?:>~ 

HISTORY OF 

BRITlS.H INDIA 
.. 

UNDER THE COMPANY 

AND THE CROWN 

BY 

P. E. ROBERTS 
FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD 

OXFORD 
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 



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STOCKTAKING-2011, 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK 

TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY 

HUMPHREY MILFORD 
P~BLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY 

24976' 
19 s~ 



CONTENTS 

PART I 
,CHAPTER 

I. PHYSICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES 

JI, SKETCH OF POLITICAL HISTORY TO THE APPEAR· 

' A'NCE OF THE BRITISH IN INDIA 

Ill.' EUROPEAN CO~IMERCE WITH INDIA 

IV. THE BIRTH OF THE LONDON EAST INDIA COM­

PANY 

V. THE ENGLISH, DUTCH, AND PORTUGUESE IN THE 

E.~ST ·' 
YJ. EARLY SETTLEMENTS IN INDIA. THE CoMPANY 

UNDER THE STUARTS, THE COMMONWEALTH, 

PAGE 

s' 
14 

21 

THE PROTECTORATE, THE RESTORATION . 3S 
VII. THE NEw· EAsT INDIA COMPANY • ~ 47 

VIII. GROWTH OF THE SETTLEMElii'S, I/08-1746. THE 

0STEND COMPANY 6o 

iX. THE LIFE OF THE ENGLISH IN THE EAST 7S 
X. THE ENGLISH AND. FRENCH .IN INDIA, TO THE 

PEACE OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE 91 

XI. THE ENGLISH AND FRENCH ON THE COROMANDEL 

COAST, TO THE RECALL OF DuPLEIX • I05 

XII, ENGLISH AND. }"RENCH IN. INDIA, TO THE PEACE 

OF PARIS. REASONS. FOR THE FRENCH DEFEAT • I 20 

XILI. THE REVOLUTION IN BENGAL. PLASSEY, AND 

CLIVE'S FIRST Go YERNORSHIP OF BENGAL. I 29 

XIV. MISGOVERNMENT IN BENGAL. REFORMS AND 

CLIVE'S SECOND GOVERNORSHIP • 149 

XV. THE ADMINISTRATION OF WARREN HASTINGS TO 

THE END OF THE ROHILLA \VAR 167 

XYI. \YARRE!\ ·RAST~GS. THE REGULATING ACT AND 

THE 1:RIAL OF NANDKUMAR I79 

XVII. W ARRE!\ HASTINGS. \\' ARS IN WESTERN AND 

SouTHERN INDIA. i9I 

XVIII. CHAIT SINGH AND THE BEGAMS OF OUDH. THE 

lMPEACH~fENT OF WARREN HASTINGS 201 



IV CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XIX. INTERNAL REFORMS. THE GREAT LAND SETTI:E-

C~!ENT. LORD CORNWAtLIS AND SIR JOHN SHORE 220' 

XX. EXPANSION. LORD WELLESLEY. SulfSIDIARY 

ALLIANCES AND ANNEXATIONS • 243 

XXI. REACTION FROM THE POLICY OF ANNEXATION. 

LORD CORNWALLIS, SIR GEORGE. BARLOW, LORD 

MINTO • 263 

XXII. FINAL DEFEAT OF THE MARATHA CONFEDERACY. 

LORD HASTINGS • 

XXIII. THE FIRST BURMESE WAR. LORD AMHERST • 

XXIV. LORD WILLIAM BENTINCK AND INTERNAL RE­

'FORMS • 

XXV. THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR •. LORD AUCKLAND AND 

. LORD ELLENBOROUGH • ' 

XXVI. THE ANNEXATION OF SIND UNDER LORD ELLEN­

BOROUGH 

XXVII. THE FIRST AND SECOND SIKH WARS AND THE 

CoNQUEST oF THE PUNJAB. LoRD HARDINGE 

AND LORD DALHOUSIE 

I:XViii, THE SECOND BURMESE WAR. LORD DALHOUSIE. 

300 

310 

333 

THE DOCTRINE OF LAPSE • 347 

XXIX. THE CAll'SES OF THE MUTINY. LORD CANNING 3.?9 
XXX. THE MUTINY ~ 368 

XXXI. THE END OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY 

PART II 

I. INDIA UNDER THE CROWN. SETTLEMENT AND PACI-

FICATION. THE END OF LORD CANNING'S AD-

li!INISTRATION 387 
II •. LORD ELGIN AND LoRD LAWRENCE. OUR RELATIONS 

WITH AFGHANISTAN • 397 
Ill. LORD MAYO. ·RELATIONS WITH SHERALI. FINANCIAL 

REFORM 412 

IV. LORD NORTHBROOK. AFGHAN AFFAIRS 419 

V. LORD LYTTON'S POLICY IN AFOHANISTAN TO THE 

BEGINNING OF THE: WAR , 431 

VI. THE SECOND A,FGHAN wAR • 442. 

VII. INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION UNDER LORD.LYTTON 452 

Till. LORD RIPON AND THE ERA OF CONSTITUTIONAL 

REFORM 463 



CONTENTS v 

CHAP1rER PAGE 

IX. ~LORD DuFFERIN. ENGLAND, RUSSIA, AND AFGHANI· 

STAN. THE CONQUEST OF UPPER BURMA 471 

X. THE "ADMINISTRATION OF LORD LANSDOWNE. THE 

FORWARD POLICY 483 
XI. MEASURES OF SOCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM, 

I885,-92. THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS 494 

XII. FAMINE, PLAGUE, AND FRONTIER WARS. LORD 

ELGIN's ADMINISTRATION , 50I 

XUL THE FOREIGN PoLICY OF LORD CURZON IN THE 

NORTH·WEST, AFGHANISTAN, AND PERSIA 514 

XIV. THE EXPEDITION TO TIBET, 1904. 525 

XV. INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION UNDER LORD CURZON 539 
XVI. THE MoRLEY-MINTO REFORi\iS. THE ANGI~o-RussiAN 

. CONVENTION 558 
XVII. THE CORONATION DuRBAR. THE MONTAGU-CHELMS-

roG~roH 5U . 
lliD~ 5~ 



LIST OF MAPS 

Indian Empire and Ceylon . 
India, showing physical features . 
India in r6o5 • • • \ . 

PAGE 

jro:ntispiece 

Sketch-map of the Carnatic . 
Sketch-map of parts of Bengal, Bihar, and Oudh. 
India in I 795 
Sketch-map to illustrate the Maratha Wars. 
Sketch-map to illustrate the Burmese ·wars, 1826, rS:j2, 1885 
Ranjit Singh's Dominions in 1839 
India in 1857 (the Mutiny year) . 
Afghanistan and N.W. Frontier . 
Burma 
Persian Gulf and the Red Sea 
Expedition to Lhasa 

4, 5 
29 
93 

131 

221 

2s3 
293 
335 
37 1 

430 
478 
520 
527 



HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF 
INDIA 

CHAPTER I 

PHYSICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES 

THE geography of India will be treated fully in a separate 
volume, and in this chapter only such broad aspects of the 
subject will be indicated as are absolutely necessary for 
a right understanding of the history. 

The natural frontiers of India are mountains and sea, and 
this fact has had a preponderating influence upon her annals. 
From the mouth of the Indus m1 the west to the delta of 
the Ganges on the east the water,of the Arabian Sea and 
the Indian Ocean wash the shores of the great triangular 
peninsula of central and southern India. A vast irregular 
semicircle of mountains, with a few breaks in the line; 
extends from. a point westward of the Indus to the shores 
of Arakan-the country on the eastern bend of the Bay of 
Bengal. This colossal natural rampart, if we trace its course 
from west to east, begins with the Kirtha range Striking 
northward from Karachi, the seaport of Sind. At Quetta 
the mountairis curve eastward for a time till the Sulaiman 
range again trends in a northerly direction. Sweeping 
rourtd to the east are the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram 
mountains with their ft-emendous summits, some attaining 
an altitude of z8,ooo feet. Thence the mighty double bar­
rier of the Himalayas, including amongst ·its peaks Mount 
Everest,. the loftiest elevation on the surface of the globe, 
stretches in a slightly concave south-eastern curve .to the 

914 B 



2 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAP. 

northern frontier ,of Assam. At the base of the central' 
Himalayas runs a belt of malarial tiger-haunted jungle 
called Tarai or Duars, and beneath the forest· overgrowth 
lie the buried remains of ancient cities famous in Buddhist 
history. At right angles to the eastern edge of the, Hima­
layas, hill ranges of lesser btit still considerable elevation 
nm due south to the seaboard of Arakan. India is thus 
magnificently fortified by nature, for the lowest passes over 
the Himalayas to the barren highlands of Tibet are I7,ooo 
feet up, and are therefore useless except for the purposes of 
a primitive form of trade. To land. armies she is vulnerable 
only from the west and north-west region of the mountain 
barrier, where the passes of the Khyber, Kurram, and Bolan 
lead down from·the eastern edge of the Iranian pl~j.teau into 
the wide plains of the Punjab. Through their grim and, 
frowning valleys successive inv'ading hosts of Aryans, Huns, 
Afghans, Persians, and Mughals have marched to the ,con­
quest or plunder of Hiridustan. 

The configuration of~he territories within these bounda­
ries of mountain and sea now demands our attention. India 
falls naturally into' two great divisions. First, Hindustan, 
which consists of the Himalayan system, the great northern 
alluvial plains, and the broken central plateau of Malwa and 
Bundelkhand; secondly, the Deccan, the triangular shaped 
peninsula of the south. 1 The division is marked by a broad 
belt of hills, forest, and the course of two rivers; the 
Satpura mountains run due east from the Gulf of Cambay, 
and in a deep trench between them and the Vindhya range 
the Narbada, 8oo miles in length, flows westward into the 

1 Both names ' Hind us tan ' and ' Deccan • have unfortunate! y a wider 
and narrower denotation. Hindustan in its wider sense means all India, 
iying north of the Vindhya Mountains ; tn the narrower sense, the upper 
basin of the Ganges. In like manner the Deccan sometimes means all 
India south of the N arbada, sometimes on! y the territory 1 ying between 
that river and the Kistna. Further the term Hindustan is sometimes 

, loosely applied by modern writers to the whole of India, 



r PHYSICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES. 3 

At:abian Sea; in an opposite direction the Mahanadi, 
with a more winding course, flows eastward into the Bay of 
Bengal, The barrier between Hindustan and the Deccan 
has always been well defined, and till the days of British 
rule it prevented India from being brought successfully 
under one imperial sway. · 

The great plains of India are in Hindustan. From the 
southern bases of the Himalayas they stretch westward to 
Kathiawar and eastward to the northern coast line of the 
Bay of Bengal. They are almost entirely composed of allu­
vial soil, the drainage of the mountains, brought down by 
two great rivers, the Indus and the Ganges. The Indus, 
1,8oo miles long, rises north of the Himalayas, and after 

. flowing north-west -ror about soc miles· in a· deep trough ~t 
the back of the range, pierces the mountain wall a~d turns 
southward. Then, after receiving as affiuents the combined 
waters of the other four great rivers of the Punjab, it makes 
its way with greatly increased volume but slackened stream 
through Sind and empties itself b:f a network of channels 
into the Arabian Sea. The Ganges, swollen by its great 
tributaries, the Jumna, the Gogra, and the Gandak, flows 
for r,soo miles across northern India almost parallel with 
the line of the Himalayas and, after irrigating an immense 
basin, finds its way through many mouths into the Bay of 
Bengal. Just before it merges into the sea, it is joined at 
Goalundo by the Brahmaputra, which under its Tibetan 
name of Tsanpo rises north of the Himalayas a few miles 
only from the source of the Indus, and flowing in a directly 
opposite direction for more than a thousand miles turns the 
eastern flank of the mountains by a wide detour winding 
first west and then sou& through the valleys of Assam into 
the plains of lower Bengal. So great is the volume of water 
carried down by these two mighty rivers that their com­
bined delta, interlaced with innumerable channels, covers 
a space of so,ooo square miles. The great river systems of 

B 2 



ARABIA 

8 E ~ 

.::.Maidiue Is. 



