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An Indian decorative design

Chapter 1 – Early competition for Indian Commerce

From time immemorial the trade of Europe with the rich and productive countries of South-eastern Asia, particularly with India and the islands of the Malay Archipelago, has been the most lucrative branch of the world’s commerce. It has been the object of fierce and persistent competition by sea and land among the more enterprising and civilized European states, of a contest that increased with the spirit of adventure’ and the desire for wealth; and it has made the fortune of every city or nation that has successively obtained the largest share of it. For nearly eighteen centuries, from the days of the Ptolemies almost until the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope, Alexandria was an emporium and half-way station of the sea-borne trade.

The Roman emperors, who were deeply interested

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Aden from the Arab cemetery

in developing the prosperity of Egypt, spared no pains to monopolize the commercial navigation of the Red Sea. They sent more than one naval expedition against the southwest coast of Arabia with the object of seizing Aden (then, as now, a most important station) and of wresting the Indian trade from the hands of the Arabs. In fact, they attempted, though unsuccessfully, to acquire very much the same position in those waters as that which the English have at last succeeded in establishing after an interval of sixteen centuries. Although the Roman navy was not strong enough to dislodge the Arabs, yet the direct European maritime traffic

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with the East in the time of the Flavian emperors took almost exactly the route into which, after some wide aberrations, it seems at length again to have settled down – that is, the route by Egypt, Suez, and Aden across the Indian Ocean to the ports on the Western coast of India.

The jealousy that was excited in Rome by the rich and enterprising merchants of Palmyra, who were diverting the stream of Eastern traffic into an overland route from the Persian Gulf up the Euphrates to Syria, is said to have been one reason for the destruction of that flourishing city. In this manner the Roman empire, while at its zenith, obtained a wider command over the main channels of Asiatic trade than has ever since been held by any European power except England; and England has also the great advantage that she not only commands the channels but, by her dominion in India, possesses the largest source of this mighty commercial stream.

The outpouring of the Arab tribes under Mohammed’s successors upset the civilized government to which the routes by the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf owed their security. When the conquests of Islam had overflowed Egypt and Syria, Constantinople became for a time the chief storehouse of the Levant, and the main current of trade with India and China took the line across Central Asia to the Black Sea, avoiding the countries recently overrun by the Mohammedans. “The commerce of Europe,” as Professor Finlay remarks, “centred at Constantinople in the eighth and

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ninth centuries more completely than it has ever done since in any one city”; the Greek navy was the largest then in existence.

But misrule, fiscal oppression, and foreign invasions ruined the Byzantine empire. As Constantinople declined, Venice and Genoa, the cities of the inland sea which lay beyond the desolating range of Asiatic conquest, rose into splendid prominence. It was the spirit of very short-sighted commercial jealousy that actuated the Venetians when, having contracted to convey the armies of the Fourth Crusade across the Mediterranean to Egypt, they insisted on an expedition against Constantinople, which was taken by the Latins in 1204. The blow fatally weakened the Greek power in the East, which henceforward opposed less and less resistance to the invading Turkish hordes. In the meantime the Italian cities had become the principal agents for the importation into Europe of the precious commodities of Asia; insomuch that in the fifteenth century the Venetians appeared literally to “hold the gorgeous East in fee,” for they were not far from possessing the whole of this enormously profitable business.

At the end of that century two capital events in the annals of the world’s commerce occurred suddenly and almost simultaneously – the discovery of America and the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope. Their effect was to give vast extension to the sea-borne trade with Asia, to turn its main volume into new channels by opening out direct communication by ships between South Asia and the countries bordering on the Atlantic,

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and to augment very greatly the supply of gold and silver for exchange against Asiatic products. The exploration of the globe, eastward and westward, produced navigation on a grand scale; and the superior skill, audacity, and capital of Europeans have ever since secured them a monopoly of the carrying trade on all the high seas.

The contest among the nations of Europe for superiority in this new field of enterprise soon began in earnest. When Pope Alexander Borgia issued his Bull dividing the whole undiscovered non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal, he awarded India to the latter power, so that the Portuguese, who had been pushing their dominion southward along the West African coast throughout the fifteenth century, at once took a much wider flight. They proceeded with ruthless energy to establish their fortified settlements on the Indian coast, to seize points of vantage in the Indian Ocean, and to beat off all attempts of the Mohammedan sovereigns at Alexandria and Constantinople to resist European predominance in those waters.

