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The British Empire may be said to have started when Elizabethan importers got into a fight with the Dutch over the price of pepper.
… But they, finding that they could no longer trade with Lisbon, resolved to seek the way to India for themselves and trade direct … Just as the Moors had tried to keep the Portuguese out of India … Even after the Dutch reached India the Portuguese tried to make mischief between them and the natives … They founded a Dutch East India Company … But now they were angry, and resolved in their turn to go to India direct for what they wanted …
The English were more interested in war than trade in the days of Henry VIII, but in the reigns of Henry’s daughters Mary I (1553-1558) and Elizabeth I (1558-1603) English mariners began to imitate their Continental neighbours and reach out to the Far East. This did not greatly please their neighbours, who resented the competition.
Posted November 22 2022
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Charles II was thinking about handing Bombay back to the Portuguese, when an Indian rebel stepped in.
… Her dowry included the port of Bombay, but the East India Company was already happily head-quartered at Surat a hundred and fifty miles to the north …
The great cities of Madras and Calcutta sprang up from the energy and enterprise of British merchants, but Bombay’s history was different. It was a gift from the Portuguese, and for some years it looked as if the beneficiary, Charles II, would be only too pleased to give it back.
Posted September 30 2019
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A maths prodigy from Madras became so wrapped up in his sums that he forgot to pass his examinations.
… Gh Hardy was so excited by what he saw that he wrote to the India Office immediately about bringing Ramanujan to Cambridge …
In 1914, a young Indian mathematician with no formal qualifications came to England. Some thought his scribbled theorems were a pastiche of half-understood fragments, or even that he was a fraud, but others sensed they were gazing into the depths of one of the most mysterious mathematical minds they had known.
Posted January 1 2018
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Lakshmi and her sister Parvati enlisted the help of the British Resident, Colonel Munro, to steady the Kingdom of Travancore.
… In 1809 the Kingdom of Travancore was embroiled in a unsuccessful rebellion against Colonel Colin Macaulay, the East India Company’s Resident there …
At the very moment Napoleon Bonaparte was trying to bring Continental bureaucracy to Britain, Queen Lakshmi brought British commonsense to Travancore (now the State of Kerala). She and her sister Parvati weeded out corruption, promoted education and healthcare, and gave stability to a realm troubled by invasion and bad government.
Posted May 31 2019
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Prussia’s invasion of Silesia in 1740 plunged Europe into turmoil, and a French invasion of England became a very real threat.
The War of the Austrian Succession began as part of the seemingly endless German quest to gobble up the continent’s smaller states. It would not have involved Britain had King George II not been also Elector of Hanover, and if France had not seen it as an opportunity to expand her empire at Britain’s expense.
Posted October 29 2018
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Rudyard Kipling believed that a better appreciation of ancient Greece and Rome could help the English be less insular.
… Well, you know, all that is worth knowing if you ever have to govern India … I have never had to govern India …
As the twentieth century progressed, more and more people asked why English schools taught Latin and Greek. Rudyard Kipling was one of those who resisted the trend. The value, he said, lay not in ‘intellectual training’, which can be acquired in other ways, but in the development of humility and respect — like playing cricket long enough to realise just how good Ranjitsinhji was.
Posted October 28