Bombay: the genealogy of a global imperial city

Abstract

This article will argue that the history of East India Company Bombay – like that of many foreign British enterprises, and like many other ‘global’ cities and indeed colonies generally – is best understood as the product of contradictions and contingencies. Bombay was never easy to define geographically and its identity as an ‘English’ settlement was precarious. It could not insulate itself militarily from the powerful polities nearby; nor could it always rely on the loyalty of its subjects, whether English or of other ethnicities. It was a city constructed out of crisis and tragedy, trial and error, a history that the story about a European dynastic ‘dowry’ obscures, and which Company representatives worked hard to conceal.

According to most accounts of the history of British India, Bombay became ‘English’ with the stroke of a (European) pen. As the story goes, in 1661 the ‘Port and Island’ of Bombay were ‘transferred’ to the English King Charles II – along with the northern African town and fort of Tangier, among other things – as part of the dowry and peace treaty upon his marriage to the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza. This supposedly romantic beginning is perhaps one of the only facts many Europeans know about the early history of East India Company Bombay, and it makes it easy to conjure up a fairly linear and natural story of how Bombay grew into the post-independence mega-city of Mumbai, exemplifying the supposed relationship between imperial and global cities more generally. Nurtured by the English East India Company, and further improved under British crown rule, Bombay amassed commercial and naval power to rival and eventually eclipse the great Mughal western Indian entrepôt of Surat. Before long, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was projecting British power and law over land and sea from the remains of the Maratha empire to eastern Africa. From there, it formed part of the backbone of the modern British empire in India and became an economic and cultural centre of an independent India. Today it is the fourth largest conurbation in the world, a living monument to imperial and post-imperial manifest destiny and a frequently cited example of a ‘global’ or ‘gateway’ city.¹

Though many others have complicated this later linked destiny of colonial Bombay and post-colonial Mumbai, we turn here instead to its early modern origin story to complicate any received picture of an inexorable global juggernaut. When the English acquired Bombay, it was largely a string of fishing villages and Portuguese seigneurial estates, dotted with a few Catholic churches and monastic establishments and some neglected manor houses. By all indications, the Estado da India regarded the archipelago as a fringe territory on the outskirts of its Indian Ocean system, of a far lower priority than the regional centres of Baçaim, Damão and Goa. The largest of these manor houses the English proceeded to fortify, and it became the centre of their settlement, thus giving rise to the rather non-specific phrase ‘the Island and Castle of Bombay’ which one often runs into in the records from the period. By 1689, Bombay had blossomed into a smallish town, but it would be a half century or more before people referred to it even sporadically as a ‘city’, unlike for example, its counterparts, such as Dutch Batavia, Mughal Surat and even English Madras, which the East India Company's leadership in London spoke of – with some exaggeration – as a ‘great’ city as early as the 1670s and 1680s. When Bombay's leadership did imagine Bombay as a city, it was far more aspirational than descriptive, and it would not be until the eighteenth century that it obtained any one of a number of markers of early modern urbanity: a large population, defensible walls, commercial vibrancy, legal incorporation and so on. Indeed, it was not even clear to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century contemporaries whether Bombay was a single place or an archipelago of separate, linked towns and competing jurisdictions. In the end, Bombay was not transformed into a city, much less an ‘English’ city, in 1661, and just when it may be said to have achieved such a status is a question with an answer that is neither straightforward nor assured.

That said, if Bombay's status as a ‘city’ when the English acquired it in the seventeenth century was questionable, it is a bit easier to consider it as a sort of global space. Over the previous millennium, it had been controlled by various Hindu and Muslim powers, connecting it, if at times indirectly, to a circulation of people, goods and ideas through pathways that had long linked the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The coming of Portuguese control in the 1530s in turn layered on top of these connections a shared and ‘connected’ Iberian transoceanic imperial network that spread from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean,² which included of course several global monastic orders, most notably – and to the English, ominously – the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits. In this sense, one could imagine the Bombay that the East India Company acquired in the 1660s as a product of the connections and coincidences of territorial, merchant and religious power in the early modern world, or what C.A. Bayly has called more generally ‘archaic globalization’ and more specifically, Portugal's ‘archaic thalassocracy’, if very much at its margins.³

It was the English East India Company, which acquired Bombay from the English crown in 1668, that first thought of converting the islands into a commercial and political hub to rival places like Dutch Batavia and neighbouring Mughal Surat. Yet, this goal was as lofty as it was implausible. Even after the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century expansion of the East India Company's naval and territorial power ensured Bombay's political and military dominance in western India, its population of 150,000 still ranked as less than one fifth of its rival Surat. Indeed, East India Company Bombay – like many British overseas enterprises – is best understood as the product of a series of contradictions and contingencies. Bombay was never easy to define geographically and through the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries its identity as an ‘English’ settlement was precarious. It could not insulate itself militarily from the powerful polities nearby, nor could it always rely on the loyalty of its subjects, whether English or otherwise. It was a settlement constructed out of crisis and tragedy, trial and error, and it is this history that the story about a European dynastic ‘dowry’ obscures, one which Company representatives worked hard to conceal. If Bombay was already connected to transcontinental networks when the Company acquired it, and the Company did succeed in turning it into an imperial city, which in turn gave way to a global city, Bombay's ‘connectedness’, the product of its strategic location on the Arabian Sea and situation at the crossroads of many competing empires and polities, and of the Company's aggressive efforts to make it a global transit point, also created problems that, more than once, threatened to sink the whole enterprise. Managing these problems – or trying to manage them – would be a key feature of East India Company policy all the way from the 1660s into the modern era. Globality played a significant role in creating the imperial city of Bombay, but the two processes of early modern globalization and urbanization were not always coincident, and neither were they easy, painless or inevitable. Global cities, in other words, are made, not born.

