.
Bands of brigands who harried France during the Hundred Years’ War.