Abstract
The first significant contact between the English and India came as the result of a letter written in 1579 by the English Jesuit, Thomas Stevens, which inspired four London merchants to travel to India in 1583 out of ‘a desire for direct communication with the East’.1 They were the first of the stream who would travel to the subcontinent in search of trade, adventure and glory. Progress was rapid and, by the end of 1600, a group of ‘merchant adventurers’2 with a capital of £70,0003 had been granted a Royal Charter to trade with India. The immediate reason for the issuing of the licence was Dutch merchants’ raising of the price of pepper from 3s. a pound to 8s. a pound.4 This commercial motive set the tone for the contacts that were to develop between the two nations.
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Notes
Roberts, P. E., History of British India, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1958 ) 21.
Mukherjee, R., The Rise and the Fall of the East India Company (Monthly University Press, 1974) 86.
Dutt, R., Economic History of India Under Early British Rule (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956) 2.
Quoted in M. E. Chamberlain, Britain and India: The Interaction of Two Peoples ( Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1974 ) 26.
Edwardes, M., British India 1772–1942 (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1967) 6–7.
Marshall, P. J., ‘The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in The Raj, India and the British 1600–1947, ed. C. A. Bayly ( London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990 ) 18.
Wilbur, M. E., The East India Company (Stanford University Press, 1945 ) 120.
Morton, A. L., A People’s History of England (Lawrence & Wishart, 1961 ) 161–2.
Green, M., Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979 ) 79.
Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937) (orig. publ. 1776) 602.
Pegg, J., India’s Cries to British Humanity (London, 1830) 14, quoted in British India 1772–1942 101.
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© 1998 Amal Chatterjee
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Chatterjee, A. (1998). Historical Background. In: Representations of India, 1740–1840. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378162_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378162_2
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