History of British navy that mastered the oceans, controlled global trade and became world ruler. On India (Comments in red are mine)-
.....The favourite hunting-ground of these
Anglo-American pirates was the Indian Ocean, where trade was rich and European warships scarce.
Basing themselves in Madagascar or other islands, they preyed especially on Indian ships. The ‘Great
Mughul’ Aurangzeb, emperor of India, naturally complained to the English East India Company, which
depended entirely on his licences to trade; while the VOC maliciously encouraged the Mughals to
think that all pirates were English, and all Englishmen were pirates. In 1690 the company’s trade was
stopped in retaliation for English piracy. In 1695 the pirate Henry Avery took the Great Mughal’s own
ship the Ganj-i-Salwai, carrying pilgrims to Mecca, whom the pirates raped and killed. (Great Mughals had no naval deterrence, English were pirates operating in Indian ocean lured by the treasure fleets of the Indian Moghul rulers)
This time the
company had to undertake to escort Mughal shipping to get its privileges restored. Then three East
Indiamen mutinied and turned pirate, and in January 1698 Captain William Kidd took the Indian ship
Quedah Merchant (whose cargo belonged partly to a Mughal minister) off Cochin. By 1701 the East
India Company was on the verge of destruction, but at home the political tide was turning against the
Whigs, and the activities of men like Kidd were becoming an embarrassment. Arrested on his return
to New York, he was hanged in London in May 1701.
The English domestic economy still
depended overwhelmingly on agriculture and woollen cloth, but English (and now Scottish)
merchants imported, and in large measure re-exported to Europe, greater and greater quantities of
sugar and tobacco from the West Indian and American colonies, cotton from India and silk from
China. These were long-distance ‘rich trades’, earning large profits but requiring large capital and
advanced skills in banking, insurance and the management of shipping. (Yes, Navy & Financial markets are two innovation that we could have learnt from British, not Democracy/Secularism/Tea/Cricket as many fiberals peddle)
...To a
greater and greater extent, Britain’s real wealth was generated, and seen to be generated, from a
maritime system in which overseas trade created the income which paid for the Navy, merchant
shipping trained the seamen which manned it, so that the Navy in turn could protect trade and the
country. Much was still to be learned about how best to do both, but few informed observers in 1714
would have disputed Lord Haversham’s judgement that ‘Your trade is the mother and nurse of your
seamen; your seamen are the life of your fleet; and your fleet is the security and protection of your
trade: and both together are the wealth, strength, security and glory of Britain.’
...Sulphur
was imported from Italy, while saltpetre, still scarce in the 1650s, was imported from India by the
East India Company. (The British Empire owed much of its strength to ready supplies of saltpeter obtained from India, an important raw material for Gun Powder, this part have not got as much attention as cotton/Opium)
......When RearAdmiral
Charles Watson arrived at Bombay in 1755 his first task was to second the East India
Company’s own little navy, the ‘Bombay Marine’, in a campaign against Mahratta sea power on the
Malabar Coast, where Angria (the Mahratta admiral) was a standing threat to coasting trade, and
sometimes even to the big East Indiamen. The Company’s ships had already taken the Mahratta port of
Severndroog in 1755; in February 1756 Watson and Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Clive launched an
amphibious assault on Angria’s main base of Gheria. This succeeded, where all previous assaults had
failed, because Watson had adequate charts, surveyed especially for the operation, which allowed
him to work his big ships through the shoals and alongside Angria’s fortifications. (Angrias resisted British Navy from the time of Shivaji and were successful to some extent)
The only British dry dock overseas did not belong to the Navy (though warships freely used it), but to
the East India Company at Bombay, where the tidal range was just sufficient to dock ships of the line.
Opened in 1754, made double during the Seven Years’ War and triple in 1773, it was an essential
support of British naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. (We could not learn this from British..still struggling to build ships, Chinese are already here, anyway we learnt secular/liberal values)
The third
was the hope of establishing bases useful in wartime, particularly those from which expeditions could
be despatched to open up Spanish South America, whose unproductive wealth and neglected
commercial opportunities were an article of faith among British policy-makers. In pursuit of one or
more of these ideas, surveys of the Indian Ocean were set in motion which identified harbours of
potential importance in Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago (midway between Mauritius and
India), the Andaman Islands and Nancowry Island in the Nicobars (both on the windward side of the
Bay of Bengal in winter-time).
..the great conquests of Marquis Wellesley (and his brother Sir Arthur Wellesley) as Governor-General
of India from 1798 to 1805, which (at the cost of almost bankrupting the East India Company) had
created a new British Indian empire and a British Indian army. By persuading their Indian troops that
they might make sea voyages without losing caste, the British acquired in the East what they never had
in Europe: a major field army available for overseas operations....
...Besides, Britain had acquired a
new overseas empire, but not from its European enemies. It was in India that the conquests of
Cornwallis and Wellesley carved out a new empire for the East India Company, which by 1818 had
annual tax revenues of £18 million (one-third of Britain’s) and an army of 180,000 men. This empire
was self-supporting, though its trade and connection with Britain of course depended entirely on
command of the sea.
