Corporate Management, Labor Relations, and Community Building at the East India Company’s Blackwall Dockyard, 1600–57

Abstract

This essay offers a social history of the labor relations established by the English East India Company at its Blackwall Dockyard in East London from 1615–45. It uses all of the relevant evidence from the company’s minute books and printed bylaws and from petitions to the company to assemble a full account of the relationships formed between skilled and unskilled workers, managers, and company officials. Challenging other historians’ depictions of early modern dockyards as sites for class confrontation, this essay offers a more agile account of the hierarchies within the yard to suggest how and why the workforce used its considerable power to challenge management and when and why it was successful in doing so. Overall, the essay suggests that the East India Company developed and prioritized a broader social constituency around the dockyard over particular labor lobbies to preempt accusations that it abdicated its social responsibilities. In this way, the company reconciled the competing interests of profit (as a joint stock company with investors) and social responsibility by, to some extent, assuming the social role of its progenitor organizations—the livery company and the borough corporation.

Corporate naval supply in England’s commercial empire, 1600–1760

“…35 In order to gather and maintain shipping, the EIC had to break with tradition, taking the significant risk of investing in the massive infrastructure necessary for ship building as well as assembling one of London's largest labour forces. 36 The docks expanded from a decision to build a single large ship in 1607, slowly expanding throughout the 1610s and 1620s into a large complex that by 1640 had constructed over 70 ships (Table 2). 37 In developing Blackwall, the EIC was continuing a tradition of large-scale ship building complexes that were already well established in other European states.…”