"دليل الخليج. مجلد I. القسم التاريخي. الأجزاء Iأ و Iب. ج.ج. لوريمر ١٩١٥" [‎٥‎١] (١٧٨٢/١٩٤)

51
a provisional union upon equal terms : the interest of the English ancl
London Companies in the joint concern created was fixed at £988,500
each ;* the common trade for seven years was to be directed by a Court
of twenty-four managers, half nominated by the one Company and half by
the other ; during seven years the Companies were to maintain separate
establishments and accounts and to dispose of their existing separate
stocks ; and, at the expiration of that period, final and complete amalga^
mation was to take place. A valuation held at this time showed the
dead stock of the London Company to be worth £830,000 and that of
the English Company £70,000. The arrangements prescribed were
duly carried out, though not without some further regrettable friction
between the representatives of the two corporations in the East. The
proceedings were accelerated by the appearance in 1707 of more private
merchants, who began to protest against the monopoly granted to the
Companies, and by a demand made on the Companies by Government
for a loan of £1,200,000.
Amalgamation was ultimately effected by an award of the Earl of Union of
Godolphin, dated the 29th of September 1708 ; and the Company
formed by the fusion received the name of " The United Company of the panies, 1708.
Merchants of England trading to the East Indies." As it was decided
that it should operate under the charter of the English (or New)
Company, the United Company should perhaps be regarded technically
as deriving its existence from that body rather than from the London
(or Old) Company. By the beginning of 1708 the separate affairs and
accounts of the Old Company in Persia had been wound up and closed.
It remains to notice certain charter obligations and English legislatu e
enactments by which English trade in the East was influenced duiing obligations
this period. In 1693, when the East India Company received a new
charter, they were required to export, in their fleet of the following enactment,
season, not less than £150,000 worth of English produce and mam> '
factures ; and this condition, as we shall see later on, gave an impulse to
their trade in cloth in Persia. Again, when the New or English Company
was constituted in 1698, one of the conditions imposed on them
was that one-tenth of the goods which they exported should be of English
origin; and this provision was afterwards made applicable to the United
Company which came into existence by the amalgamation of the Old
and New East India Companies in 1708. The nature of English hade
in the East was also affec ted by an Act, passed in 1699 or 1700, which
* The balance of £23,000 in the total capital of £2,000,000 belonged to the
" separate traders, " a rewdaum of the General Society.