S1.E1 - The East India Company

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At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to light and freedom. Those are the words of Jawaharlal Nehru. to the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi on the evening of the 14th of August, 1947. Nehru's speech was broadcast over the radio and anyone who could crowded around a wireless set.

listening to the proclamation they had been waiting years to hear. Some had waited decades. Independence. That night, India's cities were full of celebration as the clock struck midnight. and British rule in India formally ended. The following morning, Nehru was sworn in as the first Prime Minister of an independent India. The day before, the new nation of Pakistan was declared.

The Muslim-majority state was partitioned from British India, mostly from the provinces of Punjab and Bengal. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had done more than anyone else to secure the creation of Pakistan, became the first president of the Constituent Assembly. and Pakistan's first Governor-General. It is a moment of jubilation, joy and hope. A struggle which had taken decades of petitions, protests, marches and strikes, as well as riots, assassinations and communal violence.

had finally led to the independent dominions of India and Pakistan. Two days later, the exact borders of the two countries were published, and 14 million people Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a line drawn on a map in the Viceroy's office by a man who had never been to India before, never would again, and who had been given only five weeks to draw it.

The partition divided provinces, it divided cities and towns, it divided communities, neighbours and families. No one, not Nehru, not Jinnah, not Viceroy Mountbatten, expected the mass migration that followed. No one expected the violence that left at least a million people dead. But India and Pakistan were free from the British Empire. They were not the first to win their independence, and they were not the last.

But for many, then and now, this marked the end of the empire that was. Welcome to Winds of Change. I am Dr. Samuel Hume. and on this podcast we will be discovering how the sun set on the British Empire. Each season will be devoted to a different part of that empire, and how their people won their independence from it.

In this first season, we, of course, have to start with India. The greatest jewel in the imperial crown, British India was by far the largest part of the British Empire. In the early years of empire... South Asia promised luxury goods and endless wealth. Later, it became a source of raw materials and then a market for British manufacturers, feeding the Industrial Revolution.

Later still, India was a source of manpower in the First and Second World Wars, as Indian troops fought and died for king and country in the trenches of Flanders and the jungles of Burma. In many ways, India defined British interests, first as the East India Company's ambition expanded British influence, and then, once India was painted red on the map,

Politicians and officials in London, Calcutta and Delhi were constantly wary of any attempt to take India away, whether that attempt came from foreign rivals or the people of India themselves. But despite that wariness... Midnight of the 15th of August came and went, and it took the British Raj with it. Over the next 12 episodes, we're going to examine the whole period of British rule, from the first hesitant embassy to the court of the Mughal Emperor,

to the height of the British Raj, and through to those hopeful, tragic days in August 1947. Along the way, we will be joined by experts on every part of this history. There was no trial. There was no search for evidence if these were rebels or not. They were considered to be rebels and just killed. I mean, Gandhi was more of an agitational politician, whereas Jinnah was a constitutional politician.

Looking at how late colonial moments structure the politics of the 21st century gives us a sense of the longer continuities that imperialism has given the world. The sun never set on the British Empire. Until it did.

Winds of Change, Season 1, Episode 1 The East India Company On the afternoon of the 10th of January 1616, an Englishman bowed in the palace of an emperor of India. Sir Thomas Rowe hoped to make up for the poor first impression he'd made on his entry into the city of Ajmer two weeks before. Plagued with an illness which had dogged him for months and which had killed his companions,

Rowe had been bedridden with a fever and physically unable to appear at the Emperor's court when he arrived, very undiplomatic for a diplomat. For that was what Sir Thomas Rowe was, the first accredited ambassador from the Kingdom of England... to the Mughal Empire. He would not be the first Englishman to visit the Mughal court. There had been others. The Emperor had apparently found the hard-drinking, Turkish-speaking sailor, William Hawkins, a great drinking buddy.

But Hawkins and the other English visitors to the Mughal court had only been servants of the East India Company. Roe was the representative of one sovereign to another, tasked with opening up the wealthy Indian Empire... to trade with the distant European kingdom. And so, despite still feeling weak from fever, Roe was doggedly following the protocols of the Mughal court. Each time he passed into the next stage of the palace, he bowed and...

doffed his flamboyantly plumed hat before venturing deeper. Finally, he entered the inner court, and the reason he was here sat on a raised dais. better known as the Emperor Jahangir, Padisha of the Mughal Empire. Around him were nobles, Mansabdari, standing in their designated places, strictly ordered in accordance with their rank.

Roe would have also seen bearded ulema, Islamic scholars, and courtiers from across the Mughal domain, and visitors from nearly every part of the world, including, to his annoyance, several Portuguese. Sir Thomas Rowe knelt for the third time, sweeping his hat out with a flourish. Jahangir welcomed Rowe to his court as the ambassador of his brother, James VI and I. He inquired after Rowe's health.

and granted the ambassador permission to be absent from court until his health improved, and even offered his own doctors to nurse him. He graciously received a letter from King James and accepted Rowe's commission as an ambassador. And then... The audience was over, and Roe gratefully retreated to his sickbed. Over the next few days, there was some small contact. Messengers arrived at Roe's lodgings to take the English seal to show to the curious empress.

to borrow some of Rho's servants to show the emperor how to wear his gifts, a scarf and sword, in the English fashion. Rowe eagerly wrote of his encounters, expanding on how graciously he had been welcomed and how important the Emperor saw his ties with England and his royal brother, James. In Jahangir's own diaries, written almost daily and in detail, his meeting with Roe doesn't get a mention. No other Mughal accounts record it either. The arrival of the English embassy was a curiosity...

but not one worth taking note of. Roe was at the heart of an empire which ruled over an estimated 100 million people. orders of magnitude larger than the three Stuart kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland. Years before Sir Thomas Rowe set foot in India, the foundation of British rule in Asia had already been laid. It was a company.

