The Theft of India: The European Conquests of India, 1498–1765

280 Pages·2016·0.98 MB·English

by  Roy Moxham

The Theft of India
The European Conquests of
India, 1498–1765
ROY MOXHAM
HarperCollins Publishers India
Dedicated to all those across the world who campaign for equality of
opportunity.
Contents
Preface
One The Portuguese
Spices, Christianity and Extreme Violence
Two The Portuguese
Conquest, Horticulture, the Church and the Inquisition
Three The English
Venture Capitalists and Adventurers
Four The English
Splendour and Disease
Five The English
Religious Freedom and Peaceful Trade
Six The Portuguese
Terror, Luxury and Decay
Seven The Dutch, the English and the Danes
The Triumph of Peaceful Trade
Eight The French and the British
Towards Conquest
Nine The British
The Seizure of Bengal
Postscript
Bibliography
Further Reading
Place Name Changes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Book
About the Author
Copyright
Preface
Having spent some years in colonial and post-colonial Africa, I first visited India
in 1992. It soon became apparent to me that the impressions I had formed of a
benevolent British rule bore, as they had in Africa, little resemblance to the
reality. The British had indeed improved education, irrigation and transport, but
there was a much darker side too.
By chance I came across a reference to the Imperial Customs Line, a barrier
that the British used to fence off the eastern part of India in order to impose a
huge tax on salt. None of the standard histories of India mentioned this barrier.
Following its path, and delving into its history for my book, The Great Hedge of
India, I was shocked to discover that it had made salt, an essential commodity,
prohibitively expensive for millions of Indians and that many had perished as a
result. Similarly, while researching for my book Tea: Addiction, Exploitation
and Empire, I discovered that hundreds of thousands of Indians had died
unnecessary deaths because of the harsh conditions on India’s nineteenth-
century, British-owned tea estates. Again, this was not mentioned in the standard
histories of India. On completion of these two projects, I began to research the
impact of European colonialism on the Indian peninsula.
Accounts by early travellers of India’s riches – its spices, gold and gems – had
excited the imagination of the Europeans. Some of these luxuries had been
brought to Europe by the Romans, but when the Roman Empire collapsed, the
Europeans became reliant on supplies coming through Arabia and Persia. In the
fifteenth century, Portugal and Spain developed ships equipped with powerful
artillery that could travel beyond Europe. To avoid clashes between the two
Catholic countries, the Pope divided the world into two spheres of influence. The
East, which included India, would be explored by the Portuguese. In 1498,
Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route from Europe to India. Thereafter,
Europe would no longer be dependent on India’s riches being supplied through
the Middle East.
With their control of the seas, the Portuguese established a monopoly over
trade between India and Europe. They seized Goa and several other enclaves.
Events in Europe then began to impact on India. Portuguese naval supremacy
was gradually eroded by the Dutch and the English, who themselves began to
travel to India, and who eventually destroyed the Portuguese monopoly. The
English largely confined their activities to trade while the Dutch, alongside
trading, colonized parts of India. The Danes also established colonial enclaves.
The French were the last great European power to arrive and set up colonial
enclaves. The wars in Europe between the French and the British then spread
into India. Eventually the British were victorious.
Rather than consult the usual history books, I sought out, for the most part,
accounts written by eyewitness of all these events. Many of these have been
published, with helpful editing, over the last century and a half by the Hakluyt
Society. There were other memoirs too. I supplemented these readings with the
study of academic papers, whose existence was hardly known beyond academia,
by such outstanding scholars as C.R. Boxer. Gradually I built up a picture of
what really happened.
The Theft of India highlights the terrible suffering inflicted on Indians by the
European powers during the three centuries that followed Vasco da Gama’s
discovery of the sea route from Europe to India. For most Indians, life under the
Mughals was considerably worse than is generally portrayed, but at least the
