Chapter 564

Many times, a great cause can sometimes begin for extremely mundane reasons. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 infoTwo hundred and fifty-two years ago, thanks to five insignificant shillings, Britain began to engage in large-scale colonial adventures that would open up the British colonial enterprise. At that time, Dutch merchants had a monopoly on the world spice market and categorically decided to raise the price of pepper by five shillings per pound. Pepper is an extremely important condiment that almost everyone in the UK can't live without.

Eighty spice merchants in the city of London were disgruntled by this provocation, and they immediately made a decision to meet on the afternoon of 24 September 1599 on the streets of Lydanhall, in a building. The purpose of the meeting was to set up a small trading company, with an initial capital of £72,000 and one hundred and twenty-five shareholders. The Chamber of Commerce, known as the East India Company, had the sole purpose of opening up trade with India and breaking the Dutch monopoly on spices in order to make a sufficient profit.

On the last day of the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I issued a certificate officially authorizing the East India Company to operate, allowing it to trade exclusively with other countries outside the Cape of Good Hope, and the first phase was set for a period of 15 years. Eight months later, a 500-ton galleon, HMS Roar, was in the port of Surat, north of Mumbai, and the British finally arrived in India.

The first time they arrived in India, they landed on the magical coast, and the British were cautious. Back then, Christophe? When Christopher Columbus discovered the American continent, he mistakenly thought he had sailed to India. "Roaring" squad leader William? Hawkins was an experienced sailor, as well as a well-informed pirate and explorer. Escorted by fifty Pathanist mercenaries, he travels deep into the interior to the fantasy land of Elizabethan England, bent on finding rubies as large as pigeon's eggs, inexhaustible pepper, ginger, indigo, and cinnamon, giant leaves that can hold a family, and a panacea of eternal youth concocted from ivory.

On the expedition to Agra, Captain Hawkins was not able to get his way. But the meeting with the Mughal king made his trip worthwhile. Compared to the Mughal emperors, Queen Elizabeth was like the "lord of the manor" in a small estate. At the time, Jehangir ruled over 70 million subjects, the fourth and last emperor of the Mughal dynasty of India, and the richest and most powerful king in the world. There he was warmly and ceremoniously entertained by the imperial court, and the embarrassed shareholders of the "East India Company" would probably be ashamed and at a loss. The Mughal king appointed the Englishman as a court official and selected an Armenian Christian lady from among the ladies of the court and presented it to him as a sign of welcome.

When the intrepid Captain Hawkins arrived in Agra, he reaped huge profits from the spice trade, rewarding the shareholders of the East India Company. Jehangir signed an edict allowing the East India Company to open trading houses along the northern coast of Bombay.

From that day on, the East India Company quickly amassed a fortune. Soon after, two huge ships arrived at the Thames every month, unloading piles of pepper, gum, sugar, raw silk and cotton on the wharf, and then leaving the wharf laden with manufactured goods. The shareholders of the "East India Company" made huge profits, and investing in the East India Company became the wisest and most rewarding investment of their lives.

The following year, other ships of the East India Company appeared off the coast of Madras and in the Bay of Bengal. Some daring explorers even set foot in the plague-ridden Ganges Delta and set up a chamber of commerce there, which is the forerunner of today's city of Kolkata. Generally speaking, the British were greeted with friendly reception by the local kings and inhabitants wherever they went, for they went around chattering: "We are in business and not colonizing." ”

As commerce continued to expand and prosper, the brokers of the "East India Company" had to take steps to protect their trading activities, thus inevitably intervening in local political conflicts. In this way, Britain was irreversibly swept into it, which eventually led to the total conquest of India. The abundance of India's resources also attracted France, and its emergence accelerated the British conquest of India. For thirty years, Britain and France shifted the battles on the battlefields of Europe to the tropical jungles and plains of India, and the two sides fought openly and covertly in an attempt to win the support and favor of India's prominent and powerful princes. In the outstanding chairman Joseph? Françoise? At the instigation of Deepplace, France was ready to build a vast empire in India, and at one point its ambitions were almost realized. However, the "East India Company" immediately rose to the occasion to defend its interests, and finally defeated the French, and its dream of establishing an empire came to naught.

In 1757, Robert? Braving the pouring rain, General Clive led 900 British soldiers and 2,000 indigenous Indian soldiers of the 39th Infantry Regiment to annihilate the entire armed forces of Sudan in a village in Bengal, not far from Plassey, in one fell swoop. Clive's victory opened the doors of northern India for London merchants, and the beginning of the veritable British conquest of India for the next century. From then on, merchants were replaced by the founders of the empire.

London issued an edict prohibiting any "conquest and territorial expansion" in India. Nevertheless, groups of ambitious governors followed, frantically pursuing imperialist policies. Governor Richard? Wellesley openly asserted: "Only the extension of British rule can bring great benefits to the local population of India." He extended British rule to Mysore, Travangol, Barodara, Hyderabad, and Jaliol, dismembered the mighty Maratha kingdom, and conquered vast swaths of the Deccan, Bengal, and the Ganges Valley. Wellesley's successors conquered the Rajput states, annexed the provinces of Western Sindh and the port of Karachi, waged two brutal wars against the Sikhs, and finally conquered Punjab and completed the conquest of all of India.

