(^152) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
The English learned another lesson from the "Mother of God." When,
some years later, a rich prize vessel was brought into the Thames for
unloading, the men who did the job were given as work clothes "suits
of canvas doublet without pockets."^1
The English came into the Indian Ocean, like the Hollanders, at the
end of the sixteenth century. They came as interlopers and plunderers,
better at fighting than trading. Only later, and then cautiously, did
they shift to commerce.
The Dutch formed their VOC by merger of independent companies,
and moved vessels and armaments into the area on a substantial scale,
with a view to booting the Portuguese and other pretenders from the
Indonesian archipelago. The English, by contrast, acted piecemeal,
treating each voyage as a separate venture and requiring participating
merchants to reassemble their capital each time. When the English and
Dutch clashed in those early days, the English sometimes won but
lacked the muscle to mount a real challenge; and so, looking for alter
native trade opportunities, they turned north to India. This would
prove a lucky strike.
Like the Dutch, the English preferred to avoid the Portuguese. They
set up at first on the eastern or Coromandel coast, well away from
Malabar. On the western side of India they leapfrogged Goa to obtain
trading privileges in Surat, the major port of the Moghul empire, gate
way to the riches of the Indian interior and the trade with Persia and
Arabia. Later on ( 1661 ) they got permission to set up in Bombay, then
an almost uninhabited island. This was reasonably safe from landside
aggression (compare Goa), and the English developed it into a factory-
base and the major commercial center of the west coast.
On the other side of the peninsula, after planting themselves at
Madras, the English moved north into the Bay of Bengal and the val
ley of the Hugli River. There, beginning in 1690, they built their own
commercial city on the territory of a tiny village called Calcutta. The
key was the purchase in 1698 of a kind of "feudal" privilege (zamin-
dari rights of tax collection). These rights, though flouted at first by
local authorities resentful of European intrusion, were increasingly
honored as Indian merchants and officials came to depend on English
trade, assistance, and goodwill.^2
In all of this, the name of the game was buying interested friendship
and collaboration. Begin with the big merchants and the courtiers of
the Great Moghul. Go on to local agents and feudatories, who looked
nora
(Nora)
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