The Advent of the Europeans in India

By the close of the fifteenth century, European traders were searching for a direct sea route to India's spice and textile markets, bypassing the overland routes controlled by middlemen further west. Over the next two and a half centuries, five European trading powers, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danish, the French, and the English, arrived on India's coast in succession, each chasing the same trade in cotton textiles, silk, pepper, cloves, and cinnamon. Their commercial rivalry gradually turned into a contest for political control, first among themselves and then against a weakening Mughal empire. Understanding this sequence, how a chartered trading company built fortified factories, fought wars against its European rivals, and finally became the revenue-collecting ruler of Bengal, is essential groundwork for the rest of India's colonial history.

The Portuguese arrive first

In 1498, Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, discovered the sea route to India round the Cape of Good Hope, landing at Calicut on the Malabar coast. The Portuguese crown moved quickly to convert this discovery into a trading and naval empire known as the Estado da India: Afonso de Albuquerque captured Goa in 1510, and it became the headquarters of Portuguese power in Asia, with Daman and Diu added later. The Portuguese also tried to control the entire Indian Ocean spice trade by forcing local and rival ships to buy a naval pass, the cartaz, before sailing, and by fortifying key ports along the coast. This gave Portugal roughly a century's head start over its European rivals, but by the early seventeenth century, better financed Dutch and English companies began eroding that advantage. Goa, Daman, and Diu remained Portuguese possessions for centuries, but Portugal never became a major territorial power on the Indian mainland the way the English later did.

The Dutch, the Danish, and the French follow

The Dutch were next. The Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602 when the Dutch parliament merged several rival trading concerns, set up its first Indian factory at Masulipatnam on the Coromandel coast in 1605, followed by Pulicat in 1610, where it built Fort Geldria and, for a time, ran its main Indian headquarters. Dutch trade in India stayed profitable through the seventeenth century, but the Company's real priority was always the Indonesian archipelago, the source of the fine spices that fetched the highest prices in Europe; India mattered to the Dutch chiefly as a source of textiles to exchange for those spices, not as territory worth holding for its own sake.

The Danes arrived around the same time. The Danish East India Company, chartered in 1616, sent an expedition under Ove Gjedde that failed to secure a base in Ceylon and instead signed a treaty with the Nayak of Thanjavur in 1620, securing Tranquebar (Tarangambadi) on the Coromandel coast, where the Danes built Fort Dansborg. Danish India stayed a modest trading enclave, later adding Serampore in Bengal, and was eventually sold to the British in the nineteenth century; it never contested political power in India.

The French were the last of the major trading powers to arrive. The French East India Company was chartered in 1664 at the urging of Louis XIV's finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and French traders settled at Surat in 1668 before founding Pondicherry on the Coromandel coast in 1673, acquired from a local governor under the Sultanate of Bijapur. Under its first governor, Francois Martin, Pondicherry grew from a small fishing settlement into the headquarters of French India, and Chandernagar in Bengal became its second major base. Unlike the Dutch and the Danes, the French Company went on to contest political control of southern India directly with the English, a rivalry that shaped the next hundred years of Indian history.

The English East India Company builds its factories

The East India Company received its royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I on the last day of 1600, giving a group of London merchants the sole right among English trading groups to trade with the East. Its first working Indian factory was set up at Surat in 1613, after Mughal permission was secured, and the Company's position there was strengthened between 1615 and 1619, when Sir Thomas Roe, sent by King James I as an envoy, obtained trading concessions from Emperor Jahangir. Surat remained the Company's main western headquarters for decades.

On the eastern, Coromandel coast, the Company acquired a strip of coastal land from the Raja of Chandragiri, a successor state of the crumbling Vijayanagara empire, in 1639; its agent Francis Day built Fort St George there, and the surrounding settlement grew into the city of Madras (Chennai). On the west coast, King Charles II received the islands of Bombay from Portugal in 1661 as part of his marriage dowry with Catherine of Braganza, and in 1668 he leased them to the East India Company for a nominal rent of ten pounds of gold a year; Bombay became the Company's main western headquarters by 1687, overtaking Surat.

