694 England's maritime and commercial ascendancy. [1650-1715

societies; and it is in their life and progress that we must seek the principal causes of the transformation which the colonial world had undergone since 1650. In North America the activity of French and English had paved the way for a great work of colonisation. South America remained the preserve of the older maritime Powers, save that the French and Dutch had planted themselves on the "Wild Coast" between the Orinoco and the Amazon. The West Indies had passed through their experimental stage as a field of settlement. They were no longer merely the vulnerable outworks of the Spanish empire-they had become a great centre of useful enterprise, where the spirit of the colonist had triumphed over that of the lawless adventurer. West Africa had been the scene of many keen contests; yet its history during this period is but the history of its commerce. To a great extent it had been sacrificed to America, since there could be no development of the resources of regions devastated by the slave-hunter. South and east Africa reflected the changes in the East rather than in the West. The Portuguese were losing their hold on east Africa as they gave ground in the East; and the Dutch, waxing powerful in the East, had included the Cape of Good Hope among their acquisitions. Some of the old contentions had been decided, some of the old rivalries were ended; and, as the scene shifted, the grouping of the Powers had changed. The combination, informal but real, of the rest of Europe against the Spanish House of Habsburg, which was still discernible in 1650, had slowly been dissolved as circumstances changed, and, in the struggle to determine the Spanish Succession, it had been replaced by the alliance of France and Spain against the other maritime peoples, and-particularly in North America, the West Indies, and the East-by the bitter rivalry between England and France. In the competition between the English and the Dutch, so keen in 1650, the English had distanced their opponents. The United Provinces did not emerge at Utrecht from their struggle with France as they emerged at Münster from their struggle with Spain. A heavy price had been paid for the safety of their frontiers. England, on the contrary, through all these years had gone steadily ahead. She had joined in the War of the Spanish Succession because Louis XIV had become a menace to Europe, and also because she could not allow a great colonial empire to pass from the weakened hands of Spain into those of a strong and militant nation like the French. That War lifted her on to a new plane as a maritime and commercial Power, both by its exhaustion of her rivals and by the concessions of trading rights and territory which she secured. The close alliance with Portugal and its accompanying advantages, the acquisition of stations in the Mediterranean, the special commercial privileges in South America, the cessions of territory round Hudson's Bay, the mouth of the St Lawrence, and in the West Indies, were all a part of her harvest from this protracted struggle. What was more, she gained thereby the victory in the

1650-72]

The Portuguese and the Dutch in India.

695

first stage of her contest with France in America, and with the ruin of the French navy and the waning fortunes of the Dutch she was left "the sea Power without any second."

(2) INDIA.

A chapter in a former volume dealt with the history of the Portuguese, Dutch, and English in India during the earlier half of the seventeenth century. From the point then reached the narrative is now resumed. After the severe defeats inflicted upon them by the Dutch in Ceylon and on the coast of Malabar, in 1650–63, the Portuguese could no longer be looked upon as serious claimants for the Indian trade. The first western nation to appear in Hindustan, their incursion represents the final phase of the medieval struggle between Christendom and Islam rather than the new age of commerce and discovery. The stately national epic of the Lusiad has cast a somewhat misleading glamour over the crude facts of their eastern history. As the crusading spirit died down, corruption and incompetency everywhere made their appearance; and from 1650 their annals form a dreary record of degeneration. The conquerors were absorbed and degraded by the conquered, for the Portuguese more than other European nations intermarried with native races. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, petty disputes between the Viceroy at Goa and the English Governor of Bombay are almost the only visible records of the empire founded by Almeida and Albuquerque.