Perhaps the most famous company in history, the East India Company. On New Year's Eve 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter for a new merchant company, and we still have that charter.

I'm reading the text of the charter, and it starts by listing the names of its founders, the great and the good of the City of London, and it decrees that they... shall be one body corporate and politic in deed and in name by the name of the governor and company of merchants of london trading into the east indies then further down the charter defines the east indies as

the countries and parts of Asia and Africa, and into and from all the islands, ports, havens, cities, creeks, towns, and places of Asia and Africa, and America, or any of them, beyond the Cape of... Bonner Esperanza to the Straits of Magellan. So that's between the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa, all the way east to the southern tip of South America.

Think about the name the East India Company or what it would sometimes call the East Indies Company. This is Philip Stern, professor of history at Duke University and author of The Company State and Empire Incorporated. This concept of the East Indies for Europeans was really this very wide Indian Ocean world. The East India Company's charter, for example, specified it to have the jurisdiction between the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan. So it essentially...

was in charge of English contact with half of the globe. More than just making it responsible for English contact, the charter granted the company jurisdiction over English goods, ships, and even English subjects in the Eastern Hemisphere. This isn't the only reason that the East India Company stands out from other corporations, though.

What makes it rather anomalous is that it was much larger, over several hundred people amongst early subscribers and shareholders, and its ambition to go much further into the East Indies than, say, some of these other companies which we're looking at. settlements in the Atlantic world or something like that. Over time, it grew much larger.

than it even was at first. So its first initial voyages were limited in time, but over time the East India Company became a much more permanent and established corporation. The men who would form the East India Company were well prepared. A subscription had already raised £30,000 and just two months after their charter was granted, the first voyage of the East India Company was ready to sail. By June 1602...

The company's four ships had arrived in Acha, on the northwest tip of Sumatra. They negotiated with the Sultan to purchase spices in return for silver, but he drove a hard bargain. So when the English spotted an isolated Portuguese ship, this presented an opportunity. England and Portugal were at war, and so the English pounced.

The third day of October, being in the Straits of Malacca, the Hector spied a great ship towards the evening, which came from St. Tomah and was bound for Malacca, and the next morning yielded themselves without any resistance, or so much as any one man hurt.

This day we began to unload her and had out of her 950 packs of calico and potatoes, besides many great chests of merchandise. But her hold was full of rice, and because of a storm that did arise, we were forced to leave her with that great abundance of rice. and with store victuals as pork, butter, cheese, rusk, conserves, suckets, hens and pickles, hens preserved with store of cinnamon water, and palmento wine.

The name of the ship was the St. Anthony and of the burden of 700 ton. And in six days we had discharged her of the best of her lading and would have taken more if we had had time and place. When the fleet returned to England in June the following year, its holds were full. More than 900 tonnes of cinnamon, pepper and cloves. Some bought at Acha.

most captured from the unfortunate Portuguese vessel. It brought the East India Company a 300% profit, and fewer sailors, since 185 of them had died on the dangerous voyage. More expeditions were quickly planned. The charter was granted for a term of 15 years, but in 1607, Elizabeth's successor, James VI of Scotland, and now the first of England and Ireland,

agreed that the company could expect perpetual succession. Which takes us to Sir Thomas Rowe's feverish first meeting with Emperor Jahangir. The company had sent representatives laden with gifts to the court many times, but once their identities as mere merchants were revealed, they found a cool reception. But an ambassador? from one sovereign to another, could get access which a company servant could not. So it was that James VI and I dispatched Sir Thomas Rowe as his ambassador.

on the recommendation of, and very importantly for the cash-strapped king, paid for by the East India Company. He was the king's man, sent to represent the interests of the king, of the Kingdom of England, and of the Company, which, as far as the Company was concerned, were all one and the same. Roe spent three years in India, following the Imperial Court,

as it moved from Ajmer to Agra to Delhi, fighting off fever and dysentery and trying to win security for English trade in Mughal ports. After English sailors made the impolite suggestion, that they might just conquer the city of Surat, his job got quite a bit harder. Jahangir was on the brink of expelling English traders entirely.

But everything changed when the Padishah Begum, Narjahan, the emperor's favourite wife and, some historians suggest, effective co-ruler, took a personal interest in the English traders.

Rowe was surprised in October 1617 with a farman, a decree, in her name which put the English trade in Surrut under her protection. As Rowe wrote in his diary, At this instance came in to me from Asaf Khan a servant, in the name of Nar Jahan, that she had moved the prince for another farman, that all our goods might be in her protection, and that she had obtained it, and was ready to send down her servant with that, to see... and take order for our good establishment.

That she would see that we should not be wronged, that Asaf Khan had done this for fear of the prince's violence, and because of his delays. That now he was sure that his sister had desired to be our protectress, that the prince would not meddle, and upon his honor, I should receive her. This was likely part of the Empress's conflict with her stepson.

the prince mentioned in that source, the future Emperor Shah Jahan. But Ro took the win. The tentative approval of the emperor himself soon followed. He would soon sail home, and he left behind a small... but profitable company factory in Surat. He helps to secure what becomes one of the most fundamental footholds for the East Indian Company, which is rights to settle a factory or a trading post in the Gujarati town of Surat, which was both a major trading point of embark for the Mughal Empire.

and for that region, but also heavily trafficked because it was also one of the main points of embarkation and communication with the Hajj. So it was a very busy, very powerful, very important town. And having a foothold there was really critical. And eventually...

decades later would have a lot to do with the creation of an English colony at Bombay. There's a number of different ways in which Roe is important in sort of establishing and laying the foundations for English rights to trade in the Mughal Empire and also for shifting the East India Company's attention to... India when it had previously focused on what we might now think of as Indonesia and Southeast Asia. That shift in focus was not solely the English East India Company's choice.