The origins of English Bombay

At the time of the so-called Portuguese ‘transfer’ of Bombay to the English, in 1661, Bombay was neither a city nor an island, and hardly even a significant colonial enterprise. Dominated by only 11 Portuguese families, it was dwarfed by the one major European stronghold on the west coast, Goa, as well as by the city on the other side of the Indian Ocean that would become the English model for Bombay: Dutch Batavia, which in the mid-seventeenth century had as many as 8,000 people under its jurisdiction.⁴ One would have had even less sense that Bombay would become the global city it is today if one compared it to the major port towns and capitals of Mughal and southern India. Nearby Surat, which fell to Mughal control in the 1570s, had a population of upwards of 150,000 or 200,000 people by the mid-seventeenth century,⁵ and it was so much more central to the commercial and information networks of territorial South Asia and Indian Ocean trade that the English held Bombay for about two decades before they tried to move their main factory and Presidency there from Surat.

Bombay's position was also deeply precarious. It was situated in the crosshairs of the increasingly violent maritime conflicts of seventeenth-century western India. Despite the long-held belief, especially on the part of Europeans, that the ‘Asiatick’ empires were primarily territorial and uninterested in maritime affairs, the seventeenth-century western Indian littoral was in fact a critical theatre for ongoing power struggles in western India, especially as the Mughal empire's relentless expansion in the Deccan met the state- and empire-building ambitions of the Maratha state, rapidly consolidating under Sivaji Bhonsle and his successors.

These conflicts have been often retold as stories about wars over territory, involving extensive bloody sieges and campaigns supported by large contingents of infantry and cavalry, and indeed this is quite often how it appeared to imperial chroniclers, especially those embedded in the peripatetic Mughal court, moving along with the armies of conquest. However, when seen from the perspective of the western Indian littoral, this conflict takes on a much more amphibious aspect. Both the Mughals and Marathas had significant investments and interests in maintaining power and control over the sea. The Mughal empire had come to have great interests on both the east and west coasts; in western India, as we have seen, it was Surat which in the seventeenth century became one of the most valuable religious, political and commercial centres of the empire, the Mughal gateway to Indian Ocean trade and, perhaps even more importantly, the primary embarkation point for Muslim pilgrims taking the Hajj.⁶ It was also a primary trading port for the more recently arrived European companies – English, Dutch and French – all deeply dependent on local Surat officials for their trade and at times even their survival. For their part, the Marathas under Sivaji built and retained a number of coastal fortifications, most notably Sindhudurg at Malwan, about 500 kilometres south of Bombay. Moreover, the Mughal–Maratha war was not infrequently fought over these port towns and coastal enclaves, most famously exemplified in the 1663 Maratha siege of Surat, which in the words of Stewart Gordon, ‘turned Shivaji from a minor regional irritation to a major problem for the Mughal Empire’.⁷ Both Mughals and Marathas also engaged in extended and complicated manoeuvres which attempted either to capitalize upon or confront Portuguese, Dutch, French and English naval power, especially in Mughal Surat, and both quite often tried to play the Europeans off of one another.

Yet, if part of this war was fought on land over access to the sea, far more of it than is usually acknowledged was actually fought at sea. Both Mughal and Maratha ‘navies’ were, as with both empires’ territorial armies and local administration, layered networks of tributary relationships, formal and informal offices, and assignments, honorifics and revenue assignments; both – again, also as on land – relied on an itinerant military labour market that stretched from Persia to East Asia.⁸ Chief among the Maratha sarkhails (troop commanders) was Kanhoji Angre, who would later be branded an ‘arch-pyrate’ by the English at Bombay.⁹ For its part, Mughal maritime power was based on a long-standing tributary relationship with the seafaring Sidis of Janjira, a community of East African extraction that had come to dominate maritime affairs in coastal Bijapur and later Mughal Gujarat. By the late seventeenth century, the leading figure among these was Qasim, later given the honorific Sidi Yaqut Khan by the Emperor Aurangzeb, who served as a Mughal faujdar (army-holder) for the western Indian littoral, along with having been awarding a mansab, or rank, that placed him within the networked structure of the Mughal nobility.¹⁰

Given the clear importance of maritime power and sovereignty to western Indian politics, and both the volatility of their relationships with European rivals like the Portuguese and Dutch and the precariousness of the positions of their factories and residences in Mughal-controlled cities like Surat, the English East India Company's designs for a sovereign, fortified commercial power in western India were certainly modelled at times on places that might be considered early modern ‘global cities’: Surat, Goa, Batavia. Various proposals were floated, including vague and ill-conceived plans for invasions or negotiations that might lead to the acquisition of suitable territory, and as early as 1654, the Company actually proposed to the English leader Oliver Cromwell the purchase of a Portuguese stronghold for this purpose, suggesting Baçaim, Mozambique or Bombay as good options.¹¹

