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November 17 - December 30, 2024
On 31 December 1600, the last day of the first year of the new century, the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading to the East Indies’, a group of 218 men, received their royal charter.27
It was not until June 1602 that Lancaster’s fleet made it to Acheh and began to negotiate with the Sultan for his spices.
on 1 June 1603, rumours began to filter into London via France that the Company’s first fleet had returned safely into European waters. But it was not until 6 June that Lancaster finally anchored on the south coast at the Downs,
Many more voyages set off throughout the early seventeenth century, mostly generating modest profits, but from the first the EIC was unable to prevail against better armed, better financed and more skilfully sailed fleets of Dutch East Indiamen.
In 1623, the English factory (trading station) at Amboina in the Moluccas was attacked by the Dutch VOC troops and ten Englishmen were tortured and killed. This opened several decades of conflict between England and Holland in which, despite occasional successes, the English consistently came off worse.
the EIC directors decided they had little option but to leave the lucrative Spice Islands and their aromatic spice trade to the Dutch and focus instead on less competitive but potentially more promising sectors of the trade of Asia: fine cotton textiles, indigo and chintzes. The source of all three of these luxuries was India.
On 28 August 1608, Captain William Hawkins, a bluff sea captain with the Third Voyage, anchored his ship, the Hector, off Surat, and so became the first commander of an EIC vessel to set foot on Indian soil.
This trade in jewels, pepper, textiles and saltpetre soon resulted in even better returns than the Dutch trade in aromatic spices: by the 1630s
Losses were still heavy: between 1601 and 1640, the Company sent a total of 168 ships eastwards; only 104 arrived back again.68 But the Company’s balance sheets grew increasingly profitable,
62% return, 38% loss
It was not until 1626 that the EIC founded its first fortified Indian base, at Armagon, north of Pulicat, on the central Coromandel coast. It was soon crenellated and armed with twelve guns.
Two years later, the EIC tried again. The head of the Armagon factory, Francis Day, negotiated with the local governor of what was left of the waning and fragmented South Indian Vijayanagara empire for the right to build a new EIC fort above a fishing village called Madraspatnam,
1628
Before long Madras had grown to be the first English colonial town in India
In 1661, when Charles II married the Portuguese Infanta, Catherine of Braganza, part of her dowry, along with the port of Tangier, was the ‘island of Bumbye’.
When Shipman’s secretary was finally allowed to land on Bombay island in 1665, only one ensign, two gunners and 111 subalterns were still alive to claim the new acquisition.
By the 1680s Bombay had briefly eclipsed Madras ‘as the seat of power and trade of the English in the East Indies’.80
Only once during the seventeenth century did the Company try to use its strength against the Mughals, and then with catastrophic consequences. In 1681 the directorship was taken over by the recklessly aggressive Sir Josiah Child,
Ignorant of the scale of Mughal power, Child made the foolish decision to react with force and attempt to teach the Mughals a lesson:
As a consequence, in 1686 a considerable fleet sailed from London to Bengal with 19 warships, 200 cannons and 600 soldiers.
The Mughal war machine swept away the English landing parties as easily as if it were swatting flies; soon the EIC factories at Hughli, Patna, Kasimbazar, Masulipatnam and Vizagapatam had all been seized and plundered, and the English had been expelled
The EIC had no option but to sue for peace and beg for the return of its factories and hard-earned trading privileges. They also had to petition for the release of its captured factors, many of whom were being paraded in chains through the streets or kept fettered in the Surat castle and the Dhaka Red Fort ‘in insufferable and tattered conditions … like thiefs and murders’.
the Emperor left the factors to lick their wounds for a while, then in 1690 graciously agreed to forgive them.
It was the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 that changed everything for the Company.
the religious wounds Aurangzeb opened in India have never entirely healed, and at the time they tore the country in two.
Bijapur and Golconda. In the 1680s, after the Mughals conquered these two states, Maratha guerrilla raiders under the leadership of Shivaji Bhonsle, a charismatic Maratha Hindu warlord, began launching attacks against the Mughal armies occupying the Deccan.
Shivaji led a prolonged and increasingly widespread peasant rebellion against the Mughals and their tax collectors.
In 1663, Shivaji personally led a daring night raid on the palace of the Mughal headquarters in Pune, where he murdered the family of the Governor of the Deccan, Aurangzeb’s uncle, Shaista Khan.
