Tuesday 7 December 2010

Can you help?

I'm looking for figures on British beer exports to India in the 19th century. I've been having trouble finding many. Anyone know a good place to look?

4 comments:

Alan said...

Was there any sort of excise tax credit for exporting within the empire?

Ron Pattinson said...

Alan, there was a thing called drawback. Which was basically a refund of the UK tax. But that applied to exports sent anywhere.

Oblivious said...

What about shipping records?

Here is one that has suggests trade information.

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/

Martyn Cornell said...

What you want, I believe, Ron, is the "East India Statistical Abstracts" published by the India Office - they seem to list imports of beer etc under "malt liquors", which presumably is why the stats don't come up in any search for "beer India imports" and may also include whisk(e)y, but I doubt that this was a major item. Most of these volumes, for some mad reason, while available in Google Books, seem to be snippet view only, but here's one covering the 1840s to early 1860s that isn't, and there may be others - I haven't dug around much. Good luck, and I look forward to seeing the results of your researches, as always …