Besides the Portuguese, the English found another group of Europeans in the East Indies, their neighbours and rivals, the Dutch. What happened over the course of the first several decades was a rapid increase in the strength and power of its Dutch rivals, the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch East India Company mobilizes a great deal more capital and military power over the course of the first decades of the 17th century, and in many respects manages to make inroads.

into the East Indies, particularly in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and essentially outpaced the English in those places. To find out more, I spoke to Rupali Mishra, associate professor of history at Auburn University and author of A Business of State. And what the Dutch do is they use their superior strength at sea. to essentially lock down access.

Ultimately, in 1619, they're able to come to an agreement for how they're going to share the spice trade. But it's awkward. The Dutch are the majority shareholders of this, and the English are kind of... of the junior partners with much less access. And in some of the places of the East Indies,

The two groups are actually even living together. So the English are literally sharing house room with the Dutch East India Company. So you've got these merchants of different companies living together while also being rivals. An awkward living situation, not enough space, and housemates from hell. We've all been there. But at least we weren't in Amboina in 1623.

The rumors that came to the ear of the Dutch commander were that the English were going to join with rivals to the Dutch and they were going to ally together and overthrow the Dutch. A true relation of the unjust, cruel, and barbarous proceedings against the English at Amboina in the East Indies.

They tortured him with water and with fire by the space of two hours. First they hoisted him up by his hands with a cord on a large door, where they made him fast upon two staples of iron, fixed on both sides on the top of the door, his hands one from the other as well.

wide as they could stretch. Then they bound a cloth about his neck and face so close that little or not water could go by. That done, they poured the water firstly upon his hand until the cloth was full up to the mouth and nostrils so that he could not draw breath. The Amboina Massacre, as the English came to call it, was the dramatic arrest, torture, and execution of several English, Japanese, and Portuguese merchants by the Dutch on the island of Amboina, or Ambon.

The Amboina Massacre became, as historian Alison Games puts it, a shorthand to convey cruelty and betrayal. But with literal fortunes on the line, the rivalries between European companies... often erupted into violence. The English, lest you start to think of them as victims in this situation, do a very similar thing to the Portuguese in Hormuz in the 1620s as well.

essentially making a local line to kick the Portuguese out of the area violently. This is a lot of the posturing that's been going on for several decades across the 17th century. Put us in a box. Go ahead. That just gives us something to break out of. Because the next generation 2025 GMC terrain elevation is raising the standard of what comes standard. As far as expectations go, why meet them when you can shatter them?

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The company would continue to operate in Indonesia, Southeast Asia, the East African coast and even in the Atlantic. But the Amboina Massacre is usually seen as the point where the East India Company shifted its focus to their factories on the Indian coast, at Surat in Gujarat, on the western coast, and Musulipatnam and Madras on the southeast Coromandel coast. I asked Professor Stern about the different types of company settlement in India.

We should distinguish perhaps between what we might think of as factories, which again, doesn't mean a kind of industrial enterprise, although the words are related, but it's a trading post or a settlement inside of another jurisdiction or a trading town or something. where one would house and run the operations of your representatives, or what were known as factors. That's where the word comes from. The factory is the location for the East Sydney Company's factors. So a place like Surrett...

The East India Company would have factories which essentially were there inside of cities and regions that were under the government of, say, the Mughal Empire. These were very productive, but they were also, of course, subject to other authorities and required a great deal of money and political skill to maintain, as we mentioned before, you could be undercut by the politics of either other Europeans.

our other competitors from South Asia and around the region. And it can be very volatile and vulnerable as well. Company servants were always very anxious about their vulnerability, especially when based in factories or settlements. where they felt at the mercy of local authorities. It didn't take long for the company to find somewhere they could feel secure.

Madras, current day Chennai, which the East Indian Company acquired essentially with a lease or a kind of grant from a local ruler in what is now Southeastern India, but at the time was not actually within the borders, if you will, of the Mughal Empire. It was actually within...

the borders of a different empire, the Vijayanagara Empire. And so the East India Company establishes this settlement, a very small fishing village, but basically imagines it as its own sovereign city or sovereign town. Begins to build a fort.

comes down as Fort St. George, which is also another name by which the Madras settlement went, begins to try to attract settlers, not just English settlers. In fact, mostly not English settlers, but settlers from around the region who would both be, say, commercial producers, but also be tavern owners, be soldiers.

in the garrison administer their communities and eventually madras grew to actually have a you can be a kind of segregated town had what it would known as the christian town of the gentoo town the other sort of word for hindu but or gent

but eventually became as racialized into the white town and the black town. As James VI and I died and was succeeded by his son Charles, and the Mughal emperor Jahangir was followed by his son Shah Jahan, the merchants continued to trade. And though there were lean years, the company survived the troubled years of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

King Charles was beheaded in 1649, and the East India Company faced a period of uncertainty when its royal charter expired and was not renewed by the new republic. But in 1657, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell... granted the company a new charter with a permanent joint stock of £739,782 and a monopoly over English trade with Asia. Half a world away, Shah Jahan was deposed by his son, the new Emperor Aurangzeb. When the Stuarts returned in the restoration, the company was not harmed.

Apart from some ports on the West African coast, which were soon transferred to the control of the Duke of York's slave-trading Royal African Company, the East India Company soon gained a significant advantage, the islands of Bombay. Bombay, modern Mumbai, sits on the west coast of India. It had been a Portuguese possession, but when Charles II married Catherine of Braganza in 1661, the Seven Islands of Bombay had been part of her dowry.

