Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/95

Rh many of the attributes, without much of the responsibility, of dependent states. It had become abundantly clear that this organization of a Chartered Company, with powers of internal control and self-defence, possessing in some degree the resources and administrative traditions, the unity of plan and purpose, and the larger interests and relative responsibilities of a local government, was necessary to the existence of British commerce in Asia, where England then had no diplomatic representatives and many dangerous rivals. The long contest throughout the seventeenth century between England and Holland in the East Indies was destined to terminate in a kind of partition of that vast commercial domain.

Not until the nineteenth century was a final political settlement accomplished; yet the first approaches toward this end were already perceptible in the tendency of English enterprise to converge, as we have said, upon India itself, while the Dutch were visibly drawing off and collecting their strength toward Java and Sumatra. Beyond the Straits of Malacca they were still predominant; the headquarters of their administration were at Batavia; and they had seized, in 1683, the valuable position of Bantam in Java, which gave them a virtual monopoly of the trade in pepper, the most valuable commodity from those regions. The English Company had before them the example of the Dutch, who had adopted from the Portuguese the policy of making their settlements self-protective by fortifications and strong garrisons, of acquiring territory, and