CHAPTER VII
ILLUSTRATIONS OF LIFE IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
Hansards in London
Stow’s account of the Steelyard and the work of the Easterlings, is valuable for the history of trade. It exhibits the alien as the great importer, practically monopolizing the foreign trade with England up to the reign of Henry IV, and continuing to dominate it till Elizabeth ended their privileges. It also shows their relations with self-governing London, and in the whole story can be traced the working out of conditions which the English later applied to their own overseas enterprises. The status of Merchant Adventurers, East India Company, etc., as self-governing communities privileged to exist in a foreign country seems the precise reproduction of the Hansard in England, and often reproduced the same injustice for the native merchant. The report of R. Wynyngton’s capture of the Hansard fleet should be read in conjunction with this, and the position of the Hansards also compared to that of gilds of English merchants.
London Extracts
The enumeration of places, recently open country, serves to make vivid the part London was playing in the great increase of population and wealth due to the cloth industry, and the foreign adventures in trade of the Tudor period. The vivid Rembrandt picture of the night-watch suggests the utter darkness of the narrow mediæval lanes and alleys; while the regulations for rebuilding London give further suggestive details, e.g. shop-windows are still temporary, houses hitherto neither flush with one line of pavement nor of one height or style, and wood and thatch still prevail. The account of Skinner’s Well also emphasizes this period of transition from an age of intimate feudal relations between great and small, with its accompanying inequalities, to the more individualistic and mercantile relations of the modern world.
East Indies
Sir T. Roe’s embassy from James I to the Great Mogul (Jehanghir), gives the best account of that Indian court and government, and of the trade and position of the East India Co., still in its teens. The Portuguese, under Albuquerque, had created an empire in the Persian Gulf and Indian shores a century earlier. This had been challenged by Dutch traders, especially in the islands of the Indian Ocean and Malay Straits, who, in 1604, formed the Dutch East India Co. Persia had always traded with the Mogul Empire. Roe gives in this passage a valuable sketch of the relations of all five races, and lays down firmly the policy on which the English Company always hereafter insisted in theory, though constantly forced to abandon it in practice, namely that trade, and not territory, was their aim.
He also sets up the standard of honesty and honour in face of Oriental despotism, which British officials have always been expected to maintain. His statement, too, of the need of carefully selected presents, shows that the old practice seen in the Old Testament scriptures still existed in Asiatic negotiations. The Company’s servants found themselves from the first obliged both to give and to receive them, even despite the Company’s orders, and in 1773 “a talent of silver and two changes of raiment,” i.e. a Kelaat, was the recognized gift of the Mogul’s messenger.