It is doubtless fortunate that even Solyman the Magnificent, in the height of his glory, failed in his efforts to expel the Portuguese from the Indian Ocean; for his success might have been disastrous to Eastern Christendom. If the Turkish Sultan, who at the opening of the sixteenth century was supreme in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and whose fleets swept the Mediterranean, could have kept the Indian trade to its ancient and direct course through Egypt and Syria,

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the wealth that he might thus have secured must have added prodigiously to the force of his arms by sea and land. A colossal military empire upon the Bosphorus, commanding the avenues of Asiatic trade, might even in our own days overawe half Europe, and would have been irresistible three hundred years ago.

Yet Venice foresaw so clearly that the diversion of trade to the ocean route would be her death-blow, that she vigorously supported the Turkish Sultan, though in vain. When Benbo, the Venetian envoy at Lisbon, wrote that he had seen vessels return to that port from Asia loaded with Indian goods, his government became aware that the most important branch of their commerce was in danger of being cut off. By the end of the sixteenth century that inestimable privilege, the chief control of Eastern commerce in European waters, had passed for ever out of the hands of the Italian cities, whose gradual commercial decay from that epoch showed plainly where lay the mainspring of their prosperity and political expansion.

From the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, from Alexandria and Constantinople, from Venice and Genoa, the rich trade of India with Europe was now transferred to the ocean-going peoples of Western Europe. It was cut off in the Indian seas and almost monopolized for a time by Portugal, whose sovereigns improved their opportunity with remarkable activity, sending out fleets to range over the whole coast of South Asia from the Persian Gulf to Ceylon. Nevertheless their period of triumphant prosperity was short,

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Constantinople at the end of the Seventeenth century

for in 1580 all the strength and soul of Portuguese enterprise were crushed out of her by annexation to Spain. The Spaniards threw away their opportunity; they found it easier to mine the precious metals in America than to make long voyages to India; and instead of using their treasure they tried to hoard it.

From the days of the Romans up to our own time, the Indian trade has drained the gold and silver of Europe; but the Spaniards were under the delusion, so long prevalent in Europe, that to export bullion is to exhaust a country’s wealth; so that their commerce with Asia was fatally hampered by strict prohibitions against sending the precious metals abroad. This false mercantile theory must have materially retarded the expansion of the foreign trade of Europe; for we find the East India Company in the seventeenth century constantly accused of impoverishing England by their despatches of bullion. It was indeed long before any but the maritime trading classes, to whom the needs and practice of distant commerce brought real experience,

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understood that the precious metals, no less than quicksilver, must find their own natural level, or must fall in value.

By the end of the sixteenth century, therefore, the sea-borne trade of Asia with Europe had passed away from the Mediterranean cities, from Alexandria and Constantinople, from Venice and Genoa, and was being rapidly taken up by the maritime populations of the Atlantic and the North Sea. The direct waterway had been discovered; commercial competition among the Western nations was beginning; and the opening of sea communication established new points of contact between Europe and Asia, slowly but surely growing into a close connection that has affected the subsequent history of both continents, has largely influenced the politics of the maritime powers, and has determined the whole destiny of India.

When Queen Elizabeth recognized the independence of the Dutch republic (declared in 1578) and thus became committed to war with Spain, the united naval forces of England and Holland were directed against the Asiatic settlements of Portugal, which were then, as has been said, under the Spanish crown. The desperate struggle of the United Provinces against Philip II exposed Spanish vessels to the vindictive hostility of the Protestant traders in Eastern waters; and the great victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 gave confidence to England. In a memorial addressed to the queen in the following year, the English merchants ask for license and encouragement to their project of pushing

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Queen Elizabeth knighting Sir Francis Drake on board the “Golden Hind” at Deptford, April 4, 1581

forward adventures in the East Indies. Such a trade, they say, “would by degrees add to the shipping, seamen, and naval force of the kingdom, in the same manner as it has increased the Portuguese fleets.”

The Spaniards, however, took such grave umbrage at, the preparations made in England to interfere with their East Indian monopoly, that in 1599 the granting of a charter to the English Company was postponed for eighteen months by Elizabeth’s Privy Council, who were at the moment negotiating peace with Spain. In 1600, however, upon renewed solicitations from the Adventurers for the East Indian voyage, a charter was

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given by the Crown to the London Company for fifteen years. This deed of incorporation stands as a historic monument, commemorating the inception of a great enterprise; it records the origin and indicates the direction of that great current of Asiatic trade whose ever rising flow during three centuries has brought wealth and power to the English nation.

