Company towns
During the seventeenth century the power of the Mughal seemed unassailable, though it was in these times that the Mughal supremacy began to be challenged. One threat came from the sea, from the relatively innocuous European trading companies that appeared in the Indian Ocean in the 1600s.
The most successful was the British East India Company, granted a trading charter by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600. The Company’s main concern with Delhi initially was to get permission from the Grand Mughal or his officers to trade along the coast and set up factories. James I even deputed Sir Thomas Roe in 1612 to go to Delhi and negotiate with Emperor Jahangir, Akbar’s son.The first step for the British East India Company, as for other European companies, was to secure the right to set up factories on the coast in locations with reasonable docking facilities. A factory in this sense was not primarily a place to manufacture goods but a place to store them, a warehouse where goods from the hinterland could be gathered together awaiting shipment overseas. The factory was also where Company business was conducted, and where Company employees and officials resided, along with the soldiers who guarded the factory. The overall concern was the pursuit of trade and the protection of trade goods.
During the seventeenth century the Company established a number of small and large factories on both the east and west coasts of the subcontinent. Four were significant. The first was at Surat when it was still part of the Mughal Empire in the second decade of the century. Madras (Chennai) followed in 1639—1640 via a grant of land from the Nayaks who ruled the region. And then there was Calcutta (Kolkata) in Bengal, a tract of land beside the Hooghly River said to have been selected by the almost legendary Job Charnock in 1690 and purchased from local landlords. Bombay (Mumbai) came as a gift in 1661.
The Portuguese had won it in a battle in 1534 from the sultan who ruled Gujarat. In turn they gave the islands to the English king Charles II as part of his dowry when he married Catherine of Portugal. The king passed the islands over to the British East India Company in 1668, in whose hands they remained until 1858 when the Crown took over all Company territory. What later became Bombay was strategically important, a virtual peninsula of seven low-lying and marshy islands that defined one side of the major natural harbour on the west coast of the subcontinent. It was later described as ‘one of the most splendid harbours in the world’.8 As Company trade grew, it would become increasingly important.The factories had similar histories. They occupied relatively undeveloped and not particularly productive land on the coast, a harbour or an estuary of a large river system where ships could dock and load cargo. Since Madras did not get an artificial harbour until late in the nineteenth century, ships before then perforce anchored 1.5 kilometres or so out to sea, and passengers, goods and baggage were transferred to smaller boats and brought through the surf to land. Port facilities also affected Surat; its decline in the mideighteenth century resulted from the silting up of the river, though other considerations surrounding the disintegration of the Mughal Empire were equally compelling in persuading the Company to move the centre of its operations on the west coast to Bombay.9 The factories all had productive and prosperous hinterlands from which came the goods that their ships would carry away.
The factories, however, were not entirely secure, liable to attack from rivals and opponents. On the one hand European commercial and political rivals were anxious to take over the factories and eliminate competition. On the other came challenges from within India. The factory at Surat was situated in Mughal territory and therefore subject to the vagaries of the emperor’s moods as well as to attacks from his opponents and regional rulers like the Marathas.
Madras similarly was vulnerable to attack—and was attacked—by local rulers, as indeed was Calcutta. Consequently the Company built forts around the factories to defend them. It also began to acquire buffer territories beyond the existing perimeters, using both diplomatic as well as military means. The process was long drawn out and complexly different for each of the factories, but by the middle of the eighteenth century and after the battle of Plassey in 1757 the Company had become a powerful territorial ruler controlling revenue from the fertile and rich Gangetic plains. Through the end of the eighteenth and into the first decades of the nineteenth centuries the Company progressively took over most of the subcontinent, either directly or indirectly through puppet rulers. In the process the three major factories became regional administrative capitals known as Presidency Towns (while the region under their authority was a presidency). Madras and Bombay each had a governor who was also president of council (hence the presidency terminology), but Calcutta’s chief became governor-general with powers over the other two governors and the various officials needed to administer the expanded territories. India’s capital city was no longer Delhi, but Calcutta. And it was a different kind of capital.