Colonialism 15th - 18th Century

15th Century -- Spain and Portugal

In the 15th century, Spain and Portugal, the two Atlantic facing continental powers, were the two major
European countries with monarchs interested in funding a direct route to the Indies. Christian Spaniards had
been deeply influenced by Muslim cartography and philosophy and were eager to outflank the Muslims and
deal directly with the riches of the "Indies" via a sea route.

1492 -- Columbus's flagship,
the Santa Maria about 100
tons, about 70 feet long, about
40 crew. Columbus left Spain
in August 1492 and landed in
Cuba in October -- less than 2
months later.
Mediterranean Europe had worked out profitable trading relationships with the Muslims who controlled the
overland trade with China and the Indian Ocean, and saw little reason to rock the boat.
In 1492 the King of Spain funded the Italian navigator Columbus. Columbus traveling West, convinced that
the world globe was smaller than it actually was, stumbled onto what we call today the “West Indies”. He
claimed the land for the King of Spain who had bankrolled him, took some Indians as slaves and returned
home with them. He died years later still convinced he had discovered a western route to Cathay and the
Indies.

Meanwhile, financed and encouraged by their King, Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese were creeping down
the West coast of Africa attempting to find an Eastern route to the Indies.

Five years later, in 1498 Portuguese sailors traveling East, found their way around the southern tip of Africa to
the west coast of India and the fabled “Indies” (Vasco da Gama 1498),

1498 -- Vasco da Gama first
European voyage to India ship
dimensions??
16th Century --England enters the Race
By the mid 1500’s Spain’s conquistadors had conquered and enslaved the indigenous empires of Central and
South America and had set up a Spanish Empire in the interior of the New World. By the late 1500’s massive
quantities of gold and silver had been flowing from the Americas into Europe via Spain for nearly half a

1498 --Vasco da Gama's
epic journey took eleven
months
1620 -- Mayflower --"Pilgrim
Ship" to America. ~ 180 tons,
carried 192 passengers and xx
crew, 90 feet long, took 65 days
from Plymouth England to
America
century—exciting the envy of other European countries.
The Portuguese used a different pattern in the East. They were a nation of only a million people, and in the
“Indies” they faced more sophisticated and larger indigenous civilizations than did the Spaniards in the West.
Within a few years of Vasco da Gama’s trip to the Indies, Albuquerque, the Portuguese admiral, set up small
Portuguese armed enclaves along the sparsely inhabited Coromandel coast of India, and in certain of the
islands of the Indonesian archipelago. These “forts” were the entry and exit points for goods acquired by trade
and piracy, not by conquest. Portuguese strategy was to control the East Indies trade by controlling the sea
lanes to Europe and the major ports of the East. They were able to do this for close to 150 years before the
Dutch and British and French forced them out beginning in the 17th century. (Good short overview article on
European Domination of the Indian Ocean Trade here.)
In the same year that Queen Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII came to the British throne (1508) the Indian city of
Goa became the fortified capital of these Portuguese holdings. By the mid 1500’s spices, perfumes and gems
traded for European gold and silver were flowing from India, the Indian Ocean and the Spice Islands through
these trading posts, into Europe via Portugal. The treasure of the Americas began to finance Europe, and
provided the gold for the spices and textiles of the East.
In 1508 when Henry VIII came to the throne, Britain was a relatively poor, minor Catholic power on the
fringes of the Renaissance civilizations of Europe.
When Henry died (1547) he had divorced the King of Spain’s daughter, broken with the Pope, appointed
himself head of the Church of England and, to aid a near bankrupt treasury, had closed the English
monasteries and appropriated their wealth Not surprisingly, these actions caused a serious rift between
Catholic Spain and Portugal on the one hand and Protestant England on the other.
Elizabeth 1 came to the throne in 1558. She inherited an England with no standing army and a depleted
treasury. Her major asset was a relatively strong and confident navy built by her father, and an island nation
"whose rocky shores beat back the siege of watery Neptune". Britain's island geography defended it from the
Spanish Armada in the 16th century, from Napoleon and the French in the 18th century, and from Hitler and
 Germany in the 20th.

This island nation of 5 million people, was smaller, poorer and far less formidable than her chief adversary
Spain, Europe’s then most powerful nation. Nevertheless in 1588, during her reign, the British navy and the
British weather defeated an attempted invasion of England by the “invincible” Spanish Armada.