At this period, moreover, the common right of all nations to trade freely and peacefully with Asia, though it was asserted by the Dutch as against the Spanish monopoly, was in fact no more recognized than a common international right to cultivate or colonize. Each country was striving to seize and appropriate the largest possible share of this profitable commerce, to the forcible exclusion of all interlopers; they were all contending for complete and masterful possession; they were conquering by water as they might be conquering by land, and fiercely attacking any intruder upon their trading ground as if he were an invader of their territory.

At the end of the sixteenth century the Spaniards claimed the whole right of trade with the East Indies as part of their sovereignty; the Indian seas were their territorial waters; they permitted no European port except their own to exist upon the Indian seaboard. “The Indies,” they declared, “East and West, are our house, privately possessed by us for more than a hundred years; and no one has a right to enter without our permission;” they claimed over these vast regions the same sovereign jurisdiction that England affirms

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over her Indian empire. The Spanish President of the Council of the Indies told the British ambassador plainly “that in coercions and punishments to restrain access to these countries, he had an inclination rather to cruelty than to clemency,” and that the case for free trade was far different there from elsewhere, because these dominions were Spanish by the rule of nations. In 1605 the Spaniards threatened with the severest penalties any Hollander presuming to trade in the East Indies; but the war between Spain and her revolted provinces was carried on in Asia as bitterly as in Europe, and largely accelerated the downfall of the old Portuguese domination on the Indian seaboard. There was some desperate fighting in the Malacca Straits, and in the China Sea, with merciless slaughter after a defeat.

The question of the Eastern trade was the most difficult and obstinately disputed point in the negotiations which ended with Spain’s recognition of Holland’s independence. In 1607, the Spanish king offered to renounce his claim of sovereignty over the United Provinces if the Dutch would abandon their navigation to the East Indies. But the Dutch treated this as the most valuable property of their own State; they knew the Indian commerce to be the chief stay and subsistence of naval dominion in either country; they saw that while they would be ruined by resigning it, by retaining it they should keep the power of retaliating upon Spain in Asia for oppression or injuries in Europe. They insisted so firmly on their right to trade freely

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in the East Indies that the Spaniards at last gave way upon the point, though it was never conceded openly.

But although the Dutch asserted trade liberties against Spain, their own policy was to establish the strictest monopoly. Between 1597 and 1600, the Dutch ships had first rounded the Cape of Good Hope into Asiatic waters, where they were very fiercely handled by the Spanish forces in that quarter. In 1602, the Universal East India Company had been founded in Holland, with exclusive privilege of trading east of the Cape and west of the Magellan Straits, with a great capital subscribed by all the provinces, with full power to make peace and war in the name of the United Provinces, to levy troops, and to appoint generals. Strong fleets were sent out with orders to expel the Spanish and Portuguese from the Spice Islands and the Indian coasts, to found settlements, and in fact to annex the trade to Holland precisely as they might annex an enemy’s province.

In the beginning these proceedings were taken in co-operation with the English, who now make their first substantial appearance, as represented by a Company, in the field of Asiatic commerce. But the two nations soon began to quarrel in Asia, though in Europe they preserved amity, and in 1611 the London merchants prayed for protection and redress, representing that the Hollanders were driving them out of all places of traffic in the East Indies. When a joint commission was appointed to settle matters, the Dutch challenged the sole trade in spices, nor could any arrangement

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be mediated. It is worth noticing, as showing the value’ of the trade even at that early time, that in 1615 the Dutch were reported to have fifty-one ships in the East Indies, with a stock of £900,000 sterling, and £400,000 taken up at interest. The English Company paid £14,000 customs in 1615 for the cargo of two ships, and in 1616 one ship alone was valued at more than £140,000. A proposal by Holland that the Dutch and English should form one Joint Stock Company, divide their spheres of traffic, and combine forces in order wholly to drive Spain out of the East Indies was rejected, partly because James I still leaned toward a Spanish alliance. Thus all attempts to arrest or adjust the earliest disputes of England and Holland over their respective limits and shares in such an enormously lucrative trade naturally failed; indeed they served only to complicate the impending quarrel.

