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 were 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 close competition and incessant collision throughout this extensive line. But the quarrel at home between ✓ King and Parliament checked English enterprise at the fountain-head. For our government could only lend

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 were 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, 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 were also much troubled by the encroachments of interlopers, or private independent traders, some of whom were little better than pirates,

for whose misconduct in Asiatic waters the Company were nevertheless 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 licences 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, drowning the whole crew deliberately, 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 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 worth while 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, at that early stage, of the public interests involved in it have not been generally apprehended. In these transactions we may observe the precursory signs of that connexion 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 water-ways lay open to all, and when the various traders began to 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 which 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 connexion-it also gave to early English enterprise in Asia its warlike character, its taste

for armed independence, and latterly its policy (imitated from the Dutch) of territorial acquisition. 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, throughout the seventeenth century, to confine themselves to commerce, whereas Portugal and Holland began at once to seize 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 bigoted despotisms that menaced all Europe. Such an alliance, being peculiarly 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 them. selves of the whole coast line over against England across the Channel1.

These were the advantages that gave Holland preeminence 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 1651–4; 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 our shipping in Indian waters. In 1654 a peace was patched up upon payment of compensation 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

1 Letter of the French ambassador in London to his Court (April 28, 1635), 'La grande liaison de Messieurs les États avec le roy (de France) leur donne grande jalousie.'