Empire in the Early 17th-Century Indian Ocean: Sir Thomas Roe’s Embassy to the Emperor Jahangir
The peripatetic career of the early Stuart allrounder Sir Thomas Roe (c. 1581-1644) included exploration and colonisation of Guiana, active membership in a series of parliaments from 1614 through 1641, investment in the Virginia Company, and extended diplomatic service—in Istanbul on behalf of the Levant Company, in Sweden, and to the Holy Roman Empire as part of the quixotic effort on behalf of the ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth of Bohemia (daughter of James I and sister of Charles I), to restore the Palatinate to her family’s government after its seizure by the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II at the onset of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48).
It also included—perhaps most famously—his embassy to the court of the ‘Great Mughal’, the Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-27), in 1615. Thus, this almost stereotypical ‘cosmopolitan’ has attracted considerable attention as a leading light in the pursuit of early 17th-century English overseas interests. A record of Roe’s embassy (1615-19), which was published at the very end of the 19th century, provides ready access to his Indian career.1
Image 1: Jahangir (from Wikimedia Commons): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jahangir_-_Abu_al-Hasan.jpeg
Roe’s adventure marked the first time an English monarch—James I (r. 1603-1625)—dispatched an envoy to a counterpart ruling beyond Muscovy or the Mediterranean. Accordingly, it provides a very helpful case study for considering the polity of James, the situation of the East India Company (chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600), the history of diplomacy between Asian and European courts, and the early 17th-century history of English involvement in India. By 1614, the East India Company’s position had improved from a rocky start: Jahangir had granted the company a firman to trade at its first presidency at Surat and it had established additional operations at Agra, Ahmedabad, and Burhanpur.2
Of at least equal importance, the ten-year campaign between the company and its eponymous Dutch rival (VOC) in the Spice Islands (modern Indonesia) had seemingly ended: since 1603, the agents of these rivals had engaged each other around this archipelago while the inhabitants of these islands sought to take their own best advantage of the situation. The EIC set up posts at Bantam (Bandung, where it later established another presidency) and Jacatra (Jakarta) in Java, Jambi in Sumatra, and Macassar (Makassar) in Sulawesi and cultivated relations with the Banda Islands, the world’s sole producer of nutmeg at the time, in the Moluccas.
Image 2: Wit, Frederik de., and Luillier, J. "Tabula Indiae orientalis." Map. 1662. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82kp999 (accessed September 26, 2021). Reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.
VOC opposition to this activity seemed to be resolved by the first diplomatic conference called to address grievances between European polities that had arisen outside of Europe. After two years of negotiation (1613-15), the delegates agreed a treaty that proclaimed an Anglo-Dutch union against the empire of Felipe III (r. 1598-1621), divided the East Indian pepper trade in half and gave two-thirds of the Moluccan spice trade to the VOC and one-third to its English counterpart.3
In the aftermath of these settlements, the East India Company leaders decided that the appointment of a resident ambassador at the Mughal court would provide the best means of advancing English interests in Asia, over which they had charge by virtue of their charter, from this newly promising platform. Jahangir, however, had made it clear that the representative of a company of merchants—no matter how they styled their authority themselves—would have no truck; thus, his English counterpart would have to appoint the leader of the embassy. Sir Thomas Smythe, prominent London merchant and official who was governor of the EIC, recommended Roe, his fellow Virginia investor who had just returned from Guiana, who was duly appointed.
