Europeans arrive: from traders to territorial powers

Europeans first came to India as traders seeking spices, textiles, and a direct sea route that bypassed the overland middlemen of the Middle East. The Portuguese led the way: Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498, and Afonso de Albuquerque captured Goa in 1510, making it the centre of Portugal's Asian empire. The Portuguese controlled key ports and the sea lanes, but they never ruled large inland territories in India, and their power faded as Dutch and English competition grew.

The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, and the English East India Company, chartered in 1600, followed. The English set up a factory at Surat in 1613 and later gained Bombay, transferred to the Company in 1668 after its cession by Portugal under the 1661 marriage settlement of Catherine of Braganza with Charles II, and Calcutta, where Job Charnock established a trading settlement in 1690. The French East India Company set up at Pondicherry in 1674. All of these companies were trading bodies that also built forts, kept soldiers, and sought privileges from Indian rulers.

The change from trade to territory came through war. In the Carnatic Wars of the 1740s and 1750s, the English and French fought each other in south India while backing rival Indian claimants to the thrones of the Carnatic and Hyderabad. The English, under Robert Clive, won the decisive Battle of Wandiwash in 1760, and the Treaty of Paris in 1763 left the French with only small enclaves such as Pondicherry. The lesson was not lost on the English Company: Indian rulers could be defeated by combining European military methods with Indian alliances and revenue.

This period matters because it corrects a simple story of conquest. The companies arrived as guests of Indian rulers, grew rich on Indian trade, and only gradually became rulers themselves, using Indian soldiers, Indian money, and Indian rivalries. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the question was no longer whether Europeans would trade in India, but which European company, and which Indian allies, would control its richest provinces.