T B 

8 A Y 0 F 

G A L 
.. 

0 
VAndaman Is. 
0 

~ 

. . 

J N D I A 
SHOWING 

"~~~~ 
Njcobar Is. 

PHYSICAL FEATURES I} 

Scale of ·llliles 

100 50 0 100 200 300 400 50Q 



.6 HISTORICAL GEQGRAPHY OF INDIA 

the Indus and· the Ganges are parted by the watershed· of 
the Aravalli range which runs in a north-easterly direction 
across Rajputana. To the west of this chain~ where the 
irrigating waters fail, there is thrust, as it were, between the 
river valleys the wedge of the Thar or Indian desert, once · 
the floor of a vast primaeval sea. A great part of this deso­
late tract was formerly fertilized by the vanished river Hakra, 
flowing almost parallel with the Indus, which is said to have 
only fi~ally disappeared in the eighteenth century. 

While the climate of the Indus valley is on the whole hot 
and dry, and along the lower reaches of the river itself culti­
vation only extends a few miles from the banks, the plain of 
the Ganges with its moisture-laden atmosphere, rich rice 

.fields, and luxuriant vegetation is one of the most fertile and 
thickly populated dist'l:icts in the world. On the banks of 
the sacred river and its tributary the J umna stand the fairest 
and most famous cities of India. Here were the centres of 
early civilizations, the capitals of the ancient kingdoms, the 
seats of imperial dynast~s. 

The Deccan, which in the older and wider acceptation of 
the term includes all India south of the Vindhyas, is a high 
terraced plateau with a decided slope from ''"est to east. It 
thus comes about that with the exception of the Narbada 
and the Tapti on the northern Deccan frontier; all the 
important rivers of southern India, the Mahanadi, Godavari, 
the Kistna with its tributary the Tungabhadra, and the 
Kaveri flow eastwards, though many of them rise within, 
fifty miles of the western coast. The steep wall of the 
tableland on the coast of Malabar forms the mountain 
range of the Western Ghats, the lower escarpment on the 
Coromandel coast that of the Easte~ Ghats. Between the 
foot of the Ghats and the sea lie belts of fertile phiin hmd, 
and it was on these that Europeans coming by sea first 
landed and built their primitive factories and stations. On 
the· Bombay. ·side the level strip is very narrow, for the 



PHYSICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES 7 

mountains scarcely ever recede more than forty miles from 
the coast. On the Madras side it is much broader and the 
valleys of tpe Deccan rivers run far back among the hills. 
In the extreme south-east is the corr:tparatively broad plain 
of Madura and Tinn~~elly, for the Eastern Ghats, about tw() 
hundred miles !rom Cape Comorin, bend away to the west, 
and are linked up with the Western Ghats by the transverse 
range ofthe Nilgiris. · · 

The coast line of India, which is about 3,ooo miles in 
length, is .singularly devoid of indentations, and the deltas 
of the rivers are difficult to· navigate. On the western shore 
-the natural point of approach from Europe-Bombay is 
the only good unartificial harbour, and though it is one of 
the finest in the world, the city and its hinterland is so shut 
in by the Western Ghats, which extend from the Narbada 
to Cape Comorin with one break at Palghat, that till 
the development of railways it .was a very poor centre for 
distribution. The eastern shore of the Deccan is a shallow, 
surf-beaten strand, and till the m~ern harbour of Madras 
was consfructed landing could only be effected in· small 
boats. Hence the unchallenged supremacy of Calcutta as 
a port for so many years. A glance at the physical map of 
India might suggest that the valley of the Indus was a· more 
likely point d'appui from Europe. But the control of ·that 
waterway passed late into the hands of the British, and 
Karachi has only been ·made a tolerable port by artificial 
works. So, though the silt-laden channel. of the Hughli" 
is only kept open with difficulty, and its navigation is 
extremely dangerous, the delta of the Ganges has been till. 
modern times the gate of India from the sea.1 

1 Of the physical and g~graphical features of Burma something will 
b.e said in chap. xiii. 



CHAPTER II 

· SKETCH OF POLITICAL HISTORY TO THE APPEAR 
. . ANCE OF THE BRITISH IN INDIA 

IN this work we are not concerned with the ancient or 
mediaeval history of India. A few paragraphs must suffice 
to sum up the centuries that elapsed before India came into 
contact with European natiqns' by sea. India has been 
called an 'ethnological museum' ; it is a land \vith an 
infinite · variety of races, religions, and languages. The 
original inhabitants seem to have been of a short, dark, and 
snub-nosed type, and their descend-ants now dwell mainly 
in southern India. The prevailing type in northern India 
is tall, fair-skinned, and long-nosed. They are almost cer­
tainly a branch of the great Aryan ra~e which from about 
rsoo B.C. came thron~ng into Hindustan through the' 
north-western passes in successive waves of immigration, 
driving back the aborigines into the fastnesses and table­
lands of the Deccan. The Indo-Aryan invaders evolved 
their wonderful Vedic literature and the religion of Brah­
manical Hinduism in the Punjab ; and much later, about 
soo·B, c., in the upper Ganges valley, the religions of Bud­
dhism and Jainism came into existence; Jainism never 
extended beyoml India and is even there a declining .faith; 
Buddhism has disappeared from the land of its birth, but 
its·. votaries outnumber those of any other creed upon the 
earth. There too was produced the unique caste system, 
which now holds all Hindu India 6n its deadening grip, 
segregating the population into thousands of non-associating 
groups parted from each other by immaterial yet adaman­
tine barriers which forbid common intercourse and inter-

. ·marriage. 



SKETCH OF EARLY POL/TICAb 1/ISTORY 9 

·other invaders, Sakas; Kushans, and White Hu~s, fol- · 
lowed in their train, some near akin to the Aryan stock, 
·some (and these came probably through the north-eastern 
passes) of the yellow Mongolian type. In many cases the 
invading peoples intermarried with the aborigines, •thus 
producing further varieties of races and languages~ But on 
the whole the Aryan type prevailed in northern India and 
the pre-Aryan in the Deccan. The tribes of the south are 
conveniently but not very scientifically known as Dravidians, 
and the ancient tongues they speak, Tamil, Telugu, Kana­
rese, Malayalam, anQ Tulu, are classified as belonging to the 
Dravidian family of languages. 

Under the humanizing influence of Buddhism, Jainism, 
and Hinduism, a comparatively high stage of civilization 
was attained. Many Hindu empires and kingdoms rose 
and flourished, an outline of whose history is now being 
painfully wrested by scholars mainly from epigraphic and 
numismatic sources .• About soo B. c. the Indus valley was 
subdued by the generals of Darius,.,on of Hystaspcs, King 
of Persia, and became for a short time a province of the 
Persian Empire. Indian archers fought in 479 B.c. on the 
field of l)lataea. In 3 z6 B. c. Alexander the Great crossed 
the Indus in his triumphant march across Asia and subdued 
the north-western part of Hindustan. But on his death in 
323 B. c. his empire rapidly dissolved. No lasting imperial 
dominion in India was ever established by a Hindu people, 
though on three occasions such an event appeared to come 
within the bounds of probability. The short-lived empire 
of Asoka ( 273 to 232 B. c.?) is supposed by some authorities 
to have extended from the Hindu Kush mountains to, 
approximately, the no~hern frontier of Mysore. Again, 
Samudragupta of Pataliputra (the modern Patna) A, D. 4oo, 
and Harsha of Kanauj about zoo years later, extended their 
suzerainty over a great part of northern India, but neither 
founded a lasting dynasty. 



IO HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAP. 

India. was next 'destined to experience the conquering 
sword of Islam. In the beginning of the eighth century of 
the Christian era the Arabians conquered Sind, and two 
hundr_ed. and fifty yea~s later Muhammadan Turks were 

. gatherjng threateningly round the northern mountain walls. 
Ghazni in Afghanistan was occupied in A. D. 862, and the 
Sultan Of that city, Mahmud, between A. D. 997 and Ioz6, 

• made fifteen raids into northern India, though the province 
of Lahore was the one permanent possession that remained 
-to his house; Muhammad oLGhor, having conquered 
Ghazni, led six invasions of India between r I 7 5 and I zo6, 
and one of his generals founded a Turkish dynasty which 
ruled at Delhi. The Muhammadans gradually acquir~d 

Bihar and Bengal and penetrated far into the Deccan. Four. 
dynasties of Muhammadan kings succeeded each other on 
the throne of Delhi between A. D. 1206 and 1526. Mean"' 
while in central and southern India many ruling Muham­
madan Houses established themselves, pre-eminent among 
them being the five ~eccan kingdoms of Ahmadnagar, 
Bijapur, Golconda, Bidar, and Berar, which for about 
I so years before A. D. 156 5 maintained a desultory warfare 
with Vijayanagar, the chief Hindu state of southern India. 

Finally, in the sixteenth century a new conqueror, Babar 
the Mughal, overthrew the other Muhammadan powers of 
northern India. Originally the chief of Farghana iri modern 
Turkestan, he had made himself master of Kabul; and 
between A. D. I505 and 1525 led four expeditions through 
the north-western passes. In his fifth expedition he defeated 
Sultan Ibrahim, the last of the Lodi kings of Delhi, on the 
field of Panipat (1526) and founded the Mughal Empire. 
But in_ 1530, before he could coll!;olidate his power, he 
died. His dominions extended over part of northern India, 
roughly speaking from the Indus on the west to the frontier 
of Bengal. His spn Humayun, after some troubled years of 
rule, was driven back to Afghanistan, but in 1555 partially . . 



II . SKETCH OF EARLY _POLITICAL HISTORY II 

recovered his father's conquests. He died in the moment 
of his triumph and left to his son ·Akbar in ·1556 a kingdom 
consisting practically of the Punjab with the districts round 
Delhi and Agra .. Akbar (ISS6-I6os), almost exactly con­
temporary with Queen Elizabeth of England, was the greatest 
ofthf:! Mughal emperors. He stibdued Rajputana, Gujarat, 
Sind,,....Malwa, Khandesh, Bengal, and Kashmir; recovered 
Kandahar, and Afghanistan, and, by making Ahmadnagar • 
a dependency of the empire, extended his frontier in the 
Deccan roughly speaking· to the line of the river Godavari. 
But Akbar did more than enlarge the boundaries of his 
dominions. He built up an administrative and financial 
.system which gave a definite form and cohesion to Mughal 

~ 

sovereignty. The empire was divided into .fifteen subahs 
or provinces, each under a governor or viceroy known as 
Subadar, Nawab, or 1\Tazim, with a financial officer to assist 
him known as ·the Diwan. Muhammadan political termino­
logy is not. very scientific. Properly spe~king the title 
Sztbadar would seem to be appjied to the rulers of the 
great provinces, and that of Nawab to his subordinates, the 
governors of the lesser subdivisions. Thus the Subadar of 
the Deccan was the overlord of the Nawab of the Carnatic. 
Often, however, these titles seeni to be interchangeable; 
Bengal was politically perhaps the most important province 
of all, but its ruler was more often styled Nawab than 
Subadar. In India the bulk of the state revenue has always 
been derived from the soil, and Akbar's great Hindu minister, 
Todar Mall, carried through the first great land settlement, 
i. e. he determined and placed on record the proportion of 
the produce that must be paid to the treasury by the 
cultivators, as Crown ~ent. 