Despite these early ambitions, when, less than a decade after its acquisition the English crown offered the East India Company the proprietorship of Bombay, the Company only reluctantly accepted. In all probability, one of the problems was that Bombay did not seem like a very propitious place to site a port, much less a town. It was true that Bombay boasted a deep-water harbour, and that it was capable of sheltering large ships during the monsoon season, but the island, and the larger archipelago of which it was a part, had little potable water, and was capable of growing very few crops (food always had to be imported). It also lacked people. Though there is no way to know how many people lived on the Bombay archipelago when the Company acquired it, it probably measured in the hundreds rather than the thousands. Moreover, even at the best of times mortality was high, especially for Europeans. As a result, the East India Company abandoned plans almost immediately to ‘people’ their new settlement of Bombay entirely or even largely with individuals from the British Isles. By the 1680s, the town of Bombay and the adjoining islands included, along with a few hundred English, an unknown number of Portuguese and Indo-Portuguese Catholics who were there when the island was handed over to Charles II, various indigenous groups and castes such as Kolis and Bhandari, Hindu textile manufacturers, some of them refugees from the Deccan wars and itinerant soldiers of European, Asian and African origin.¹² Efforts were also made to attract other groups and individuals traditionally active in the Indian Ocean trade, including Baniya merchants from western India, the so-called ‘Muscat Arabs’, traders from the Ottoman and Chinese empires, not to mention itinerant merchants from Jewish, Bohra, Zoroastrian, Parsi, Syrian, and Armenian mercantile networks. The ambition was clearly there to create a global trade nexus not unlike Batavia or Surat.

One major challenge was that efforts to create a heterogeneous trading port (and perhaps even, at its most idealistic, a city) co-existed uneasily with attempts on the part of the Company to assert and defend the symbolic prestige and solidarity of Europeans, especially Englishmen. The Company's business model required that its higher-ranking employees in India be seen, especially by the Mughals, as a kind of mercantile nobility, which gave rise both to a good deal of supercilious behaviour at the expense of peons and to extremely lavish public displays, from the richly caparisoned horses and large number of attendants considered necessary for any public appearance of a top official to the costly food and wine and silver table services featured on the East India Company's table in Surat.¹³ But at least as urgent a concern as impressing the Mughals was the control of plebeian English soldiers, sailors and private traders, who lived far less luxurious lives, and whose loyalty to the Company, the settlement and Protestant Christianity was often in doubt. There was unrest and unhappiness through the 1670s, and late in 1683 disgruntled European settlers and soldiers seized control of Bombay, ejected the sitting East India Company deputy-governor and set up their own regime led by one Richard Keigwin, who attempted to bypass the Company by arguing that he and his supporters owed allegiance directly to the king. It took almost a year for the Company to regain control of the town. Equally shocking displays of disaffection and disloyalty were to follow a few years later, as we will see. The Company tried to build esprit de corps among its highly valued European soldiery and stop them mutinying or deserting by encouraging them to think that they were superior to ‘blacks’ (i.e. Indians) both as soldiers and as human beings. But there were clear limits to this policy if the Bombay Council wanted to attract higher-ranking Indian and other non-European traders. In short, especially in the early years, the colony's identity as ‘English’ remained both precarious and elusive, and it was, at least in part, at odds with its ambition to create a global trade entrepôt.

The Company undoubtedly made some progress in the 1670s and 1680s towards its goals of building a thriving and populous colony devoted to trade. The settlement also began to look more like a town, with fortifications, a few stone buildings, quays and the like – though it still lacked a Protestant church. However, less than 20 years after the Company took over control from the crown, the settlement was almost lost for good, when it was invaded and occupied for upwards of 16 months in a conflict usually, but perhaps misleadingly, referred to as the First Anglo-Mughal War. The Company had imprudently instigated a trade war with nearby Surat and begun seizing Mughal ships. In addition, late in 1688, John Child, the sitting governor of Bombay, antagonized Sidi Yakut Khan by seizing some shipments of grain that were being sent to feed part of the Mughal army. As we have seen, Sidi Yakut held a Mughal noble rank, or mansab; he also had an enviable military reputation, mostly gained at the expense of his sworn enemies, Shivaji Bhonsle and his son Sambhaji of the Maratha Kingdom. Sidi Yakut also controlled a famously impregnable island fortress at Janjira about 35 kilometres south of Bombay as well as a fortified island at the mouth of the bay itself. When Child refused to negotiate the return of the grain, Sidi Yakut sailed north and in mid-February of 1689 he invaded Bombay with a force of around 14,000 men. The settlement was caught unprepared and with the fortifications to the castle still unfinished, Sidi Yakut's men came ashore in one of the many small creeks and inlets that crisscrossed the islands, and swiftly overran all of the five then inhabited islands of the archipelago, including most of the town itself. This left the Company holding only Bombay Castle and a small spit of land to its south. The Sidi army then proceeded to place gun batteries in most of the more permanent buildings of the town (those made of stone), as well as atop the strategically appointed Dongri Hill, and settled in for a long siege. In response, much of Bombay's population fled to the mainland, and those remaining crowded into the fort for safety, where for over a year they endured food shortages, almost daily bombardments and, eventually, an outbreak of the plague. Moreover, over the course of the siege, a large proportion of the English and Indo-Portuguese garrison deserted over to the occupying forces, a number of them converting to Islam. The situation grew so dire and morale so low that the Company leadership seriously considered abandoning the settlement, blowing up Bombay Castle and departing for England on their remaining ships.¹⁴ It would be more than a year before the beleaguered East India Company could negotiate what turned out to be (especially from Company critics’ point of view) a very humiliating and financially costly peace with the Mughals and 16 months before Sidi Yakut's men finally left the island.