The rivals of the Portuguese, the Dutch, during the same period not only consolidated their position in the Spice Archipelago, but for a time, at any rate, obtained the preponderance on the mainland. Dutch fleets cruising in the Indian Ocean at this early stage were far larger in point of numbers than those despatched by England and France during the War of the Austrian Succession. Ryklof van Goens in his operations against Portugal in 1661-3 commanded a squadron of twenty-four vessels, besides a formidable land force. The Portuguese stations in Ceylon were finally conquered in 1658. The occupation of the Cape of Good Hope must have seemed likely to turn the line of Dutch expansion still more sharply inward towards the nearer east. Colonised under Jan van Riebeck in 1652, it was garrisoned thirteen years later; and by 1672 the Dutch had come to look upon it as the "frontier fortress of India.” In 1664 the roll of their factories on the mainland included nineteen names. They had established posts in Bengal, Gujerat, Malabar, and on the coast of Coromandel. To contemporary observers it appeared probable

696

The Dutch in India.

[1654-1729

that Holland would combine dominion in the Malayan Archipelago with supremacy in Hindustan, and so become paramount in the East, from the Cape of Good Hope to the distant shores of the China Sea.

In 1672 Leibniz, in his curious treatise, the Consilium Aegyptiacum, anticipating a scheme of Napoleon, urged Louis XIV to win an eastern empire by occupying Egypt. He assumes as an incontrovertible fact that no European nation can hope to oust the Dutch by ordinary means; and the burden of the whole pamphlet is, "Hollandia in Aegypto debellabitur." But within the next twenty years the power of the Dutch had begun sensibly to decline. To this effect many causes contributed, which have been traced in an earlier chapter. International complications weakened them at a critical time in their colonial history, and India has always in a certain sense been lost and won on European battlefields. They were fighting England in 1652-4, 1665-7, and 1672-4. After that date they were precluded from following their old aggressive policy on the Indian seas by the curious fate which made them for reasons of state policy allies in Europe of their most formidable rivals in the East. The Dutch were at war with France except for short intervals from 1672 till 1713, and, though they were allied with England during part of that time, the bulk of the fighting in India fell to their share. They drove the French admiral, de La Haye, from Trincomali in 1673, and captured St Thomé by storm two years later. In 1693 they captured Pondicherry after a twelve days' siege. But the drain on their resources from the long wars in Europe was tremendous, and signs of exhaustion made their appearance. It has been proved from records at the Cape that for many years after 1672 the number of ships sent to the Indies fell off considerably, hardly any sailing with their full complement of men. Much blood and treasure had been expended in seizing positions which, as the future proved, were not strategically of the first importance. It had cost them dearly to wrest Malabar from the Portuguese. As the spice merchants of the world the Dutch reckoned the pepper-trade of that district the greatest prize of Indian commerce. But the country was ruined by the break-up of the Moghul empire and by Maratha misrule; and before the middle of the eighteenth century almost every European settlement on the south-eastern coast had fallen into decay. The policy which was perhaps inevitable for the Dutch as an insular Power militated against their prospects of success on the broader arena of the mainland. In the Spice Archipelago they were engaged in constant wars and expeditions. The exigencies of their position obliged them to crush all opposition with a heavy hand. Too often they succeeded to Portuguese methods as well as to Portuguese territory. Such terrible reprisals as were practised after the Chinese rising at Formosa in 1652, the revolt in the Moluccas in 1672, and Governor Vuyst's attempt to make himself absolute in Ceylon in 1729, cast a malignant light on Dutch colonial policy. Of the four western nations that successively appeared in India,

1686-1759]

The Dutch in India.

697

it is noticeable that the final struggle lay between the two which used the more humane and sympathetic methods in their dealings with eastern peoples.

