2 - The setting: Bombay City and its hinterland

Summary

In 1661, Britain acquired Bombay from the Portuguese as part of Charles II's dowry on his marriage with Catherine of Braganza. Eight years later, it was transferred as a worthless possession to the East India Company by the Crown. In 1788, it was almost abandoned by Cornwallis, the defeated hero of Yorktown. For nearly a century and a half, this sparsely populated cluster of islands off the west coast of India was more notable for its pestilential swamps than its commercial value. Fortune hunters were better advised to rely upon their winnings from whist rather than risk the slim pickings of trade. Arrack alone, it was said, could ‘keep the soldiers from the pariah houses’. Alcoholic fevers and venereal diseases made up the white man's burden.

At the close of the seventeenth century, it appeared impossible ‘that Bombay from its situation could ever become a place of trade notwithstanding the great attention paid to it by the Government’. By 1872, however, this inhospitable fishing hamlet, where Englishmen did not expect to survive two monsoons, had become the second city of the Empire.

It was only in the 1780s that Bombay began to replace Surat as the largest trading port and major commercial centre of the region.