Upon only one point the two Protestant nations agreed cordially – in their inveterate hostility to the Spanish and Portuguese. They spared no pains to beat off and expel from the coast of India the Portuguese, who were, in 1613–1615, in very bad odour with the Moghul government for having seized a great ship in which the emperor’s mother was the principal share-holder. The correspondence of the English Company at this period is filled with reports of fierce battles with the Portuguese, in one of which, at Surat, for example, between four and five hundred “Portugals” were slain, burned, and drowned. This rather sanguinary business is mentioned in an ordinary letter, which, without

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change of tone, goes on to give the prices of commodities and the colours of cloths that will not keep fast in an Indian climate.

By 1615 the trade of Portugal had, we are told, infinitely decayed; and the Spanish government showed very little concern at the rapid impoverishment of that kingdom. In Holland, on the contrary, the Republic looked upon its East India trade as “a high point of state,” and assisted the Company with great sums of money. But the substitution of Dutchmen for Portuguese as our rivals in this part of the world was by no means an advantage to us. Their estrangement from England, originally caused by the wavering policy of the first two Stuarts, who leaned first toward Spain and afterwards toward France, was undoubtedly fostered by growing commercial jealousies. Thenceforward, throughout the seventeenth century, the annals of East Indian affairs record a continuous persevering contest between the English and Dutch for advantage in the Indian trade, and for possession of the settlements that were necessary to its existence. The Dutch had gradually annexed most of the principal Portuguese settlements; they asserted paramount European power in all those seas and islands; so that they constantly came into sharp collision with the English, who were still weak in those regions, and whose merchant adventurers were ill supported by the vacillating and unpopular government of James I and his son Charles.

It should be understood that the term “East Indies,” according to the nomenclature of those days,

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comprised not only India proper, but also the countries on the east side of the Bay of Bengal, the Straits of Malacca, Java, Siam, and all the Spice Islands further eastward in the Java and Chinese seas, such as the Celebes and the Moluccas. With China and Japan also a very active commercial intercourse had been established by the English Company, something under 100 per cent. being reckoned a reasonable rate of profit on sales.

In the first half of the seventeenth century the traffic with the Spice Islands was by far the most important and profitable; and from this branch of the general East India trade the Dutch were determined to exclude us; for indeed upon this commerce the prosperity of their state and people largely depended. They did, in fact, so thwart and embarrass the operations of the English Company in the waters of Eastern Asia, beyond the Malacca Straits, that the English gradually withdrew from many of their stations in that region, and shifted their trade more and more, as time went on, toward the coasts of India and the countries adjacent. From this tendency of the English to concentrate their business upon the ports and factories of the Indian mainland, and to cultivate relations with the Moghul Empire, we may deduce some ulterior consequences of much importance in regard to the course and character of their subsequent expansion.

In this manner began the contest for valuable markets that gave so strong an impulse, at this period, to the system of chartered companies; for the early

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The Moghul Mosque at Fathpur-Sikri

traders in Asiatic waters had to fight their own way and hold their own ground; they could expect little or no help in Asia from their own governments, and nothing but merciless hostility from their European rivals. Trade was more valuable, to the maritime folk, than territory, and commerce than conquest. But traffic with distant lands could not be carried on without taking up stations and arming ships, since the understanding among European nations was that regular diplomatic relations practically did not extend beyond certain well-known lines of longitude.

According to a treaty made between France and

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Spain in 1598, in the regions westward of the Canary Islands tout serait à la force; and although Spain and Portugal claimed immense jurisdictions, political and ecclesiastic, in the East, yet these were of a nature too impalpable and fluctuating to be acknowledged distinctly by international law. The Chartered Companies therefore represented a device, invented to suit these conditions of existence, for extending commerce and for securing it by territorial appropriations, without directly pledging a government to answer for the acts of its subjects. The charter expressed the delegation of certain sovereign powers for distinct purposes; it amounted from one point of view to a license for private war; and the system has since had a long, eventful, and curious history, which is even yet by no means ended.

