History of India

HISTORY OF INDIA VOLUME - 6 Hindu Fair at Ramnagar, near Benares History of India Edited by A. V. Williams Jackson, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Indo-Iranian Languages in Columbia University V olum e 6 – From the firstEuropean S ettlem en tsto the Foun din g ofthe En g lish EastIndia C ompan y By Sir William Wilson Hunter, K.C.S.I., M.A., LL.D. 1906 Reproduced by Sani H. Panhwar (2018) Introduction by the Editor The story of the preceding volumes was that of Medieval or Mohammedan India, the subject of this and the next volume comprises a new era in India’s history – the opening-up of Hindustan to the West. Alexander the Great had found one of the routes in the early ages, but no Europeans, except the occasional traveler, the persistent trader from Roman days, and the devoted Christian missionary, had traversed this or the other pathways to India from Alexander’sday until the time of the Moghul Empire. The period of Mohammedan rule in India and the sway of the Ottoman power in the East had opened no new way for Occidental influence to enter Asia and had been prejudicial to any development of intercourse between Europe and India; but with the changes that were ushered in by the sixteenth century, the quest for India by the sea route began, and India was brought within reach of the maritime nations of Europe as a rich prize to strive for. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English vied with each other in bitter rivalry to gain control of commerce and to establish a lasting supremacy in the East. The fullest and best account of this struggle will be found in the following pages from the late Sir William Hunter’spen. Sir William Hunter’swork, although comprising two bulky volumes in its fuller form, was not complete at his death, but in spite of that fact it will always remain one of the noblest monuments to his name. Through the courtesy of Lady Hunter and Sir William’soriginal publishers, arrangements have been made to reproduce in this and the following volume of the present series that portion of his work which relates to the first European settlements in India down to the founding of the East India Company in 1600, and also the portion covering the earlier events of the history of British India in the seventeenth century. The permission thus graciously accorded is acknowledged here with appreciation. Sir William’s text has been preserved practically without change, except for the omission of footnotes and for occasional modifications in certain matters of detail to agree with the rest of the series. A new feature in the volume, however, is the Appendix which I have added, giving some early accounts by Mohammedan historians regarding the presence of Europeans in India during the Moghul Empire. I feel sure that certain of the descriptions and some of the expressions of opinion in this Appendix will be found to be interesting reading. For particular assistance in illustrating this volume and the next by pictures from out- of-the-way sources I wish to thank Mr. George C. O. Haas, my student and ready helper, and I have had special aid from my friend, Dr. Justin E. Abbott, of Bombay, who has most kindly procured for the Grolier Society a special series of India photographs from which to select pertinent illustrations for the two volumes. A. V. Williams Jackson A uthorP reface In this book I have endeavored to complete a task which has occupied a large part of my life. Years ago my attention was drawn to the historical materials in the record rooms of Bengal, and the inquiries then commenced have been continued from the archives of England, Portugal, and Holland. I found that what had passed for Indian history dealt but little with the staple work done by the founders of British rule in the East, or with its effects on the native races. The vision of our Indian Empire as a marvel of destiny, scarcely wrought by human hands, faded away. Nor did the vacuum theory, of the inrush of the British power into an Asiatic void, correspond more closely with the facts. Yet if we bring down England’s work in India from the regions of wonder and hypothesis to the realm of reality, and if the Jonah’sgourd growth of a night must give place for a time to the story of the Industrious Apprentice, enough of greatness remains. The popular presentment of the East India Company as a sovereign ruler, with vast provinces and tributary kingdoms under its command, obscures the most characteristic achievement of our nation in Asia. That achievement was no sudden triumph, but an indomitable endurance during a century and a half of frustration and defeat. As the English were to wield a power in the East greater than that of any other European people, so was their training for the task to be harder and more prolonged. We have been too much accustomed to regard our Indian Empire as an isolated fact in the world’shistory. This view does injustice to the Continental nations, and in some degree explains the slight esteem in which they hold our narratives of Anglo-Asiatic rule. In one sense, indeed, England is the residuary legatee of an inheritance painfully amassed by Europe in Asia during the past four centuries. In that long labour, now one Christian nation, then another, came to the front. But their progress as a whole was continuous. It formed the sequel to the immemorial conflict between the East and the West, which dyed red the waves of Salamis and brought Zenobia a captive to Rome. During each successive period, the struggle reflected the spirit of the times: military and territorial in the ancient world; military and religious in the Middle Ages; military and mercantile in the new Europe which then awoke; developing into the military, commercial, and political combinations of the complex modern world. This preliminary volume attempts a survey, rapid, yet so far as may be from primary sources, of the early phases of that conflict. After a glance at its commercial meaning to the peoples of antiquity, the scene opens with the Ottoman Power in possession of the Indo-European trade-routes. The first Act discloses the capture of the ocean highways of Asia by Portugal; an exploit which then seemed a maritime extension of the Crusades, and which turned the flank of Islam in its sixteenth-century grapple with Christendom. The swift audacity of the little hero-nation forms an epic, compared with which our own early labours in India are plain prose. The second Act sets forth the contest of the Protestant sea-powers of Northern Europe with the Catholic sea-powers of the South for the position which Christendom had thus won in the East. Portugal, forced under the bigot rule of Philip II, was dragged into his wars with England and the Netherlands, and her fleets, which had grown up on the Asiatic trade, went to swell the wreck of the Armada. The task appointed to Elizabethan England stands out as a struggle not of Protestantism against Catholicism alone, but against Catholicism equipped by the wealth of both the West and the East Indies. Before Portugal could break loose from her sixty years’captivity to Spain her supremacy in the East had passed to the English and the Dutch. Again the victors fought over the spoils. Those spoils lay chiefly not on the Indian coast, but in the Eastern Archipelago. India was then a half-way house for the richer traffic of the Spice Islands. The third Act unfolds the strife between the two Protestant sea- powers for this prize. The Netherlands had long contained the marts by which the produce of the East, trans-shipped at Lisbon to Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, was distributed to Northern and Central Europe. The capture of the Indian trade seemed to Holland a continuation of her just revolt against Portugal and Spain, a heritage from her hard subjection, and the seal of the independence which she had so dearly won. To England it was but the mercantile development, on an extended scale, of the sea enterprise of the Elizabethan adventurers. Holland brought to the struggle a slowly acquired knowledge of the Eastern trade, a vast patriotic subscription from the United Provinces, and a resolve alike of her people and her Government that the Spice Islands should pass to no hands but their own. England cared to risk only a small capital, split up into separate voyages and joint- stocks; for state sup-port she had but the quicksand diplomacy of the first James and Charles. The United Dutch Company was practically a national enterprise; the London Company was a private undertaking; and the fortitude of individual Englishmen in Asia availed little against the combined strength of Holland. The forces were too unequally matched, as will be seen when we come to describe the catastrophe which compelled the English to realize that, if they were to establish themselves in the East, it must be somewhere else than in the Spice Archipelago. It may seem, perhaps, that I have allotted too much space to this threefold struggle – of Christendom against Islam, of the Protestant North against the Catholic South, and of the two Protestant sea-powers of the Atlantic – for the Asiatic trade. But a different law of proportion applies to Indian history, as I have conceived it, from that which sufficed for a melodrama of British triumphs.

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