In 1668, the archipelago was transferred to the East India Company. In time, Bombay would become a hub of the company's growing state. In the 30 years between 1658 and 1688, the company experienced an economic boom. There were 404 completed voyages between London and the East Indies, and increasingly... the company was trading with products from mainland India. By the end of the 1660s, silk textiles made up the majority of company imports, mostly from Coromandel, Gujarat, and especially Bengal.

Pepper was now demoted to second place, followed by raw silk, indigo, saltpeter, coffee, and tea. By 1684, the vast majority of the company's imports were Indian textiles. 83%. 1.76 million individual pieces of silk and cotton fabric sailed from Indian shores to European markets which exploded with new fashions and styles. Of course with so much money flowing

around a lot of people wanted to get in on the action for the east india company for all of the conflicts and all of the competition we have talked about with the Dutch or the Portuguese or Mughal authorities or Persian authorities. Probably the greatest threat and concern for the East India Company were other English subjects who wanted to be in the East India business in some way. They would call these people interlopers. They were interloping on the company's rights.

This, to the company, was essentially a slippery slope towards complete disorder and anarchy. And they had a zero-tolerance policy for interlopers, officially. In practice, of course, there were many exceptions, many local arrangements, many alliances on the ground. that were not quite the way the company's government in London would like things to have gone.

The company was deeply concerned about interlopers, and increasingly there were more and more of them. Not just English subjects, but also Scottish and Irish subjects who were finding themselves in the East Indies. The story of interloping is also part of the very complicated and evolving...

story of the making of Britain itself, because the English East India Company's relationship to the Crown's Scottish subjects was very ambiguous and complicated. In fact, in the 1690s, there was an attempt at what we might think of as a Scottish East India Company to... compete with the English East Indy Company, and that's a whole other story. And the same thing with whether or not the King's Irish subjects had a right to be in the East Indies as well.

Those concerns with interlopers were, on one level, very much about trade. They were afraid that interlopers making special deals in competition with the official trade of the East India Company, would drive up prices. As you can imagine, if you had different English people competing with local vendors, for example, they would raise prices.

But it was also a matter of political authority. The English East Indies Company found it deeply embarrassing and threatening that there were these English people running around the East Indies who... not only didn't follow the company's laws, but quite aggressively rejected the East Indy Company's authority over them, and some in some very colorful language.

There's a deposition to the company made by a man called John Hackney, and he's describing how, in Surrut, an interloping Englishman, Thomas Eatman, drunkenly declared, I do not care a fart. for the king and company. And then Hackney states that Eatman tried to bribe him with six bottles of wine if he would forget he heard anything. But since we have this record, Hackney doesn't seem to have taken the deal. Maybe it wasn't good wine.

There was a religious dimension to this as well. The East India Company saw itself and certainly argued that they were a critical institution to protecting Protestant. Englishmen in this world of what they call the world of the infidel. And interlopers, they saw, as they at least argued, were dangers to the souls of Protestants in this foreign world.

And this is laden with all kinds of racialized and ethnically prejudiced kinds of languages and understandings of maybe some willful misunderstandings of how things work in the East Indies. But it was the language in which they spoke. It was the political language in which they sort of rallied support against.

interlopers. The East India Company actually created its own what they called admiralty courts to try to collect evidence and prosecute these interlopers. The line between interloping and piracy for the East India Company was very, very thin and very often... Interlopers would be understood as pirates and pirates would be understood as interlopers in the languages and the sort of legal implications of those categorizations.

would be mobilized by the East Indy Company to try to defend itself. And it was always a losing game. They were never very successful at keeping all those people out. You can imagine the East Indy Company's footprint across Asia in the 17th and early 18th of the Dream is fairly minimal if you look at the map.

And it's a pretty big place and a lot of space for lots of people to prosecute their own interests and trade. People would go and live in Asia for decades and thumb their noses at the East India Company's authority.

The relationship between the company and the Mughal court seemed like a strong and mutually beneficial partnership. But in the 1680s, the company tried to force Emperor Aurangzeb's hand. For quite a while, the East India Company had been interested in expanding its rights and privileges under the Mughal Empire, and was very, very keen in particular on acquiring a kind of Mughal grant, what the East India Company tended to think of as...

kind of a charter-like instrument, which in a Mughal jurisprudence is known as a farman. They very much wanted a set of agreements, a set of concessions from the Mughal Empire. Chief amongst them was the right for the East Indian government either to go into Mughal territories and seize, or for the Mughals to agree to turn over interlopers or English subjects who committed crimes or who were in Asia without their permission.

Eastern Company also wanted other things, relief from certain customs and things like that. At the same time, a number of English interlopers also had insinuated themselves in Siam in Southeast Asia. Officials in Madras, sort of the regional head of that area. also wanted to force those people back into company control. And so as you start to get to the mid-1680s, the East Indian Company starts to get increasingly aggressive and impatient for having these kinds of concerns.

sessions met and these kinds of demands met. One of those most impatient would be Josiah Child. Child would dominate the East India Company for many years. He wanted the company to follow the Dutch approach. fortified settlements and armed bases funded and supplied by local subject populations. With these outposts, the company could trade and negotiate from a position of strength, or at least not from weakness.

Both Madras and Bombay would suit this strategy of militarisation, but the company did not have a similar stronghold in Bengal. Bengal was also growing increasingly important to the company. and it was also the prime example of the company being subject to Mughal abuses. The Nawab of Bengal,

The governor, Shasta Khan, had imposed a 3.5% export duty on the company, as well as taxing the gold and silver that the company imported to buy Bengali goods. Company officials in India and London... agreed that these amounted to the Nawab abusing his authority. In January 1686, Governor Childe approved sending a force of ten ships and six infantry companies to Bengal to assert the company's rights and privileges.

