Willem Bolts

William Bolts (1739–1808) was a Dutch-born eighteenth-century merchant active in India. He began his career as an employee of the British East India Company, and subsequently became an independent merchant. He is best known today for his 1772 book, Considerations on India Affairs, which detailed the exploitation and despoliation of Bengal by the East India Company which began shortly after the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The observations and experiences he recorded offer a unique resource for scholars inquiring into the nature of early British rule in Bengal. Throughout his life, Bolts continued to propose and execute various trading ventures on his own behalf and in conjunction with various commercial and governmental partners. The ventures of individual traders like Bolts did much to spur governments and large corporations into the expansion of their own interests and empires.

William Bolts was born in Amsterdam on 7 February 1739. The baptismal register of the English Church in Amsterdam records his baptism on 21 February 1739, his parents being William and Sarah Bolts (his mother was perhaps English, his father German, from the Palatinate).

He spent some time working in Lisbon in the diamond trade, according to a deposition he made in 1801, before he went out to Bengal in 1759 where he was employed in Calcutta as a factor in the service of the English East India Company. He learned to speak Bengali, an addition to his other languages, English, Dutch, German, Portuguese and French. Later he was appointed to the Company’s Benares (Varanasi) factory, where he opened a woollens mart, developed saltpetre manufacturing, established opium works, imported cotton, and promoted the trade in diamonds from the Panna and Chudderpoor (Chhatarpur) mines in Bundelkhand.

He fell foul of the East India Company in 1768, possibly because diamonds were a favourite means for Company employees to secretly remit to Britain the ill-gotten gains of private trade in India which they were officially forbidden to engage in. He announced in September of that year that he intended to start up a newspaper in Calcutta (which would have been India’s first modern newspaper), saying that he had “in manuscript many things to communicate which most intimately concerned every individual”, but he was directed to quit Bengal and proceed to Madras and from thence to take his passage to England. Company officials declared him bankrupt, “to the irretrievable loss of his Fortune”, he later claimed. He never seems to have been able to redeem himself in the eyes of the Company, and in London and elsewhere fought a rearguard action against his many opponents within it.

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