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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Roy Moxham
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October 4 - November 14, 2017
malabathrum [cinnamon leaf]
is Malabar derived from it? Probablg yes.
Cannanore,
Kannur of today
We took a ship from Mecca in which were 380 men and many women and children, and we took from it fully 12,000 ducats, with goods worth at least another 10,000. And we burned the ship and all the people on board with gunpowder.
cruelties of Vasco Da Gama; example
When the service was over, Albuquerque gave the order to kill all the remaining Muslims. It took three days to hunt them all down. Men, women and children were burnt alive as they prayed in their mosques. The final death toll was forty Portuguese and 6,000 Muslims.
The charter of ‘The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ was finally signed on 31 December 1600.
Thomas Smythe became the first governor of the Company.
He had also just become governor of both the Russian and Levant Companies. Smythe was rather grander than most of the merchants. He had been MP for Aylesbury and was master of a great city guild, the Haberdashers.
Surat, the largest of the Mughal ports,
on 7 January 1613 Emperor Jahangir confirmed that the English could trade from Surat.
In 1611 the Company was granted permission for a factory at Masulipatam, a busy port on the Coromandel Coast in the Sultanate of Golconda.
Madraspatam
Madras; later known as.
group of seven islands.
The islands had been ceded to Portugal in 1534 by the ruler of Gujarat in exchange for help against the invading Mughals.
In 1632 he ordered the destruction of newly built Hindu temples. Nevertheless, there was still a good deal of religious tolerance in Mughal India. More toleration than in many Muslim countries; more than in most of the countries of Europe.
prohibition on ‘crossing the black sea’. Hindus who did travel were liable to be ruined by being expelled from their caste.
Some of these arrived relatively recently – probably via other European countries – such as the tomatoes and potatoes. Others, however, arrived in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and were almost certainly brought in by the Portuguese. These included pineapples, custard apples, papaya, prickly pears, guavas, passion fruit, cashew nuts and groundnuts, cassava and maize. Most surprisingly, chillies, such a feature of the present Indian diet, also came from South America. The first known reference to them as being in India was in 1604.
the Portuguese brought in tobacco. Around 1604, one of Akbar’s courtiers chanced upon some tobacco, which he bought and gave to the emperor and his nobles. From the court, its use spread. However, it suffered a temporary decline when Akbar’s successor, Jahangir, issued an edict in 1617. ‘As the smoking of tobacco has taken a very bad effect upon the health and mind of many persons, I order that no one should practice this habit.’
For it was but an unwise undertaking for our East India Company, with a handful of men and money, to go make wars with one of the greatest monarchs in the world who, although not so well versed in war and manage of guns, yet had men enough to have eaten up all the Company’s servants for a breakfast. Edward Barlow, Barlow’s Journal, 1692
They were not allowed within sixty-four feet of a member of a Nair, warrior caste, or within ninety feet of a Brahmin.
Indian textiles, as Daniel Defoe wrote ‘crept into our houses, our closets, and bed chambers, curtains, cushions, chairs and at last beds themselves were nothing but calico or Indian stuffs. In short, everything that used to be made of wool or silk, relating either to the dress of women or the furniture of our houses, was supplied by the Indian trade.’
extent of Mughal market in England & Europe
In 1685 the Company’s agent asked the viceroy for permission to fortify a landing place for goods. This was indignantly refused, the Company’s trade brought to a halt and one of its factories besieged.
1686 there was a skirmish between the English and the Mughals. The English had the better of it but, realizing that their long-term prospects of holding out were poor, they left Hooghly in small boats. Twenty-seven miles downstream, they landed on a bank with three villages, one of which was called Kalikata.
establishing Calcutta
they went downstream they attacked several Mughal forts and burnt a town.
forts & town existed south of Calcutta
Mughal nobles who had been held in check by the central administration became largely autonomous.
ideal conditions for the Europeans to play one side off against the other.
This was the first significant British success against the French and their allies.
September 1751
In the first half of the sixteenth century, Rumi Khan from Turkey modernized the artillery of Bahadur Shah of Gujarat.
By the end of the eighteenth century, European artillery and infantry officers were attached to most Indian armies.
In 1674, Shivaji had been made king of the Marathas at Raigad. He was the first Hindu king in that area since the rise of Muslim power four centuries before. The East India Company saw that there was a new authority to placate and they had sent a senior official bearing gifts who had successfully negotiated a treaty to facilitate trade.
Sambhaji had few military gifts and many vices. He drank to excess, participated in sexual orgies and could not control his temper.
In 1689 a small column of Mughal soldiers had made a foray deep into Maratha territory. They made for the lakeside palace of Sangameshwar. Unlike the strong Maratha hill forts, it was a soft target. It was easy to capture the palace and easy to capture the king of the Marathas for Sambhaji was drunk.
A tax was imposed on the Indian and other merchants to finance a wall with fortified gates around the township.
Colaba. Although this fort was on an island, at low tide it was possible to reach it from the mainland by foot.
The treachery of Mir Jafar had won the day.
trechery of Mir Jafar, Battle of Plassey, Nawab Sirajuddaula, Clive
Seventy-five boats were loaded up, each carrying a large chest containing Rs 100,000.
Siraj-ud-daula was brought back to Murshidabad as a prisoner. He had been recognized and then captured by Mir Jafar’s brother. Within a few hours he was stabbed to death. Before he was buried, his corpse was paraded around the city on the back on an elephant.
Company’s army to depose Mir Jafar and replace him with his son-in-law Mir Qasim. For this, Mir Qasim generously rewarded Vansittart and his colleagues. Furthermore, several districts of Bengal that were adjacent to Calcutta were ceded to the Company.
The Company declared war, pronounced Mir Qasim unfit to rule and reinstated Mir Jafar as nawab. Once again he paid up for this.
In eight years the Company’s senior officers had received a total of £3,770,833, this at a time when a British labourer’s family might make £37 a year and a Bengali family less than £2.
1765. The defeat of Mir Qasim and his allies at Buxar enabled the Company to dictate terms to the losers. Mir Qasim fled to Delhi and died in poverty. Rather than conquer further territories, Clive decided to allow the viceroy of Awadh to resume office, but give some of his land to the Mughal emperor. In gratitude the emperor bestowed the ‘Dewani’ of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa on the Company. This made them the legal rulers and gave them the right to all the revenue. This momentous document was delivered at Benares by the Mughal emperor himself. He handed it down from a makeshift throne made by
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‘such a scene of anarchy, confusion, bribery, corruption, and extortion was never seen or heard of in any country but Bengal; nor so many fortunes acquired in so unjust and rapacious a manner’. He introduced various restrictions on private trade and banned bribes and lavish gifts.
‘Exclusive Company’ was established whose profits would be distributed among the East India Company’s senior officers according to seniority. Clive himself was given the largest number of shares. It would have an exclusive monopoly to make what profit it could on tobacco, betel nut and salt. In the three years before London forced its closure, it made a profit of over Rs 6 million, when the basic wage for Bengalis was one or two rupees a month. Once again, these profits left Bengal for Britain.
1772, officials toured the Company’s territories to ascertain the mortality. They estimated that, out of a population of thirty million, some ten million had died.
in the first thirteen years of British rule, more harm was done to the people of India than by all the other European invaders of the centuries before.
Huge sums had to be extorted from Indian rulers to meet the cost. The resulting furore led to the impeachment of the Company’s Governor General. In 1784 ultimate control of the Company passed to the British government.