In Bengal, the Company's first factory was set up on the banks of the river Hugli in 1651. Trade there expanded steadily, and in 1690 the Company's agent Job Charnock founded a new settlement by combining three villages, Sutanuti, Kalikata, and Gobindapur, on the banks of the Hugli. Permission to fortify the site followed in 1696, and the Company bought zamindari rights over the three villages in 1698, the same period Kalikata began growing into the city of Calcutta (Kolkata). The fortification, completed around 1700 and named Fort William, became the nucleus of British Bengal. The Company also secured a farman from Emperor Aurangzeb granting it the right to trade duty free in Bengal, a privilege Company officials then stretched to cover their own private trade as well, a running source of dispute with the Nawabs of Bengal that would eventually help trigger the Battle of Plassey.

Why trade turned into conflict

Because every company chased the same goods, competition among them pushed up the prices at which these could be purchased, cutting into everyone's profits. The only way a company could keep flourishing was by eliminating its rivals. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the trading companies regularly sank each other's ships, blockaded routes, and stopped rival vessels from moving with supplies. Trade was carried on with arms, and trading posts (called "factories," after the Company's traders, known as "factors") were protected through fortification. This fusion of commerce and force is what eventually made it impossible for any of these companies to keep trade separate from politics, and nowhere did it go further than in the long rivalry between the English and the French.

The Anglo-French rivalry and the Carnatic Wars

The English and French East India Companies fought three separate wars in southern India, collectively called the Carnatic Wars, each of them an extension of a war being fought at the same time in Europe.

The First Carnatic War (1746 to 1748) grew directly out of the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe. When a French fleet under Bertrand-Francois Mahe de La Bourdonnais arrived on the Coromandel coast, the French Governor-General Joseph Francois Dupleix used it to capture English-held Madras in 1746. The war ended because the European conflict ended: the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) restored Madras to the English in exchange for the French fortress of Louisbourg in North America, which the English had captured. The war had already shown both sides that European-style discipline and artillery, combined with locally recruited and trained sepoy troops, could defeat much larger Indian armies, a lesson neither company forgot.

The Second Carnatic War (1749 to 1754) had a more local trigger: succession disputes in the two neighbouring states of Hyderabad and the Carnatic. When the Nizam of Hyderabad, Asaf Jah, died in 1748, his throne was contested between his son Nasir Jung and his grandson Muzaffar Jung; around the same time, the Carnatic Nawab's throne was contested between the incumbent, Anwaruddin Khan, and a rival claimant, Chanda Sahib. Dupleix backed Muzaffar Jung and Chanda Sahib with French troops, while the English backed Nasir Jung and Anwaruddin. Anwaruddin was killed in battle, and Chanda Sahib took the Carnatic with French help, giving Dupleix effective control over a large part of southern India through client rulers. The English response, a small garrison under a young officer named Robert Clive, captured and held the Carnatic capital, Arcot, in 1751, drawing Chanda Sahib's forces away and turning the military tide. The war ended with the Treaty of Pondicherry (1754), which forced the French Company to give up its territorial gains; Dupleix, blamed in Paris for an expensive war that produced no lasting French advantage, was recalled the same year.

The Third Carnatic War (1756 to 1763) was again a by-product of a European war, this time the Seven Years' War. Its decisive engagement was the Battle of Wandiwash (1760), where an English force under Sir Eyre Coote decisively defeated the French army led by the Comte de Lally, effectively ending French military power in India. The Treaty of Paris (1763), which ended the Seven Years' War in Europe, let France keep its Indian trading posts, Pondicherry, Chandernagar, Mahe, Karaikal, and Yanam, but forbade it from fortifying them or stationing troops there. France remained a trading presence in India for another two centuries, but never again competed for political control; the English East India Company had no European rival left in India.

From trading post to conqueror: the Battle of Plassey

While the Carnatic Wars were being fought in the south, a parallel crisis was building in Bengal. Tension between the Company and successive Nawabs, Murshid Quli Khan, Alivardi Khan, and finally Sirajuddaulah, had been rising through the early eighteenth century over tribute, fortification, and the right to mint coins. In June 1756, Sirajuddaulah, alarmed at the Company strengthening its fort at Calcutta without permission, marched on the city and captured it; the brief imprisonment of English captives that followed, remembered as the Black Hole of Calcutta, became a grievance the Company used to justify a military response. An expedition sent from Madras recaptured Calcutta in January 1757, and Company officials then conspired with Sirajuddaulah's disaffected commander-in-chief, Mir Jafar, and other Bengali financiers, to replace the Nawab. In 1757, Robert Clive led the Company's army against Sirajuddaulah at Plassey; Mir Jafar's contingent held back from the fighting as agreed, and Sirajuddaulah was defeated and later killed. Mir Jafar was installed as the new Nawab in return, but as a Company client rather than an independent ruler. Plassey was a small battle by later standards, but it marked the point where a mercantile trading company began its transformation into a territorial power, governing Bengal in all but name through a puppet Nawab.

