The Advent of the Europeans

Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in May 1498, declaring he had come for 'Christians and spices'. The Portuguese built not an empire of land but the Estado da India — a network of fortified coastal factories from Goa, captured by Albuquerque in 1510, to Diu, Daman and Hooghly, controlling the spice trade through the cartaz (naval pass) system enforced by sea power. They left India its first printing press, its first European-style forts, and — through the Inquisition at Goa — a darker inheritance of religious coercion.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC, 1602) displaced the Portuguese in the spice islands and traded from Surat and Bengal, but made profits in Indonesia, not India. The French came last and dreamed largest: under Governor Dupleix in the 1740s, France intervened in the succession disputes of the Carnatic and Hyderabad, inventing the game of king-making — the policy of placing subsidised allies on Indian thrones — that the English would perfect. The dream died on the field of Wandiwash (1760), where Eyre Coote crushed Lally; by the Treaty of Paris (1763) France kept only its comptoirs, like Pondicherry, as unarmed trading posts.

The English East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, set up its first factory at Surat (1613), and acquired Bombay (1668), fortified Calcutta (1690s) and held Madras (Fort St George, 1639) — three coastal citadels joined by the navy. The Company's advantages were structural: a joint-stock organisation that could raise capital, a navy that commanded the sea lines between Europe and Asia, ruthless internal discipline, and a capacity to mix trade with war that the Mughal state could neither match nor effectively tax. When Bengal's revenues became the prize after 1717, the Company was the only European power in a position to seize them.