The point to be observed is that this system, under which the foundations of the British Empire of India were laid, was something very different from the kind of scrambling haphazard adventure to which the establishment of that empire is by common imagination so often ascribed. On the contrary, it provided, in the hands of a free and wealthy people, a very powerful instrument of colonial and commercial expansion. The prize in dispute was a share or, if possible, the monopoly of the commerce between Western Europe and all the ports of Asia from the Red Sea to China and Japan. The early records of the East India Company show that along the whole accessible coast line of the Asiatic continent and among the islands, at every point

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where trading could be done – on the Arabian seaboard, in the Persian Gulf, from the western side of India to North-eastern China – the European nations were now contending vigorously for commercial profits and privileges.

The value of the prize for which they were competing was even then perfectly well known; and subsequent history has proved that the wealth, liberties, and political predominance at home of the contending nations depended considerably on their failure or success. It was the foreign imports that brought the revenue which maintained the great fleets and armies of Spain; it was maritime trade that fed the stubborn power of resistance displayed by the Dutch Republic; and the greatness of England has been manifestly founded upon her world-ranging commerce. By far the most important branch of sea-borne traffic was, in the seventeenth century, the exchange of goods with Asia, and each national government took part, directly or indirectly, in the struggle for it. The first maritime explorers from the despotically governed states of Spain and Portugal seized lands and claimed navigation rights in the name of their Crown, which at once treated all these captures as increments to its complete sovereignty.

Between the Dutch Republic and its East India Company the connection was exceedingly close; although a formal distinction was always maintained. In 1618 this Company, as we learn from an English report, was composed of the great majority of the Privy

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Council, the nobility, judges, and gentry, and was furnished with an assured stock of £1,600,000. When, in 1617, the English East India Company raised its second Joint Stock, the sum of £1,620,040 was at once subscribed in London; and the records of 1622 state that goods bought in India for £356,288 had produced £1,914,600 in England. Here were two great commercial associations with power and resources quite equal to those of the minor states at that period.

But while the state of Holland was, so to speak, incorporate in its Company, the English adopted from the beginning, and preserved up to the end of the eighteenth century, a system under which the state held a position not unlike that of partner en commandite, taking no risks, acknowledging very slight responsibility, interfering occasionally to demand a share of profits or to lay a heavy fine upon charter renewals, and assisting the Company only when such a course accorded with the general political interests of the nation. Armed with a valuable monopoly, and left to their own devices, the English Company relied not so much upon state aid as upon their own wealth and energy; they underwent some perilous vicissitudes and performed some remarkable exploits.

The extent to which unofficial war was practised, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, by the roving nations of Europe, is perhaps hardly appreciated in this age of international law and ubiquitous diplomacy. If English merchants in India or the Persian Gulf had been obliged to refer home for remedy of

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Boats on the Persian Gulf

From Edwin Lord Weeks’s Through Persia and India.

grievances or settlement of disputes with Dutch, French, or Portuguese, they would have been very soon exterminated. They did no such thing; they took to their own weapons, and their military operations were often upon a considerable scale. In 1622 there was formal peace between Portugal (which then belonged to Spain) and England; but the English East India Company was at bitter war in the Indian Ocean with the Portuguese, who had disturbed its trade and molested the Honourable Company’s ships. So the English Company fitted out a small fleet at Surat, and sent it up the Persian Gulf with orders to assist Shah Abbas, the Persian king, in turning the Portuguese out of the island of. Ormuz, which they had held for a century, and which gave them exclusive command of the

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Gulf. The business was done, with the aid of the Persians, very thoroughly; there was a regular bombardment of the fortress, and a naval action with the Portuguese royal fleet, until the island was surrendered, the fortifications razed, and the Portuguese garrison transported to Goa.

We do not hear that Portugal made any serious remonstrance against these proceedings, which would certainly startle modern diplomacy; but it stands on record that James I and the Lord High Admiral (the Duke of Buckingham) exacted large sums of money from the Company as the royal share of the profits. Another heavy fine was again demanded by Buckingham from the Company before he would permit them to despatch a fleet for the protection of their commerce against Portuguese reprisals. Probably the English might have claimed to set off against the affair at Ormuz other similar irregularities on the part of the Portuguese; for among the nations then engaged in the East India trade there was little scruple about ways and means of dealing with rivals.

