The standard textbook account begins, more or less, with Plassey. This is unfortunate, because the East India Company had by then been operating in India for one hundred and fifty-seven years, and the early decades of that operation are by some distance the most interesting. Before the Company was an empire, it was a commercial proposition of extreme marginal solvency, run from a counting-house on Leadenhall Street by men who had never been further east than Calais. The story of how it actually got a foothold in Mughal India — at Surat, in 1612 — is in almost every particular different from how that story tends to be remembered.

For one thing, the Company did not exactly conquer anything. For another, it was not at this stage acting as an arm of English foreign policy; it was acting, frequently, against English foreign policy, which during the early years of James I was attempting to maintain a careful peace with Spain. The Spanish Crown at this point included the Portuguese, who had been in Surat in one form or another since the 1530s, and who regarded any English ship in the Indian Ocean as legitimate prize.

The Mughal context

The Mughal Empire under Jahangir was, in 1612, by most economic measures the wealthiest state in the world. Its annual revenues exceeded those of every European monarchy combined. Its army was larger than any in Europe and considerably better-supplied. Its court was — by the accounts of every European ambassador unfortunate enough to visit it — a thing of staggering and bewildering complexity. To this state, the East India Company arrived in the manner of a small group of door-to-door salesmen attempting to interest a duke in their range of penknives.

What the English had to offer was, by Mughal standards, almost nothing of value. Wool, of which India had no need. Tin and lead, of which India had ample supply. Some quantity of silver, which was useful but not in the volumes a serious trading partner could provide. What the English wanted, on the other hand, was substantial: pepper, indigo, saltpetre, and above all the cotton textiles of Gujarat, which were at that moment the most desired manufactured product on earth.

The Battle of Swally

The proximate event that secured the Surat factory was a sea engagement of which most English readers have never heard. In November 1612, a small English squadron under Captain Thomas Best — two ships, the Red Dragon and the Hosiander — encountered a Portuguese fleet of four galleons and twenty-six smaller vessels off Swally, the deep-water roadstead used by Surat. Best, by every reasonable expectation, ought to have lost. He did not. Over the course of two engagements between the twenty-ninth of November and the thirtieth of November, his two ships severely mauled the Portuguese without loss, and at the end of it the Portuguese withdrew toward Goa.

The Mughal governor of Surat had watched all of this from shore. So had the assembled Mughal merchants, who were dependent on the Portuguese-controlled sea lanes for the safety of their pilgrim shipping to Mecca. What they had just witnessed was the only naval power capable of disrupting that pilgrim shipping being defeated by two English merchant vessels of moderate size. The political implications were immediate.

Best, who was a careful man with a strong sense of theatre, did not press his advantage. He sailed quietly back to Surat, anchored, and waited. Within a week the Mughal authorities had granted him permission to establish a permanent factory — a warehouse with a small resident staff of merchants — on the conditions that the Company would protect Mughal pilgrim ships against the Portuguese and would not under any circumstances build fortifications. Both conditions were agreed to. Both conditions were, eventually, broken; but not for several decades.

The factors

The first English Chief Factor at Surat was Thomas Aldworth, a Bristol merchant of unremarkable background, who arrived with two junior factors, William Biddulph and Paul Canning, in late 1612. They lived in a rented building in the city's commercial quarter, kept their books in single-entry bookkeeping which would horrify any modern accountant, and spent most of their time attempting to acquire indigo through middlemen who had no particular reason to deal fairly with them.

Their letters home, which survive in the India Office Records (now British Library, IOR/E/3/1), are among the most quietly interesting documents of the period. They complain endlessly about the heat, about the difficulty of obtaining decent wine, and about the impossibility of getting any kind of straight answer from the local merchants. They also complain — and here a modern reader recognises the universal voice of the employee a long way from head office — about the home office's refusal to send them either reliable trade goods to barter, or sufficient silver to buy outright, or any clear instructions about what they were actually supposed to be doing.

We are here, by God's good providence, established in a manner most acceptable to the Governour, but our stocks are so meane and our wares so ill-chosen for this market that we may scarce buy our own dinners with what comes consigned to us. — ALDWORTH TO THE DIRECTORS, 18 FEBRUARY 1614

This is, in essence, the story of the Surat factory for its first decade: three or four Englishmen in a hired house, sending plaintive letters home, gradually learning the textile trade, and slowly accumulating the local relationships that would, eventually, make the Company solvent in India. There were no soldiers. There was no fort. There was, for years, no clear strategy. What there was, instead, was a foothold — a single warehouse, a name in the books of the city, a body of correspondence accumulating in Leadenhall Street.

What followed

The transformation of this modest operation into the Company that would eventually rule a subcontinent is a story for elsewhere. What is worth noting here is the durability of the original arrangement. The Surat factory, with various interruptions, lasted nearly two hundred years. It became the seat of the Company's western India presidency until 1687, when the administrative centre moved to Bombay, and even then it continued operating as a major commercial outpost.

What strikes me most about the Surat documents is how completely the English at this stage misunderstood what they were doing. They thought they were getting into the spice trade. The spice trade turned out to be a footnote. The real business — cotton textiles, indigo, and later opium — would come from places they had not yet thought about. The empire they would eventually build was the result of two centuries of accidents stacked on top of an original commercial gamble whose terms they did not quite grasp. There is, in this, a kind of lesson; I will leave it for the reader to determine what it is.

A note on the sources

The India Office Records at the British Library are the indispensable archive for any serious work on the early Company. Letters Received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East (the printed series edited by Frederick Charles Danvers and William Foster, published 1896–1902) covers the first decades and is freely available online. For the Battle of Swally specifically, the relevant ship's journals are reproduced in Foster's The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612-14 (Hakluyt Society, 1934), which remains the standard scholarly edition. For the broader political context, Sanjay Subrahmanyam's The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500–1700 is essential reading.