Although he had never been to Asia, Sir Thomas proved a quick study with a good sense of the EIC’s situation and how best to improve it. He warned the company that ‘war and traffique are incompatible’ citing the ‘error’ of the Dutch ‘who seeke Plantation heere by the Sword … turne a wonderfull stocke, they proule in all Places, they Posses some of the best;’ but their fighting ‘consume all the gayne’. The ‘Portugall’ fared no better: ‘notwithstanding his many rich residences and territoryes, that hee keepes souldiers that spendes it’ and so ‘neuer Profited by the Indyes since hee defended them’.4
Initially, Roe’s pacific approach brought success. Commercially, the first years of his tenure saw unprecedented profits flow to the EIC coffers: in 1617, its ships brought some two million pounds of pepper to London at a price the company set at 26d/pound for the commodity brought from Jambi in Sumatra and 25d/pound for that brought from Bantam (Bandung) in Java.5
The ambassador also managed, with the assistance of naval victories, to see off fervent Portuguese hostility to the English presence in India. This included obtaining Jahangir’s permission ‘that the English be allowed to live “according to their own religion and lawes” without interference’ at their trading factories.6
Image 3: Sir Thomas Roe (from Wikimedia Commons): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SirThomasRoe.jpg
Ultimately, though, Roe’s tenure experienced near-fatal difficulties. First and foremost, the Dutch in the East Indies declined to pay any heed to whatever was going on in Europe as the remarkably vigorous Jan Pietersz. Coen, who became governor of VOC operations at around the same time, pursued the policy that Sir Thomas had cautioned against with even greater intensity: between 1617 and 1621, the Dutch defeated the Sultan of Bantam and his English allies and destroyed Jacatra (having expelled the English)—then rebuilt and renamed the place Batavia, which served as the seat of Dutch operations in East Asia until Indonesian independence in 1949—and they crushed, enslaved, and deported the Bandanese, who had placed themselves under English protection. These “insufferable insolencies” left the EIC with Indonesian factories at Bantam and Macassar (both seized later in the 17th century), and these setbacks generated a rethink by which the company recognized the importance of establishing a Batavia-style base, which finally occurred with the acquisition of Madras (Chennai) in 1639.7
Image 4: Jan Pietersz Coen (from Wikimedia Commons): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Pieterszoon_Coen.jpg
While the East India Company did not suffer such setbacks in India, Roe was unsuccessful in his efforts to extend its presence into Sindh and Bengal. He also sought commercial prospects in Persia and Arabia efforts that ran afoul of the company factors on the ground in those places.
This conflict sheds light on both the nature of the Jacobean polity and on the conduct of English overseas interests in the early 17th century. As a royal ambassador, Roe claimed authority over the company traders; he carried instructions from the king, after all. The EIC factors, as the agents of a royally chartered company charged with managing English interests in Asia, denied this authority: they regarded the emissary’s projects in Persia and Arabia as drains on their own interests, but the terms of Roe’s appointment expressly placed the management of the company’s factories outside of the scope of that appointment. Thus, they ignored Roe when it suited them even when he threatened them with royal wrath.
The problem of a Crown ambassador serving with a chartered company presented itself most acutely when a VOC fleet turned up at Surat to the consternation of the English traders: they feared Dutch competition, especially if the newcomers were able to build their own factory “where they would both out-present, out-bribe and out-buy us in all things”—practices that Dutch traders followed, according to their English competitors, from the East Indies to Guinea to North America—but they hoped that an English fleet would arrive to remove the newcomers. Roe, though, had royal instructions to avoid hostilities with the Dutch, although he did everything that he could to encourage them to depart; fortunately, for the EIC and ‘their’ ambassador, the newcomers did so.
It is interesting to consider how Sir Thomas would have exercised authority over the traders had his commission included direction of company affairs in India his brief: even today, a company can only legally exercise such power as the chartering authority (James I in this case) grants it even implicitly. In the event, Roe departed Surat in February 1619 without a replacement. Indeed, no English person held a position equivalent to the VOC Director-General at Batavia for the rest of the 17th century. Rather, EIC factors on the ground, as well as ‘interlopers’, took the lead in entrenching English interests in the subcontinent by ingratiating themselves diplomatically with local rulers on the Coromandel Coast especially after the company’s fortunes sank to a low point in the mid-1630s.8
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Bibliography
[1] William Foster, ed., The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619: As Narrated in His Journal and Correspondence, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899); Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 154-59; Lauren Working, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 37-45.
[2] K.N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600-1640 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1965), 43-55.
[3] G.N. Clark and W.J.M. van Eysinga, The Colonial Conferences between England and the Netherlands in 1613 and 1615, 2 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1940-51).
[4] Sir Thomas Roe to East India Company, 24 November 1616, in Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 2: 342-52 at 344.
[5] Chaudhuri, The English East India Company, 140-67.
[6] Sir Thomas Roe’s Negotiations with Prince Khurran, August 1618, in William Foster, ed., The English Factories in India. 1618-1621 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 38-40 at 39-40.
[7] Martine Julia van Ittersum, ‘Debating Natural Law in the Banda Islands: A Case Study in Anglo-Dutch Imperial Competition in the East Indies’, History of European Ideas 42, no. 4 (March 2016): 459-501; Vincent C. Loth, ‘Armed Incidents and Unpaid Bills: Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Banda Islands in the Seventeenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 4 (October 1995): 705-40. For ‘insufferable insolencies’, Sir Thomas Roe to the East India Company, 14 February 1617/18, Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 2: 466-85 at 481.
[8] David Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
L.H. Roper is SUNY Distinguished Professor History at the State University of New York--New Paltz (USA), a Fellow of the New York Academy of History, and the author/editor of seven books on English overseas trade and colonisation in the long seventeenth century. He tweets @RoperLou