India’s history predates 5000 BC and will take many a book to tell her story. I wanted to give the readers of VIRIAH a context of colonial India and how it was one of the key factors for sugar intenture. This is an overview of the British, Dutch, French and Portugese colonization efforts in the Indian subcontinent.

The reader must note that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were one country – India at that time (till the division in 1947). Thus, the time period begins in 1600 AD.
In 1600, a group of merchants led by Sir Thomas Smythe started the East India Company in London. Queen Elizabeth I granted them a charter to trade with the countries of the eastern hemisphere. While the East India Company was being formed in England, Moghul Emperor Akbar united most of Indian subcontinent under his rule. He passed away in 1605 and was succeeded by his son Jehangir. The affluence of the Moghul Empire far exceeded even Europe’s wealth at that time.

East India officials in Moghul emperor Jehangir’s durbar

In 1612, Emperor Jehangir granted trading permission to Sir Thomas Roe and thus the East India Company began operations in India. They traded in silk, indigo dye, cotton, tea, and opium, and set up their first trading post in Surat on the west coast of India and the second port in Masulipatnam. In its first hundred years, the company focused only on trade, but skimirshes with the other European traders like the French, Dutch, and Portuguese led the company to build forts to protect the trading posts and then build armies to defend the forts.

After Emperor Jehangir’s death, the Moghul Empire declined and the East India Company witnessed a divided India with hundreds of small kingdoms fighting one another. In 1757, the kingdom of Bengal, which is said to have been richer than all of England at that time, provided them with an opportunity to seize power.

The British hatched a plot with the army commander Mir Jafar against the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj Ud-Daulah. With the help of the East India Company, Mir Jafar defeated the Nawab’s armies in the Battle of Plassey, and Mir Jafar was made the Nawab of Bengal. At that point, Mir Jafar became a puppet king and only did the bidding of the British.
After the Battle of Buxar in 1764, in which the East India Company decisively defeated the combined armies of the Moghul, Bengal, and Awadh, Mir Jafar granted the East India Company permission to administer and collect taxes in Bengal. This left the company in control of the richest state in India, and it soon became a major military and political power.

After the defeat of strong rulers like the Marathas and Tipu Sultan, by 1770 the East India Company became the de facto ruler of India. By 1803, at the height of its rule in India, the British East India Company had a private army of about 260,000 soldiers—twice the size of the British Army—with Indian revenues of fourteen million pounds per year. The company began a regime of ruthless exploitation of India’s resources, inhumane taxation to amass fortunes that put the wealthiest kingdoms of Europe to shame.
From the battle of Buxar till India’s independence in 1947, it is estimted that 55 million of the 300 million people died of famines. In 1943, as 3 million Indians were perishing in a famine in Bengal, Winston Churchill the British PM apparently remarked "The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for "breeding like rabbits."

Even during such famines, the British ordered the food grains available in stocks to be exported for profit and to feed the british soliders in europe and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, other colonial powers had a presence in India, too. The Portoguese were actually the first to arrive in India, as early as 1498. Vasco da Gama, the renowned Portuguese sailor, was the first European to reach India by sea and found the route to India via Africa. He made landfall in the Cape of Good Hope and gave the name “Natal,” meaning “Christmas” in Portuguese, to the land he passed by. The Portuguese arrived in Calicut, Kerala, and obtained permission to trade from Saamoothiri Rajah of Calicut.

They set up a trading post in Goa in 1510 and then two more in Bombay and Kerala. Apparently the Portuguese gave Bombay in dowry to the British when Princess Catherine of Portugal married Charles II of England in 1661. Except for Goa, the Portuguese lost all of their other trading posts. Goa remained under Portuguese control even after India got independence from the British in 1947. Only in 1961, after 450 years of Portuguese rule, Goa became an integral part of India and still retains the influence of Portuguese language, art, and cuisine.

The Dutch came to India, as well. The Dutch East India Company was registed in 1602, two years after the English East India Company came to India in 1605. They had a presence on the east coast from the Malabar to Bengal. But losses in wars in other parts of the world forced the Dutch to give up their trading posts in India. The Dutch ceased Indian operations in 1825 and focused their efforts on Indonesia.

Following the Portuguese, English, and Dutch explorers, the French also established trading bases in India. Their first establishment was in Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast in southeastern India in 1674. They established trading posts in Bengal in 1688 and Yanam in Andhra Pradesh in 1723. After losing the Battle of Plassey in Bengal to the British, when the British supported the Nawab of Bengal, the French steadily lost influence in India. They sided with Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, the rulers of Mysore. After the British defeated the armies of French and Tipu in 1799, the French influence all but ended. The trading post of Pondicherry, which became part of India in 1954, retains the French influence in its roads, buildings, and signboards.

Thus, amongst all the colonial powers, the British ruled India for the most part between 1600 and 1947, when India won her independence. After the Uprising of 1857 called the First War of Independence, the British Crown took over control of India from the East India Company. Thus the East India Company effectively ruled India from the 1700s to 1857, and the British Crown ruled India until 1947, when India gained her independence.

In the colonial time period from 1600 to 1947, India had about 175 princely states (large states like Hyderabad, Gwalior, Baroda, Mysore, Travancore, Patiala, and Jaipur) and 400 smaller states. The rulers of these states and had small armies which were no match for the large and well equipped army of the East India Company. The internal conflict between these states made it easier for the colonial powers, especially the British, to divide and conquer.

Over a period of time, the rulers of these states were influenced by the western lifestyle and often spent vacations and sent their children for schooling in Europe.
Their lavish lifestyles required extra funding which came in terms of British loans. Those loans had strings attached in terms of taxes and governance controls. Effectively, most of the rulers of these states became nominal figureheads and danced to the British tune. The common man of India like Viriah bore the brunt of the colonial rule for almost three centuries.