His intention, as he informed the president of Madras, was to change the company from mere trading merchants into a formidable martial government in India. They were to, quote, establish such a polity of civil and military power, and create and secure such a large revenue to maintain both at that place as may be the foundation of a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India.

for all time to come. The East India Company essentially declared war on these empires and thought that it could use its maritime power and did have a great deal of success, say blockading ports. and using its ships to undertake these kinds of aggressive maneuvers, thought it could threaten the stop of trade and a bit of an aggressive move at sea to just simply get what it wanted out of these concessions.

At sea, company ships had some success, capturing many Mughal vessels and seizing their goods. But on land, it was a different story, as Emperor Aurangzeb immediately reacted. The company's factories in Surat were captured, Bombay was besieged, and the Nawab of Bengal had forced the English out of three settlements on the Hooghly River, the towns of Sutanuti, Govindpur, and Kali Kata.

Didn't work out as planned. In particular, the most catastrophic consequence of this was an invasion of the company's colony of Bombay that basically occupied the main areas of the... archipelago of Bombay for upwards of a year, and it really devastated Bombay. It soon became clear that the victories at sea would not be enough to win this war. The company had annoyed a superpower and was punished for it. with a humiliating peace deal.

The East India Company sent some officials to Surat to negotiate peace, and those officials were put under house arrest and not allowed to leave. And when all of this came back to England, it was really great material for the growing opposition to the East India Company.

of people who either wanted to get rid of the East India Company to open up the company's trade or the trade to India or what ultimately happened, which was to create a new company that would replace the old company, which was very much tied up also in the politics of the Glorious Revolution. Josiah Child had hitched the fortunes of the East India Company to those of James VII and II, which seemed like a good idea at the time. But, in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688...

The Dutch William of Orange invaded, and with the support of English Protestants opposed to the Catholic James, and through his marriage to James' daughter Mary, he usurped his father-in-law's thrones. Many of William's English supporters were fierce critics and rivals of the East India Company, and news of the company's disastrous war was music to their ears. I asked Professor Stern what we can learn from this conflict.

The critics who say that they overestimated their military capacities or their alliances were absolutely right. This was not a wise move. But I think it's a mistake in history to see catastrophic consequences and read back foolish intentions. I think it fit within a very coherent and clear ideology and approach of the East India Company to defend its rights aggressively or what it saw.

its rights aggressively in the east indies it wasn't just some foolish anomaly which is how the literature has seen it this was a commercial company that because of some bad leadership overstepped its bounds and tried to fight a war but actually it was more typical of the way the east indy company approached what it was doing in say those hundred years between the 1650s and the 1750s and helps to explain how the company became an aggressive

military force in the late 18th century as it expanded territorially rather than seeing this moment as some weird anomaly that then was repeated as a weird anomaly 60 years later, if that makes sense. But what about the lessons that the company took from their defeat? The East India Company failed in this war in really all objective measures. But...

The devastation of Bombay caused by the Sydney's invasion could be seen historically as a real catalyst to the expansion that happens over the next 50 years. I mean, the Sydney Company really became... deeply concerned about how vulnerable Bombay was and spent a great deal of resources and energy over the next 50 years from, say, the 1690s to 1750, building up

what became known as the Bombay Marine, building up the fortifications at Bombay and aggressively defending its power, ejecting the Portuguese from a wider and wider radius around Bombay. The number of crises that happened in the late 17th century could be seen as historically laying the groundwork for the kind of aggressive expansion that you see later. I guess there's the cliche that you lost the battle, but you won the war.

There's a way in which losing the war became an inspiration and a motivation for what became even more violent, more aggressive, and much more familiar forms of colonial expansion later down the line. It did not take long for the company to return to Bengal, and this time they would put down roots. In India, Shasta Khan was replaced with the more company-friendly Ibrahim Khan.

After the company's ambassadors begged forgiveness for starting the war, or as they called it, their irregular proceedings, Ibrahim Khan wrote to them and invited them to return to Bengal. So, in 1690, Job Charnak, who had led company soldiers in Bengal during the war, returned to those three towns on the Hooghly. A healthy distance from the centres of Mughal power in Bengal...

The towns of Sutanuti, Govindpur and Kalikata were already home to small but flourishing communities of merchants and weavers. The company established a new factory here, and a few years later, after memories of the war faded, and Bengal was riven with rebellion, the company received permission from the Nawab to build a small fort, for their protection from rebels, of course. Two years later, the company received Zamindari rights.

and began to receive rent and tax from nearby tenants. Over the following century, a town grew around Fort William, named after the king, of course. Soon, this new settlement merged with the existing towns of Sutanuti, Govindpur, and Kalikata. In time, it would become a metropolis of millions of people, the capital of British India. and the second city of the British Empire. The city the British would call Calcutta.

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The East India Company was facing two very different futures, success in Asia and turmoil in Europe. In Asia, despite its war with the Mughal Empire, the company was on a firm footing. With factories across the East Indies and fortified strongholds at Madras, Bombay and its most recent fortification at Calcutta, the company had bounced back from Aurangzeb's wrath.

I asked Professor Stern how the company viewed these outposts. The most important and iconic idea here is that the East India Company thought of these places and spoke about them and wrote about them as colonies.

They used the term colony and used other synonymous 17th century terms to talk about it. But they didn't mean a kind of large territorial empire, but they thought of it more in that kind of... the Roman sense of these kind of compacted colonies, but also places that were not necessarily going to be filled with English settlers, but attempting to attract settlers and merchants and soldiers from around South Asia and around Asia, including East Asia.

