The East India Company

John Cabot, or Caboto, a Genoese living in Bristol, made a westward voyage to Newfoundland in 1497, but was lost at sea in a subsequent venture. The Newfoundland fishery was widely known and exploited at the time by the Portuguese, the French, and the Basques, as much as by the English. The slave trade had its origins in mid-sixteenth-century gold-trading voyages to the Guinea coast of West Africa by Sir John Hawkins and many others. Hawkins initially obtained African slaves by means of piracy on Portuguese slave traders, but then moved to trading directly with African chiefs. He then sold slaves in the Spanish dominions in America, which was like slavery an illegal activity, at least under Spanish law.

The Elizabethan adventurer Francis Drake continued the tradition of interloping among the Spanish Caribbean colonies and preying on Spanish trade.During his famous circumnavigation of 1577, a feat not repeated by an English sailor until George Anson’s voyage of the 1740s, Drake plundered Spanish shipping. To an extent, the English war on Spanish trade in the era of the Spanish Armada of 1588 was a war of self-defense. In this period, piracy, slave trading, commerce-raiding, and naval warfare were not distinct. Most enterprises involved a combination of private and royal vessels, and both crown and merchant hoped for a windfall. There was little idea of securing permanent colonies until the end of the century. In the sixteenth century, maritime trade was usually pursued through joint-stock companies, in which a number of merchants pooled resources under a royal charter. The East India Company was formed on the pattern of other trading enterprises of the time, such as the Levant and Muscovy Companies. The intent was to pool capital and share risk among a number of traders rather than to colonize or conquer the country into which they traded. The Levant Company secured extraterritorial privileges from the Porte (the Turkish government) in 1583, but it had no thought of conquest; likewise the Muscovy Company of 1555 aimed only to trade with the Russia of Ivan the Terrible.

The East India Company was founded on a similar pattern in 1600. During its first century and a half of existence, it made no extensive territorial acquisitions, limiting itself to trading forts and surrounding territories. In India, these included Fort St. George, later Madras, and Bombay, acquired from the Portuguese in 1660. The East India Company was not without competition, chiefly from the French, the Dutch, and, in early years, the Portuguese, as well as from English “interlopers,” violating the company’s monopoly of trade with India. Disorder created by the breakdown of the Mogul Empire in the eighteenth century and consequent opportunities for plunder and mercenary warfare drew the East India Company and its army deeper into Indian politics. The company made significant conquests in southern India, but its most notable conquest was Bengal, with Robert Clive’s victory at the battle of Plassey in 1757. At that point, the company became a large Indian landowner.