When the siege was finally lifted, most of Bombay's inhabitants were dead and the town lay in ruins. Alexander Hamilton wrote that ‘of seven or eight hundred English that inhabited [Bombay] before the war, there were not above sixty left by the sword and plague, and Bombay, that was one of the pleasantest places in India, was brought to be one of the most dismal deserts’.¹⁵ This was a mortality rate of between 80 and 90 per cent and there is no reason to think that the death toll was much lower among the other ethnic groups who made up the majority of the population before the siege. The infrastructure of the town was largely gone: most of the habitations had been burnt to the ground, and more durable buildings were looted by the Mughal-allied forces, then badly damaged or destroyed by one or the other side in artillery exchanges. Dams, sea walls and other small land reclamation projects across the archipelago – part of an ongoing quest to add arable land and improve food self-sufficiency on the islands – were also destroyed.

It was not clear for several years following the invasion whether Bombay would survive as an East India Company settlement, or indeed, whether the Company itself, closely identified with James II (Stuart), would survive the Revolution of 1688–89. Here, we focus on the first of these issues, the Company's response to the near-destruction of one of its two prize settlements in India. One of the major rationales for the Company retaining its monopoly on trade was the extraordinary expense of keeping up fortified settlements. It was therefore important to assert that Bombay had successfully defended itself, which required the Company or its surrogates to downplay, conceal and, at points, wilfully misrepresent the catastrophe that had befallen Bombay town and its people. The Company leadership in London also went to some lengths to try to convince an understandably sceptical English public that its war with the Mughal empire had been both justified and successful in achieving its aims. The endgame, where the Company had had to agree to a virtually unconditional surrender in order to get the Sidi and his men to lift the siege and leave the island, required especially delicate handling back in London. It was just too hard to reconcile with the Company's claim that it had won the war, or at least not lost it. On the whole, therefore, the Company leadership in London was happy to say as little as possible about the events at Bombay and it was assisted in this by the fact that the events happened half a world away and only a very small number of people survived to tell the tale.¹⁶

In Bombay itself, the Company seized upon the crisis to consolidate its control, in part by retreating from its former fairly accommodationist stance toward ethnic, religious and institutional pluralism. Out of the ashes of post-siege Bombay, it began to create a new town, and later city, one that was significantly more ‘English’, Protestant and ‘Imperial’. While the Company had had a long-standing commitment to protecting its monopoly, if necessary by force (or, more often, the threat of force), the new Bombay spoke to fundamental threats to the settlement's very existence and a powerful new understanding of the dangerous neighbourhood in which it found itself. In the end, the Company remade Bombay in a new image instead of letting it slip from its grasp, and it is there that we finally begin to see a global city slowly emerging.

In 1710, 20 years after the siege, John Burnell, an ensign, and commander of one of Bombay's many forts, wrote up a detailed description of the topology, flora and fauna and, above all, the military circumstances of the Bombay archipelago. His account reflects the long shadow cast by the Mughal invasion and the plague; it also shows some of the many ways that the Company sought to reconceive Bombay in the wake of tragedy. At the time Burnell wrote, the destruction wrought by the siege was still visible across the archipelago and especially in Bombay town. Gutted buildings, like the ‘ruinated’ sessions house, disfigured the townscape. The English church, half-built at the time of the siege, damaged during it and still not completed, had trees growing through the walls. In Modi's bay, just north of the town, the ‘carcasses’ of two English ships, sunk by the Sidi Yakut's men, still showed at low tide. The Company had moved swiftly to do basic repairs on the fort but it still bore the scars of the months of bombardments. Dressed stones, shot from the Sidi's guns when his men ran short of iron shot, still lay in piles on the ground. And the remains of the Mughals' own bulwarks could still be seen on Dongri Hill, Mazagaon Hill and elsewhere on the archipelago.¹⁷

There were also many reminders of the dreadful death toll on both sides of the conflict. A cross north of Bombay marked where Ensign Alexander Monroe and 14 others were killed on the first day of the invasion. The north side of Dongri Hill was ‘thickly covered all over with Moors tombs, the sepulchres of those who received their fate in the wars’. And Burnell paints a macabre picture of the Mendham's Point burial ground, where most of the English had been laid to rest. It was common practice to bury plague victims en masse in pit graves, but, according to Burnell, this was also standard for common East India Company soldiers, whatever the cause of death. Unlike their betters, who lay beneath elaborate tombs, soldiers were buried in groups, ‘whole regiments of them', and not allowed coffins, presumably as a space-saving measure. As a result, packs of jackals were prone to digging up and eating their remains and scattering the bones.¹⁸

