Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/22

 xiv FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE in the East, built on native alliances and upheld by drilled native soldiers, was no invention of Dupleix improved upon by Clive. It developed with a slow continuous growth from the first Portuguese garrison in Malabar; through the Dutch system of subjuga- tion by treaty; to the Feudatory States, the Sepoy army, and the Imperial Service Troops of British India. Much that we have accomplished our prede- cessors attempted, and not in vain. t Nor were their forms of home-control less fruit- ful of analogy than their experiments in Indian ad- ministration. The conquest and commerce of India were in Portugal royal prerogatives, almost a private estate of the Portuguese kings. The Dutch first tried separate voyages, then a United Company which be- came more and more national in character till it ended in a State Department. The English commerce with the East also started on the basis of royal prerogative the prerogative of granting monopolies in trade. Under the later Stuarts the East India Company formed a battle-ground between the ancient privileges of the Crown and the growing strength of the nation; with the Revolution, the right of granting its char- ters passed finally to Parliament. Nor have the varied forms of organization which the Dutch devised for their Indian trade lacked counterparts in Eng- land; from the London Company's initial system of separate voyages, and its regulated or joint-stock associations of the seventeenth century, to the United East India Company and Board of Control in the