Place · Ostend Company settlement · India
Banquibazar
Also known as Bankibazar, Banki Bazar, Ichapore, Ostend Company
The Habsburg settlement on the Hooghly, north of Barrackpore and between English Calcutta and Dutch Chinsurah, held by the Ostend Company of the Austrian Netherlands from 1722. It is the closest an Austrian empire came to territory in India, and it lasted fifteen years.
- Date
- 1722–1737
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.805, 88.372 (approximate)
Worth knowing
In 1733 the English and Dutch persuaded the Mughal governor at Hooghly to attack it; the garrison of fourteen men escaped to Europe. The Emperor Charles VI had already suspended the company's charter in 1727 as the price European powers demanded for recognising his daughter Maria Theresa's succession.
Connections (3)
- CampaignKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
Banquibazar sat between Calcutta and Chinsurah by design, buying from the same Bengal weavers with Flemish capital and undercutting both. The English and Dutch could not attack a neutral European settlement directly, so in 1733 they persuaded the Mughal governor at Hooghly to do it for them. It is a clean example of European companies fighting each other through Indian authority.
- Site adjacencyHooghly–Chinsurah
Add the Ostend Company's Banquibazar to Portuguese Bandel, Dutch Chinsurah, French Chandernagore, Danish Serampore and English Calcutta and six European flags stood within thirty kilometres of one another on one river. None of them held more than a few square miles. What they were competing for was access to Bengal's weavers and the Nawab's customs terms, not land.
- Power passed toTrieste
Charles VI suspended the Ostend Company's charter in 1727 and abandoned it entirely under the Second Treaty of Vienna in 1731, as the price Britain and the Dutch Republic demanded for recognising the Pragmatic Sanction and his daughter's succession. Austria traded its Indian prospects for Maria Theresa's throne, and it was Maria Theresa who authorised the second attempt from Trieste.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Banquibazar”. Jan Parmentier, Tea Time in Flanders: The Maritime Trade between the Southern Netherlands and China (1996); the Second Treaty of Vienna, 1731.
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