Disturbing as these reminders may have been, there were also more present dangers. The military threats to Bombay were real and continuing, and they included both Indian and European enemies and potential enemies. Throughout much of the 1690s, the Company lived in fear of another invasion by the Mughals, and specifically by Sidi Yakut. After 1702, though Sidi Yakut continued to cause concern, the greater menace was Kanhoji Angre, another coastal warlord – sometimes styled by the English the admiral of the Marathas but more often derided by them as a pirate king. Like Sidi Yakut, Angre eventually set up what was effectively his own regime and for more than a quarter century he preyed upon English, Dutch and Portuguese ships, imposing periodic blockades on Bombay shipping, and threatening more than once to invade the island. All the Company's efforts to defeat him failed, and after his death in 1729 his son and brother continued for some time to disturb Indian and European shipping. European rivals for the East India trade were also a problem. Though the Portuguese had ceased to be a significant military threat they ruled a good deal of prime territory in the vicinity of Bombay, and more importantly they controlled food supplies to the archipelago which, as we have seen, had few food resources of its own. Moreover, some of the Portuguese, notably members of the Jesuit religious order, were suspected of conspiring with the Company's enemies to restore Bombay to the Portuguese crown. The Dutch threat greatly diminished after 1689, but the French threat became correspondingly much more significant. The latter rivalry was to become much hotter during the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), and while most of the hostile encounters took place on the Coromandel (east) coast of India and around the Bay of Bengal, at different points during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fleets of well-armed French ships posed a clear and present danger to English interests on the north-west coast as well. The Bombay settlement was always thought of as a bulwark against competing forms of commerce and sovereignty, both Asian and European, but for a very long time it was an exceptionally fragile and vulnerable one.

Very shortly after the Sidi army left the island, the Company began strengthening Bombay's defences.¹⁹ As we have seen, the fortification of Bombay Castle was not complete when the Sidi invaded. This ‘castle’ was not especially well sited, and its shortcomings became blindingly obvious during the siege. The biggest difficulty was that it was overlooked by nearby Dongri Hill about half a mile away. By the second day of the Sidi's invasion, the Mughals had seized the hill (which seems to have been wholly undefended) and they immediately raised a gun battery at its summit, from which, for months, destruction rained down on the town, the castle and ships in the bay. Another problem was that the main freshwater source lay outside the fort's walls. Moreover, the town's most substantial buildings (East India House, the Sessions House, the governor's residence, the Portuguese Catholic Church), were located too far from the fort to be defended, but near enough to pose a serious threat should they fall into enemy hands. Unfortunately for the settlement, that was exactly what happened. During the invasion and siege, they were overrun by the Mughals and turned into gun batteries and forward operating locations.

In the decades immediately after the invasion, various attempts were made to address these vulnerabilities, and they led to a substantial rethinking of the town's defences. One of the earliest projects, dating from the mid-1690s, was to construct a fort on Dongri Hill: ‘It was on this summit that the Seddy [sic], in the late wars, raised his batteries against the Castle, discommoding it very much, the Fort being not then built’ writes Burnell, who was acutely conscious of the way the Mughal army had turned many of the Bombay archipelago's topographical features against the Company.²⁰ The new fort, which Burnell would actually command for a short time, was intended to stop would-be invaders from seizing the hilltop and using it to launch artillery attacks on the castle and town. A good deal of thought (as Burnell tells us) was devoted to making Dongri Hill as impregnable as possible to an attacking force and to ensuring the defenders had the water and supplies to hold out almost indefinitely.²¹

A much more ambitious project was the building of a semi-circular wall of bastions around the landward parts of Bombay town. This was largely completed by 1716, though improvements continued for decades, including a series of ravelins to impede access to the town gates. Improvements in the defences of Bombay town were accompanied by efforts, which extended as well to other parts of the archipelago, to ensure that large stone structures that were outside the walls, that were in threatening places (such as on hills overlooking other towns, as was the case with several Catholic churches), or that obstructed the line of defensive fire from the fort (such as the original Mumbādevī temple), were pulled down.²² This created what became the Esplanade, a characteristic visual feature of imperial Bombay (and other imperial cities in India), which lasted into the 1860s.²³ In the case of Catholic churches, this policy probably also reflected the Company leadership's belief that Catholics, especially the clergy, could not be trusted to be loyal to them. In addition, existing forts in other parts of the archipelago, invariably overlooking possible routes of attack, were refurbished or rebuilt. Supplementary arrangements were made in more remote parts of the archipelago that seemed especially ripe for an invading force, such as a guard house, manned by sepoys, on the sea side of Malabar Hill, ‘whose business is to look out that no enemy attempt to pass the channel that letteth into the Back Bay on that side, and land in the obscurity of the night, it being a convenient place for such a design and nothing near to disturb them’.²⁴ By Burnell's time, there were well-armed and well-manned forts, fortlets, batteries and guardhouses in or overlooking every location anyone would think to land an army on, with an especial focus on the various ‘breaches’ (inlets and creeks), and on Portuguese territory to the north. By the 1720s, the Bombay archipelago was one of the most comprehensively defended island settlements in the world.