But the Dutch, though formally friends and allies of England, soon became much more dangerous enemies in Asia than the Portuguese, and were now inflicting heavy damage on the British East Indian trade which the English Company was by no means disposed to endure. The two Companies were rapidly drifting into a rather ferocious war, quite uncontrolled by international law or military usage, in which little quarter was given and nothing spared that might extirpate

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the enemy. Both sides possessed armed ships and fortified stations; but although the Dutch had many more forts and a much larger territory than the English, their policy of seizing all the points of vantage had the drawback that it involved them in quarrels with the native chiefs and crippled their capital by heavy military charges. After protracted negotiations, however, a treaty was at last arranged between Holland and England in 1619 on the basis of mutual restitutions and compensations. The news, we learn from the correspondence, reached India just in time to prevent “a bloody encounter between eleven of our best ships and seventeen of the Dutch.”

This treaty, which was made for twenty years, actually lasted less than twenty months, and seems to have been little regarded in the East Indies, where the necessities of commercial competition went on multiplying disputes and reciprocal violence, until one particularly atrocious outrage brought matters to a climax. The massacre by the Dutch of almost all the English at Amboyna in the Moluccas in 1623 was a piece of cruel iniquity that bred long and fierce resentment against Holland among the English merchants and mariners of that generation, and heated the animosities that broke out later between the two nations in Europe.

The preponderance of the Dutch in the Spice Islands, and their dangerous enmity, had undoubtedly much weight in diverting English trade toward the Asiatic continent, and thus in making the factories on the Indian seacoast the principal object of our attention.

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On the western side of India the English had settled first at Surat, in 1612, under a farman of the Moghul government, with special privileges procured by Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy from James I to the Emperor Jahangir in 1615–1618. In 1630 the English and Portuguese fleets fought a respectable battle in that roadstead, without prejudice to international relations at home. And as the Dutch were now making virulent attacks upon the possessions of Portugal in India and Ceylon, her power had by this time fallen into a rapid decline. When, in 1640, she recovered her independence as a kingdom, she made some feeble attempts to hold her ground in Asia; but after the Treaty of Minster in 1648, which limited her Indian possessions, Portugal fell irremediably into the background.

In 1638 Surat became the English Company’s chief establishment; and by 1643 it was established on the east coast at Masulipatam and Madras, with a factory up the Hugh River for the Bengal traffic. Their influence at the Moghul’s court was substantially promoted by the deputation of Mr. Boughton, a surgeon in the East India Company’s service, to Agra for the purpose of professionally treating the emperor, who afterwards appointed him physician to the household. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Company was trading all along the southern seaboard of Asia from the Persian Gulf eastward to the borders of China; and as the commercial operations of the Dutch took the same geographical range, the two nations were in

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The Hugli River at Barrackpur

close competition and incessant collision throughout this extensive line. But the quarrel at home between king and Parliament checked English enterprise at the fountainhead, for our government could lend only a weak and fluctuating support in disputes with foreign rivals; while Holland and even Portugal were actively backed by their respective governments, who gave the direct weight of national authority to all expeditions and annexations in the East.

As the English Company was thus virtually in the position of a private association contending against two sovereign powers, it is not surprising that toward the end of the civil war they were in very low water, while the Dutch had gained superiority over the English on the Indian coasts, were cutting off their trade with the Spice Islands, and treating them with the greatest arrogance everywhere. The State Papers of this time record incessant complaints of the “intolerable injuries,

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cruelty, insolency, and cunning circumventing projects” of the Dutch in the East Indies, who made no scruple about sending fleets with large bodies of soldiers to seize or expel foreign merchants and to occupy stations whenever it was their interest to do so.

The English Company was also much troubled by the encroachments of interlopers, or private independent traders, some of whom were little better than pirates, but for whose misconduct in Asiatic waters the Company was often called to account by the local authorities. In default of any diplomatic or consular relations between Europe and Asia, a responsible trading association, holding regular grants and licenses from the Moghul or his governors, was naturally regarded as representing the nationality to which it belonged, and had to suffer reprisals or pay indemnities for the misdeeds of its compatriots. Still graver consequences might follow offence given by the independent English merchantmen to the Portuguese or the Dutch, who thought little of sinking an intruding vessel, deliberately drowning the whole crew, or levelling an obnoxious factory.