Up to this time the Mughal sway in Hindustan had been 
little more than a military occupation, but Akbar left to his 
son Jahangir (16os-27)-almost coeval with James I, to 
whom in character he has been compared-an empire strong 



!2 CHAP, 

and well administered. It was in the latter's reign that the 
English acquired their first factory on the Indian coast, and 
at his court that Sir Thomas Roe resided for thtee years as 
ambassador from the King of England. For about a hundred 
years from the accession of Jahangir, the Mughal Empire 
was governed by a line of able and powerful rulers, and the 
general peace they maintained throughout northern and 

• central India was undoubtedly favourable to the growth 
and development of the European settlements. In the reign 
of Shah Jahan (I627-58) the southern Muhammadan king­
doms of Bijapur and Golconda acknowledged the suzerainty 
of Delhi, and though the control of the Mughals over the 
Deccan was never very effective, the states in that regiop 
were to some ext~nt overawed and induced to maintain 
comparative peace amongst themselves . by their dread of 
the great empire in the north. vVb.en after I7 12 the mighty 
fabric fell into decay, the European settlers, though they 
had many difficulties and dangers still to face, were left 
strong enough to main~in their position in the era of 
confusion and political anarchy that ensued. 

In the reign o[Aurangzeb (1658-qo7), by far the greatest 
event as regards the history of India was the gradual rise of 
the Marathas, a Hindu people whose original home was 
Maharashtra, the hilly territory of the Western Ghats lying 
east of Bombay and south of the Satpura mountains. This 
despised race of Deccan peasants was destined to be the 
most powerful solvent of the Mughal Empire and the most 
determined rival of British supremacy in India. The people 
themselves and their ruling house were of low caste origin, 
though many of their'later political leaders were high caste 
.Brahmans. They were physically a s~all, active, hardy tribe, 
famous as light horsemen and contemned as mere plunderers 
arid brigands~ the 'mountain rats of the Deccan ', as 
Aurangzeb styled them. They were welded together as 
a nation by Sivaji ( 162 7-So ), who successfully resisted 



n SKETCH OF EARLY POL.TTICAL HISTORY 13 

Mughal efforts to crush him and gradually extended his 
sway over southern India wherever his neighbours were 
weak and their territories defenceless. Ranging over the 
Deccan he demanded chauth or blackmail, a tribute usually 
of one-fGurth of the revenue, from the states not strong 
enough to withstand him, and if they refused to pay it he 
harried their hinds with fire and sword. The descendants 
of Sivaji in the second generation reigned only as pageant 
kings 'at. Sa tara, and the real sovereignty passed to their 
Brahman ~1inister ~r Peshwa, Balaji Vishvanath, who founded 
a dynasty seated at Poona. But Maratha power still grew, 
imd by the middle of the eighteenth century thr:eatened 
every settled government from Cape Comorin to Bengal and 
Itajputana. A terrible defeat on the field of Panipat in the 
Punjab at the hands of the Afghan invader of India, Ahmad 
Shah Durrani, in 1761, drove them back for a time in head· 
long rout to the Deccan, but the conqueror returned to his 
o\vn count~y and the Marathas soon recovered their position. 
It. seems certain -that but for the J¥itish challenge the. whole 
inheritance of the Mughals would have passed into thei~ 
hands, and, as we shall see in the course of this history, 
four hard-fought campaigns were necessary before the Maratha 
confedera~y was shattered, subdivided, and subdued. . 



CHAPTER III 

EUROPEAN COMMERCE WITH INDIA 

AFTER the invasions of Alexander the G~eat· and his suc­
cessor Seleucus Nikator about 300 B. c., India, except for 
the travels of Marco Polo the Venetian in 1294-5, remained 
practically unvisited by Europeans till the end of the fifteenth 
century. 

Even the genius of Imperial Rome had turned back from 
the thought of Indian conquest. The distances were appalling, 
the difficulties insuperable. Yenhe products of Indian soil 
and ·Craftsmanship were from time immemorial well known 
in western marts. They were brought by ancient trade 
routes to the shores of the Black Sea. to the Levant, or to _ 
Egypt. In classical tim(Ji Tyre, Alexandria, and Constan-_ 
tmOj)fe became successiyely the ·chief emPoria of eastern 
commerce, to be replaced in the Middle Ages by Venice 
and·Geno~, whence merchants carried their wares to Antwerp, 
or Bruges in the Netherlands, and the cities of the Hanseatic 
league. 

The conquest by the Turk~ of south-western Asia and 
south-eastern Europe did much to close the old channels of 
commercial intercommunication, and dealt a serious blow 
at the prosperity of the Italian republics and the marts in 
northern and central Europe with which they were con­
nected. The onslaught of the Ottoman power, however, 
only hastened a movement that was-in any case inevitable. 
The discovery of the ocean route to India could not be 
indefinitely postponed, though the barrier interposed across 

"the. ancient land paths stimulated the cause of maritime 
enterprise. The ancient fame of India and the desire for 



I . 

EUROPEAN COMMERCE WITH INDIA 15 

a share in her traditional weall:h led indirectly to the dis­
covery of a new world in the West, the tragedies of early 
Arctic exploration, an~ · the full recognition by mankind of 
the spherical form of this planet. · · 

In the opening up of new continents men of Latin 'race 
led the way. Christopher Columbus the Genoese, seeking 
to reach India by the western route,: discovered the West 
Indies and Sout~ America for Spain in 1492. In 1497 
John Cabot, also a Genoese by birth but a naturalized 
citizen of Veriice, sailed froll,l Bristol with. an English crew 
and landed in Newfoundland.' To Portugal belongs the 
glory of having realized the quest for India . by sea after years 
of stubborn endeavour and heroic perseverance. From 1418 
to 1460 a succession of Portug'uese sea captains, inspl"r~d 
and trained by Prince Henry the Navigator, crept 'further 
and further down the ~'estern shore of Africa. In i486 

'Bartholomew Diaz was carried by storm winds past the 
Cape of Good Hope. In the following year Pedro de 
Covilham, travelling overland, r~ac~d the coast of Malabar 
and explored the Indian Ocean from an eastern base. The 
south-eastern route to India was now definitely proved to be 
feasible, and Vasco. da Gama safely rounded the Cape; 
crossed the Indian Ocean, and in May 1498 anchored off 
the coast of Calicut. 

During the sixteenth century the Portuguese enjoyed 
a monopoly of the trade to the East-a monopoly formally 
granted to them by the fiat of the Papacy. By the Bull of 
Pope Alexander VI in 1493, as interpreted by the Treaty of 
Tordesillas in 1494, and ratified in further Bulls of Julius II 
and Leo X in 1506 and 1514, an imaginary line was drawn 
3 7 o leagues west and s&th of the Cape Verde Islands.· All 
undiscovered countries east of that line were assigned to 
Portugal, and all lands on ' the west to Spain. The 
pronouncement of the P<Qpe was,.,,univ~rsally rega~&'f NORr/f $. 

throughout Catholic Europe as- th~•highest possible ~res- <"~ 

2 l19 l 6 \/' - ~ LIBRARY· ~· 
Jj 

1 9 SEP 1968 ll- ~· 
~~ ~. _ ..... ~.::::, 



16 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAl'. 

sion of international law, while the Protestant nations for 
nearly a hundred years did not feel themselves strong 
enough to defy it. Not till many hopes had been dashed 
and many lives lost in the attempt to force a route to India 
by a north-west or north-east passage (upon which no 
embargo was laid by the Bulls) did England a!ld Holland 
nerve themselves to strike out to the south-east and south­
west. 

For a century, therefore, Portugal had a clear field. She 
held 'the gorgeous East in fee', at ·least so far as the 
Popes could enable her to. do· so. The sails of her swift 
caravels were seen henceforward from Orrrfuz in the Persian 
Gulf, as far eastward as Malacca and the Spice Islands. 
Goa, on the western coast of the Deccan, the capital of 
Portuguese India, was acquired in rsro and fortified fac­
tories were established at Quiloa, Mombassa, .and Melinde 
on the east coast of Africa, at Ormuz in the Persian Gulf, 

. 4 
at Diu, Daman, and Cochin on the coast of Malabar, and 
at Malacca in Malaysi~ The period of Portuguese supre­
macy produced some great names, especially those of Vasco 
da Gama, Almeida (rsos-9), and Albuquerque (rso9-r5). 
!t brought riches . and fame to the Portuguese kings, and 
inspired the epic genius· of the poet Camoens; but Portugal 
was not destined . to win a permanent dominiqn in India. 
By the discovery of Brazil a great part of her colonizing 
energy was devoted to the West. Portugal, says Mr. White­
way, was the earliest intruder into the East,.and the East 
'has resented' the intrusion 'by absorbing and degrading 
the intruder' .1 The trading methods of Portuguese sea 
captains had more than a flavour of piracy about them. 
Profits were derived quite as muca from plu.ndering raids 
upon Arabian merchants as from legitimate commerce. 
portuguese treatment of the natives often showed a cruelty 
lower than the ~tand!l-rds of a cruel age. The eastern power 

1 The Rise of Portuguese Power i11 India, R. S .. vYhiteway, p. 2, 



III EUROPEAN COMMERCE WITH INDIA 

of t.he Catholic pioneer nation w~s destined to yield before . 
the more vigorous methods and less romantic ideals of the 
commercial Protestant states of the North, but even ·had the 
field been left clear, it is very doubtful whether her power 
would not have slipped from her hands, either when the 
Mughal Empire conquered the southern MuhammadaiV 
kingdoms, or: at the recrudescence of Hindu power under 

1 • ' . 

the Marathas. 
Gradually, as the sixteenth century drew to an end, the 

conviction was reached that there was no fea~ible route to 
India by a north-west or nortl).-east passage. The voyages 
of the Englishmen, Hore, Willoughby, Frobisher, Davis, and · 
the Dutchman Barents, were not unfruitful either in the· 
field of commerce or in that of geographical exploration. 
Hore reached Newfoundland in 1536, Sir Hugh Willoughby 
discovered Nova Zembla and explored the northern coast of 
Russia. His voyage resulted in the foundation of the 
Russia or Muscovy Company which opened to English 
merchants an overland trade with Per•ia. Frobisher ( 15 7S--8) 
and Davis (r585-7) traversed the fringe of the Arctic regions 
to the north-west, while the Dutchman Barents (1594--:6) 
made desperate attempts to break through to the north-east, 
in: the course of which he visited Staten Island and Spitzc 
bergen. In 1519-21 a Spanish squadron accomplished the 
dream of Columbus in reaching the East Indies by the 
western route. It was commanded by Ferdinand Magellan, 
who, having served uncfer and quarrelled with Albuquerque, 
offered his services to the Emperor Chades V. . He .coasteci 
down the shores of South America, passed through the 
straits that have. immortalized his name, and voyaged across 
the vast expanse of the I'acific to the Philippines. There he 
himself was killed, but the expedition reached the Moluccas • 
and one ship returned to the port of embarkation, having 
thus . completed the circumnavigation of the globe. This 
was a wonderful feat in view of the small vessels. a~d rude 

il4 c 



r8 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAI', 

.nautical instru~ents· of the time, and it clearly showed· th~t 
of: the possible southern routes the one to the south:_ west 
was so tedious and circuitous that it could n·ever be. com· 
mercially profitable. · 

._• Three causes,· geographical; religious, and political, thus 
converged to make England and Holland openly refuse to 
obey any longer. the Papal Bull. First, their: despair of 
discovering ·the northern passage. Secondly, their rebellimi: 
from the Pope's spiritual authority. ·Thirdly, .t)le forcible 
annexation by Spain of the kingdom of Portugal 'in rs8o, 
which. set ·. a totally differenp aspect upon the question. 