All this took a significant amount of money and manpower. One major outcome of the fiasco at Bombay in 1689–90 was that the Company resolved to make a substantially greater military investment in Bombay than it had previously done. The Company's trade in the east had always included a component of military force, necessary (as many believed) to protect its trade and settlements against other Europeans, especially the Dutch, patrol its monopoly from British interlopers and overawe lesser Indian princes. Its usefulness in the face of much larger imperial polities, such as the Mughals or the Qing Dynasty in China, was much less clear. The Mughal invasion could have been used to argue that forts, fortified factories and independent settlements were useless against Mughal might, and merely a pretext used by the Company to justify its monopoly. And indeed, some of the Company's English enemies did just that, maintaining that the English should trade peacefully in Asia under the protection of Asian powers, just as Indian merchants did.²⁵ But that was not the direction the Company took after the Sidi invasion. Instead, it doubled down on the policy of militarized trade supported by revenue raised from local sources – rents, customs and other forms of taxation – setting in motion more organized and institutionalized efforts to get Bombay's inhabitants to finance a significant part of the improvements to the archipelago's defensive infrastructure and the increase in both troop and naval strength.²⁶

Before the siege, the defence of the archipelago was in the hands of four ‘Christian’ companies, who probably numbered in total between 400 and 500 men. These companies were a mix of men from the British Isles and men with Portuguese names, suggesting that they were either Portuguese-born or ‘topasses’ (men of mixed Indian and Portuguese descent). The governor also had a personal guard. But by August of 1690, when the siege was finally lifted, and after taking into account deaths from combat, bombardments, desertions and illness, there were only 182 ‘Christians’ (presumably both Protestants and Indo-Portuguese Catholics) left. By that time, much of the defence was being provided by sepoy mercenaries who numbered 705 men, though some of them were probably paid off and let go that same month.²⁷ Worse was to come. By 1706, after several more visitations of the plague, the garrison was said to consist of 6 commissioned officers and less than 40 English soldiers, many of them sick.²⁸

All this had changed by the time John Burnell wrote his account in or around 1710, and the contrast speaks powerfully to the East India Company directors’ new commitment to its most important north-west Indian settlement. By Burnell's time, the defence of the archipelago was being entrusted to five companies of ‘Christians', consisting of Europeans, topasses and ‘coffrees’ (Africans, probably from Madagascar), for a total of around 600 men. In addition, there were eight permanent companies of sepoys, ‘they being all of them either Moors [Muslims] or Gentows [Hindus] of the Rajput caste’ numbering about another 600. Altogether, Burnell estimated the ‘whole soldiery’ of the island at about 1,200 men, an extraordinary number for a place which, by various estimates, had a total population only somewhere between 10,000 and 16,000 people.²⁹ The defence forces were also in the process of being professionalized, and their conditions of employment and living standards were improved, both in hopes of building greater loyalty than their predecessors had shown during the Sidi invasion and as a way to lower mortality from disease.³⁰ They were furnished with uniforms bearing special company colours, they got a more ‘wholesome diet' and a large new barracks ‘in imitation of Chelsea College’ was built to house some of them.³¹ Not long after that, the town militia, to which all freemen were supposed to belong, began to be phased out. This body had not distinguished itself during the Mughal invasion: only two days after the Sidi army landed, it was reported that ‘most or all of our Militia [has] run away to the other side [the mainland] in boats’.³² During Burnell's time, there still was a town militia (actually two, one for Bombay and one for Mahim) and they were seeing a good deal of service owing to a rumour that Kanhoji Angre was making preparations to invade. However, militia duty, which involved ‘lying out at night’ watching for an invasion that, this time, did not materialize, was much resented by the tradesmen and farmers forced to do this service. On top of that, the professional soldiers were disdainful of the militiamen's fighting skills (Burnell thought they drilled ‘with as much grace as a cow might make a curtsey’).³³ Shortly after Burnell's departure, and when the threat from Angre had somewhat receded, militia duty was changed into a money payment, which in turn was used to purchase the services of yet another company of professional soldiers.

As we have seen, disloyalty, both on the part of their own soldiers and of civilians, had been a marked feature of the siege. At least 113 members of the Bombay garrison deserted over to Sidi Yakut. While the various reforms of the military were clearly intended to cope with this problem, it still left the issue of what to do about townspeople and other inhabitants of the archipelago suspected of disloyalty or collaboration. In an emergency like an invasion, these are, of course, rather subjective terms. In the initial panic, many people fled with their families to the mainland. Were these people really traitors or simply refugees? Others sold food and other supplies to the invading army – because they had few other ways of making a living. Were these people to be viewed in the same negative light as persons or groups who had actually deserted over to the Mughals and fought against their former countrymen, or conspired actively with the Sidi to undermine the Company's interests? After the siege was lifted, the Company used these uncertainties opportunistically to reward people it considered its ‘friends’ and punish those it was suspicious of, usually by confiscating their land.