Only a company supported by the state, with an exclusive trading charter, could command the capital, exert the strength, and maintain the consistent organization that was indispensable in those days, when English commerce had to fight its own battle against enemies who would have entirely expelled it from the great markets of the East. In these essential qualifications for success the Dutch excelled all other nations

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during the greater part of the seventeenth century. The whole Republic, as is observed by an English writer of the time, was virtually an association for the purposes of navigation and trade; the Dutch companies were connected organically with the constitution of the States-General. And since in Holland the people at large were merchants and mariners, their commercial policy was stronger, more stiffly resolute, and better supported than that of states ruled by a court and a landed aristocracy, whose aims and interests were diverse and conflicting.

It has been thought worthwhile to relate and explain, in some detail, the history of the East Indian trade during the first half of the seventeenth century, because the importance and magnitude of the public interests involved in it at that early stage have not been generally apprehended. In these transactions we may observe the precursory signs of that connection between European and Asiatic politics that has grown closer and has multiplied its points of contact during the last three hundred years. If it had been possible for one great seafaring nation to draw to itself all the sea-borne Asiatic commerce – as the Phoenicians seem to have once almost monopolized the Mediterranean trade – that commerce might have been carried on for a long time peaceably, with as little disturbance as was given by the overland trade to the countries through which it passed. But while the land routes traversed recognizable territorial jurisdictions, the waterways lay open to all, and when the various traders began to

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jostle each other in the Asiatic ports, the Dutch, English, and Portuguese fell out among themselves in the Eastern seas as naturally as Greeks, Italians, and Arabs quarrelled, two centuries earlier, over the same prize in the Mediterranean.

These quarrels affected, and were affected by, the changing course of politics during an age of incessant war in Europe; for while kings and ministers were already influenced by the interests of a trade that constantly aided their treasuries, the acts and relations of European rulers bore directly, then as now, on their foreign commerce. The persecution of the Reformers in Holland by Spain led to the foundation of the Dutch East India Company; the success of the Dutch stimulated English enterprise; and the long quarrel in the East Indies between these two Protestant nations not only diminished and for a time dissolved their natural connection, but also gave to early English enterprise in Asia its warlike character, its taste for armed independence, and latterly its policy of territorial acquisition imitated from the Dutch. Never before or since in the world’s history has there been so much bloodshed over commerce as distinguished from colonization, for a very brief experience of the perils of East Indian adventure seems to have convinced the English that they must abandon the hope of peaceful trading in that part of the world. They are, however, justly entitled to the credit of having done their best to confine themselves to commerce throughout the seventeenth century, whereas Portugal and Holland began at once to seize

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The old East India House (1726–1796)

territory. But the inevitable consequence of uncontrolled self-reliant competition among the European nations was to convert all their East Indian Companies into armed associations. How these armed associations were subsequently converted into political powers will be seen hereafter.

In the meantime, as the strength and stability of the Dutch Republic increased in Europe from the beginning of this century, their enterprise in Asia became bolder and more high-handed. During the Thirty Years’ War, Holland was supported on the Continent by the Protestant States of Germany and by France against Austria and Spain, the two countries that men-aced all Europe. Such an alliance, being peculiarly

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favourable to the security of Holland on the land, rendered her a very serious rival to England on the sea. The Dutch were throwing the English into the shade; they had founded their East Indian empire; they had made good a footing in Brazil; they had captured in West Indian waters the Spanish ships that carried a rich cargo from Mexico to Havana; they had annihilated the fleet of the Infanta Isabella. They were becoming masters of the narrow seas at home; they were threatening, with the aid of France, the Spanish Netherlands; and the English were feeling much alarm lest Holland and France together should possess themselves of the whole coast line over against England across the Channel.

These were the advantages that gave Holland pre-eminence in Asiatic commerce during the greater part of the seventeenth century. She had stripped Portugal of some of her most important possessions in the East and had fixed her trading-posts firmly in well-chosen places. Under Cromwell’s vigorous rule, however, the English began to recover their position in the East Indies.

The jealousies, political and commercial, between the two Republics culminated in the war of 1651–1654, when East India merchants, whose grievances had formed one of the chief grounds of hostility, prayed for permission to fit out an armed fleet against the Dutch in Asia, who had been making depredations on the English shipping in Indian waters. In 1654 a peace was patched up upon payment of compensation

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for injuries, especially for the “bloodie business of Amboyna,” and with the effect of defining the situation of the English on the Indian littoral.

