46o TI0E INDIAN EMPIRE [CHAP.
dominion in India for all time to come.' The Company began
to covet revenues, rents, and fortified positions, and determined
to consolidate their position in India on the basis of territorial
sovereignty, to enable them to resist the oppression of the
Mughals and Marathas. With that view they laid down the
policy which was destined to turn their clerks' and factors
throughout India into conquerors and proconsuls:-
'The increase of our revenue is the subject of our care, ...
as much as our trade; 'tis that must maintain our force when
twenty accidents may interrupt our trade; 'tis that must make us
a nation in India. Without that we are but as a great number
of interlopers, united by His Majesty's Royal Charter, fit only
to trade where nobody of power thinks it their interest to
prevent us. And upon this account it is that the wise Dutch,
in all their general advices which we have seen, write ten para-
graphs concerning their government, their civil and military
policy, warfare, and the increase of their revenue, for one
paragraph they write concerning trade.'
War with The actual results in India were in grotesque contrast to
the these brave words. A fleet of ten ships with a considerable
Mughal
empire, military force was dispatched from England under Captain
16,6-go. Nicholson. When it arrived in India, fighting had already
begun in Bengal between the Nawab and the English. Job
Charnock, the chief of the Hooghly factory, had twice been
driven from Calcutta, whither he had first gone in i686. All
the warlike operations of the Company were attended by
failure; an attack on Chittagong hopelessly miscarried. The
English in Bengal were compelled to take refuge on their ships;
they fled to Madras and remained there for fifteen months.
In I69o the representatives of the Company were forced to
accept from Aurangzeb a humiliating peace, by which, on
making submission and paying a considerable fine, they were
Job allowed to return to Bengal. In August, I69o, Job Charnock
Charnock once more moored his ships in the long pool of Calcutta and
founds
Calcutta, definitely founded the capital of British India.
1690. Meanwhile at home the Company had again to confront
The Com-
ahneo- a determined and organized opposition. For many years
monopoly individual interlopers had defied the Company's claim to the
attacked. sole market of the Eastern trade, one of the most famous
being Thomas Pitt, the grandfather of Lord Chatham, who thus
founded the fortunes of his family. In I69I the enemies
of the Company formed themselves into an association and
allied themselves closely with the Whig party in Parliament.
The struggle was a long one, and can only be very briefly
outlined here. The Old Company obstinately refused all
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