The Battle of Buxar and the grant of Diwani

Company control through a puppet Nawab proved unstable. Mir Jafar was replaced by his son-in-law Mir Qasim in 1760, but Mir Qasim soon resented the Company's continued interference and its officials' abuse of their duty-free trading privilege, and turned against it. Mir Qasim allied with the Nawab of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daula, and with the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II himself, bringing together three of the most powerful authorities in north India against the Company. This combined army was decisively defeated by a Company force under Major Hector Munro at the Battle of Buxar on 22 October 1764. Buxar mattered more than Plassey in one important respect: Plassey had been won through a palace conspiracy against one Nawab, but Buxar was a straight military defeat of a coalition that included the Mughal emperor's own forces, proving the Company's army could beat the most legitimate authorities in Hindustan in open battle.

The consequences were settled the following year at the Treaty of Allahabad (1765). Robert Clive, negotiating on the Company's behalf with Shah Alam II, secured the Diwani, the right to collect and administer the revenues of the rich provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, in exchange for an annual tribute to the emperor and a separate payment to the Nawab of Bengal for the Nizamat, the region's policing and judicial functions, which nominally stayed with him. This split created what is usually called the system of Dual Government: the Company held the power that actually mattered, revenue, while a nominally sovereign Nawab kept the costly duty of administering justice and order without the income to pay for it properly. For the Company, the Diwani was the real turning point, more than Plassey. It converted a trading corporation into the acknowledged government of one of the richest provinces in the Mughal empire, with the legal right to tax tens of millions of people, years before the Company held a single acre of Bengal in full sovereignty.

The exam angle: sequence, cause, and not conflating Plassey with Buxar

UPSC tends to test three things from this chapter. First, the correct sequence of arrival: the Portuguese first (1498), then the Dutch (first Indian factory in 1605), then the Danish (Tranquebar in 1620), then the English, chartered in 1600 but not working from Surat until 1613, and the French last (Surat in 1668, Pondicherry in 1673). It is easy to confuse the English Company's charter date, 1600, with the date it actually built a working presence in India, which came more than a decade later. Second, the causal chain that turned traders into rulers: mercantile competition among the European companies, fortified factories, wars fought as extensions of European conflicts (the three Carnatic Wars), exploitation of a weakening Mughal successor state in Bengal, and finally outright conquest, first through Plassey's palace conspiracy and then through Buxar's open battlefield victory. An option crediting "peaceful expansion of trade" for the Company's territorial gains is nearly always wrong; the real mechanism was competitive violence between rival companies, followed by political interference in divided regional states. Third, keep Plassey and Buxar distinct: Plassey (1757) removed one hostile Nawab through conspiracy and installed a friendlier one, while Buxar (1764) defeated a coalition that included the Mughal emperor in genuine battle, and it was Buxar, not Plassey, that led directly to the Diwani grant of 1765, the point at which Company rule in Bengal became a matter of formal legal right rather than informal control behind a puppet Nawab.

Quick revision points

• Vasco da Gama reached Calicut by sea in 1498; the Portuguese based themselves at Goa from 1510.
• The Dutch (first factory 1605), the Danish (Tranquebar, 1620), and the French (Pondicherry, 1673) all traded in India, but only the French seriously contested political power with the English.
• The English East India Company received its royal charter in 1600 but only began working from Surat in 1613; its first Bengal factory was set up at Hugli in 1651, and Calcutta was founded in 1690.
• The three Carnatic Wars (1746 to 1763) were fought between the English and French companies as extensions of European wars; the Second War made Dupleix and Robert Clive famous, and the Third War's Battle of Wandiwash (1760) ended French military ambitions in India.
• The Battle of Plassey (1757), won by Robert Clive with the help of Mir Jafar's betrayal, was the Company's first major territorial gain in India, but it worked through a puppet Nawab, not direct rule.
• The Battle of Buxar (1764) defeated a coalition led by the Mughal emperor himself, and the Diwani grant of 1765 gave the Company the legal right to Bengal's revenues, completing its transition from trader to ruler.

Once the full sequence, from rival chartered companies to the revenue-collecting ruler of Bengal, is clear, practise the linked questions from this chapter.