CHAPTER IV

BRITISH RULE UNDER THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

The basic fact which has governed the whole evolution of British rule in India is that we went there in the first instance as traders, and not as conquerors.  For trade meant co-operation.  There could be no successful trading for British traders unless they found Indian traders ready to co-operate with them in trade.  That we ever went to India at all was due to the national instincts of an insular people accustomed to go down to the sea in ships and to trade with distant lands.  When the rise of great Mahomedan states on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and finally the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, blocked the overland trade routes from Christendom into the Orient, our forefathers determined to emulate the example of the Spaniards and Portuguese and open up new ocean highways to the remote markets credited with fabulous wealth which would have been otherwise lost to them indefinitely.  The handful of English merchant-venturers who under Queen Elizabeth’s charter first established three hundred years ago a few precarious settlements on the far-flung shores of a then almost unknown continent no more dreamt of ruling India than did the great East India Company of which they had laid the foundations when it first sought to extend its trading operations into the interior and sent an embassy to court the goodwill of the mighty Moghul emperors then at the height of their power.  Throughout those early days co-operation between Indians and Englishmen, though then for the sole purpose of trade, was the principle that guided British enterprise in India, and the venturers would never have grown and thriven as they did had they not laid themselves out to secure the confidence and co-operation of the Indians who flocked to their “factories.”  At home too it was not dominion, but the profits derived from the Indian trade that occupied the mind of the nation.  Not till the disintegration of the Moghul Empire in the eighteenth century plunged India into a welter of anarchy which endangered not only our trade but the safety of our settlements, which, like the foreign settlements in the Chinese Treaty Ports to-day, attracted in increasing numbers an indigenous population in search of security for life and property, did the Directors of the East India Company consent to depart from their policy of absolute non-intervention in the internal affairs of India.  Nor was it till, in the course of the great duel between England and France for the mastery of the seas which only ended at Trafalgar, the genius of Dupleix threatened the very existence of the East India Company that the British nation began to face the responsibilities of British dominion in India as the only alternative to the greater danger of French dominion.  It was the French challenge to Britain’s position all over the world far more than any deliberate policy of conquest in India that drove successive agents of the East India Company to enlarge the area of British authority, and successive Governments at home to acquiesce and aid in its enlargement, until ultimately the whole peninsula was made subject to the paramount British power from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.