Free The East India Company: The World's Most Powerful Corporation (The Story of Indian Business) by Tirthankar Roy Page A

contract as complete and binding as possible. A detailed and precise set of instructions and clauses added legitimacy to the contract, made the seriousness of purpose more evident to the local British officers, and divided responsibilities for implementation of the contract between the two parties. The document that Roe prepared for Jahangir to sign upon was less than ideal for this purpose, but it was still the first authentic contractual agreement ever drawn up concerning privatecommerce by a sovereign of India. In the Indian scenario, it was nothing short of a new paradigm. It was a treaty between two sovereigns rather than a one-sided grant of royal favour as the previous orders had been.
Running into the Dutch, again!
    By 1610, the Dutch and the English were the powers on the rise in the Indian Ocean. Competition between these two armed rivals threatened to break out in violence on numerous occasions. If they did not after all engage in a fight to the finish, that restraint owed partly to their shared dislike for the Portuguese, and partly from a sense that whoever won a decisive engagement would emerge the absolute master of the seas, and no one wanted to take the risk. They came to blows many times in the seventeenth century, but a debilitating conflict was avoided.
    When Roe’s mission ended, the Dutch were securely positioned in Java. The Dutch and the English were friends in Europe, but in southeast Asia, Dutch ships intimidated and drove off English ships whenever possible, retaining a substantial control over the spice trade. The two fleets were so evenly matched in power that a proposal to merge the two Companies to form a huge monopoly did not surprise anyone. The proposalcame from the Dutch side in 1615, but fell through after the English investigators realized that the Dutch ran their enterprise with massive doses of borrowed money.
    The next seven or eight years went by in this curious combination of cautious friendship in Europe and bickering in Southeast Asia. Matters came to a head with the execution of Towerson, an agent of the English Company, along with nine Englishmen and a few Japanese mariners by the Dutch in 1623 for plotting to storm the fort in Amboyna. No more than a case of trade rivalry that went out of control, the episode became known in England as ‘the massacre of Amboyna’ and evoked a sharp reaction to the treachery of the Dutch. The two parties agreed upon a truce only from shared fear of the Portuguese. But the alliance was far from a happy one. ‘All in all,’ the Dutch governor-general explained, ‘a disagreeable wife is bestowed on us.’
The Persian campaign
    In West Asia, on the other hand, a conflict was brewing between the Portuguese and the English over trading rights in the Persian empire. Hormuz was the principal entrepôt on the mouth of the Persian Gulf, where caravan trade met maritime trade. Persia providedvaluable silks to Europe. It was also a source for horses, for which there was an insatiable demand among Indian kings. In effect, it was the first item in the trading chain that spanned Persia, India and Indonesia. Horses bought in Persia were traded for cotton in India which in turn was exchanged for spices in Indonesia. The catch in this arrangement was that Hormuz and the Gulf were dominated by the Portuguese.
    The English in the Gulf pursued a strategy of diplomacy backed by military power not unlike the one that succeeded in India. Robert Sherley (or Shirley) was initially employed by the British to establish communication with Shah Abbas of Persia. Sherley was a mariner of aristocratic antecedents who had settled in the Persian capital and married the daughter of a Circassian nobleman. In 1608, he was appointed by the Shah as the ambassador to the court of James I, where he caused a sensation by arriving with his Circassian wife with the regalia and fanfare befitting a Persian courtier. In 1615, he was sent as ambassador to Portugal and Spain. The precise