The petty militarism of the Dutch settlements was a weapon of doubtful efficacy in the hands of a trading body. The English Company in 1686 averred that the Dutch possessed 170 fortified places in the East, and could drive the English out of all India in one year; but they added that most of the forts were poorly manned and that, if it came to a predatory war, "they are a broader mark to hit than we are." The tradition of Dutch supremacy lingered long into the eighteenth century. In 1718 the English Company declared that the strength of the Dutch was greatly superior to their own and that of all other European nations joined together, "and nothing but the Powers in Europe make them afraid to prove it against any or all of their competitors in the trade of India." But this was to misread strangely the signs of the times. By stress of circumstances the two nations had been compelled to respect each other's sphere of influence. The hold of the Dutch upon the coast of India was gradually weakened; and they drew away more and more to the south-east where, after the fall of the English factory at Bantam in 1683, their supremacy was unchallenged. On the Coromandel coast the desolating war waged between Aurangzeb and the King of Golconda, in 1687, proved ruinous to their settlements, whereas the English were comparatively immune behind the walls of Fort St George. From Surat they were temporarily driven in the early years of the eighteenth century. In Bengal they suffered far more than their rivals from the welter of anarchy that ensued on the interregnum at Delhi in 1712-3. Though the death-blow to their hopes in India was not given till the capitulation of Chinsura to Clive in 1759, the very fact of their taking no part in the dynastic struggles which after 1748 threw southern India open to Europeans was a proof, if any had been needed, that the time of their great opportunity had gone by for ever.

We must now return to the position of the English Company in 1650. Involved at home in the cataclysm of the Civil War and harassed in India by interloping associations, they had almost given up the struggle in despair. But with the return to settled government there came an improvement in their prospects. They shared in the benefits of Cromwell's foreign policy and obtained from him a new charter, which a few years later they were eager to shuffle out of sight. The Protector extorted from Portugal a formal acknowledgment of England's right to trade in the East, and obliged Holland to pay a belated indemnity for the "massacre of Amboina." But the real prosperity of the Company dates from the Restoration. They became the willing creditors of the King and enjoyed his high favour, for Charles found in the Indian interest the only whole-hearted support for his championship of the French cause against the Dutch.

His charter of

698

The English in India.

[1633-90 1661 granted the Company the right of coining money, commanding garrisons in the East, and exercising jurisdiction over the populations, native or British, gathered within the walls of their settlements. The foundation of Fort St George has been mentioned in a former volume. Bombay, which formed part of the dowry that Catharine of Braganza brought to the King in 1662, was made over to the Company in 1668, and their position on the west coast of India was greatly strengthened, for Surat was destined to lose its commercial and strategic importance. The first license for trade in Bengal had been received in 1633; and in 1651 a factory was established at Hooghley. Thereafter the factories in Bengal, though as yet subordinate to the Presidency of Fort St George, drove a thriving and increasing trade. A succession of able men, Gerald Aungier, Sir George Oxenden, and Sir Streynsham Master, presided over the growing settlements. Under these favourable circumstances the Company prospered greatly; and the value of their stock rose to an unprecedented height, being sold in 1683 at a profit of from £360 to £500 per cent. From that date, however, the Company's path was beset with difficulties. Keigwin's insurrection at Bombay, and the mutiny at St Helena in the following year, brought discredit upon them in England and serious loss in India. A still more sinister symptom was the appearance of disruptive tendencies in the outlying provinces of Aurangzeb's vast empire. The Marathas had long freed themselves from the control of the Moghul. Sivaji was with great difficulty repulsed from Surat in 1664; and ten years later, by their first treaty with the Maratha Confederacy, the English were driven to recognise the belligerent rights of a Power nominally in rebellion against the supreme Government. After 1683 Bombay was continually exposed to predatory raids; Madras was menaced by the desultory fighting in southern India, where the Emperor was waging war with the kingdoms of Golconda and Bijapur; but the worst effects were felt in Bengal, where the defenceless English factories were oppressed by a semi-independent viceroy.

At this crisis in the Company's history a masterful personality dominated their counsels. Sir Josia Child was for many years almost supreme in Leadenhall Street; and his brother Sir John, Governor of Bombay from 1682 to 1690, ably represented him in India. The policy of the Court of Committees had hitherto been founded on the dictum of Sir Thomas Roe, "it is an error to affect garrisons and land wars in India." Their instinct was to confine their energies to commerce, avoiding so far as possible political entanglements and territorial responsibilities. Inevitably they sometimes failed to see where a policy, prudent in itself, required modification. All the capitals of British India were founded in opposition to their will. The name of Francis Day was entered in the Company's Black Book for building Fort St George. Bombay was reluctantly taken over from the King's control; and expenditure on its fortifications formed the subject of bitter