Mughal spoils were generally retained in India. The Europeans, however,
exported not only vast amounts of India’s wealth but thousands of Indian slaves
too.
European oppression began with a reign of terror by the Portuguese. Entire
communities were massacred, and those who survived were often forced to
convert to Christianity. Many of them were victimized by the Portuguese
Inquisition and atrocities continued to take place under the conquests of the
Dutch and French. All these European powers exported slaves, mostly to the
East Indies. Finally, the British, who until the eighteenth century had largely
confined themselves to peaceful trade, conquered Bengal. They imposed a
chaotic administration and seized much of Bengal’s wealth, which they then
exported to Britain. The impoverished population, without money to purchase
food from other parts of India, could not fend off famine as they had in previous
years. Millions starved to death.
Numerous eyewitness accounts by both Indians and Europeans bring all these
events to life.
One
THE PORTUGUESE
S , C E
PICES HRISTIANITY AND XTREME
V
IOLENCE
We took a ship from Mecca in which were 380 men and many women and
children, and we took from it fully 12,000 ducats, with goods worth at
least another 10,000. And we burned the ship and all the people on
board with gunpowder.
– A Portuguese companion of Vasco da Gama, 1502.
On 20 May 1498, Vasco da Gama anchored his ships just north of Calicut on
the Malabar Coast of India. These were the first ships to reach India from
Europe. Calicut was a haven of peaceful trade for the ships of the many nations
that came to purchase India’s spices. Only two years later the Portuguese would
capture those ships, slaughter their crews, train their cannon on Calicut, destroy
its houses and kill its inhabitants. The Portuguese terror would have started.
The Indian Ocean was not unexplored territory. Vasco da Gama’s achievement
had been in finding the route from Europe around the tip of Africa – an
achievement that would transform the trade between Europe and Asia. Once he
had reached the Indian Ocean he was in a sea that had been traded on for at least
two thousand years. Spices from India were well known in Europe. They were
much in demand, especially pepper, but they had usually come by sea to the
northern ports of the Indian Ocean and then been taken overland.
Pepper had been used in ancient Egypt as a part of the armoury of spices used
to embalm its rulers. The mummy of Ramesses II, who died in 1213 BC, is in the
Cairo Museum. X-ray examination has revealed a peppercorn stuffed and sealed
into each nostril. Pepper was the most important item imported from south India
by the Greeks and the Romans. It is mentioned by Aristotle, and was
recommended by the famous physician Hippocrates, when mixed with vinegar
and honey, as a cure for an infected uterus. Much of this pepper probably
travelled through Egypt, which came under Greek control in the fourth century
BC. It seems to have been used solely as a medicine until the Roman emperor
Augustus started to use it as a condiment. It was during his reign that the
Romans annexed Egypt in 30 BC. The Romans transformed the trade across the
Arabian Sea. In the middle of the first century they had become acquainted with
the details of the monsoon – already well known to the Arabs – and had built
large ships to travel directly from Egypt to southern India. Pliny the Elder tells
us that the journey from Ocelis, at the mouth of the Red Sea, to Muziris on the
Malabar Coast in south-west India, took one month. The Romans destroyed the
principal Arab trading centre of Aden, and made treaties with the smaller ports
on the Arabian coast so that they could dominate the spice trade. By the end of
the first century, spices were no longer a scarce luxury for the Romans.
Alexandria became the centre of the spice trade, with large pepper warehouses.
The use of pepper spread across the Roman Empire. In Rome itself, Emperor
Domitian built pepper warehouses, the remains of which are still visible. Pepper
was used both in the kitchen and at table. Several exquisite pepper pots from this
period have been discovered in France and in Britain.
It was not only goods of Indian origin that went from Malabar to Europe.
From well before Roman times, there had been a flourishing trade in spices and
other goods between south India and the East. Indian spices were exported to
China. Spices from Indonesia, such as cloves and nutmeg, came to India.
Quantities of these were then shipped onwards to Arabia and Europe. The spices