In particular, the Company worked to consolidate its power at the expense of Catholic landowners, large and small, but especially against the Catholic religious orders who owned significant tracts of land across the archipelago. There was a long history of distrust between the Company and the Jesuit order in particular, and not only in Bombay.³⁴ Even before the Company period, Crown Governor Gervase Lucas had attempted to question the titles to land of many of the large landholders at Bombay, including the Jesuits of Bandra; such challenges and ensuing confiscations were repeated both after a scare of a Dutch invasion in 1673 and then, far more extensively, in the rebuilding process after the Sidi's departure.³⁵

Policies of confiscation were to be long-lived. In 1706, Jesuit lands in Parel, one of the two northernmost islands of the archipelago, were ordered to be confiscated and their buildings pulled down.³⁶ Burnell describes this as Company retaliation against the Jesuit Father Superior of neighbouring Portuguese Bandra for having allegedly supported the Sidi army with provisions and money.³⁷ The same thing happened on the island of Mazagaon, formerly a seat of the noble De Sosa family. Their estates appear to have been confiscated after the siege, and the inhabitants, Koli fishermen, made into slaves or serfs of the Company.³⁸ We have already mentioned the policy of pulling down large churches and other religious buildings that were seen as a security threat. These policies certainly did not make Bombay into a completely English island: the Company needed a significant population of non-English people – Indo-Portuguese, Hindus, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Armenians, etc., ideally paying taxes and customs fees, fishing and growing food – for the settlement to be viable. But they did have the effect of concentrating significantly more political and military power and economic control in the Company than had been the case before. Bombay's ‘cosmopolitanism’ was always one part acceptance and one part segregation and xenophobia, but its dual character became even more pronounced in the aftermath of the Sidi's siege. This schizophrenia continues to characterize modern global cities today, despite their pretensions to openness – ensured less by fortifications than by security barriers, segregation and exurbanization.³⁹

There was one other significant area of vulnerability going forward, and that was the geography of the archipelago itself.⁴⁰ Part of the confusion about whether Bombay was a single place or many stemmed from the fact that it was a group of seven islands at high tide and a series of salt marshes at low tide, with many ‘breaches’ where the sea flowed around and into the land. This was a problem for at least three reasons. First, it limited the amount of cultivable land on the archipelago. This, combined with the local Hindu population's antipathy to cow-killing, made the salt-beef-dependent English inhabitants of the settlement highly reliant on provisions from elsewhere, including Portuguese Bandra and Salsette to the north. Burnell writes: ‘Cows are a scarce commodity on the Island, as in truth is everything else of provision, we being beholden to our neighbours the Portuguese for almost everything we eat; otherwise we might starve, were we only to subsist on the product of the Island.’⁴¹ Ironically enough, the other great source of provision was the hinterland near the Sidi Yakut's stronghold of Janjira to the south, which, according to one commentator, probably writing of the 1690s and early 1700s, ‘feeds good numbers of black cattle, from whence Bombay is mostly supplied, when they keep in good terms with the Sidi, otherwise he makes them feed on fish’.⁴² Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Bombay, obtaining fish was not always straightforward either. At least during Burnell's time, the villagers at Karanjah, a large island across the bay, began seizing and enslaving fishermen, so that they had to be convoyed out daily to their fishing stakes using Company boats. Moreover, there were already beginning to be signs of overfishing in the bay.⁴³ Food vulnerability, and specifically dependence for food provision on people one had little reason to trust, was a serious and ongoing problem for the settlement at Bombay. It made the island less defensible (there had been severe food shortages during the siege), and it made it more difficult to attract shipping to the port, since ships could not be sure of their ability to re-provision.

Second, when the tide was high, it offered numerous potential entry points, often shielded from sight by hills, for invaders coming in by boat from the mainland. That was precisely what the Sidi's army had done: the men were landed at night on a beach near Sewri Creek on the island of Parel and presumably crossed over to Mazagaon (where they established their headquarters), and then Bombay Island by the simple expedient of walking across the mud-flats at low tide. As we have seen, in the fortification projects that followed the siege, particular attention was paid to surveilling these ‘breaches’; but longer-term solutions were also needed. It is difficult to say when the idea of joining all the tidal islands into one first came up but projects to achieve it were in full swing during Burnell's time. He reports on the ongoing work to dam the breaches between the islands of Worli and Mahim, and between Mahim and Sion. Not coincidentally, these inlets were strategically located directly across from Portuguese territory and the mainland.⁴⁴ And though Burnell does not mention it, work also began in 1711 on damming up the ‘Great Breach’ between Worli and the Malabar Hill area of Bombay Island. This was finally successful over a decade later, and it both freed up land for agricultural purposes and eliminated one of the most worrisome potential avenues of attack by sea, since at high tide enemy troops could (in theory) be landed within a stone's throw of Bombay town.

Third, damming up the breaches, and converting the island's geography, was seen as part of a wider effort during the first decade of the eighteenth century at civic improvements, and especially what one might understand as a public health policy. ‘The Breaches must be stopt', London wrote the Bombay Council in 1717, not only because it would make for more arable and inhabitable land, but ‘as it will render the island more healthful’.⁴⁵ The Bombay government also took measures to reduce or eliminate ‘buckshawing’ – the use of dried fish as fertilizer – which produced a noxious smell and was thought to spread disease, and which had been a matter of great debate and concern almost since the Company's earliest days at Bombay.⁴⁶ As London instructed in 1718, ‘The Complaint of being hindered [in] Buckshawing their Trees must never be redrest, the common benefit of the Peoples to be preferred to all Considerations’ – in other words, the council was to resist lobbying by locals to restore the practice.⁴⁷ Under the government of Nicholas Waite in the opening years of the 1700s, the council also forbade the fermenting of coconuts in the ground – a common practice for making coir, a kind of rope made from coconut shells; it also explored various possibilities for confronting the dysentery that plagued the island, including adding chalk to the water, though it is not clear what if any measures were actually undertaken in that regard.

