East Indies Quotes

Considering how advantageous it would be to this realm to reestablish its foreign and domestic commerce, ... we have resolved to establish a council particularly devoted to commerce, to be held every fortnight in our presence, in which all the interests of merchants and the means conducive to the revival of commerce shall be considered and determined upon, as well as all that which concerns manufactures. …. We also inform you that we are setting apart, in the expenses of our state, a million livres each year for the encouragement of manufactures and the increase of navigation, to say nothing of the considerable sums which we cause to be raised to supply the companies of the East and West Indies;

The sweetest violence to keep our enemies in check without resorting to open war is to populate the lands with our own people and fill them to such an extent that we instill respect in our feigned friends, the English, fear in our enemies, and obedience in the rebellious. Large numbers of people are the principal foundation of the Company's state in the Indies, without which it cannot exist.

It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson's presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men.

Our neighbors the Hollanders may be our example in this case; who whilst we have been driving a private trade from port to port, of which we are likely now to be deprived, have conquered so much land in the East and West Indies that it may be said of them, as of the Spaniards, That the sun never sets upon their dominions.

The Board of Trade consists of a committee of the Privy Council, composed of all the great officers of state. The business is principally conducted by the president, deputy president, and the chief of the clerks. It is, properly speaking, a board of reference, to which all difficult or doubtful cases relative to trade or our colonial possessions, exclusive of the East Indies, are referred

Shortly there will not be a slave in the British colonies. Five lines in an Act of Parliament, the other night, liberated nearly 500,000 slaves in the East Indies, at a single blow. The West Indians will be obliged to grant emancipation, in spite of the paltry attempts to prevent it; and we will then turn to America, and to every part of Europe, and require emancipation

As it is seems natural to our nation to aspire to golden freedom (ad auream libertatem), so we experience in contrast amongst the ordinary nations of these countries such a servile character, that their freedom and self-government apparently are even worse than slavery. Moreover, when freed, they pursue their submission to another person …. They set their sail according to the wind, have themselves circumcised, following and practicing the Muslim faith

It has been our experience, that free men are often seduced by sinister practices, enslaved, and transported, which can thus be prevented