·England ever since r386 (the Treaty of Westn1inster) had 
remained on friendly terms with Portugal, and the United 
Netherlands had traded freely with Lisbon, the commodities 
of eastern marts being shipped thence to Antwerp for dis­
tribution amidst the ports of northern Europe. After 158o 
the port of Lisbon, now under the territorial sovereignty of 
Philip II, closed its gates to the rebels of the Low Countries, 
arid Eljzabeth of Englal\d was gradually driven by her people, · 
by the merchants and the buccaneers, to make open war 
\Vith Spain. In 1529 Sjr Francis Drake on his way round 
the world yjsjted ·the Moluccas. or Spic.e..,_Islands, in_the 
East Indies by the south-western route and is said to have 
entered into treaty relations with the chief of Ternate. 
From this date it was inevitable that England and Holland 
should openly challenge the supremacy of Portugal in the 
Indian Ocean. Spain even 6fferecf in r6o7 to renounce 
her .claim to sovereignty over the United Provinces if the 
Dutch. would abandon the navigation ,of the Indies. The 
English and Dutch assault upon the Portuguese monopoly 
was contemporaneous, and it was quite an open question in 

• the race for pre-eminence which nation would be the first to 
reach its goal. It is impossible here \vithin the space at our 
disposal to describe in detail the fluctuations in fortune and 
the progressive steps by which now England, now Hollan'd1 



III EUROPEAN COMMERCE WITH INDIA . 19 

pushed forward her pioneering flag. Broadly, and in outline, 
the course of events was as follows. The East India Com· 
panies of the two nations were founded within a few years 
of each other. The English Company was the first to :be 
incorporated, but for many years it lagged behind the great 
Company of the United Netherlands in power and prosperity. 
For the first decades of the seventeenth century both nations 
were forced to make tlieir way in the teeth of Portuguese 
resistance, but when that was surmounted, they turned 
jealously upon one another. Both coveted the Far East, the 
Malay Archipelago, rather than the mainland of India, as the 
fairer and 'more profitable' inheritance, and there ultimately 
the Dutch secured their hold, driving out the English by 
their superior physical force, and keeping them out by the 
restrictive and monopolizing spirit that in the seventeenth 
century dominated the colonial policy of Holland. The 
English reluctantly and perforce· were driven to develop 
their settlements on the mainland, little realizing at the time 
that India itself was destined to coie(er on its possessors the 
sovereignty of the East, while the attractive Spice Islands 
were in reality a seductive by-path leading those who fol­
lowed it astray from the road to dominion. The Dutch had 
thus early in their eastern history been led into a cardinal 
error, but it was an error impossible for them or any other 
nation to avoid in the light of contemporary knowledge. 
Nor would it be fair to attribute wholly to this initial step 
the fact that the Engli~h and not the Dutch were ultimately 
to .attain supremacy in the East. Dutch power in India 
was largely jeopardiied on European battlefields. The 
eastern dominion of Holland, compact and· profitable, is 
even now no mean intft!ritance, and is perhaps as great in 
extent and achievement as it ever could have been, in view 
of the endless political difficulties from European·· com plica-' 
tions that beset the path of Dutch statesmen. It was on 
the Dutch pattern that the English of the seventeenth 

C2 



20 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA 

century consciously modelled their administrative system in 
India. 'Our d~sign .in the whole', wrote the Court in 1687, 
'is to set up the Dutch government among the English in 
India (than which a better cannot be invented) for the good 
of posterity and to put us upon an equal foot of power with 
them to defend or offend or enlarge th'e English dominion, 
and unite the strength· of our nation under one entire and 
absoiute command subject to us as we are and ever shall 
be most dutiful to our sovereign, with this distinction that 
we will always observe our own old English •terms, viz. 
Attorney General instead_of Fiscal. ... President and Agent 
instead of Commandore, Direct.ore, or Commissaries.' 1 

Such is the barest outline of the course of events. The 
history of Holland in the East can only be dealt with in 
detail where it touches that of Great Britain, and even so 
the narrative must necessarily be summarized. 

1 India Office Records, Letter Book No.8, Dispatch to Fort St. George, 
Sept. 28, 1687. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE BIRTH OF THE LONDON EAST INDIA COMPANY 

, THE visit of Sir Francis Drake to the Moluccas in 15.79 

has already been noticed. It was prophetic of what was to 
come. The craving of adventurous Englishmen to sail 
southwards and eastwards could no longer be kept back by 
the calculating policy of the Queen, who, a slave now to the 
purely negative and dilatory policy that had served her so 
well at the opening of her reign, stiU blew hot and cold in 
her reluctance to come to an open breach with Philip.of 
Spain. She braced herself in I s8o to declare to the Spanish' 
ambassador that 'the ocean was free to all; for as much 
as neither nature nor regard of wblic use do permit the 
exclusive possession thereof'.1 In rsSz England made the 
first direct attempt of any European power to break down 
the Portuguese monopoly ·by a voyage round the Cape. 
Edward !'enton sailed with four ships, but proved an unfor­
tunate or incompetent captain, and the expedition ended 
disastrously. 

The first Englishman known to have lived on the main­
land of India was Thomas Stephens. He became in 1579 
Rector of the Jesuit co1lege in Goa. The letters he wrote 
to his father are said to have spread in England a wider 
desire for direct communic'ation with the East. In I583 
two English merchant~ Fitch and Newbery, accompanied 
by Leedes, a jeweller, and Story, a painter, journeyed over­
land to India. The Portuguese arrested them at Ormuz,' 
and took them prisoners to Goa. After their rele:l;se, Story 

1 History of Elizabeth, William Camde~, 1675, p. Z55· 



HISTORICAL GEOGHAPHY OF INDIA CHAP, 

became a monk, Leedes entered the Mughal service, New­
bery died on the way home, but Fitch, after adventurous 
wanderings through Bengal, Burma, :tvialacca, and Ceylon, 
returned safely home in 1591, to inspire· in his countrymen 
a keener desire for trade and exploration in the East. 

The defeat of the Armada in I sSS impelled even the 
Queen to show her hand more boldly. Permission was 
granted to some merchants to attempt a voyage by the Cape 
route. In 1591 James Lancaster, in the Edward Bonavm­
tura, reached Cape Comorin and the Malay Peninsula, 
though the commander of the expedition, George Raymond, 
went down with his ship. On his return voyage Lancaster 

. was driven by sform winds to the coast of Brazil and the 
West Indies. There part of his crew mutinied and carried 
off the ship, and Lancaster sailed for England in a French 
vessel, arriving in May 1594· In 1596 a squadron of three 
vessels was dispatched by Sir Robert Dudley under the 
command of Benjamin Wood, but was never heard of again. 
In 1599 a London ,r.Ieochant adventurer, John Midnall or 
Mildenhall, reached India by the overland route. He was 
granted a passport by Elizabeth, and spent seven years in 
the East, during which time he visited the court of the 
Emperor Akbar at Agra, and. procured from him certain 
privileges of. very dubious value. These he afterwards 
attempted in vain to sell to the East India Company, which 
had been incorporated during his absence. 

The old Turkey Company, founded in 1581, had been 
granted permission in 1593 to trade overland as far as the 
East. Indies, and was renamed the Levant Company, but 
the difficulties of the trade route were such that little good 
came of it. Accordingly two prmtinent members of the 

. ' . 

Levant Company, moved no doubt by the fact that Cor-
nelius Houtman, a Dutchman, had sailed to Sumatra arid 
]3antam ,by the Cape route in 1596, came forward with 
a number of other merchants and raised a subscription for . 



lV THE LONDON EAST INDIA COMPANY 

a voyage to India by way of the Cape. On September 24, 

1599, they met together, subscribed ~sum of £3o, 133 3s. 8d., 
and applied to Elizabeth for a charter. But in the realm of 
high politics negotiations were pending for a truce to end 
the long war with Spain, and the government were. not 
inclined to imperil all chances of a settlement by granting 
the prayers of a few traders. The next year prospects were 
more favourable, for the peace proposals had been ship­
wrecked. Accordingly, a year later all but a- day, Septem­
ber 23, ·r6oo, the adventurers met again, in Founders' Hall, 
more than doubled the amount of their former subscription, 
raising it to £68,373, and purchased ships. They asked 
only for leave to trade in the East where Spaniards and 
·Portuguese-' have not any castle, fort; blockhouse, or com­
mandant'. They thus ignored the right founded on a 
Papal Bull, but recognized the doctrine of effective occupa· 
tion. On the last day of the year r 6oo the East India 
Company- ;a; inco-rporated 'by 'nam~ of. ' the Governor 
and Company of Merchants of London trading into the 
East Indies'. • 

The number of subscribers was 217. The first governor, 
Thomas Smythe, and twenty-four 'comn;Itt"~es' (i.e. com­
mittee met1)were nominated in the charter, a~d ~vere after­
~aidt'to-be ·:rm~~ll)7 '"elected.... The . e~clusi~e- tr~de with 
In-dia was- granted for fift~en years. Thus the first great 
step was taken on that path which was to lead Great 
Britain to the goal of her wonderful eastern empire. It is 
interesting to pause for a moment and attempt to estimate 
the magnitude of the task that lay before the stout-hearted 
body .of merchant adventurers, to eliminate for a moment 
the facts of later histQry as we know them, and face the 

· problem as they faced it. The preliminary step was one 
requiring no mean courage on the part of those who took 
it .. They had no first-hand knowledge of the East; the 
reports of Fitch and Stephens ~nd a translation of the 

• 



HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAP. 

works of the Dutch .traveller, Linschoten, who had lived at 
Goa 1583-9, were alinost all upon which they had to 
rely. Peace with Spain was not concluded till r6o4; and 
they -fully realized that they had to face the determined hos­
tility of the Spaniards and Portuguese, the latter ·of whom 
had enjoyed for a century the prescriptive right to the 
Indian seas. 'rhe Dutch also were certain to prove formid­
_able rivals. Though the great United Dutch Company was 
not founded .till 16oz, the numerous provincial companies 
of the Netherlands dispatched between 1595 and· 16or no 
less than fifteen expeditions to the East consisting of sixty­
five ships. 

The task before· the London East India Company was 
tp.~r~ore a hard one. It had to explore and map out the 
Indian seas and coasts, £had painfully to work out a system 

.. of commerce, to experiment with commodities and merchan­
dise, to train and discipline a staff of servants. It had to 
brave or conciliate the hostility of England's hereditary 
Catholic enemy and her new Protestant rival. Further, it 
had to establish a posthon even at home. The English 
East India Company was the first organized attempt to 
trade with India based upon individual effort. Portugal's 
.achievements in the East had been due mainly to the pro-· 
tecting care of her royal house. The Dutch Company was 
to be backed and defended by the states of the United 
Netherlands, which through its ageni::y transferred to the 
Indian Ocean and there prosecuted with renewed vigour 
their undying quarrel with the Spaniard. Just as Elizabeth 
left the sporadic naval war with Spain, and even the defence 
of England against the Armada, mainly to private enterprise 
.and patriotism, so there was no ac~ve state support given 
to England's first essays in the East. The East India Com-· 
parry was~(radh:!d i~-the' chilly-but invigorating ~tmosphere 
of individualism. It had to ·cope with the lingering medi­
aevalt)~e)~i~~ ~g~inst th,e export. of bullion and a fallacious 

• 



IV ·THE LONDON EAST INDIA COMPANY 

theory of foreign trade. It had to depend altogether on 
mercantile initiative, and merchants desire a profitable and 
immediate return upon their outlay. Profitable the returns 
of an Indian voyage often were, though the margin of pos­
sible disaster was very wide; immediate, never. A period of 
two years was almost the least time that could elapse between 
the departure and the return of a ship, even if it survived the 
hazard of storm or the attack of an enemy .. Under the early 
system of separate voyages, in which each fleet was dis­
patched to India by a particular group of subscribers, who 
on the return of their vessels wound up the venture and 
realized the profits, there was no averaging up the_ losses 
and gains, for each venture stood by itself: It was not till 
after more than half a century of trial that the Company 
was driven by various stages to adopt a permanent joint 
stock after the fashion of modern times. 