This surprising victory opened a crack in the Spanish and Portuguese monopolies of the treasure routes to
America and the Indian Ocean. Elizabeth, short of money, “chartered” English pirates like Drake and
Hawkins to harass and plunder Spanish and Portuguese ships and to trade in slaves. Her price was a share of
their plunder.
1812 EastIndiaman between
800 and 1200 tons, similar to
ships used by Blanchette and
Roberts to sail to India.
Journey took 5 months. Ships
carried about 400 heads
Queen Elizabeth 1 as 17th Century
a young girl. When
she died in 1603 England, India and the "Honorable East India Company"
England had become
a major European In 1592, four years after the rout of the Armada, a full century after Columbus’ landing in the New World, and
power challenging Vasco da Gama’s voyage to the Indian Ocean, an English pirate (a “privateer”) xxx captured a Portuguese ship
the Spanish and off the Azores islands on its way back home from Asia.
Portuguese Empires.
It was Queen The Madre de Deus was brought to the port of Dartmouth; 165 feet in length with a beam of forty-five feet and
Elizabeth who began some 1600 hundred tons, she was the largest ship Elizabethan England had ever seen. Beneath her hatches was
the English slave
trade, encouraged a cargo of jewels, cloth, ebony and spices with an estimated value of half a million pounds sterling or about
exploration, half the total holdings of the Crown's Exchequer at the time. This fabulous haul not only created a sensation, it
chartered the HEIC, gave England's merchants a firsthand glimpse of the wealthy trade they were missing out on.
hired "privateers"
and laid the To put this ship in perspective: the “Marquis of Wellington” which brought Thomas Blanchett to India two
groundwork for hundred years later, weighed in at 910 tons with a length of about xx feet. Columbus largest ship weighed
England's colonies about 100 tons and was about 80 feet long. The largest "EastIndiaman" built in the early 19th century was
which laid the rated at about 1500 tons. The "Stratheden" on which I returned to England displaced 24,000 tons.
foundations of
Empire. English Merchants agitated for a chance to compete for this wealth until at last, on the last day of 1600,

"for the honor of the nation, the wealth of the peoples, The increase of navigation and the advancement of
1562 --English lawfulle traffic,"
African Atlantic
Slave trade starts Elizabeth chartered the Honorable East India Company (HEIC) to trade in the "Indies". It was later granted
the right by James 1 to “acquire territory, coin money, maintain armies and forts, form foreign alliances,
1612 English HEIC declare war, conclude peace, and try and punish law breakers”.
ships defeat
Portuguese ships off There is an excellent series of recent articles on the HEIC here and an older summary piece from
coast of Surat, India the Encyclopedia Britannica on the British Empire here.
-- impresses
Moghuls, helps We are the direct descendants of Roberts and Blanchett, the British soldiers who were sent out to India
HEIC trade in India in 1800, two hundred years after the founding of HEIC, “to declare war and conclude peace” on behalf
of the merchants of the HEIC.

By 1650 HEIC had The first HEIC trading post, known as a station or factory, was set up at Surat on the West Coast of India
several installations (Bombay Presidency) around 1612 and the second at Fort St. George (Madras Presidency) 1640. The mouth
scattered along the of the Ganges was known as Kallikati (Calcutta) and here Fort William was established around 1665.
coast of India
These three factories in time developed to become the three HEIC "Presidencies" of India, each controlling the
ever-growing areas around them. Thomas Blanchett fought for the "Bengal Presidency" in the HEIC army
By 1700 the HEIC
had developed large
trading stations known as the "Bengal Europeans".
(factories) at
Calcutta, Madras Until 1813 the Company had a complete (British) monopoly of all trade east of the Cape of Good Hope across
and Bombay with to Cape Horn, that is all of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Until 1813 no British subject could go to India
attendant armies of without the permission of the HEIC or live there without a license granted by them. In 1813 HEIC lost
native troops (sepoys) its monopoly after which independent British traders and missionaries began flooding into India.
commanded by
Europeans. HEIC influence spread all over the East with Fort Marlborough (Bencoolen) being established in Sumatra.
Other HEIC factories were at the Prince of Wales Island (Penang), Singapore, Malacca, Java, Borneo,
Celebes, Siam (Thailand), Persia (Iran) and the Persian Gulf, Macao and Whampoa (China). St Helena was
settled by the East India Company in 1659 and was held and administered by them until the island was handed
over to the Crown in 1836. Napoleon was incarcerated in an HEIC property. He was guarded by the same
British regiment which was home to Robert Roberts.

The Dutch East India Company was chartered in Holland at roughly the same time as the HEIC and had the
same objectives as the HEIC. Through the (often armed) three way competition between the Portuguese, the
Dutch and the British, during the 17th century, the Portuguese were gradually defeated, the Dutch took control
of Indonesia and Ceylon, and the British became the main contestants for primacy in India.

