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Maritime Enterprise and Empire: Sir William Mackinnon and His Business Network, 1823-1893. By J. Forbes Munro. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2003. ix + 525 pp. Index, notes, illustrations, maps, references, tables. Cloth, $130.00. ISBN 0-851-15935-4.
Reviewed by Michael Miller
For close to a century, the Mackinnon Mackenzie group, later known formally as the Inchcape Group, was one of the leading expatriate firms in the Indian Ocean region. Founded in 1847 by William Mackinnon and Robert Mackenzie, both from Campeltown, Scotland, the firm and its related enterprises grew to include agency and shipping activities in India, the Persian Gulf, East Africa, and Australia. Mackinnon Mackenzie was best known as the founder and manager of the British India Steam Navigation Company (BI), at one time the largest shipping company in the world. In British shipping circles, only the Alfred Holt network stands as an equivalent model to the shipping and ship-agency relationship established between Mackinnon Mackenzie, British India, and P & O, with which BI merged in 1914. The group, however, also managed tea estates, jute and cotton mills, and a riverboat feeder company between Calcutta and Assam, and its members continued to act as trading companies after the core Mackinnon Mackenzie house had abandoned these undertakings to concentrate on its maritime ventures. In addition to BI, Mackinnon Mackenzie ran the Netherlands India Steam Navigation Company (NISM), an interisland shipping operation in the Dutch East Indies (until it was ousted in favor of a purely Dutch firm toward the end of the century), and another coastal shipping firm in Australian waters. Despite the prominence it achieved, its history has often been relegated to fragments in larger studies. Percival Griffiths's A History of the Inchcape Group (1977) and Stephanie Jones's Two Centuries of Overseas Trading: The Origins and Growth of the Inchcape Group (1986) did review the main group firms, but the focus...