Fortune smiled upon the CompanY's first voyage. It 
consisted of five vessels under the command of James Lan­
caster, who set sail on February r~ r6or, visit~d Achin in 
Sumatra, and delivered to the King a letter from Queen 
Elizabeth. Having captured a richly laden Portuguese 
carrack and left a factory at Bantam, Lancaster returned to 
England in September r6o3. Middleton, the commander 
of the second voyage, visited Bantam and the Spice Islands, 
Amboyna, Ternate, and Tidore (r6o4-6). He ericoun­
tered much opposition from the Dutch, who, since the 
~oalition and federation of the provincial companies into 
the great United East India Company of the Netherlands, 
with a capital eight times as great as that of its English 
rival, were sedulously pushing forward_ their claim to mono, 
polize the spice trade of~he Archipelago. The ·third voyage 
was n1emorable from the fact that a landing was then first 
made on the mainland of India, Captain Hawkins disem-

1 
barking at Surat in r6o8 and visiting the court of Jahangir 
at Agra. The Emperor received him favourably anci . 



HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHA!'. 

granted the Eriglish permission to settle in Surat, but the 
Portuguese were still strong enough in India to procure the 
revocation of the decree. Hawkins waited in vain for two 
and a half years at Agra, marrying an Armenian wife at 
Jahangit's suggestion, and hoping against hope, as he wrote 
to the Company, 'I should feather my nest and do you 
service'.. Finally he made his way down to the coast, and 
EiJYbarked in an Engiish ship in January 1612. 

The year 1612 forms a convenient terminal date for the 
1irstchapter of"the Company's history. It is .the year of 
tl1e ninth a~d last separate voyage/ and of Captain Best's 
naval victory over the Portuguese off Swally, which was not 
only the East India Company's first definite· armed success 
over a European rival, but resulted, through the foresight 
and policy of Thomas Aldworth, in permission to build_ 
a factory at Surat. In the first twelve years of its existence 
fue East India Cornpany could claim only a moderate mea­
sure of success. Till r6r2 the English had obtained no 
permanent establishme~t on the mainland of India; while 
their position in the eastern islands was weak as compared 
with that of the Dutch, and in the Red Sea they had 
seriously damaged their commercial reputation by the 
•romaging '-that is, pillaging-of Indian vessels. On the 
other hand their profits, though irregular, had been large, 
and the approval of the Crown and the nation had been 
~n- in the grant of tlleSecond cliaiter, dated I 609.1 

~vhich re-~ndowed the ·company, now reinforced by many 
rti~t;;Sers of the nobiiity, "~itli i:lie trade in perpetuity, unless 
it should prove unprofitable to the realm, when it could be 
revoked on three yea,rs' notice being given. 

But the Company was about t& enter !l.llOther zone of 
troubles and hardships. It had still battles .to fight with 

.·t Between 1612, the date of the last separate voyage, and 1657, when 
the permanent joint stock was raised, there was an intermediate stage of 
transitory joint stocks and '.Particular' or 'General' voyages. · 



IV THE LONDON EAST INDIA COMPANY 27 

the Portuguese before it could secure a foot-hold on the 
mainland, and even fiercer com bats to wage with the Dutch 
for what was universally regarded as the El Dorado of the 
East, the Spice Islands of the Malay Archipelago. Troubles 
from interlopers-that is, traders who infringed the. mono­
poly-civil war, popular hatred, and the favours of fickle 
and embarrassed sovereigns were to beset it at home, and 
during the next hundred years the Company had many a 
struggle to maintain its corporate existence and the continuity 
of its trade. · 



CHAPTER V 

THE ENGLISH, DUTCH, AND PORTUGUESE IN THE 
• EAST 

BE:FORE dealing in detail with the early settlements of the 
Company, sop-lething may profitably be said of the inter­
national relations of the three European nations competing 
for. the Indian trade, during the first half of the seventeenth 
century.. Such a summary will inevitably pass beyond the 
period with which we are at present concerned, but. it is 
convenient to group certain facts under definite headings 
and to dispose of them before resuming the main thread of 
the narrative. 

The conflict wM a threefold one. There was the 
struggle between the Po~uguese and the Dutch, between the 
Portuguese and the English, and betwe.en the Dutch and 
the English. The first aspect of the conflict hardly con­
cerns us here. It is ~nough to say that the Dutch captured 
Amboyna from the Portuguese in r6o5 and gradually sup­
planted them in the Spice Islands. They blockaded Goa 
in 1639, seized Malacca in r64r, and took the last Portu­
guese stronghold in Ceylon in 1658. By r664 they had 
ousted their rivals from most of their early settlements on 
the Malabar coast. 

Peace between England and Spain was made in r6o4, 
but it hardly extended to the. Indies, though by the treaty 
and their charter the 'English were•henceforward debarred 
from resmting to Portuguese possessions, since the Spanish 
and Portuguese Crowns were united from rs8o to I640· 
In r6u a Portuguese fleet prevented Sir Henry Middleton 
from entering the mouth of the Tapti river. But in 



'> 

'Z 

INDIA 
in 16 05 

Scale of.Miles 

0 50 100 200 300 400 

BAY' OF 

BENGAL 

AKBAR'S SUBAHS. 
1 Kabul 8 Ajmere-
2 Lahore 9 Gu jerat 
3 Mullan 1 0 Malwa 
4 Delhi 11 Rehar 
5 Agra 1 2 'Bengal 
6.0udh 13 Khandesh 
7 Allahabad 14 Berar 

15 Ahmadnagar 

• 



HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF IiYDIA CHAP. 

November a·nd December of the following year Captain 
Thomas Best with two ships defeated them in· several 
engagements. ·In December r614 and January 1615 
Captain Nicholas Downton, with a larger squadron of four 
vessels, won a still more decisive victory over the Portuguese 
viceroy in person. These defeats irretrievably damaged the 
credit of the Portuguese on the western shore of India, and 
in the eyes of the native powers the English were the natu­
ral successors to the prestige they had enjoyed. In 1622 
the English allied themselves with the Sh~h of Persia and 
captured. Ormuz in the Persian Gulf from the Portuguese, 
being rewarded by permission to settle in Gombroon and to 
receive half the customs dues. Henceforward 'Portugal 
ceased to be ,a dangerous rival to England. In I 6 30 the 
Treaty of Madrid declared that the two countries should 
abstain from hostilities in the East. But a convention 
signed by Methwold, the English President of Surat, and 
the Viceroy of Goa in 1634 was of much more practical 
impo'rtance, and actuall¥ guaranteed commercial inter-rela­
tions between the English and Portuguese in India. The 
recovery by Portugal of her independence from the yoke ot · 
Spain in 1640 further mitigated the hostility of the English, 
and recalled the old tradition of alliance and friendship 
with the Portuguese nation. In 1642 Charles I of England 
and John IV of Portugal concluqed a treaty for freedom of 
trade between the two countries, and definitely accepted 
the Surat-Goa convention. Finally Cromwell, in his Treaty 
of July 1654, extorted from Portugal a full recognition or 
England's right to trade to the East Indies. The Treaty 
which brought Bombay to Charles II in r66r as part of the 
dower of Catherine of Braganza, l!lound him to maintain 

1 the Portuguese possessions in India against the Dutch. 
, But the enmity between England and. her. hereditary foe 

the Catholic and Latin Spanish-Portuguese Empire was as 
nothing to that'which existed in the eastern seas between 



V. ENGLISH, DUTCH, AND PORTUGUESE 

herself and the Dutch, the northern Protestant power with 
whom, in .Europe at any rate, she seemed to have so much 
in common. This was no doubt mainly due to the fact 
that at a comparatively early stage the Englishman realized 
that 'the Hollander' and not 'the Portugal' was the real 
enemy. The Dutch, on "the other hand, were aggrieved by 
the mere appearance of the English in the East. Their 
assault on Portuguese possessions was a continuation of the 
struggle for freedom against the despotic power of Spain. 
'Holland', says Sir William Hunter, 'turned her despairing 
land-revolt into a triumphant oceanic war'; 1 she extended 
that war to the Far East and she wanted no third competitor 
for the prize of victory. In 1 6o9 her proud enemy Spain, 
after vainly endeavouring in r6o7 to purchase a Dutch with­
drawal from India by conceding independence in Europe, 
was forced to agree to a twelve years truce. The Dutch 
were now free to display their enmity to the English and to 
develop their plan of campaign for acquiring a mo,nopoly of 
the trade in the Moluccas, which ~ey claimed by right of 
conquest from the Portuguese. On the high seas and in 
many an Indian port, «ollisions took place between hot~ 
headed ,sea captains or jealous commercial rivals ; a famous 
incident in this unofficial war was Nathaniel Courthope's • 
defence of Pulo Run, one of the Banda Islands, with a tiny 
garrison for four years ·(16r6-2o) against frequent assaults 
from the Dutch. The representatives .of both nation~ 
endeavoured to undersell one another and to form binding 
ties. with the ·native powers. The Dutch asserted that they 
had linked to themselves by treaty almost all the petty . , 
rulers of the Moluccas ; the English put forward a claim to 
priority of occupation d!ting from the famous voyage round 
the world of Sir Francis Drake, charging the Dutch with 
oppression and intimidation of the natives, while they 
~ealously and with good reason combated the idea that a. 

1 A History of British India, vol. i, p. 237. 



32 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAP. 

few isolated and widely separated 'forts' amounted to genuine 
and effective occupation of the whole island group. · Dutch 
power there was consolidated and regularized by the appoint­
ment of Pieter Both 1 (r6og-14).as first Governor-General. 
Th'e English Company in r6rr, in a petition to the Earl of 
Salisbury (Lord High Treasurer), declared that they were 
'enforced at last to break silence and co'mplain their griefS '. ~ 
Continuous conferences in London and at the Hague (r6rr 
and r613-15) ended in failure to bring about a settlement, 
for. though proposals for a union of the two companies \\'ere 
freely made, and it was even suggested that a joint subscrip· 
tion should be raised, the English· looked with suspicion 
and dislike upon the heavy military expenditure of their 
rivals and, when called upon to share it, showed the strongest 
disinclination to do so. Meanwhile, open reprisals never 
ceased in eastern waters until, in July r6rg, the English 
Company unwillingly came to terms with the Dutch, and 
entered into a union giving up their claims to compens.ation 
for past injuries. The,- engaged to share in the expenses 
of Dutch fortifications and to provide half of a fleet o( 
defence of twenty ships which was to remain in the East 
for the purpose of patrolling the seas. In return for their 
acceptance of these onerous conditions, the· English were 
grudgingly granted a certain proportion of the trade. The 
Company's assent to the treaty was largely due to the 
pressure put upon them by James I, who then, as always, 
was exceedingly ambitious of the renown of the peacemaker. 
The treaty was to be executed by a joint Council of Defence 
in the East, consisting of four members from each Company, 
with an appeal to the States-General of Holland and the 
King of England. • 

1 This is the Dutchman who gave his name to the well-known rock in 
Mauritius. He was lost off that island in r6r6. See vol. i of this 
series, 2nd edition, p. I 46. . 

2 First Letter Book of the East India Company, Sir G. Birdwood and 
W. Foster, p. 429. · 



v ENGLTSH, DUTCH, AND PQ,RTUGUESE 33 

The treaty was ill received by the Dutch in the East, 
who, under their able Governor-General Coen (the founder 
of Batavia in x6xg), believed they had the English almost 
at their mercy. 'The English ought to be very thankful to 
you~. wrote Coen, 'for they had worked thems(;:ives very 

, nicely out of the Indies, and you have placed them again 
in the midst.' 1 Within two years the union had utterly 
broken down .. The English were violently expelled from 
Lantor and Pulo Run (1621-z), and negotiations were 
resumed in London in z621; but before the Dutch and 
English commissioners could come to any agreement, news 
arrived of the massacre of Amboyna in r6z3, a bloody and 
brutal piece of work committed by a subordinate Dutch 
official, which put an end to all compromise and stirred tip 
in England a deep and just resentment. 

