Although Surat and its satellite ports had provided the Company with the necessary means of trade and communication, the resistance of Mughal authorities stifled any prospects for expansion. The Coromandel coast seemed to offer opportunities. Here were important trading centres beyond Mughal authority where local chiefs, anxious to consolidate their rule in the febrile political climate that prevailed, viewed the activities of European merchants as a means of generating revenue. From the time Francis Day was first appointed as a factor in 1632, he had applied himself to the task of finding a new site to further English trade. In 1637, he set a course southward from Masulipatnam to Pondicherry with the hope of negotiating the establishment of a factory. The voyage achieved little, but Day noted in passing a small fishing village which clearly attracted his attention, not least because overtures were made by local Telegu nayaks who were keen to attract English trade. A kaul, probably drafted by Day, was speedily granted for the ‘tradeing and fortificing at Medraspatam’. So were laid the foundations for the settlement of Madras.

This chapter depicts the failure of the English nation state to launch and sustain overseas enterprises in Asia in the early seventeenth century. It reveals that the East India Company was conceived as a mercantilist strategy of monopoly and force by the crown to acquire new markets and sources of wealth beyond the Cape of Good Hope. But a combination of fiscal–military weakness, unrealistic policies fostered on it by the state and a general economic and constitutional crises which engulfed England by the mid-century, all combined to undermine the Company’s attempt to establish itself at Bantam, Japan and on the Coromandel Coast in India. The result was the abandonment by Company servants on the spot in Asia of metropolitan policies in favour of realising their own local private interests of trade, power and transcultural immersion. As the Company teetered on the verge of collapse in England, it left a vacuum of authority and leadership within its factories in Asia, allowing Company servants to seize new opportunities to empower themselves and appropriate Company policies to suit their own interests. As investment, shipping and specie stopped flowing from Europe, Company servants insinuated themselves into pre-existing Asian networks of commerce and influence.