The New Student's Reference Work/East India Company

East India Company.  The East India trade dates from the time when the Portuguese navigator, Vasco da Gama, having effected the eastern passage to India by doubling the Cape of Good Hope, cast anchor off the city of Calicut, May 20, 1498.  Though the Portuguese did not start a formal trading-company, they held sway in the seas they had opened during the whole of the 16th century.  In the next century their place was rapidly taken by the Dutch, whose first vessel had rounded the Cape in 1596 and whose East India Company was founded in 1602.  But the earliest incorporated East India Company was the English, to which Queen Elizabeth granted a charter on the last day of the 16th century.  Several later English companies, after a brief period of rivalry, were united with the original company under the title of The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies.  In the 17th century the Dutch crowded the English out of the islands where all the European powers had gained their first footing, and so settlements were founded by the English on the coasts of the Indian peninsula.  Madras, Bombay and Calcutta were founded one after the other.  Properly speaking, the company were only merchants exchanging the products of the east and west, but soon they were drawn into the quarrels among the native princes, which resulted in the establishment by England of sovereign powers over vast regions.  The charter of this Company was renewed again and again, but a feeling against the monopoly gradually grew up in England.  In 1833 the company’s exclusive trading-privileges were taken away, and from that time the government took a constantly increasing part both in trading and in governing the Indian dominion, though it was nominally done by the company.  In 1858, after the Sepoy rebellion, the company was forced after great resistance to yield its powers to the crown; and Indian affairs are now managed by a secretary of state for India.  French and Danish East India Companies have existed for short periods.  See India; and India under British Rule, by J. T. Wheeler.