Van Speult~ the Dutch Governor of Amboyna, arrested 
Towerson the English agent and eighteen other Englishmen 
besides several Japanese soldiers on a trumped-up charge 
of having conspired to seize the Dutch fort. There was no 
evidence against the prisoners at the time, except confessions 
drawn from them by fiendish torments and revoked imme­
diately they were carried from the torture chamber. On 
the other hand there exists abundant proof in both the 
Dutch and English archives that the supposed plot. was· 
a mere figment of the imagination, if it were not a deliberate 
device to exterminate the English factory. Tow(!rson and 
nine other Englishmen with nine Japanese were put to 
death ; their papers and protestations of innocence were 
destroyed, but a few pathetic and broken sentences written 
on the leaves of Prayer Book or Bible or in the pages of 
a ledger escaped unnotic~, and served afterwards to inflame 
popular feeling in England to fury. 

The action of Van Speult was not only a crime but a 
blunder, and the Prince of Orange openly declared· that he 

1 A History o/ Bn"tis!t India, Sir W. W. Hunter, vol. i, p. 384. 

914 D 



34 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA ·• 

wished that 'when Speult began to spell this tragedy,. he 
had been hung upon a gibbet, with his council about him '.1 

But in spite of intense popular excitement no real repa!ation 
was extorted from the Dutch till after the lapse of. thirty­
one years. James I, angered at the refusal of the Spanish 
court to favour his matrimonial plans for his son Charles, 
was inclining at this time for alliance with the Netherlands. 
Once again state policy was at variance with the aspiratiqns 
of the Company, though at this time these aspirations were 
backed by the voice of the whole English people. Both 
James and his successor Charles I used brave words, but 
failed to follow them up with courageous action. The East 
India Company found a more worthy protector in Oliver 
Cromwell, who: by the Treaty of w:estminster in I654 
referred the question of claims and counter-claims to four 
commissioners, to be named on both sides, meeting in 
London, with an appeal on disagreement to the Swiss 
Cantons. The commissioners restored Pulo Run to the 
English, and awarded them a sum of £Ss,ooo as indemnity 
for the Company, with• £:;,615 for the heirs of the sufferers 
at Amboyna. 

In the East, Dutch sovereignty in_ the Spice Islands 
remained secure. Though the English continually reasserted 
down. to I 667 a claim to Pulo Run, re-established a factory 
at Bantam in i6z8 (which supported a troubled existence 
till r68z), and maintained a Presidency ,at Bencoolen in 
Sumatra till r824, they never seriously challenged the 
position of the Dutch in the Malay Archipelago until Lord 
Minto's conquest of Java in r8rr. Dominion in that region 
was denied them, but the door was opened thereby to a 
wider and more imperial destiny. • 

1 Calettdar o/ State Papcrs1 East Indies (1622-4)1 c:d. by W, N, 
Sainsbury, p. 331, · 



CHAPTER VI 

EARLY SETTLEMENTS IN INDIA. THE COMPANY 
UNDER THE STUARTS, THE COMMONWEALTH, 
THE PROTECTORATE, AND RESTORATION 

IN the Spice Archipelago, as we have seen, the star of the 
English had waned before that of the'Dutch. In the mean­
time the factors and agents of the East India Company in 
the face of many difficulties and discouragements were open­
ing up trade with the ports of the mainland of India and 
endeavouring to obtain permission for the factories which 
their system of commerce rendered necessary. The failure 
of Captain Hawkins in r6o8, through Portuguese opposition, 
to settle in Surat has been already mentioned. A different 
complexion was put upon matters by Best's victory in the 
sea fight off the mouth of the Taptr in r6rz, and an Eng­
lish factory wa~ permanently established there on a grant 
obtained from Jahangir by Thomas Aldworth, who pro­
nounced it to be 'the only key to open all the rich and best 
trade of the Indies '.1 A foothold once effected, commercial 
ties wex:e gradually formed with the country inland, and 
subordi~ate agencies were established ·at Ahmadabad, 
Burhanpur, and, in the heart of the Mughal's dominions, at 

. Ajmer and Agra. 
The East India Company wisely determining to press· 

home by all possible means the advantages they had gained, 
decided to send an ambailjador 'of extraordinary countenance 
and respect' to reside at the court of the Emperor. Their 

1 Letters receive<i by the East India Compa11y from z'ts servants z'11 fit~ 
East, vol. i, ed. by F. C. D.tnvers, p. 238. . 

· D 2 



HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAP, 

choice fell upon Sir Thomas Roe as being 'of ~regnant under­
standing, well spoken, learned, industrious, and of a comelie 
personage '.1 The sanction of James I for the appointment 
was then obtained-the more readily perhaps because the 
Company paid the ambassador's . s;;tlary and allowances. 
Roe ~ailed in February I615. On his arrival at Surat in 
September he discovered Jhat Dowhton's victory over the 
Poituguese early in the year had only served to endanger 
the English cause in the eyes of the Mughal government. 
~rhere was a strong party:at the court of Jahai1gir, headed 
by Prince Khurram (afterwards the Emperor Shah Jahan), 
which favoured the Portuguese, and was now endeavouring 
to procure the expulsion of the English from Surat. Roe 
won the favour of Jahangir and lived ,at his court as 
accredited ambassador from the King of England for three 
years, at Ajmer, Mandu, or Ahmadabad. He failed to pro­
cure, as he had hoped to do, a formal and definite treaty; 
but he obtained permission for the establishment of factories 
at·certain towns in theJVIughal dominions, and did much, by 
his statesmanship and tact, to' instil into the Mughal mind 
a respect for the English as a nation. Above all, he formu­
lated a policy for tpe Company which' they followed for 
seventy· years, a policy· which was to be unaggressive and 
wholly mercantile. Roe disliked the· military-commercial 
policies of the Por~uguese and Dutch, which he beljieved to 
consume all their profit. 'It is the beggaring of the Portugal, 
notwithstanding his many rich residences and territories, 
that he keeps soldiers that spend it, yet his garrisons are 
mean. He never profited by the Indies, since he defended 
them. Observe this well. It hath been also the error of the 
Dutch, who seek plantation here ~y the sword. They turn 
a ·wonderful stock, they prowl in all places, they possess 
some of the best; yet their dead payes consume all their 

I The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, ed. by ·w. Foster [Hakluyt 
Society], vol. i, lntrod., p. iv. 



VI··· . EARLY-SETTLEMENTS IN 'INDIA .. 3T 

gain. Let this be received as a rule that if you will profit; 
seek it at sea, and in quiet trade; for without controversy, if 
is· an error to affect garrisons and land wars in India.' 1 Roe 
served the Company well, claiming with truth 'my sincerity 
toward you in all actions is without spot ; my neglect of 
private gain is without example, and my frugality beyond 
your expectation '.2 He left India iri February r619. 
' The English factory at Surat henceforward became the 

chief English settlement in the East, even Bantam being 
made for a time subordinate to it in r63o. It was seriously 
affected by the depredations of Courten's association,3 1636-
49, and by their rival factory at Rajapur, but recovered its 
position in 1657, remaining the headquarters of the Company 
in the East till its pla~e was takenby Bombay in 1687 .. 

On the eastern coast Captain Rippon in 16 r r ·landed at 
Pettapoli in the Kistna delta, and proceeding northwards 
founded a factory at Masulipatam, a seaport of the Muham­
madan kingdom of Golconda. For some years the factory 
flourished, but after 1624 declined bfi[ore the opposition and 
'foul injuries ' of the Dutch. The English factors_ even 
abandoned the place in r6z8, and, though they returned 
two years later, they cast about for another station where 
they might be unimpeded by European rivals. In r64o. 
Francis Day, a member of the Masulipatam council, procured 
from a petty Hindu raja a narrow strip of land about 230 

miles south of Masulipatam witl~ permission to build a forti­
fied factory which he named Fort St. George. Round the 
guns of this protected factory grew up within a fe\v years the 
town of Madras, divided into the White Town, or European 
settlement, and the Black Town, where the Indian mer­
ch.ants and weavers congPegated. The Court of Committees 
at first looked askance at the expense involved in the new. 

1 The Embassy of.St'r Thomas Roc, ed. by W. Foster [~Inkluyt 
Society], vol. ii, p. 344· 

2 .Ibid., p. 343· 3 See infra, p. 36. · 



HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF' INDIA CHAP. 

settlement and entered the name of its founder in the Black 
Book which recorded the deeds of those servants who had 
incurred their displeasure. But Fort•St. George soon justi­
fied its existence, and in 1642 it displaced Masulipatam as 
the chief settlement on the coast of Coromandel, though it 
remained subordinate to Ban~am till 1653, when it was raised 
to the position of an independent agency . 

. In the meantime the English, striking northwards, had 
made their first settlements in Orissa and Bengal.· In 1633, 
Ralph Cartwright, sailing from Masulipatam, established 
stations at Hariharpur in the Mahanadi delta and at Bala­
sore on the boundary between Bengal proper and Orissa. 
For many years the English only maintained their hold 
upon these places \vith the greatest difficulty, being fiercely 
assailed by· the Portuguese a~d Dutch and decimated by the 
deadly exhalations of the malarial swamps. Indeed, it was 
only the foresight of ·Francis Day, the founder of Madras, 
which prevented the total abandonment of the Bengal fac­
tories in 1642. Englisil prospects were much improved by 
the efforts of Gabriel Boughton, surgeon of the Company's 
ship Hopewell, who since 1645 had lived as court physician 
with the Mughal Subadar, or viceroy, of Bengal. In 165o 
he obtained from his patron a licence for the Company to 
trade in the province, and in the following year an English 
factory was established at Hughli, where the Portuguese 
and Dutch were already settled. But misfortunes still 
dogged the Bengal stations. They were too far from Madras 
to be effectively controlled. The f~ctors sent there fell into 
irregular and dishonest courses. In 1656 the Madras 
Council had determined to withdraw from Bengal altogether, 
but the arrival or' new supplies lnd men in r658, after 
Cromwell's charter, made them alter their decision. In the 
same year all the settlements in Bengal and on the Coro­
mandel coast were made subordinate to Fort St. George . 

. Meanwhile, at home the Company's fortunes were under 



VI 
) 

EARLY SETTLEMENTS IN INDIA . 39 

a cloud. As a monopoly their claims aroused much oppo­
sition from the growing popular party in England. Their 
practice of exporting bullion was regarded as ruinous to the 
country, for the political economy. of that day, says Sir · 
William Hunter, ' was a compound of mediaeval tradition 
and national prejudice '.1 Based as the Company was upon 
'a royal charter, it might be expected that their reliance 
would be mainly upon the throne, but a Stuart king was only 
a broken reed. In fact, as Charl~s and the Parliament were 
rapidly drifting into a life-and-death struggle, the East India 
Company was likely to fare ill in the capacity of third party. 
There is noticeable a distinct attempt, and complete failure on 
their part, to prevail·upon the Commons to include their griev­
ances amongst those preferred by the popular party against 
the throne, and at other times to coerce the King by the 
threat to appeal to Parliament. In r628 they laid a format 
Petition and Remonstrance before the Commons which was 
disregarded. The rebuff from Parliament was followed by 
;t still severer blow from Charles. 1jl 1635, on the ground 
that the Con1pany 'had merely intended and pursued their 
own present profit and advantage without providing any 
safety or settledness for establishing of traffic in the said 
Indies for the good of posterity ', 2 the King granted a licence 
for trade in the East Indies to a courtier, Endymion Porter, 
who was financed by Sir William Courten or Courteen, a 
great London merchant, son of a Protestant Flemish refugee. 
The monopoly of the Company was for a time at an end. 
Courten's association did their utmost to secure an imme­
diate profit without a too scrupulous regard for the rights 
either of their fellow countrymen or of the Hindu and 
Mughal traders with wh~ they had dealings. The Com­
pany petitioned Parliament again in January, 1641, but 
Charles persuaded them to recall their petition, admitting 

1 A History of British ludia, vol. ii, p. 20. 

2 Grant to Sir VI'. Courten, Dec. 12, 1635· . . 



IJISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAP; 

that ' lVlr. Porter had nothing to do in the business, his 
name only being used, and that what was done was His 
Majesty's act '.1 Courten's association established a settle­
ment at Assada in Madagascar, whence the name of 
'Assada Merchants' by which they soon became known. 
Meanwhile a renewed petition of the East India Company 
to the Long Parliament in June 1641 had been unnoticed,· 
arid the only action of tha! famous assembly in relation to 
the Company was to force the officers of their ships to take 
the Solemn League and Covenant. The ruinous competi-

. tion between the two bodies was brought to an end in 1649 
by a ' union' to which both sides reluctantly consented. In 
1654 the original members of the East India Company 
desired to raise another joint stock while the Assada Mer­
chants were in favour of converting the Company into a 
'Regulated' one, i.e. of allowing members to trade indi­
vidually with their own capital and ships. Both sides 
appealed to the Council of State, but for three years nothing 
was· done. Cromwell indeed wa~ credibly said in 1657 to 
have contemplated declaring the trade to India open, and 
the Company in despair threatened to withdraw from India 
altogether.' Their threat seems at last' to have turned 
Cronnvell's attention to the grievances they had pressed 
upon him so long. He granted them a charter in 1657. 
Under its provisions• they raised the first permanent joint 
stock and 'the Company passed from its mediaeval to its 
1'nodern basis '." Ninety-one new factors and m\'rchants 
were dispatched to the East, and the settlements there 
entered upon a new lease of life. 

