EASTERN STRIFE AND WESTERN POLITICS

27

jostle each other in the Asiatic ports, the Dutch, English, and Portuguese fell out among themselves in the Eastern seas as naturally as Greeks, Italians, and Arabs quarrelled, two centuries earlier, over the same prize in the Mediterranean.

These quarrels affected, and were affected by, the changing course of politics during an age of incessant war in Europe; for while kings and ministers were already influenced by the interests of a trade that constantly aided their treasuries, the acts and relations of European rulers bore directly, then as now, on their foreign commerce. The persecution of the Reformers in Holland by Spain led to the foundation of the Dutch East India Company; the success of the Dutch stimulated English enterprise; and the long quarrel in the East Indies between these two Protestant nations not only diminished and for a time dissolved their natural connection, but also gave to early English enterprise in Asia its warlike character, its taste for armed independence, and latterly its policy of territorial acquisition imitated from the Dutch. Never before or since in the world's history has there been so much bloodshed over commerce as distinguished from colonization, for a very brief experience of the perils of East Indian adventure seems to have convinced the English that they must abandon the hope of peaceful trading in that part of the world. They are, however, justly entitled to the credit of having done their best to confine themselves to commerce throughout the seventeenth century, whereas Portugal and Holland began at once to seize

territory. But the inevitable consequence of uncontrolled self-reliant competition among the European nations was to convert all their East Indian Companies into armed associations. How these armed associations were subsequently converted into political powers will be seen hereafter.

In the meantime, as the strength and stability of

the Dutch Republic increased in Europe from the beginning of this century, their enterprise in Asia became bolder and more high-handed. During the Thirty Years' War, Holland was supported on the Continent by the Protestant States of Germany and by France against Austria and Spain, the two countries that menaced all Europe. Such an alliance, being peculiarly

COMMERCIAL ASCENDENCY OF HOLLAND

29

favourable to the security of Holland on the land, rendered her a very serious rival to England on the sea. The Dutch were throwing the English into the shade; they had founded their East Indian empire; they had made good a footing in Brazil; they had captured in West Indian waters the Spanish ships that carried a rich cargo from Mexico to Havana; they had annihilated the fleet of the Infanta Isabella. They were becoming masters of the narrow seas at home; they were threatening, with the aid of France, the Spanish Netherlands; and the English were feeling much alarm lest Holland and France together should possess themselves of the whole coast line over against England across the Channel.

These were the advantages that gave Holland preeminence in Asiatic commerce during the greater part of the seventeenth century. She had stripped Portugal of some of her most important possessions in the East and had fixed her trading-posts firmly in well-chosen places. Under Cromwell's vigorous rule, however, the English began to recover their position in the East Indies.

The jealousies, political and commercial, between the two Republics culminated in the war of 1651 - 1654, when East India merchants, whose grievances had formed one of the chief grounds of hostility, prayed for permission to fit out an armed fleet against the Dutch in Asia, who had been making depredations on the English shipping in Indian waters. In 1654 a peace was patched up upon payment of compensation

for injuries, especially for the "bloodie business of Amboyna," and with the effect of defining the situation of the English on the Indian littoral.

Nevertheless, although the enmity and the encroachments of the Dutch in Asia by no means ceased, the proposals made to Cromwell for dissolving the Company's monopoly and throwing open the whole Asiatic trade were so tempting to a ruler who was in sore need of ready money that he was hardly dissuaded from it by the combined weight of the arguments and liberal subsidies of the London Company. Yet it was absolutely clear that free-traders in Asia would have fallen an easy prey to the common enemy, for the power of the Dutch was again on the increase. They now maintained large military and naval forces in the East Indies, obstructed our trade, harassed our agencies, and disregarded all treaties. They drove the English off the coast of Eastern Asia, seized Ceylon, blockaded Bantam-the Company's headquarters in Java-and once more tried to exterminate the English factories in the Spice Islands.

Meanwhile, trade was much disturbed, and the Company's settlements were put in jeopardy by the civil war that broke out in India among the sons of Shah Jahan in 1658 during that emperor's life. By 1660, however, Aurangzib's triumph over his brothers had restored tranquillity. The beginning of his long reign, full of importance to Anglo-Indian history, synchronizes with the Restoration of Charles II, an event which changed the political connections of England and ma

ANGLO-PORTUGUESE ALLIANCE IN THE EAST 31

terially affected our commercial system. The Company wanted more extensive powers, and Charles II wanted to obliterate from their existing charter the name of Cromwell; so he gave them a new charter, authorizing them to make peace and war with any non-Christian people, although in fact their only troublesome enemies belonged to Christendom.

Portugal now sought the English alliance in the hope of recovering some of her Eastern possessions that

she had lost while under the Spanish yoke, or at least of defending against the Dutch what she had been able to retain. These negotiations brought us the valuable acquisition of the island of Bombay, which was ceded to England in 1661 as the pledge of an arrangement for a kind of defensive war against the Dutch in Asia. But since the Portuguese were as jealous of the English as they were afraid of the Dutch, some years passed before the English found themselves in quiet possession of the island; nor was it until 1669 that Bombay