448 Part VI: European Empires in Asia
centuries, were engaged in rich long-distance international trade. Their capitals
were never coastal but always deep inland. The enemies they worried about
were even further inland, across passes and corridors from which aggressive,
mounted warriors periodically emerged. Wealth and glory could be had by
conquering territories and putting populations to work. The seas, by contrast,
seemed merely empty; they were the borders you didn’t have to worry about.
Who could imagine a maritime empire?
Thus, when the East India Company turned from the Spice Islands to
India looking for trade, it found the Mughal Empire at its peak; it had a mighty
army but no fleet. England first sent high-ranking ambassadors to court to ask
for trade treaties; here, too, there was the problem of Jesuits speaking against
Protestant English traders; and there was the problem that England didn’t
really produce anything that India needed or wanted. India had its own thriv-
ing cloth industry; anyway, in the Indian climate, who needed English wool-
ens? But they were happy to sell Indian products for silver or gold. Emperor
Jahangir finally granted permission to trade and build a “factory” but refused
to give the Company the monopoly they desired.
The first factory of the East India Company in India was in the Mughal
capital at Agra. But Agra was not convenient for maritime trade; they needed a
factory on the Ganges delta, which would turn the entire Ganges system into a
vast trade network. They were given permission to build a factory at Hooghly
near a Kali shrine and a ghat, from which came the name Calcutta (Kali-ghat).
Down on the southeast coast, the Company bought some land from a minor
raja near the village of Mandraz to build a fort they called St. George in 1639.
The city that grew there came to be called Madras, after the village. And
finally, on the west coast, there was a small island that King Charles II got in
his dowry when he married the Infanta of Portugal. He rented it to the East
India Company for a loan at low interest and 10 pounds a year; this became
Bombay. These three posts, now India’s three largest cities, gave England a tri-
angulation on India; convenient at first for shipping, they became toeholds,
then the founding territories, and finally the three “Presidencies” from which
Britain moved inland as the Mughals went into decline after 1707.
India became the place where ambitious young men went to seek their for-
tunes. Salaries were low, but the expectation was you would use your entrepre-
neurial ingenuity to engage in business on the side, where fabulous fortunes
were to be made. The greatest of the early adventuring Company men was
Robert Clive, a hothead who regularly got into trouble until his father sent him
to India to straighten him out. He went to Fort St. George as a clerk, but this
work bored and depressed him so severely that once he tried to blow his brains
out. It turned out there were better adventures ahead for Robert Clive.
The French had also established a post near Madras, and they got good at
the game everyone (the English, the Dutch in Indonesia) learned: use your
troops to support weak contenders for local thrones; put them in power; then
use them as puppets. They repay you in currency, treasure, and trade; you get