By the time you get to the 18th century, the East India Company is very much in the business of government, and it very much knows it. The company also learned other lessons from the war. I spoke to John Wilson, Professor of Modern History at King's College London and author of India Conquered. What the Anglo-Mughal War had done to English ideas of...

how to do things in Asia was fortification and some kind of way of protecting what they saw as their authority was necessary to exist within South Asia. Violence has always been a possibility from quite early within the kind of English presence in South Asia.

in the kind of earlier 17th century. But that kind of military defeat led them to take the wrong lesson, which is double down on the causes of defeat, which was the fact that they were building forts and trying to use force to protect their position. The Western Presidency, the authority in charge of company business on the Gujarat coast, moved out of Surat to the archipelago of Bombay.

Though it had been besieged and occupied, the company invested heavily in its defences. He consolidated that sense of vulnerability, I think, but led to fortification, led to the different British outposts. particularly, you know, along the coast, being kind of fortified in greater investment in Portland, St George, in Fort William, Calcutta, etc. Obviously, also, the company, what it's protecting is commerce, is its capacity to trade.

All while the company built its forts, recruited soldiers, and governed these colonies, the merchants continued to trade. The East India Company's trade was a vast part of English and soon British trade. By 1701, the value of imports from the East Indies matched the value of cash crops produced in the English West Indies, sugar, tobacco and coffee, and Asian trade was twice as valuable as imports from the North American colonies.

Goods imported on East India Company ships were essential for the Atlantic slave trade. The exotic goods of India, the East Indies and China were re-exported and traded for enslaved Africans to work on the sugar, coffee and tobacco plantations of the Caribbean and America.

This is all to say that trade with the East Indies was still a path to fortune and power, if you could get the East India Company's permission. In April 1702, this... rosy financial picture was complicated by the arrival in Aurangzeb's campaign tent of Sir William Norris, the royally credentialed ambassador of William III and agent of the new East India Company.

The new what? Through the 1690s, you had a group of people who opposed the East India Company. But what's very interesting is that they spoke in the language of free trade and anti-monopoly. What they really wanted was not to open up the East India Company trade and get rid of a company. There were some people...

who were making an argument that the trade should be opened up to everybody and just let individual traders go the way, say, for example, you might trade to Europe. What the biggest opposition was actually people who wanted to keep it in a limited joint stock model, but... but replace this older legacy company with a new company much more closely tied to the Whig politics of the 1690s and to a lot of the individuals and people that were there.

This takes us back to 1688 and the critics of the East India Company, who now had the king's ear. After the Glorious Revolution, radical changes in the orientation of... of how English and ultimately British politics worked really thrust Parliament into a much more

central role in governing and guiding politics. And so the negotiations between the court of William and Mary opened up a space for people who had been critical of the company for a very long time. And it's a very motley crew of critics. It includes former company employees and people who had sort of...

fallen out with the company, former company leadership, actually. There was a bit of a leadership struggle in the 1680s over the East Indy Company, and the people who kind of lost out on that corporate coup, if you will, kind of didn't go away, but really kept thinking about wanting to create themselves a a rival or new company.

There were a number of disaffected former company employees. And then there were just others who were invested in other kinds of trades or a great number of people who you couldn't just buy stock in the company. It wasn't an infinite amount of stock in the company. And you certainly couldn't trade on your own without violating.

the company's charter, although as you become one of those much maligned interlopers, all of these people saw an opportunity in the new political environment to maybe forward their critiques, which they also forwarded by associating the East India Company, rightly and wrongly, with the ousted

steward regime, so associating the East India Company as a kind of Jacobite relic also made a case for why we would need to replace this new company. Over the course of the 1690s, these critics were ascendant. Parliament convened a committee of inquiry into the company, and attacks came from two directions. In October 1692...

A petition came before the House of Commons, listing all the crimes and abuses that the company was accused of. This included the illegal seizure of English property, supporting piracy, arbitrary government in its colonies, and starting the recent war with the Mughal Empire. During this war, quote, many outrages and violences were committed upon the innocent natives on shore, end quote.

The day after this petition was presented, the Commons resolved that a new company should be formed. Meanwhile, the King's Privy Council proposed 32 alterations to the existing Charter. The company governors defended their position and rejected the proposed changes, leading the king to grow impatient. In February 1693,

Parliament moved against the East India Company and presented William with a bill for a new East India Company. But the wheels of state turned slowly, and the old East India Company... was not prepared to die quietly. Instead, it committed legal suicide. In March, the company paid its taxes a day late. Company leaders claimed they'd forgotten.

but also that the Exchequer had been closed for a holiday when it hadn't been. By failing to pay their tax on time, they had violated their own charter and rendered it forfeit. Parliament couldn't revoke or alter it anymore because it wasn't valid anymore. It legally didn't exist. The company's strategy was to force the question of their future out of Parliament's hands and into those of the monarchs.

The company had always had better luck with the sovereign than with their parliaments, no matter who wore the crown. If a new charter wasn't issued quickly, then English trade with Asia would collapse. It is now confessed almost by all, even the very enemies of the present company, that the East India trade is of a great national advantage. The gamble worked.

That October, a hastily written Royal Charter was put into effect, which confirmed all the company's previous privileges and disregarded the company's accidental failure to pay their tax. The East India Company was back. and legally it had never left. But buried in the charter was a clause which required the company to accept any reforms that the monarchs or their Privy Council presented over the following year.

And what a surprise, the very next month, a charter of regulations was issued from the Privy Council, which included many of the reforms they had previously tried to implement. The company had survived this latest attack, but it had set the precedent that the Privy Council and potentially Parliament could review and alter its internal government. And none of this had put a stop to the push for a new East India Company. And eventually in 1698...