Nevertheless, although the enmity and the encroachments of the Dutch in Asia by no means ceased, the proposals made to Cromwell for dissolving the Company’s monopoly and throwing open the whole Asiatic trade were so tempting to a ruler who was in sore need of ready money that he was hardly dissuaded from it by the combined weight of the arguments and liberal subsidies of the London Company. Yet it was absolutely clear that free-traders in Asia would have fallen an easy prey to the common enemy, for the power of the Dutch was again on the increase. They now maintained large military and naval forces in the East Indies, obstructed our trade, harassed our agencies, and disregarded all treaties. They drove the English off the coast of Eastern Asia, seized Ceylon, blockaded Bantam – the Company’s headquarters in Java – and once more tried to exterminate the English factories in the Spice Islands.

Meanwhile, trade was much disturbed, and the Company’s settlements were put in jeopardy by the civil war that broke out in India among the sons of Shah Jahan in 1658 during that emperor’s life. By 1660, however, Aurangzib’s triumph over his brothers had restored tranquillity. The beginning of his long reign, full of importance to Anglo-Indian history, synchronizes with the Restoration of Charles II, an event which changed the political connections of England and materially

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Bombay in 1773

From an old print

affected our commercial system. The Company wanted more extensive powers, and Charles II wanted to obliterate from their existing charter the name of Cromwell; so he gave them a new charter, authorizing them to make peace and war with any non-Christian people, although in fact their only troublesome enemies belonged to Christendom.

Portugal now sought the English alliance in the hope of recovering some of her Eastern possessions that she had lost while under the Spanish yoke, or at least of defending against the Dutch what she had been able to retain. These negotiations brought us the valuable acquisition of the island of Bombay, which was ceded to England in 1661 as the pledge of an arrangement for a kind of defensive war against the Dutch in Asia. But since the Portuguese were as jealous of the English as they were afraid of the Dutch, some years passed before the English found themselves in quiet possession of the island; nor was it until 1669 that Bombay

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and St. Helena were granted in full property to the London Company.

In 1661 Charles II had granted to this Company by charter the entire English traffic in the East Indies, with license to coin money, administer justice, and punish interlopers; and he confirmed their authority to make war and peace with non-Christian states in those parts. He also adopted Cromwell’s famous Navigation Law, which was devised to give British sailors and shipping a monopoly of the transport of goods interchanged with England, and was aimed chiefly at the Dutch, who were then the principal carriers of the sea-borne trade of Europe.

In this manner the commercial resources of England were formed, organized, and directed toward maintaining an equal contest against inveterate foes; nor can there be any doubt that trade monopolies were in those days essential to the existence of British commercial settlements in Asia. England then had no diplomatic representatives in non-Christian countries; the home governments paid no attention to the grievances of any single merchant or ship-master; and the Amboyna massacre is only one example of the reckless methods in use among commercial rivals in distant countries. Without large capital, an armament, and authority to use it, without some kind of rough jurisdiction over their countrymen in distant settlements, no mercantile association could preserve sufficient influence at home or security for their foreign stations and their ships at sea.

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All these measures for strengthening the East India trade angered the Dutch, who were also alarmed by the sale of Dunkirk to France, which let the French into the narrow seas, and by the weakening of the Spanish barrier of the Netherlands between France and Holland. The quarrel with England over Eastern affairs became sharper and more virulent; for the Dutch were resolved to check and beat back the encroachment of the English on their Asiatic trade; and the English, on their side, were continually exasperated by the acts of violence committed against their traders in the East. In 1664 the French ambassador reported from London that England was ready to come to blows with the Hollanders, but it was then the policy of Louis XIV, who had just been induced by Colbert to launch the French East India Company, to preserve peace. He feared that if war broke out it would end by giving irresistible naval superiority to the nation that won, and as his navy was not ready, he was anxious to maintain a balance of naval power on the French coast. Nevertheless, the quarrel grew so bitter that war did begin in 1665, when the French king was reluctantly obliged to join the Dutch, being under treaty obligation to do so.

In short, at the beginning of the seventeenth century the desire to destroy the colonies and commerce of Spain and Portugal united against them the Dutch and English in the East Indies. Then, as the power of the Spanish empire waned, the two Northern nations, having the Asiatic field to themselves for a time, turned

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savagely on each other. But the fierce naval fighting that ensued between the Dutch and English enfeebled both nations; and they soon became equally distrustful of the designs of the French not only in Europe, but also in Asia; for France was now entering the arena, although many years were still to pass before she could establish herself substantially upon the coast of India.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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