In 1616, Thomas Roe arrived in India as James 1’s ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and , to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a united Great Britain under Stuart monarchy. The court he entered in India was very wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be the greatest and richest empires of the world.

Nandini Das gives an insider’s view of a Britain in the making a country, whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice islands of Indonesia.

Bengal-born Nandini Das, a professor of early modern English literature at Oxford, explores art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, and offers a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire.

St Stephen’s Hall, the reception area of the Palace of Westminster, home to UK Parliament is decorated with murals showing the beginning of British diplomatic relations with India: the meeting in 1614 of Sir Thomas Roe, London’s first emissary to the sub-continent, with the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, depicting a meeting of equals a confident, dashing standing before the dazzled emperor, airily waving a letter from James I as trumpets blow and courtiers bow. Roe “succeeds by his courtesy and firmness at the Court of Ajmir in laying the foundation of British influence of India”.

Nandini writes, “In practical terms Roe’s embassy achieved very little. To the Mughals, the English were hardly worth a mention. And Roe was an ambassador on back foot”.

Roe’s mission is the lens through which to give sharp focus to a remarkably wide-ranging study that does much to illuminate the bigger story of the unpromising origins of British power – and initial powerlessness – in India. Jahangir’s land spanned from India, all of modern day Pakistan, Bangladesh, and much of Afghanistan. The Empire comprised about a fifth of humanity, 150 million people, kept 4 million men under arms, and accounted for a quarter of all world manufacturing., while England’s population as just over 4 million and turning out only 3 per cent of global manufacturers, after suffering from a devastating pandemic  and in the Reformation, an extended and vicious internecine war of religion, as the country was worried about immigration, unemployment, and relations between England and Scotland was strained, despite sharing the same new king.

The fiercely Protestant island nation and its excommunicated monarch had just cut itself off from Catholic southern Europe, badly damaging trade and prosperity and throwing the kingdom into deep financial woes. Roe’s embassy is a much written about event, like the Battle of Plassey in 1757, one of the foundation stones of British rule in India – the Raj.  

Thomas Roe is a rich, well-connected ambitious, “good on horseback and handy with swords and guns” but also highly opinionated” Essex man unsure about his place in society and constantly quarrelling about status.  He goes to Oxford aged 12,  then at 16 to the Inns of Court, where he become good friends with the playwright Ben Jonson and poet John Donne.

 He is selected to lead the first English expedition to the Amazon, but fails to find the El Dorado or his golden lands. The Embassy to Mughals is his chance to redeem himself, and make his name. While struggling with Mughal protocol on arrival in Surat, Gujarat, Western India, his cook get into a drunken figth with a man who turns out to be the brother of the local governor, the very man who controls his access to the court. Mughal officials openly laugh at the shabbiness of Roe’s presents that included a gilt state coach.  The Portuguese Jesuits tell the Mughals that the English are a marginal and powerless nation “ who dwell in a small island”.

Roe has to wait several months to get his first audience with the emperor. Jahangir shows little interest in discussing such crude matters as trade, making clear that Roe’s diplomatic present are “very meane and ordinary”, especially some wooden animals that the emperor thought ridiculous and ill shaped. He was much happier discussing metaphysics and the science of Vedanta with a 300-year-old naked hermit who live in a pit.

Roe lobbied for a firman, a formal court order, “ to establish a firm, and secure trade and residence for my countrymen in constant love and pease.  Jahangir countered with questions about English painting and the manufacturing of beer.

Roe followed the emperor around his dominions for several months, and both he and his chaplain wrote diaries that became celebrated classic of travel writing.

Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das, Bloomsbury £30, 480 pages.

Encounters in the history of colonialism

In 1616, Thomas Roe arrived in India as James 1’s ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and , to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a united Great Britain under Stuart monarchy. The court he entered in India was very wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be the greatest and richest empires of the world.

Nandini Das gives an insider’s view of a Britain in the making a country, whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice islands of Indonesia.

Bengal-born Nandini Das, a professor of early modern English literature at Oxford, explores art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, and offers a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire.

St Stephen’s Hall, the reception area of the Palace of Westminster, home to UK Parliament is decorated with murals showing the beginning of British diplomatic relations with India: the meeting in 1614 of Sir Thomas Roe, London’s first emissary to the sub-continent, with the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, depicting a meeting of equals a confident, dashing standing before the dazzled emperor, airily waving a letter from James I as trumpets blow and courtiers bow. Roe “succeeds by his courtesy and firmness at the Court of Ajmir in laying the foundation of British influence of India”.

Nandini writes, “In practical terms Roe’s embassy achieved very little. To the Mughals, the English were hardly worth a mention. And Roe was an ambassador on back foot”.

Roe’s mission is the lens through which to give sharp focus to a remarkably wide-ranging study that does much to illuminate the bigger story of the unpromising origins of British power – and initial powerlessness – in India. Jahangir’s land spanned from India, all of modern day Pakistan, Bangladesh, and much of Afghanistan. The Empire comprised about a fifth of humanity, 150 million people, kept 4 million men under arms, and accounted for a quarter of all world manufacturing., while England’s population as just over 4 million and turning out only 3 per cent of global manufacturers, after suffering from a devastating pandemic  and in the Reformation, an extended and vicious internecine war of religion, as the country was worried about immigration, unemployment, and relations between England and Scotland was strained, despite sharing the same new king.

The fiercely Protestant island nation and its excommunicated monarch had just cut itself off from Catholic southern Europe, badly damaging trade and prosperity and throwing the kingdom into deep financial woes. Roe’s embassy is a much written about event, like the Battle of Plassey in 1757, one of the foundation stones of British rule in India – the Raj.  

Thomas Roe is a rich, well-connected ambitious, “good on horseback and handy with swords and guns” but also highly opinionated” Essex man unsure about his place in society and constantly quarrelling about status.  He goes to Oxford aged 12,  then at 16 to the Inns of Court, where he become good friends with the playwright Ben Jonson and poet John Donne.

 He is selected to lead the first English expedition to the Amazon, but fails to find the El Dorado or his golden lands. The Embassy to Mughals is his chance to redeem himself, and make his name. While struggling with Mughal protocol on arrival in Surat, Gujarat, Western India, his cook get into a drunken figth with a man who turns out to be the brother of the local governor, the very man who controls his access to the court. Mughal officials openly laugh at the shabbiness of Roe’s presents that included a gilt state coach.  The Portuguese Jesuits tell the Mughals that the English are a marginal and powerless nation “ who dwell in a small island”.

Roe has to wait several months to get his first audience with the emperor. Jahangir shows little interest in discussing such crude matters as trade, making clear that Roe’s diplomatic present are “very meane and ordinary”, especially some wooden animals that the emperor thought ridiculous and ill shaped. He was much happier discussing metaphysics and the science of Vedanta with a 300-year-old naked hermit who live in a pit.

Roe lobbied for a firman, a formal court order, “ to establish a firm, and secure trade and residence for my countrymen in constant love and pease.  Jahangir countered with questions about English painting and the manufacturing of beer.

Roe followed the emperor around his dominions for several months, and both he and his chaplain wrote diaries that became celebrated classic of travel writing.

Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das, Bloomsbury £30, 480 pages.