The English were minor players on a very large stage when they arrived at the Mughal Court in 1616, writes Nandini Das in this extract from her new book

As James I’s ambassador, Thomas Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by inner strife and financial woes, and deeply conflicted about being identified as a single entity, a unified ‘Great Britain’. Britain’s imperial destiny at this moment may have been dreamt of by some, but it was by no means certain. Instead, Roe’s negotiations unfold against the chiaroscuro of a glittering court and its scandals, deep-set fractures within its political structures, and the beginnings of a cycle of trade and consumerism that devoured all things new and exotic and transformed society in the process.

By the time James I came to the throne, England had already gone through many cycles of famine, plague, war and economic stagnation. An ever-widening wealth gap fuelled a nationwide anxiety about immigrants and ‘masterless men’, to the extent that the Elizabethan geographer Richard Hakluyt could call for the state’s support for English voyages and the colonisation of North America not simply because of the advantages of trade and rich mines of gold and silver (and the dubious pleasure of outdoing the Spanish), but because it would offer a clearing ground for the unwanted.

‘[M] any thousands of idle persons’, Hakluyt argued, have ‘no way to be sett on worke’. They are ‘either mutinous and seeke alteration in the state, or at least very burdensome to the common wealthe and often fall to pilferage and thieving and other lewdness’. Sending them to colonies abroad could relieve the pressure on the state, as well as save the lives of those who ‘for trifles may otherwise be devoured by the gallowes’.

Asian trade equally attracted the speculative adventurer and the desperate. Roe was one of them. It is not surprising that the vocabulary of risk-taking becomes the principal leitmotif within that landscape. Words like ‘venture’ and ‘adventure’, ‘lotteries’, ‘wagers’ and ‘gaming’ are sprinkled across the pages of diaries and journals, ships’ logs and letters that preserve Roe’s story. They illuminate the uncertain world of English enterprise, from individual small-time crooks and entrepreneurs, to the astonishing levels of speculation risked by the Crown and the trading companies themselves.

Those records also illuminate an increasingly connected world. Its contours have become progressively visible as historians have traced the movements and encounters among people in this period – whether voluntary or forced, driven by trade, war or exploitation. The challenge that such connections pose for our understanding of history has grown along with it. Roe’s embassy stands testimony to that. The court he entered in 1616 was of the wealthy and cultured ‘Great Mogol’, whose dominion was widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. With the Ottomans and the Safavids, the Mughals made up what has been described as an ‘interimperial grid of competing, large-scale political entities’ that could ‘hold each other in partial check’.

Together with China, they controlled the best part of the global economy. The trade routes that connected them had functioned for centuries before the arrival of Europeans. Among the latter, the efforts of the Spanish and the Portuguese to embed themselves within that nexus pre-dated that of the English by some decades. Roe’s presence at the Mughal court was both a symbol of English enterprise, and a reminder of England’s deeply belated entry into a long established, intricate network of global geopolitics.

This is an extract from Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, £12.99) by Nandini Das. Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

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