Portugal maintained its toehold on the Indian mainland by retaining Goa. It remained a Portuguese possession
until the 1960’s long after the British and the Blanchettes had left. It was “liberated” when Indira Gandhi’s
Indian army expelled the Portuguese by force in 1961.
18th Century
1757 -- Battle of Plassey.
British merchants take control India and Britain and France
of East India (Bengal). HEIC
begins to expand control of The rival French East Indies Company, “Compagnie des Indes”, was established in the 18th century and
India through force and bribery succeeded the Dutch as HEIC’s chief rival in India. During much of the 18th century Britain and France
battled for domination in India by using Indian proxies.

In 1757 HEIC backed Indian forces under Robert Clive defeated the French backed Indian forces at the
 .
definitive battle of Plassey in Bengal. This victory together with the victory at Buxar in 1760, made the HEIC
the unacknowledged rulers of Bengal. Despite Napoleons later ambitions about India, France never
recovered from this defeat and became a minor player on the Indian stage.

HEIC installed their puppet Mir Qassam as ruler of Bengal. Qassam gave HEIC the right to collect tax money
and HEIC employees accepted "gifts" and collected taxes as "official" tax collectors for Bengal. The money
was retained mostly by individual Englishmen while the HEIC and Bengal suffered. Chaos ensued for the
next two decades while Englishmen plundered Bengal, and HEIC faced bankruptcy.

In 1770-72 nearly a third of the Bengali population died of famine while Englishmen were repatriating
millions of pounds back to England . The number of deaths has been estimated to have been in the region of
10 million people.

Here is a web page written by Bengalis giving a Bengali point of view.

Indian Sepoy 1795. These are
the Indian soldiers who fought In 1773, with the HEIC on the verge of bankruptcy, the British Government intervened to create the
alongside Blanchett and Bengal Governor as Governor-General of all the Company's Indian lands. Later a London Board of Control
Roberts. They were used by the was appointed to supervise the East India Company who were charged by Parliament to continue running
HEIC to conquer India, and India. Warren Hastings, a long time HEIC employee, became the first Governor General of India (1774-1785)
later by the British Government and began to impose some control. Hastings was an Indiaphile. Like virtually all senior HEIC personnel he
to expand the Empire and fight had lived in India most of his life, appreciated Indian culture, and supported government of Indians by Indians
in European wars. for everyday affairs, with ultimate authority remaining with British. Hastings India policies faced severe
criticism at home in Britain. He resigned, was impeached, was on trial for seven years and eventually
From 1780 until the "Mutiny" exonerated.
of 1857 control of India rested
with a "Joint Venture" between Here is a BBC article on 18th Century British-India by Professor Peter Marshall
the British Government and the
HEIC. During this time the The second Governor General Lord Cornwallis --a political appointee with no Indian experience--was sent out
"Governor General" was an in 1786. He was given a much freer hand than Hastings and in his tenure set the tone and laid the foundation
unchecked dictator. of the British Indian Raj. Cornwallis himself was incorruptible. He was convinced all Indians were corrupt
and incapable of governing themselves. All government must be by Englishmen raised and hired in England.
In 1805 Roberts and in 1817 The foundation of the separation of Britons born in Britain from the rest of Indian society, and the retention of
Blanchette go to India to fight
in wars of HEIC all but the most minor government jobs for Britons born in Britain, was laid during Cornwallis regime (1780
expansion The major wars are and 1793). .
listed here: 1757 - 1947 --
Chronology of "The Raj" The fourth Governor General was the Marquess of Wellesley (xxx), the older brother of Arthur Wellesley, the
future Lord Wellington, the man who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. The Wellesley brothers were
1810 onwards -- Roberts and determined to use India for their own advancement. Despite direct orders from the London HEIC Board, they
later Blanchette marry in India massively expanded the HEIC territories in India by war, bribery and treaty abrogation.
and their descendants begin to
raise families. Cornwallis It was as a result of the Wellesley's Indian conquests that Robert Roberts and later Thomas Blanchett
proclamations eliminates them went to India. Robert Roberts had joined the Royal Army and went out to India in 1805 after seeing
from military and most other service in the West Indies. Roberts died in Trichinopoly while campaigning against the Pindaris during
jobs in India the Mahratta wars instigated by the elder Wellesley. Thomas Blanchett joined the HEIC Bengal army
as a youth of approximately 15 and went to India in 1817. I don't yet know what campaigns he fought
in.

Here is a piece on the HEIC Bengal Army contribution to Empire and here is a Timeline of Robert Robert's
Regiment the 53rd Shropshires

On to Colonialism 19th and 20th Centuries