Bengal was a region long known to the Company. Trade, however, was stifled by the Portuguese and the determination of Mughal authorities to resist English incursions. The Company was able to establish settlements in the weaving centres of Patna, Dacca and Malda, but these were outlying centres of production. Josiah Child’s control of the Company signalled a shift towards a new aggressive phase notable for a resolve to fortify settlements, exploit new sources of land revenue and a willingness to challenge Mughal authority. In the aftermath of the abortive assault on Chittagong, Job Charnock settled on a site on the banks of the Hugli. Pestilential, remote and of little interest to Mughal authorities it may have been, and yet the three small villages which became Calcutta were trading centres, made easily defensible by the encompassing jungle and river. Charnock died before any vision he had for the site could be realized, but his successors acted expeditiously and mostly fraudulently to secure zaminardi rights over the surrounding area, erect adequate fortification and after a period of uncertainty, impose a system of justice based on the mayors’ courts of Bombay and Madras.

The Anglo-Mughal War of 1686–1690 is the focus of Chapter 5, which seeks to challenge traditional understandings of the war as the result of a more capable and belligerent Company seeking to impose its will on the Mughal empire and expand its territory and rights by force, culminating in the acquisition of Calcutta. Instead, this chapter places the war within the context of the personal tensions and conflicts produced by the transcultural ties which bound Company servants and Mughal elites together. Some servants sought to renegotiate these increasingly one-sided relationships with a limited show of force, for which they were immediately expelled from Bengal by the Mughal government. Only after ten years of complex negotiations, in which new transcultural relationships were established with an entirely new Mughal regime, could the Company return and develop Calcutta as a settlement. Even then, its expansion relied on the Company’s utility to the new Mughal regime, to which they contributed men and money to uphold the nawab’s authority against several large-scale rebellions. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Company transformed itself into a key client of the Mughal government which could be mobilised to consolidate the empire’s control of Bengal in exchange for greater rights and privileges.

This chapter shifts the focus onto Bengal, and the various strategies adopted by the Mughal empire in accommodating and subordinating the Company’s growing presence in the province of Bengal. If the integration of Company servants into surrounding communities at Madras and their subordination to the sultanate of Golconda unlocked a range of rights and privileges which allowed them to expand their presence on the Coromandel Coast, the opposite was true in Bengal. The English experience in Bengal represented the Company at its most subordinate, pliant and, indeed, weakest, utterly subservient to the communities, elites and rulers whom they relied on. This situation was compounded by the growth of interloping communities, who were even more effective than Company servants in integrating themselves socially, culturally and commercially with Indian communities and elites, assuming many of the subordinate services that Company servants had traditionally fulfilled. Skilful Mughal governors played these groups off against one another, utilising interloping and Company networks for their own benefit, without needing to concede any substantial rights or autonomy to either. In maintaining a plural commercial environment, Mughal elites ensured their place at the top of local hierarchies of wealth and power.