Parliament, along with William III, charter this new company to be the English East India Company. Actually, its name is now the Governor and Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies, whereas the previous company in the very style of the earliest. 17th century was the governor and company of merchants of London, trading with East Indies companies. So they are trying to make an argument. They are also more national and more inclusive and more representative of England.

Once this new company received its charter, it sprung into action, trying to tear down its old rival. The ambassador, Sir William Norris, that was the first ambassador since Thomas Rowe to come with royal credentials. to Asia. But part of what Norris was in India to do was to try to proclaim that the English were now supporting this other company and to not pay attention to what came to be known as the old company and the new company, which is probably the easiest way to keep track of the two.

of them. The details get very complicated and somewhat comical at times. One of the ways the old East India Company defends itself is by actually investing a lot of money in the new East India Company. Neither company effectively wins. After years of negotiations, the directors of both companies agreed to merge in 1702, and this was finally completed in 1709, with the formation of the United East India Company.

The newly united company brought together the strengths of each. It inherited the infrastructure which the old company had built up over a century. Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, the rest of the forts, factories, farmans and diplomatic contacts, and from the new company it had a vast fund of more than £2 million, generated from subscriptions in the 1690s.

The other thing that's very important to understand about how this new company becomes more powerful is that as part of its settlement in Uniting... Its capital stock is essentially permanently invested in the British crown. It essentially becomes a major funder alongside the Bank of England of British national debt.

In that sense, it becomes much more closely tied to the fate of the nation in very complicated and important ways. But it wasn't just a story of two East India companies. One of the few things which united both companies

was their shared anger at their northern neighbours. We often think of this as a conflict in the old and new companies, but it's actually a three-way competition, because in the 1690s, the Scottish Parliament, which again is not... part of England is a separate political body, but also under the same crown.

of William III, charters its own East Indies and Africa company, which becomes most famously known actually for not being an East Indies or Africa company at all, but for actually trying to plant a colony on the Isthmus of Panama known as the Darien Colony. Their idea was

essentially to plant a colony in Panama and truck goods across the Isthmus to get to Asia more quickly, which at the time seemed like a harebrained scheme, but of course, as we all know, with the building of the canal was actually not that bad of an idea. The tensions between the English companies and the Scots reached their height in 1704, when a new company ship docked at Leith, outside of Edinburgh. The ship was seized and its captain and officers arrested.

They were charged with, among other things, selling English East India Company goods in Scotland. Convicted of interloping, the English merchants were hanged. It was partly because of this bad blood that the Scottish Company was not invited into the United East India Company. In fact, when the two companies merged in 1709, the Scottish Company was already dead.

Because in 1707, England and Scotland were formally united as the Kingdom of Great Britain. Article 15 of the treaty demanded the dissolution of the Scottish East India Company.

Over these years, British society picked up a new trend from the trade with Asia, and it was a trend with some serious sticking power. In fact, I'm drinking some right now. Tea was not at all on the company's radar most of the 17th century. Tea as a commodity came largely from China. The city company didn't actually transplanted tea into tea plantations in India in the later, the early 19th century.

So we think about tea as coming from India, but that's really a product of colonial expansion rather than starting point. As the company starts to, and other Europeans as well, start to transport tea in very, very small amounts into Europe in the 17th century, alongside what was a much bigger commodity, which was coffee, it started to see the potential for a market for what is ultimately...

addictive drug, an intoxicant. It wasn't very difficult to get people interested in it over time. The company's initial efforts to sort of bring tea was not actually in a mass market, but really was more at a very elite level. It would gift tea into the royal court. And so a lot of historians have sort of pointed to this kind of emulative experience. You start to see people drinking tea at court.

elites drinking it and then eventually it sort of diffuses into wider and wider populations i think there's some merit to that argument but i also think that just over time the city company think of it in a more modern sense, did a really good job of marketing and selling advertising sense, selling tea as something people would want to try and to drink.

Tea is basically the iconic product of empires. It becomes so deeply ingrained in the particular kind of British cultural and social practice, and then, of course, almost identity. So tea really picks up and explodes across the 18th century. as the East Indy Company is also expanding in a wider and wider territorial and political sense across South Asia and the East Indies. By the time you get to the late 18th century, it's just radically exploded in the size and scope.

and value of the commodity. And so much so that, of course, the glut of tea and the amount of tea that was coming into Britain by the 1770s, combined with the complexities of the taxation of that tea, were what led to the city company to push Parlimid to pass...

certain legislation, which allowed for that tea to be more readily imposed upon American colonies. And Americans will be intimately familiar with the tea that was so ceremoniously taken off of an East Indian company ship and thrown into Boston Harbor. which became known as the Boston Tea Party, which was one of the sparks of the American Revolution. So this becomes a global and interconnected economy that's very much tied up with politics and ideas of identity.

and what it meant to be British and what it meant to have liberties very quickly by the late 18th century. But in the late 17th century, if you were in company leadership and you had predicted that tea would be one of its major commodities, people probably would have laughed you out of the room.

Two months before the Act of Union took effect, the 88-year-old Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb died. He had been born just months after Sir Thomas Rowe had sailed away from Surrut. He had ruled the Mughal Empire since 1658, before his father, Shah Jahan, even died, and he reigned for almost 50 years. His wars expanded the empire's borders.

and by his death, his realm had never been larger. Few empires had. Millennia had passed since a single ruler had held sway over more of India. This was also the peak of Mughal power. Less than a century after the death of Aurangzeb, that record would be surpassed, not by an emperor, but by a company.

After Argusib's death, for the next 30 or 40 years, you had a rather quick succession of different emperors, a lot of political conflict at the court, very typical dynastic conflict, and you essentially had...