Thus, in just a few decades, the Chamber of Commerce, which was formed by a group of merchants, developed into a powerful monarch, its brokers and accountants became powerful generals and governors, its warehouses became palaces of gold, and its competition for money turned into a greedy plundering of territory. The British replaced the Mughal emperors, who nevertheless opened the gateway to the Indian subcontinent for them.

However, the greed of the British was constantly resisted, and the fiercest resistance occurred a few years ago, four years ago, due to the political, economic, religious and military domination of India by the British, which caused discontent among all classes of India, the British indigenous mercenaries near Delhi first mutinied on a large scale. Bands of Indian troops under British command throughout central India responded and swept across vast areas of the upper Ganges within a few months. The Anglo-Indian colonial army survived British rule in India thanks to the help of some princely princes loyal to the British, and then gathered the armed forces of the princely states to brutally suppress the mutinous soldiers and princely states in a-for-tat. The immediate effect of this mutiny was that the British changed the way they ruled India forever. After two hundred and fifty-eight years of fruitful business, the famous "East India Company" ceased its activities in India in 1858 in accordance with the Queen's Royal Decree in the same manner as when it opened for business. Under the new edict, the fate of 300 million Indians was placed in the hands of Queen Victoria. This twenty-nine-year-old woman, with a stubborn and arrogant facial expression, symbolizes the desire of the British race to rule the world. Since then, the British crown has exercised British power in India, directly ruling one-fifth of the world's population through its representative in India, the vice-king.

In British India, the world's largest and most populous colony, a small, well-equipped and well-trained army was responsible for the huge and arduous task of administering India, and it was the "British Indian Army", which was composed of Indians and British, the former belonging to Indians from the Indian mainland; The latter was made up of Britons who were born in England and sent to serve in India. Backed by thousands of British officers and soldiers and hundreds of thousands of indigenous Indian soldiers, he ruled over a large country of 300 million people and maintained social order throughout British India. This fact speaks more eloquently to the nature of British rule in India, and at the same time shows how docile the Indian masses were.

"How exactly did the British rule India?"

In the sound of the whistle, Baloyev, who had just arrived in India at the docks in Mumbai, looked at the place with a curious eye, as a European he naturally did not need to be like the natives, with the crowd of people passing through the customs, as Europeans they enjoyed additional passages, in the colonies of various countries there have always been three classes, the first class is naturally the "suzerain" who came to the colony as colonists, the second class is those who are recognized by the colonial government as the superior natives, and the third class is ordinary natives.

As a European, Baloyev naturally enjoyed the same treatment as the British, and the color of his skin determined everything, whether in India or in Africa under Chinese control, the skin color of "silver" and "gold" enjoyed supreme power over the natives.

For ordinary Europeans, they would never have contact with inferior natives, and even with those natives princes, it was also very limited.

But for Baloyev, he did not exclude contact with the Indians, in fact, for the Russians, they never divided everything by the color of their skin, and for them, even blacks could become their nobility as long as it was necessary to maintain their dominance.

So, unlike many Europeans who rejected Indians, Baloyev, a Russian merchant who came to India to "find cheap raw materials for the Russian textile industry", soon penetrated into the heart of India, and along the way he made contact with the local Indian merchants, and of course with the princes, although the mutiny a few years earlier led to the abolition of many princes, and the princely states were directly ruled by British India, but in Baloyev's view, this was exactly what he needed.

"On the surface, Indians were docile to British rule, but in reality Indians' distrust of British rule was a legacy of the 1857 rebellion, and this distrust affected not only Indians but also the British, who were narrow-minded and fearful of Indians, and even xenophobic towards those of the same background, highly accomplished or loyal. The British and their civil servants lived in camps, isolated from the Indians; Social occasions such as private clubs are also xenophobic and exclusionary for Indians......"

Almost every day, Baloyev kept a record of what he had learned about India, and no Russian before him had made such a subtle observation of India, and no Russian had come to the heart of India, and what he did, just as Russian adventurers had expanded eastward in the past few hundred years, put everything in India under the microscope, from understanding the region, to understanding the indigenous people of the land.

Great careers often begin with ordinary beginnings, and for Baloyev, who came to India as a "merchant", was by no means a "merchant", a merchant was nothing more than a disguised identity, his other identity, in fact, an adventurer, he was employed by the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire in St. Petersburg, and he came here to get to know the land and prepare for the future.

People living in temperate zones can never understand the desire for warmth and sunshine in the cold zone of Russians, like Baloyev, although the scorching sun of the South Asian subcontinent is often uncomfortable for Europeans, but for Baloyev, he enjoys the warmth of this sun, and for him at this time, he is completely addicted to the mesmerizing side of India, where everything seems dreamlike.

"Only in India will you understand why this rich continent is so important to Britain, for Britain, this rich continent provides not only a huge market, but more importantly, it can provide Britain with countless riches, and it is these endless riches that have made Britain the most powerful empire in the world over the past century or so, and for Britain, it is undoubtedly lucky to have India, but for Russia, India under British control was no less than a disaster, and we must see the fact that if Russia wants to be a great empire, it must have India! ”

――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――

Now is the time to double the monthly pass, I hope you can continue to support Speechless and support the iron and blood ambition! Thanks again! Every one of your subscriptions, recommendations, and favorites is a great support for Iron and Blood, thank you! Iron and Blood Grand Plan Group: 150536833, welcome friends to join and discuss the plot together!