Commercial interests drew the Dutch also to India, where they established factories in Gujarat, on the Coromandel Coast and in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, entering deep into the interior of the lower Ganges valley. The more important of their factories in India were at Masulipatam (1605), Pulicat (1610), Surat (1616), Bimlipatam (1641), Karikal (1645), Chinsura (1653), Cassimbazar, Baranagore, Patna, Balasore, Negapatam (1658) and Cochin (1663). By supplanting the Portuguese, the Dutch practically maintained a monopoly of the spice trade in the East throughout the seventeenth century. They also became the carriers of trade between India and the islands of the Far East, thus reviving a very old connection maintained in the palmy days of the Vijayanagar Empire. At Surat the Dutch were supplied with large quantities of indigo, manufactured in Central India and the Jumna valley, and from Bengal, Bihar, Gujarat and Coromandel they exported raw silk, textiles, saltpetre, rice and Gangetic opium. After 1690, Negapatam instead of Pulicat became the chief seat of the Dutch on the Coromandel.
The Spanish and Portuguese Crowns remained united from A.D. 1580 to 1640. England concluded peace with Spain in A.D. 1604; but the English and the Portuguese became rivals of each other in the eastern trade. By allying themselves with the Shah of Persia, the English captured Ormuz in the Persian Gulf from the Portuguese in A.D. 1622 and obtained permission to settle in Gombroon and take half the customs dues. From this time, however, Portuguese rivalry began to be less acute. The treaty of Madrid, concluded in 1630, provided for the cessation of commercial hostilities between the English and the Portuguese in the East, and in 1634 Methold, the President of the English factory at Surat, and the Portuguese Viceroy of Goa signed a convention, which “actually guaranteed commercial inter-relations” between the two nations in India. The growth of peaceful relations between the English and the Portuguese was facilitated by the recovery in A.D. 1640 of Portugal’s independence from the control of Spain, the old enemy of England. The right of the English to the eastern trade was recognised by the Portuguese in a treaty, dated July A.D. 1654; and another treaty, concluded in A.D. 1661, secured for the Portuguese from Charles II, who received Bombay as a part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, the promise of English support against the Dutch in India. In fact, the English were no longer faced with bitter commercial rivalry from the Portuguese in India, who came to be too degenerate to pursue any consistent policy, though individual Portuguese traders occasionally obstructed the collection of investments by the English in their factories in the eighteenth century.
The Dutch rivalry with the English, during the seventeenth century, was more bitter than that of the Portuguese. The policy of the Dutch in the East was influenced by two motives: one was to take revenge on Catholic Spain, the foe of their independence, and her ally Portugal, and the other was to colonise and establish settlements in the East Indies with a view to monopolizing commerce in that region. They gained their first object by the gradual decline of Portuguese influence, which we have already noted. The realization of their second object brought them into bitter competition with the English. In Europe also the relations between England and Holland had been hostile under the Stuarts and Cromwell, owing to commercial rivalry, and the French alliance and pro-Spanish policy of the Stuarts.
The naval supremacy of the Dutch and the negotiation of a twenty-one years’ truce between Spain and Holland in 1609, by freeing them from the danger of war in Europe and some restrictions in the Spice lslands, encouraged the Dutch to oppose English trade in the East Indies more vigorously than before. During this period, the activities of the Dutch were mostly confined to Java and the Archipelago. However, they established
themselves on the Coromandel Coast and fortified a factory at Pulicat in 1610, to provide themselves with cotton goods for which a ready market found in the Archipelago. Conferences held in London and at the Hague (A.D. 1611 and 1613-1615) led to an amicable settlement between the Dutch and the English. They came to terms in A.D. 1619 but hostilities were renewed after two years, and the cruel massacre of ten Englishmen and nine Japanese at Amboyna in 1623 “marked the climax of Dutch hatred” of the English in the East. Though the Dutch began to confine themselves more to the Malay Archipelago and the English to India, the former did not cease to be commercial rivals of the latter in India. The years 1630-1658 formed a period of expansion for the Dutch on the Coromandel Coast and extension of their trade in other regions, “though wars, famine and official rapacity continued to pIague them” and they had occasional conflicts with Mir Jumla. During the years 1672-1674 the Dutch frequently obstructed communications between Surat and the new English settlement of Bombay and captured three English vessels in the Bay of Bengal.
In 1698 the Dutch chief of Chinsura complained to Prince ‘Azim-us-Shan, when he visited Burdwan, that while his company paid a duty of 3.5 per cent on their trade, the English paid only Rs. 3,000 per annum, and asked that the Dutch might be granted the same privilege the English. The commercial rivalry of the Dutch and the English remained acute till A.D. 1759.
The English East India Company
The completion of Drake’s voyage round the world in 1580, and the victory of the English over the Spanish Armada, inspired the people of England with a spirit of daring and enterprise in different spheres of activity and encouraged some English captains to undertake voyages to the eastern waters. Between 1591 and 1593 James Lancaster reached Cape Comorin and Penang; in 1596 a fleet of vessels under Benjamin Wood sailed eastward; and in 1599 John Mildenhall, a merchant adventurer of London, came to India by the overland route and spent seven years in the East. It was on the 31st December, 1600, that the first important step towards England’s commercial prosperity was taken. On that memorable day the East India Company received a charter from Queen Elizabeth granting it the monopoly of eastern trade for fifteen years. At first the Company dispatched “separate voyages”, each fleet being sent by a group of subscribers, who divided among themselves the profits of their trade, and it had to encounter various difficulties. “It had to explore and map out the Indian seas and coasts, it had painfully to work out a system of commerce, to experiment with commodities and merchandise, to train and discipline a staff of servants. It had to brave or conciliate the hostility of England’s hereditary Catholic enemy and her new Protestant rival. Further, it had to establish a position even at home . . . there was no active State support given to England’s first essays in the East. The East India Company was cradled in the chilly but invigorating atmosphere of individualism. It had to cope with the lingering medieval prejudice against the export of bullion and a fallacious theory of foreign trade.”
