Abstract:
n this book I endeavour to complete a task which
has occupied a large part of my life. Thirty-four
years ago my attention was drawn .to the historical
materials in the record rooms of Bengal, and the
inquiries then commenced have been continued
from the archives of England, Portugal and
Holland. I found that what had passed for Indian
history dealt but little with the staple work done
by the founders of British rule in the East, or with
its effects on the native races. The vision of our
Indian Empire as a marvel of destiny, scarcely
wrought by human hands, faded away. Nor did thfe’
vacuum theory, of the inrush of the British power
into an Asiatic void, correspond more closely with the facts.
Yet if we bring down England’s work in India
from the regions of wonder and hypothesis to the
realm of reality, and if the Jonah’s gourd growth
of a night must give place for a time to the story
t)f the Industrious Apprentice, enough of greatness
remains. The popular presentment of the East
India Company as a sovereign ruler, with vast provinces and tributary kingdoms under its command,
obscures the most characteristic achievement
of our nation in Asia. That achievement was no
eudden triumph, but an indomitable endurance
during a century and a half of frustration and
defeat^ As the English were to wield a power in
the Ejkst greater than that of any other European
people, so was their training for the task to be harder
and more prolonged. We have been too much accustomed*to regajd
our Indian Empire as an isolated fact in the world’s
history. This view does injustice to the Continental
nations, and in some degree explains the slight
esteem in which they hold our narratives of Anglo-
Asiatic rule. In one sense, indeed, England is
the residuary legatee of an inheritance painfully
amassed by Europe in Asia during the past four
centuries, In that long labour, now one Christian
nation, then another, came to the front. But their
progress as a whole was continuous. It formed the
sequel to the immemorial conflict between the East
and the West, which dyed red the waves of Salamis
and brought Zenobia a captive to Eome. During
each successive period, the struggle reflected the
spirit of the times : military and territorial in the
ancient world; military and religious in the middle
ages; military and mercantile in the new Europe
which then awoke; developing into the military*
commercial, and political combinations of the complex
modern world.
