WEST COMES EAST 231but his great-grandson Aurangzeb reversed all his policies, enforcing or-
thodox Islam rigidly, restoring discrimination against Hindus, squashing
smaller religious groups such as the Sikhs, and generally replacing toler-
ance with repression. And yet, say what you will about the man's narrow-
minded zealotry, Aurangzeb was a titanic talent, so he not only held his
empire together but extended it. The whole time, however, he was sowing
the discord and tension that would erupt to ruin the empire as soon as a
less capable ruler took charge.
This less capable ruler was the very next one after Aurangzeb-and the
next one after him and the next one after that and so on down. In its first
two hundred years, the Moghul empire had just six emperors; in its next
fifty years it had eight. Of the first six, five were world historical geniuses;
of the last eight, all were midgets.
During the fifty-year era of those midgets, Hindu kings called the
Marathas surged again in the south. The Sikhs became a militant force.
Nawabs, Muslim provincial governors, began to ignore orders from the
capital and rule as independent princes. In fact, India broke up into
smaller states and each state dissolved into turmoil as clashes broke out be-
tween Hindus and Muslims and others, making life uncertain for all.
Throughout this fragmentation, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the
French, and the English were hovering on the edges, doing business from
their trading posts along the coast. At first the Portuguese had domi-
nated this trade. Then the Dutch had outflanked them, planting forts
and trading posts in both Southeast Asia and Persia, and beating the Por-
tuguese at sea with better ships and bigger guns. Then the French came
in and held their own, and so did the English, who built a fort at Madras
in 1639, acquired Bombay (now called Mumbai) a bit later when their
king married a Portuguese princess (Bombay came with her as part of her
dowry) and then planting a colony on the Bay of Bengal, which grew
into Calcutta.
The Europeans who came to East Asia in this era represented some-
thing new and unprecedented in world history. They weren't generals or
soldiers, they didn't come as the envoys of kings, they didn't represent
governments. They were employees of private companies, but companies
of a new kind: joint stock-holding companies or, as we now call them,
corporations.