Based as it was upon the constitutional exercise of the 
royal prerogative, the Company· haf\ always been ill at ease 
under the Commonwealth and Protectorate. It had indeed, 

1 India Office Records, Court Book No. 17, p. 385. 
2 Ibid., No. 23, pp. 546, 5f6. . 
·s A History of British India, Sif W. W. Hunter, vol. ii, p. 103. 



VI EARLY SETTLEMENTS IN INDIA 

when ordered to do so, effaced the royal arms upon its ships,' 
and even, as we have seen, attemp'ted to identify its cause 
with the cause of the .Parliamentary Party, but that was only 
when all other expedients had failed. 

With the Restoration came a welcome change in its 
fortunes. The twenty years r66o-8o may be regarded as 
the golden age of the Company while still· a non-political, 
non-territorial trading body. Its stock steadily rose in price. 
It stood at 130 in r669, 245 in r677, 28o in r68r, and 360 
in r683. Dividends between the years r659 and r691 
averaged 25 pet cent. per annum. The Company at .home 
enjoyed royal patronage and support', for if Charles II, like 

. his father, borro~wed money of the Court of C~mm1ittees, he 
was, unlike his father, punctual in paying it back. The 
charters granted between the years r66r and r683 strength­
ened the position of the Company in many ways, giving it 
the right to coin money, erect fortifications, exercise juris­
diction over English subjects residing in the East, make 
peace or war, and form alliances wi~ non-Christian peoples. 
The Company acquired the town destined to be the seat of 
its western Presidency through the marriage of the King 
with. a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza. She 
brought Born bay with the best harbour in India to Charles II 
as part of her dowry in r66i, to the despair of the viceroy 
of Goa, who wrote, ' India will be lost on the same day on 
which the English nation is settled in Bombay '.1 Charles 
found the place an exceedingly unprofitable possession, and 
was glad in r 668 to hand it over to the East India Company 
at a rent of ten pounds a year, to be held, in quaint legal 
phraseology, 'as of the manor of East Grej:!nwich in the 
county of Kent in free• and common soccage'. Bombay 
gradually grew in fame and prosperity and succeeded Surat 
as the chief settlement on the west coast in r687. 

The Company's success during the first twenty years of 
1 Tlze Rise of Bombay,S. M. Edwardes, p. gr. 



HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAP. 

the Restoration period was largely due to the fact that they 
were practically unmolested by European rivals. Charles II 
did indeed wage two wars with Holland in 1665-7 and 
1672-4, but there was hardly any collision of the hostile 
forces in the East that was worthy of notice. By the 
Treaty of Breda, r667, Pula Run and some other places were 

· finally relinquished to the Dutch in return for the far more 
valuable colonial possession (though its worth was not 
recognized at the time) of New Amsterdam, renamed New · 
York. In India proper the Dutch ,mainly directed their 
operations against France, and so, without intending it, con­
ferred a service upon England by checking at a very critical 
time the growth of the French Company. 

After ·r685 the East India Company once more entered 
upon a period of stress and difficulty. The early essays of 
the· English nation in India had fortunately coincided with 
the reigns of the M ughal emperors who for about a hundred 
and fifty years gave political cohesion at least to northern 

''India. During the lat~r part of the reign of Aurangzeb, 
·the last of those able sovereigns, the empire was politically 

· amidst the breakers. The provincial viceroys were getting 
out of the control of the central government; Sivaji the great 
Maratha leader, up to his death in i68o, had raided and 
plundered in open defiance of the supreme power. The wide 
extent of country over which he ranged may be gauged from 
the fact that in x664 and 1670 he was driven with difficulty 
frori1 the walls .of the English factory at Surat after he had 
pillaged the town, while in 1677 he passed close to Madras 
on his way to the capture of Jinji. The result was a break­
down of that internal order and good government which 
was absolutely essential to a profita~e trade.· The English 
in Bengal were oppressed by the Na\vab Shaista Khan 
(x664-77 and 1679-89). 'The whole kingdom', said Job 
Charnock in x678, 'is lying in a very miserable feeble 
condition, the great ones plundering and robbing the 



VI EARLY SETTLEMENTS IN INDIA 43 

feebler '.1 The change that had passed over the Indian scene 
is gniphically described by Gerald Aungier in a striking 
dispatch, ' the state of India ... is much altered of what it 
was ; that justice and respect, wherewith strangers in general 
and especially those of our nation were wont to be treated 
with, is quite laid aside ; the name of the honourable Com· 
pany and the English nation through our long patient suffer· 
ings of wrong, is become slighted ; our complaints, remon· 
strances, paper protests, and threatenings are laughed at, .... 
in violent distempers violent cures are only successful ..• 
the times now require you to nianage your general com­
merce with your sword in your hands '.2 To this general 
cause were added others more directly affecting the Com­
pany. A curious rebellion of Keigwin, the royalist com­
mander of the garrison at Bombay, in 1683-4, and a. rising 
in St. Helena, the 'Sea Inn' of East Indiamen (first occu· 
pied by the English in 1659 and finally taken from the 
Dutch in 1673), embarrassed the Company and brought 
their administration into evil odout" at home as tyrannical. 
To meet these new conditions the Company, though with 
reluctance, determined to employ new methods. The 
advice of Gerald Aungier therefore fell on willing ears, and 
the Court of Committees groping in the dark and neither 
understanding the real weakness of the Mughal Empire nor 
the immense ditiiculties which as yet made their attempt 
hopelessly premature, resolved to declare war on Aurangzeb. 
Having definitely decided to break with the old traditions 
which had been laid down by Sir Thomas Roe and had 
served them since his time, their conversion was whole­
hearted. They expressed a new-born admiration for the 
-,wise' Dutch who werl concerned less with trade than 
' their government, their civil and military policy, warfare 

1 Diary if William Hedges, ed. by Sir Henry Yule[Hakhiyt Society], 
vol. ii, p. 46. · 

2 India Office Records, 0. C. 4258. 



44 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAP. 

and the increase of their revenue '.1 They realized that the 
inevitable question would be put, 'Why cannot the Company 
now subsist with as small duties as they levied formerly?' 
and their answer was: 'They may subsist as they did; 
having their factories generally at the mercy of the 
Heathens among_whom they lived,' 2 But the Company 
since the charter granted them by James II was in ' the 
condition of a sovereign state in India ', 3 and no longer 
chose· to live from hand to mouth. It was at this time 
(r687) that one of their dispatches contained the famous 
sentence so often quoted as a prophecy-truer than they 
could ever have guessed-of British destiny in the East; 
they urged their President and Council to ' establish such a 
Politie of civil and military power and create and secure, 
such a large Revenue . . . as may be the foundation of a 
large, well grounded sure English Dominion in India for all 
time to come'. 4 

Tradition has largely associated this new departure with 
·the names of Sir J osia a.~d Sir John Child. Recent research 
has disproved the belief that they were related. The former 
certainly wielded for many years an almost autocratic in­
fluence in the counsels of the Company at home, being four 
times governor between r68r and r687. Some letters of 
his still preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford 5 show 
clearly how all-powerful was his position .in the Court of 
Committees, even at a later date than this (1692-4). Sir' 
John Child was President of Surat and Governor of Bombay, 
that is, really chief of the Company in India from 1682-90~ 

The policy thus valiantly and grandiloquently formulated 
ended in bitter disappointment. Captain Nicholson was 

• 
1 India Office Records, Letter Book No. 9, Dispatch to B'ombay, 

Sept. I I, I689. 
2 Ibid., No. 8, Dispatch to Fort St. George, Jan. 14, Io86. 
3 Ibid., Sept. 28, r687. 
' Ibid., Dec. 12; 1687. 
G Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MSS. A. 303. 



VI 'EARLY SETTLEMENTS IN INDIA 45 

sent from England with a fleet of ten armed ·vessels and a 
force of 66o men, to be reinforced by 400 taken on board' 
at Madras. He was ordered to capture and fortify Chitta­
gong on the north-eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal 
(though the Court of Committees believed it to be some­
.where .. '.up the great Ganges'), as the future seat· of the 
Company in those regions, to go to war with the King.of 
Siam, and to capture Salsette from the Portuguese. Not 
.one of these ambitious aims was realized. When the expedi­
tion arrived at Hughli in October r686, hostilities broke 
.out prematu~ely, and after the town had been bombarded 
.the English retired twenty-seven miles down the river to 
a village called Sutanati, the site of the modern Calcutta. 
The Emperor now gave: orders for a general attack on the 
English settlements. The factories at Patna, Cossimbazar,' 
Masulipatam, and Vizagapatam were seized, and Bombay 
was besieged. Captain Heath was sent out from England 
with reinforcements, and in r 688 took on board all the 
English in Bengal with the Com~any's goods, bombarded· 
and burnt Balasore and sailed to effect the conquest of 
Chittagong. But he found the place strongly defended and 
after a month offutile negotiations, made his way to Madras. 
There he arrived in March r68g. And so the consequence 

• of the Company's spirited war policy was the evacuation of 
Bengal and the loss of the results of half a century's painful 
toil and effort. 

