Within thirty years Bombay had grown to house a colonial population of 60,000 with a growing network of factories, law courts, an Anglican church and large white residential houses surrounding the fort and tumbling down the slope from Malabar Hill to the Governor’s estate on the seafront.

Jahangir was, after all, an enormously sensitive, curious and intelligent man: observant of the world around him and a keen collector of its curiosities, from Venetian swords and globes to Safavid silks, jade pebbles and even narwhal teeth.

the next 200 years it would slowly learn to operate skilfully within the Mughal system and to do so in the Mughal idiom, with its officials learning good Persian, the correct court etiquette, the art of bribing the right officials and, in time, outmanoeuvring all their rivals – Portuguese, Dutch and French – for imperial favour.

At that time England was a relatively impoverished, largely agricultural country, which had spent almost a century at war with itself over the most divisive subject of the time: religion.

Such a varied group would rarely be seen under one roof, but all had gathered with one purpose: to petition the ageing Queen Elizabeth I, then a bewigged and painted woman of sixty-six, to start up a company ‘to venter in the pretended voiage to ye

On 21 May, Nader Shah with a force of 80,000 fighting men crossed the border into the Mughal Empire, heading for the summer capital of Kabul, so beginning the first invasion of India for two centuries. The great Bala Hisar of Kabul surrendered at the end of June. Nader Shah then descended the Khyber. Less than three months later, at Karnal, one

On his return to London, Roe made it clear to the directors that force of arms was not an option when dealing

Company realised that if it was to trade successfully

almost immediately orders came from the court of the Privy Council suspending both the formation of the Company and the preparations for the voyage. The peace negotiations with Spain which had followed the death of King Philip II in 1598 were progressing, and their lordships, ‘thinking it more beneficiall … to enterteyne a peace, than that the same