How east india company transform from the trading company to a territorial conical power?
Answers
Answer:
In 1600, a group of London merchants led by Sir Thomas Smythe petitioned Queen Elizabeth I to grant them a royal charter to trade with the countries of the eastern hemisphere. And so, the ‘Honourable Company of Merchants of London Trading with the East Indies’ – or East India Company, as it came to be known – was founded. Few could have predicted the seismic shifts in the dynamics of global trade that would follow, nor that 258 years later, the company would pass control of a subcontinent to the British crown. The company has recently been featured in BBC One’s period drama Taboo – central character James Delaney, played by Tom Hardy, comes into conflict with the EIC, which is characterised as a mighty and villainous organisation. In reality, how did this company gain and consolidate its power and profit?
At the same time as Elizabeth I was signing the East India Company (EIC) into existence in 1600, her counterpart in India – the Mughal emperor Akbar – was ruling over an empire of 750,000 square miles, stretching from northern Afghanistan in the northwest, to central India’s Deccan plateau in in the south and the Assamese highlands in the northeast. By 1600, the Mughal empire (founded by Akbar’s grandfather, Babur, in 1526) had come of age and was embarking on a century of strong centralised power, military dominance and cultural productiveness that would mark the rule of the ‘Great Mughals’. The Mughal court possessed a wealth and magnificence to overshadow anything that Europe could produce at the time, while India’s natural produce and that of its artisans was coveted all over the world