The position of the English in India was only saved by 
their sea power. Sir John Child on the western coast 
seized all the Mughal shipping he could lay his hands on, 
and sent his captains to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to 
arrest the pilgrimage tJaffic to Mecca. This bold stroke 
induced Aurangzeb at last to listen to overtures for peace, 
though the terms he conceded were harsh and contemptuous. 
In February r6go he granted the English pardon and a new 
licence. for trade, provided they paid a fine ~f £, I7 ,ooo, 



46 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA 

engaged 'tci ·behave themselves for the future no more in 
•such a shameful manner', and that ' Mr. Child who did the 

disgrace, be turned out and expelled'. The English were 
spared this last humiliation, for Sir John Child, worn out 
with his exertions, had died earlier in the month, having, in 
the words of his employers, despite his final failure, 'done 

"'more for the Company and the honour of his country than 
ever any Englishman did in India'. The tale of disaster 
was relieved by one episode, the importance of which could 
not be realized at the time. Job Charnock, the English 
agent at Hughli, had twice since 1686 endeavoured to 
establish a settlement on the site of Calcutta, and had twice 
been forced to abandon it, when the open breach occurred 
with the viceroy of Bengal. At the conclusion of the peace 

·the English were contemptuously granted permission to 
resume their settlements in the delta of the Ganges. And 
so after fifteen months' sojourn at Madras he made his way 
back almost unnoticed to his .ruined settlement. The same 
year, therefore,· which witnessed the abasement of the Com­
pany before Aurangzeb,.also witnessed the humble founda­
tion of a future capital of British India, the first step in the 
realization of the h~lf ~nconscious prophecy of 1687. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE NEW EAST INDIA COMPANY 

THE opponents of the Company in England inveighed 
against 'the unjust and wicked war with the Great Mogul ',1 
and the news of the humiliating peace concluded in India 
gave them a welcome handle against the Court of Com· 
mittees. Opposition to the East India monopoly had been 
growing for many years and took many for~s. There was 
a considerable section which objected to the trade altogether 
for economic reasons that are not unknown at the present 
time. They disliked it because of' the export of bullion 
which was its necessary concomitant, and because it im­
ported manufactured goods and commodities which they 
supposed to be positively harmful, for instance coffee, which 
as a contemporary writer quaintly r@marked was 'most use­
less since it serve's neither for nourishment nor debauchery'.2 

Such opponents laid down the principle that no foreign trade 
was advantageous to. the kingdom which did not export 
produce and manufactured goods and import raw materials. 
It is interesting to note that, if these specious arguments­
which are often enunciated to-day-had prevailed, the incal­
culable advantage of the Indi\'(n trade_ would have been lost 
to England. 

The Company's apologists in their attempts to answer , 
, these objections groped their way to a sounder economic 
theory which often anticipated the conclusions of Adam Smith 
and the Free T-rade sch~ol. They declared stoutly that 'no 

1 Some Remarks upon the present state of the East India Company's 
Affairs, r6go. 

2 Britannia Langums, or a Discourse of Trade, r68o. 



48 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA 'CHAP. 

nation 'ever was or will be considerable in trade, that pro· 
''*hibits the exportation of bullion '.1 It was a fallacy to regard 

bullion or speCie as different from any other form of wealth, · 
'gold and silver and ... money are nothing but the weights 

. and measures by which traffic is more conveniently carried 
on than could be done without them '. 2_ These writers' 
objected to the whole principle of state- interference in 
commercial matters, 'La\YS to hamper trade whether foreigri 
br domestic relating to money or other merchandizes are 
not ingredients to make a people rich .... No people ever 
yet grew rich by policies.' 2 'Few laws relating to trade ', 
wrote Davenavt, 'are the mark of a nation that thrives by 
traffic.' 3 But they based the main defence of the India 
trade on yet wider grounds : ' Since the discovery of the East 
Indies, the dominion of the sea depends much upon the 
wane .or increase of that trade, and consequently the security 
of the liberty, property, and protestant religion of this 
kingdom.' 1 

A second party were opposed simply to the Joint Stock 
theory and clamoured ror a COI!Jpany on a regulated basis, 
L e. one in which merchants traded on their individual 
capital as members of a guild. 

Thirdly, a large and increasing number objected to the 
existing Company as resting on a too narrow and exclusive. 
basis. When these men urged the dissolution of the Company, 
they only meant the winding up of the particular group of 
subscribers who had monopolized the trade since r657, and 
there was little doubt that. the Company might well have 

• increased its capital and admitted a greater number to share 
its high profits. This section inveighed fiercely against the' 
autocratic power which Sir J asia. Child wielded in the 
Co~nts of the Company. In r68r a prominent member of 

1 A Treatise whereiu is demonst?-ated, that the East india Tradd is 
the most national tf all foreign trades, by 4-tll.oTTaTp.s, 1681. 

2 Discourses upon Trade, Sir Dudley North, London, 1691; 
s An Essay on the East India Trade, 1696 [by Charles Davennnt]. 



Vlf TilE NEW EAST INDIA COMPANY 49 

the Court, Thomas Papillon, foreseeing the tendency of 
affairs, suggested that the Company itself should take the "' 
initiative by admitting more outsiders to a share in its 
privileges. But Sir Josia Child refused to accept the pro· 
posal and hounded Papillon and his associates oqt of the 
Company. 'The great Ministers and chief men at court 
fell in with Sir Josia ',and he and his supporters' do tumble 
the members in and out of the Committee according as they 
serve their mvn terms '.1 

For many years individual 'interlopers' in India had 
defied the Company's servants, or acted in collusion with 
them ; one of the most famous of the interlopers was 
Thomas Pitt, grandfather of the Earl of Chatham, who 
made a large fortune by unlawful, or, at least, unauthorized 
trading, and purchased a large landed estate together with 
the pocket borough of Old Sarum. These men had in vain 
attempted to get a pronouncement that the monopoly of 
the Company was illegal, in the famous trial of .Thomas 
Sandys in 1683, when Judge Jefieys decided for the 
Company. The only result seems to have been the charter 
of r686, which strengthened the Company's power against 
both native chiefs in India and contumacious Englishmen, 
'(arming us', as Sir Josia Child triumphantly wrote, 'into 
the condition of a sovereign state in India'. 2 

The fall of the Stuart dynasty was a serious blow to 
Child. 'The.Revolution', says Sir William Hunter, 'brought 
the Company face to face with Pariiament.' 3 The London 
Company's 'numerous enemies associated themselves with 
the Whig Party, and as early as r6go succeeded in inducing 
a parliamentary committee to pass a resolution in favour 
of a new Company. Alft.lut this time they banded them-

1 Some Remarks ttpon the present state of the East india Company's 
A/fairs, 16go. 

2 India Office Records, Letter Book No.8, Dispatch to Fort St. George, 
Sept. 28, 1687. 

8 A History of B1·itisk India, vol. ii, p. 275, 
9H E 



50 ll!STORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAP. 

selves together in an informal kind of association meeting 
in the Hall of the Skinners' Company in Dowgate Street. 
Parliament and the King in vain endeavoured to persuade 
the old Company to admit new members, and finally the 
Commons petitioned the Crown to dissolve the defiant 
corporation. So far from being intimidated Sir J osia Child 
expended over £8o,ooo in bribery among ministers and 
actually thus procured a new charter for the old Company 
in 1693. The res~lt was, as might be expected, an out­
burst of great anger in the country and in the Commons. 
An interloper, Gilbert Heathcote, whose ship was seized 
in the Thames, voiced the national feeling when he declared, 
before a committee of the House of Commons, that 'he did 
not think it any sin to trade to the East Indies, and would 
trade thither till there was an Act of Parliament to the 
contrary'.' Parliament itself subscribed to this view and 
resolved, in 1694, 'that all the subjects of England have 
equal right to trade to the East Indies, unless prohibited by 
Act of Parliament '. 2 Jhis resolution, which was promptly 
acted upon by many daring spirits, seriously invalidated the 
Company's position. In r695 an inquiry was held into the 
Company's corruption. It was found that £ro7,ooo had 
been expended between r688 and I694· These revelations 
caused a great sensation and brought about the political 
ruin of a minister, the Duke of Leeds. 

At the very tiine that the Company was incurring disgrace 
from these damaging disclosures, an attack on their privi­
leged position was made from an unexpected quarter, in the 
attempt of Scotland, still legally a separate and independent 
kingdom, though united under one crown, to win a share 
in the Indian trade. Nearly nin~ty years before, in I 6 I 7, 
James I had granted letters patent to Sir James Cunningham, 
one of his northern subjects, to trade to the East Indies, 

1 :Journals if the House if Com mom, Jan. 8, · 1694. 
~ Ibid., Jan. r6, .1694· · · ·· · 



VII THE NEW EAST INDIA COMPANY SI 

but the London Company warded off the dariget by buying· 
him out. In 1693 the Scottish Parliament legalized the 
formation of associations for over-sea trade, and followed 
this up in 1695 by establishing the Company of Scotland, 
trading to Africa and the· Indies. One of the leaders of 
the movement was William Paterson, the founder of the 
Bank of England. The names of the subscribers to the 
capital of £4oo,ooo, and the representative classes from 
which they were drawn, prove that the undertaking was 
essentially a national one. A Scottish pamphleteer of the 
day declared that Scotland had ' been most unmercifully 
cramped and fettered in its national liberties ... till the late 
providential and happy revolution', and prayed that the 
harmonious working together of the English and Scottish 
Companies might be an inducement to all men to 'lay 
aside misplaced passion, ..• obliterate and bury in oblivion 
the distinguishing names of Scotch and English, and then 
voluntarily list themselves under the united banner of 
undivided Britain '.1 But this gene1ous dream was socin 
dispelled, and the episode of the Scottish Company was 
destined rather to embitter for many years the feeling 
between the two countries. However divided the English 
people might be as to the domestic question between their 
own Old and New Companies, they were at one in their 
opposition to possible rivals from the north. William III, 
as sovereign of both nations, was in an unenviable position, 
being bound either to disappoint the legitimate aspirations 
of one kingdom or to fall foul of the strong prejudices 
of the other. Both the English Houses of Parliament 
presented to him an address against the Scottish Company, 

nd he rather weakly temtJorized by replying, 'I have been 
· !-served in Scotland, but I hope some remedies may be 
ound to prevent the inconveniences which may arise from. 

1 A letter from a member of tile Parliament of Scot laud to' kis fi·iend 
t Londo1z. 

E2 



HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA CHAP. 

this Act '.1 The English Parliament next passed a violent 
resolution that the Directors were guilty of a high crime 
and misdemeanour, and should be impeached. But, in the 
end, it was their own ill-advised action that 'ruined the 
Scottish Company and freed the King from an embarrassing 
predicament. They were debarred from settling on territory 
belonging to a friendly power, but in spite of this they 
established a settlement on the Isthmus of Darien, which 

_ was claimed by Spain. The Spaniards protested, and the 
English government left the settlers to their fate, warning 
the English colonists at New York, Barbados, and Jamaica 
not to render them any aid. Disease and famine, combined 
with Spanish hostility, completed the ruin of the colony and 
brought about the fall of the Company. 

In 1698 the members of the Dowgate Association, on 
raising a loan of £ z,ooo,ooo at 8 per cent. for Montagu, 
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were incorporated under 
the name of the General Society. To this Society was· 
granted the exclusive •rade to India, saving the rights of 
the Old Company, which would expire after three years' 
notice, and saving also the private rights of those traders 
who had embarked for India on the strength of the Resolu­
tion of the House of Commons in 1694. The Old or 
London Company, to safeguard some of their privileges in 
the East India trade, subscribed £315,ooo in the name of 
their treasurer, John Du Bois. The General Society was, in 
deferenceto the critics of the Old Company, established upon 
a regulated basis, which meant that the subscribers might 
trade individually to· India, but the King was empowered 
to incorporate as many of such members as desired it into 
a joint-stock company, and und~ubtedly such a develop­
ment was contemplated from the 'very first. By far the 
greater number at once took advantage_ of this provision, 

1 A Comp1·ehensive History of India, Henry Beveridge, vol. i, p. 369. 



Vll 'THE NEW EAST INDIA COMPANY 53 

and were incorporated on September 5, 1698, as 'The 
English Company trading to the East Indies', controlled by a 
court of twenty-four 'Directors'. It must clearly be under­
stood that, for the next few years, there were four classes of 
traders who possessed a legal right to trade to the East Indies. 
(r) The New English Company. (z) The Old Company, 
trading on their full capital until r 701 and after that on 
their limited subscription of £31s,ooo to the General 
Society. (3) Subscribers to the General Society who had 
refused to incorporate the~selves in the joint stock of 
the New Company, and it must be remembered that 
after I70I the Old Company ranked under this category. 
The capital of the separate traders, apart from the 
Old Company, did not amount to more than £22,ooo. 
(4) A few private adventurers, who had embarked in 
the trade to India after the Commons' Resolution in 
1694 and before the incorporation of the General Society 
in r6g8. 

The private traders under the l~t two heads had little 
importance, and the real struggle for supremacy lay between 
the English and the London Company. It may be asked