What older historians and historians in previous generations called a decline of the Mughal Empire, but recent literature tends to think of it not as a decline, but more as a decentralization and reallocation of where political power lay. So Mughal Empire was always very... much of a kind of

enterprise, which, you know, since swallowed up local authorities, put them underneath a kind of common power, but always had distributed rights and was very good at balancing that power to maintain the central authority by the time you get to the early 18th century. the Mughal Empire starts to lose that control from the center, what you see emerging are much more regionally oriented.

robustly powerful polities at a much more local level. So you have rival empires like the Maratha Empire, but also places like Bengal, which became much more, though still nominally under the formal authority of the Mughal Empire, much more autonomous in how they were governed by the leader of those provinces. And in Bengal, that leader is known as a Navab. It tends to be translated by the English as governor, though it's a bit more complicated.

One of the most interesting things I have to say when I was researching the company's state that I discovered that I did not anticipate, the East India Company was planning and aware of the possibility of Aurangzeb's death for at least 15 or 20 years before it happened. So the East India Company wouldn't say that it was fully repaired. It's not like it had a good game plan on file, but...

Both because it's sort of seen it coming, but also because of the nature of what the East India Company was, which was another one of these localized polities of sort in a very complicated political environment, managed to find a way to expand in this decentralized environment.

rapidly and much more effectively than it had under the Mughal Empire. As a series of weak or short reigning emperors followed Aurangzeb, the company pushed once again for the Farman. Here are some of the concessions the company instructed its ambassadors to request.

Our first request is in general terms, that His Majesty will please confirm in His royal farming all the grants and privileges heretofore enjoyed by our nation at all places in its dominions where we now have or formerly had settlements. especially those granted to us in the days of his royal ancestor, Al-Rangzeb, and since this general request is already granted us in effect.

Our goods or treasure, which we send to our settlements or any off the Orangs inland, pass on our own dust stock without examination and back to us in the same manner. Our merchants, factors, or agents, who we employ at the Orangs or elsewhere, are not to be molested. or called to account by small officers upon frivolous pretenses, whilst they continue in our service and are employed for us.

We hold and enjoy three towns, namely Calcutta, Sudhanuti, and Govanpur, paying those same yearly rent for them into the king's treasury, which the Zamandars paid before they were granted to the English company. The iconic moment of this is in 1717, the East India Company sends an embassy to the Mughal court after having really established itself as, increasingly established itself as a much more powerful player in Bengal out of its sort of city state of Calcutta.

And this embassy, which is not royally credentialed, it's just a party that's sent and paid for by the East India Company, manages to secure that farm on with a lot of the conditions that the East India Company had demanded 30 years earlier that had led to the war. we talked about. You see it as a discreet event, looks like a foolish and idiosyncratic anomaly. If you see it on a much longer timescale, it's sort of a failed...

part of a longer process that eventually leads to these concessions. And a lot of those concessions that the company gets in 1717 produce a great deal of conflict with the Navab of Bengal. And tensions over what the company thought of as its rights and its responsibilities really

fuel the conflicts that emerged in the 1750s that essentially lead to the East India Company's military victories and political victories that essentially spark off its territorial expansion over the rest of the century.

The East India Company had arrived in India a hundred years before. They had arrived late compared to their European neighbours. They had little to offer the magnificently wealthy Mughal court.

Their first attempts at diplomacy were rebuffed, and it was only a decade later that Sir Thomas Rowe successfully wrangled some pretty measly support. Now, in the early years of the 18th century, The company governs colonies and factories across the Indian Ocean world, and trade with Asia has become an integral part of the British economy.

In the next episode of Winds of Change, we shall see the company go from strength to strength, conquering and co-opting every other power in India, until even the Mughal emperor himself is in their power. By the time you get to the 1790s, you really see the company able to outspend and out equip rival armies that it's fighting. We will see what company rule was like.

It leads to a big transformation in who owns land because a lot of landholders don't or can't pay the amount of revenue that they're supposed to pay. What happens is that landholders think that any number is treated as a number to negotiate over because that's how things have worked in the past. And we will set the stage for company rule to come crashing down.

The British could only be stopped by overthrowing and defeating the British military. If you've enjoyed this episode of Winds of Change, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening right now. If there's someone you just know would love Winds of Change, don't be shy. Tell them to find us on their favourite podcast app Thank you to our guests, Philip J. Stern, Professor of History at Duke and author of the company State and Empire Incorporated.

John Wilson, Professor of Modern History at King's College London and author of India Conquered, and Rupali Mishra, Associate Professor of History at Auburn University and author of A Business of State. You can find the full details of our guests and their published work in the episode notes. Featuring the talented voice work of Matt Breen, host of The Explorers podcast. All research, writing and production by me, Samuel Hume.

Go to airwavemedia.com for other great history podcasts. Thank you to my guests, and of course, thank you for listening. What do you get when you take two childhood friends with a passion for unexplored history and a whole lot of booze? You get us, Queen's Podcast. And here at Queen's, we are spilling the tea on all kinds of women from history. From New Orleans voodoo queen, Marie Laveau.

to Marie Antoinette and everything in between. Each queen is paired with a cocktail recipe that will totally get you in the mood to hear the fun, dramatic, and juicy stories of fascinating women from history. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers! Are you interested in the parts of history that remain a mystery? Do you want to learn more about the historical myths and misconceptions used to prop up false belief today? I'm Nathaniel Lloyd.

In my podcast, Historical Blindness, I delve into all of these topics, sharing puzzling tales from the past and examining hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and misremembered events that provide insight into modern politics and religion. New episodes every two weeks. Find historical blindness on most podcast players and platforms.