Trieste Company

Austrian East India Company is a catchall term referring to a series of Austrian trading companies based in Ostend and Trieste. The Imperial Asiatic Company of Trieste and Antwerp (French: Société impériale asiatique de Trieste et Anvers) and Asiatic Company of Trieste or the Trieste Company (Société asiatique de Trieste) were founded by William Bolts in 1775 and wound up in 1785.

In 1775, William Bolts offered his services to the Imperial government, putting forward a proposal for re-establishing Austrian trade with India from the Adriatic port of Trieste. His proposal was accepted by the government of Empress Maria Theresa.

On 24 September 1776, Bolts sailed from Livorno in the dominions of Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, the younger son of the Empress, to India in command of a ship under the flag of the Holy Roman Empire, the former Indiaman Earl of Lincoln, renamed the Giuseppe e Teresa (also called Joseph et Thérèse or Joseph und Theresia). He took with him a ten-year charter authorizing him to trade under Imperial colours between Austria’s Adriatic ports and Persia, India, China and Africa, and from Africa and Madagascar to America. This enterprise required substantial capital, which Bolts sought in the Austrian Netherlands (modern-day Belgium), and he brought in the Antwerp banker, Charles Proli, and his associates, the bankers I.C.I. Borrikens and D. Nagel.

In the next few years Bolts established factories on the Malabar Coast, on the South East African coast at Delagoa Bay and at the Nicobar Islands. His aim in establishing a factory at Delagoa Bay was to use it as a base for trade between East Africa and the West coast ports of India. He procured three ships to conduct this “country” trade, as trade by Europeans between India and other non-European destinations was called. During his voyage out he obtained Brazilian cochineal beetles at Rio de Janeiro and transported them to Delagoa Bay, thereby predating the introduction to Bengal of this insect for the making of scarlet dyes and carmine. The Imperial flag did not fly for long over Delagoa Bay, as alarmed Portuguese authorities who claimed the place as their own sent a 40-gun frigate and 500 men from Goa to remove Bolts’s men in April 1781, and to found the presidio of Lourenço Marques (Maputo) that established a permanent Portuguese presence there.

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