Aurangzeb dismissed Shivaji as a ‘mountain rat’. But by the time of his death in 1680, Shivaji had turned himself into Aurangzeb’s nemesis, leaving behind him a name as the great symbol of Hindu resistance and revival after 500 years of Islamic rule. Within a generation, Maratha writers had turned him into a demi-god.
By 1700, the Emperor’s siege trains had taken the Maratha capital, Satara.
The Mughal Empire had reached its widest extent yet, stretching from Kabul to the Carnatic, but there was suddenly disruption everywhere. Towards the end it was no longer just the Marathas: by the 1680s there was now in addition a growing insurgency in the imperial heartlands from peasant desertion and rebellion among the Jats of the Gangetic Doab and the Sikhs of the Punjab.
in the mid-1690s the Italian traveller Giovanni Gemelli Careri complained that Mughal India did not offer travellers ‘safety from thieves’.100 Even Aurangzeb’s son Prince Akbar went over to the Rajputs and raised the standard of rebellion.
As military expenses continued to climb, the cracks in the Mughal state widened into, first, fissures, then crevasses.
Aurangzeb finally died on 20 February 1707.
In the years that followed his death, the authority of the Mughal state began to dissolve, first in the Deccan and then, as the Maratha armies headed northwards under their great war leader Baji Rao, in larger and larger areas of central and western India, too.
In the worst year of all, 1719, four different Emperors occupied the Peacock Throne in rapid succession.
From Babur to Aurangzeb, the Mughal monarchy of Hindustan had grown ever more powerful, but now there was war among his descendants each seeking to pull the other down.
Disorder and corruption no longer sought to hide themselves and the once peaceful realm of India became a lair of Anarchy.104
By the early eighteenth century, the Marathas had fanned out to control much of central and western India.
On 7 January 1738, Baji Rao’s Maratha army surprised the Nizam near Bhopal, encircling and surrounding him. At first, Baji Rao was too intimidated to take on the Nizam’s fortified position, but he attacked anyway and, somewhat to the surprise of both sides, defeated the veteran Mughal general.
In 1732, Nader had seized the Persian throne in a military coup. Shortly afterwards he deposed the last infant Safavid prince, ending 200 years of Safavid rule.
Nader Shah
On 21 May, Nader Shah with a force of 80,000 fighting men crossed the border into the Mughal Empire, heading for the summer capital of Kabul, so beginning the first invasion of India for two centuries.
In a single swift blow, Nader Shah had broken the Mughal spell. Muhammad Shah Rangila remained on the throne, but, with little remaining credibility or real power,
The regional dynasties of governors consolidated their hold on power, now free from the control of Delhi.
Decline and disruption in the heartlands of Hindustan after 1707 was matched by growth and relative prosperity in the Mughal peripheries. Pune and the Maratha hills, flush with loot and overflowing tax revenues, entered their golden age. The Rohilla Afghans, the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Jats of Deeg and Bharatpur all began to carve independent states out of the cadaver of the Mughal Empire, and to assume the mantle of kingship and governance.
soon as news belatedly arrived from Europe that Britain and France had joined the War of Austrian Succession on opposing sides, Dupleix approached his EIC counterpart in Madras, Governor Morse, to assure him that the French in Pondicherry would not be the first aggressors.
The squadron arrived in February 1745, and promptly attacked and seized a number of French ships,
Dupleix made an attempt to secure compensation from Madras. But after being rebuffed he made the decision to strike back and get redress by force.
His new regiments of sepoys and the African and French reinforcements from Mauritius were all sent north on troop transports overnight, supported by eight men-of-war.
they appeared without warning behind the British lines and to the rear of the EIC defences. The siege began on 18 September with such an immense bombardment of mortars that the EIC’s nervous chief gunner, Mr Smith, died there and then of a heart attack.
Within three days, having lost many of his troops to desertion, Governor Morse sought terms. On 20 September, after the loss of only six EIC lives and no French casualties at all, Madras surrendered to the French.
The most significant incident in this war, however, took place a month later. The Mughal Nawab of the Carnatic, Anwar ud-Din, was furious with Dupleix for ignoring his orders by attacking Madras without his permission, and then insulting him by refusing to hand over the captured town to his authority.