If the Sidi's invasion of the island showed anything, it was the weakness of the archipelago's military infrastructure. Bombay would never secure its settlement without first attending to security. During the first half of the eighteenth century, though all vulnerable parts of the archipelago/island received the attention of military planners, the most dangerous areas, as we have seen, were deemed to be the northern parts abutting the waterway that divided Bombay from Salsette and Bassein. A series of governments also used the ongoing maritime threat of ‘piracy', especially that of the Maratha naval commander Kanhoji Angre, to expand the naval power of the island as well; Charles Boone, upon taking over as governor in 1715, almost immediately had four frigates built at Bombay for both defensive and offensive purposes; it was also Boone who implemented a 1 per cent excise tax to help fund the rebuilding of Bombay's town wall. Stephen Law, two decades later, had a ditch dug and a number of houses and trees removed from the fort's environs in order to improve its security from without and within.⁴⁸

For the colonial government, there was a direct and intimate relationship between civil and martial improvements. Both ensured the stability and increase of population, which in turn produced revenue. This allowed for greater civil and martial improvement. It was a sort of civil–military–fiscalism that was at the core of the Company's conception of government at Bombay, always with the consequences of failure – and particularly the invasion of 1689 – in mind. Thus, for example, Boone's government not only laid the foundation for the naval force that would become the Bombay Marine; it also literally laid the cornerstone for the Protestant church that had been envisioned by Gerald Aungier almost half a century earlier.⁴⁹ Both were also necessary to create an urban colony as it had been imagined by early Company projectors, as was the formal incorporation of the town into a municipality in 1727, which, alongside Calcutta and Madras, was meant to facilitate its ability both to administer justice and to collect revenue from inhabitants for civic improvements. Both were also symbolic milestones in the lengthy effort to create an at least partially English and Protestant city.

By mid-century, though threats from the Indian mainland had not entirely abated, far more attention was being paid to the French threat, which was just as or more likely to come from the sea, that is from the Arabian Sea to the west, or from attempts to cruise into the bay and menace Bombay town from the east. This led to a new flurry of activity designed to reinforce and expand Bombay's defences. Among these improvements, two in particular perhaps most symbolized the final transition of Bombay from a small, vulnerable settlement on the edge of Mughal, Maratha and Portuguese empires to being the cornerstone of a British empire in western Asia. First, in 1762, the Mendham's Point cemetery was flattened in order to ensure a better sight-line to the main entrance to Bombay Harbour. This cemetery, probably dating back at least a century, had harboured many of the casualties of the Sidi invasion and subsequent plague, but it also contained large and impressive stone and plaster tombs of various Company notables from Bombay's early days as an English settlement. These monuments to another era were now deemed to impede artillery fire out across the entrance to the bay, so they had to go.⁵⁰ The other, finally, was the removal of Dongri Hill, from whose summit the Sidi artillery emplacements had done so much damage. It was still a threat, according to the defence planners, and its fort, of which Burnell had been so proud, could not be depended upon to keep it out of enemy hands. So the entire hill was levelled, a new fort built on the now flat ground and the complex joined to the town wall – a symbol of a new Bombay in a new imperial world.⁵¹

Conclusion

Bombay did ultimately become both a crucial centre of colonial British India and ultimately the global city now called Mumbai, but it did not do so easily, quickly or predictably. The early years of East India Company settlement were punctuated by rebellion and the threat of rebellion. An extremely destructive invasion and siege by Mughal forces reinforced an ever-present sense of danger and precariousness, and the Bombay of the early eighteenth century was, literally, built on ruins and death. In order to hold on to Bombay, the Company had to substantially build up its troop strength, reform its military and make significant changes to the fiscal and defensive infrastructure of the town and surrounding islands. It also chose to adopt punitive policies designed to increase its hold over the polyglot and multi-religious population of the archipelago. Finally, the Company remade the geography of the Bombay archipelago, altering its relationship both to the sea and nearby land-masses, and building a single contiguous island out of what had been a more complicated geography.

Thinking about the history of early Bombay offers methodological perspective on the larger project of studying global cities in the early modern period. Bombay first began its life on the outskirts of various regional and global imperial systems, before becoming a vulnerable imperial space with global possibilities. It was that vulnerability that impelled its further transition into an urban space, predicated upon a range of unanticipated and at times tragic circumstances. In retrospect, such challenges may seem like mere incidents but at the time each appeared to be a profound and existential threat. Moreover, the process by which Bombay became ‘English’ in any meaningful sense was protracted, uncertain and one might argue never completed. Nonetheless, this early history of failure and retrenchment in response to the constant anxieties and concerns of potential annihilation, though fitting uncomfortably within teleological and triumphalist narratives, was an integral and possibly indispensable part of the story of the making of modern Bombay.