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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Corbett, Drake and the English Navy. Payne, Elizabethan Seamen. Innes, England under the Tudors, chap. xxiii. Froude, The Elizabethan Seamen in the Sixteenth Century. Lee, Source Book of English History, pp. 316 ff. for contemporary accounts of Elizabethan seamen.

CHAPTER III

RISE OF BRITISH DOMINION IN INDIA

THE rise of British dominion in India under the management of a trading company has been regarded by many writers as one of the wonders of history; but a careful examination of the conditions in India and the steps by which British power was built up makes the whole process clear and simple. The rich trade of the East which first attracted British merchants was older than the time of Alexander the Great, but it was not until 1498 that the Portuguese under Vasco da Gama found a water route around Africa to India. For almost one hundred years the Portuguese enjoyed the immense profits of this commerce, but in 1591 the English sent an expedition to trade on their own account. Four years later Dutch merchants despatched their first expedition and the three powers soon entered into a heated rivalry for trading advantages. In this bitter contest, the Portuguese were vanquished, the Dutch triumphed in the Spice Islands, and the Engglish confined their enterprises largely to the mainland of India. In 1667 the French joined in the race for Eastern markets and by the opening of the eighteenth century had secured several important posts in India. This trade rivalry was shortly transformed into a contest for dominion, and to understand this one must examine the local situation in India.

When the English first went to India, that country was ruled by a mighty Mohammedan Moghul, whose ancestors had conquered the native population and founded a great empire. As long as powerful Moghuls succeeded one another, the European traders were secure in their operation, and the possibilities of conquest were slight. However, in 1707, the last of the great Moghuls, Aurangzeb, died and his dominions began to go to pieces under

the weak rule of his successors. Shortly the English and French opened a contest for the dismemberment of the ancient empire in which the latter were overthrown during the Seven Years' War. Finally, the English were compelled to war with the native and Mohammedan princes, and step by step they wrested from them the fragments of the disintegrating empire. This whole story is told in a clear and readable fashion by Sir Alfred Lyall, in his Rise of British Dominion in India.

§ 1. Two Periods in the Growth of British Power1

The rise and territorial expansion of the English power may be conveniently divided into two periods, which slightly overlap each other, but on the whole mark two distinct and consecutive stages in the construction of our dominion. The first is the period when the contest lay among the European nations, who began by competing for commercial advantages, and ended by fighting for political superiority on the Indian littoral. The commercial competition was going on throughout the whole of the seventeenth century; but the struggle with the French, which laid the foundation of our dominion, lasted less than twenty years, for it began in 1745, and was virtually decided in 1763.

The second period upon which we are now about to enter is that during which England was contending with the native Indian powers, not for commercial preponderance or for strips of territory and spheres of influence along the seaboard, but for supremacy over all India. Reckoning the beginning of this contest from 1756, when Clive and Admiral Watson sailed from Madras to recover Calcutta from the Nawab of Bengal, it may be taken to have been substantially determined in fifty years; although for another fifty years the expansion of our territory went on by great strides, with long halts intervening, until the natural limits of India were attained by the conquest of Sinde and the Punjab.

§ 2. Explanation of the Easy Conquest of India

The first thing that must strike the ordinary observer on looking back over the hundred years from 1757 to 1857, during which the

Lyall, The Rise of British Dominion in India, pp. 98 ff. By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, Publishers.

acquisition of our Indian dominion has been accomplished, is the magnitude of the exploit; the next is the remarkable ease with which it was achieved. At the present moment, when the English survey from their small island in the West the immense Eastern empire that has grown up out of their petty trading settlements on the Indian seaboard, they are apt to be struck with wonder and a kind of dismay at the prospering of their own handiwork. The thing is, as has been said, so unprecedented in history, and particularly it is so entirely unfamiliar to modern political ideas, we have become so unaccustomed in the Western world to build up empires in the high Roman fashion, that even those who have studied the beginnings of our Indian dominion are inclined to treat the outcome and climax as something passing man's understanding. Our magnificent possessions are commonly regarded as a man might look at a great prize he had drawn by luck in a lottery; they are supposed to have been won by incalculable chance.

But it may be fairly argued that this view, which embodies the general impression on this subject, can be controverted by known facts. The idea that India might be easily conquered and governed, with a very small force, by a race superior in warlike capacity or in civilization, was no novelty at all. In the first place, the thing had actually been done once already. The Emperor Báber, who invaded India from central Asia in the sixteenth century, has left us his authentic memoirs; it is a book of great historical interest, and nothing more amusing has ever been written by an Asiatic. He says: "When I invaded the country for the fifth time, overthrew Sultan Ibrahim, and subdued the empire of Hindusthan, my servants, the merchants and their servants, and the followers of all friends that were in camp along with me, were numbered, and they amounted to twelve thousand men. I placed my foot," he writes, "in the stirrup of resolution, and my hands in the reins of confidence in God and I marched against the possessions of the throne of Delhi and the dominions of Hindusthan whose army was said to amount to one hundred thousand foot, with more than one thousand elephants. The Most High God," he adds, "did not suffer the hardships that I had undergone to be thrown away, but defeated my formidable enemy and made me conqueror of this noble country."

This was done in 1526; Báber's victory at Paniput gave him the mastery of all northern India and founded the Moghul empire. He had really accomplished the enterprise with smaller means and

resources than those possessed by the English when they had fixed themselves securely in Bengal with a base on the sea; and the great host which he routed at Paniput was a far more formidable army than the English ever encountered in India until they met the Sikhs. Now what had been done before could be done again, and was indeed likely to be done again. So when at the opening of the eighteenth century the Moghul empire was evidently declining towards a fall, and people were speculating upon what might come after it, we find floating in the minds of cool observers the idea that the next conquest of India might possibly be made by Europeans.

83. Early European Views of the Situation in India

The keynote had indeed been struck earlier by Bernier, a French physician at the court of Aurangzeb, towards the close of the seventeenth century, who writes in his book that M. de Condé or M. de Turenne with twenty thousand men could conquer all India; and who in his letter to Colbert lays particular stress first on the riches, secondly on the weakness of Bengal. But in 1746 one Colonel James Mill, who had been twenty years in India, submitted to the Austrian Emperor a scheme for conquering Bengal as a very feasible and profitable undertaking. "The whole country of Hindusthan," he says, "or empire of the Great Moghul, is, and ever has been, in a state so feeble and defenceless that it is almost a miracle that no prince of Europe, with a maritime power at command, has not as yet thought of making such acquisitions there as at one stroke would put him and his subjects in possession of infinite wealth. The policy of the Moghul is bad, his military worse, and as to a maritime power to command and protect his coasts, he has none at all. . . . The province of Bengal is at present under the dominion of a rebel subject of the Moghul, whose annual revenue amounts to about two millions. But Bengal, though not to be reduced by the power of the Moghul, is equally indefensible with the rest of Hindusthan on the side of the ocean, and consequently may be forced out of the rebel's hand with all its wealth, which is incredibly vast." If we bear in mind how little could have been accurately known of India as a whole by an Englishman in 1746, we must give Colonel Mill credit for much sagacity and insight into the essential facts of the situation. He discerns the central points; he places his finger upon the elementary causes of India's permanent weakness, her political instability within, and her seacoast exposed and undefended externally.

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