The Battle of Cassel, fought near the…

A ship in the service of the East India Company had been forced to land on Ceylon en route to Persia, after suffering the loss of the ship's mast on November 1659 in a storm.

The ship had been impounded and sixteen of the crew, including Captain Robert Knox and his eifhteen-year-old son, also named Robert Knox, had been taken captive by the troops of the Kandyan king, Râjasingha II.

The elder Knox had inadvertently angered the king by not observing the expected formalities and had the misfortune to do so during a period of tension between the king and some of the European powers.

Although the crew was forbidden from leaving the kingdom, they were treated fairly leniently; the younger Knox was able to establish himself as a farmer, moneylender and peddler.

Both father and son had suffered severely from malaria and the elder Knox had died in February 1661 after a long illness.

The younger Knox had eventually escaped with one companion, Stephen Rutland, after nineteen years of captivity.

The two men were able to reach Arippu, a Dutch fort on the northwest coast of the island.

The Dutch treated Knox generously and transported him to Batavia (now Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies, from where he was able to return home on an English vessel, the Caesar, arriving back in London in September 1680.

During the voyage, Knox had written the manuscript of An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, an account of his experiences on Ceylon, which is published in 1681.

The book is accompanied by engravings showing the inhabitants, their customs and agricultural techniques.

It attracts widespread interest and makes Knox internationally famous, influencing Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as well as sparking a friendship with Robert Hooke of the Royal Society.

One of the earliest and most detailed European accounts of life on Ceylon, it is today seen as an invaluable record of the island in the seventeenth century.

The Indian subcontinent had had indirect relations with Europe by both overland caravans and maritime routes, dating back to the fifth century BCE.

The lucrative spice trade with India had been mainly in the hands of Arab merchants.

By the fifteenth century, European traders had come to believe that the commissions they had to pay the Arabs were prohibitively high and therefore sent out fleets in search of new trade routes to India.

The arrival of the Europeans in the last quarter of the fifteenth century marked a great turning point in the history of the subcontinent.

The dynamics of the history of the subcontinent come to be shaped chiefly by the Europeans' political and trade relations with India as India is swept into the vortex of Western power politics.

The arrival of the Europeans generally coincides with the gradual decline of Mughal power, and the subcontinent becomes an arena of struggle not only between Europeans and the indigenous rulers but also among the Europeans.

Siraj ud Daulah, governor of Bengal, unwisely provokes a military confrontation with the British at Plassey in 1757.

He is defeated by Robert Clive, an adventurous young official of the British East India Company.

Clive's victory is consolidated in 1764 at the Battle of Buxar on the Ganges, where he defeats the Mughal emperor.

As a result, the British East India Company is granted the title of diwan (collector of the revenue) in the areas of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, making it the supreme, but not titular, governing power.

Henceforth the British will govern Bengal and from here extend their rule to all of India.

Vasco da Gama had led the first documented European expedition to India, sailing into Calicut on the southwest coast in 1498.

In 1510 the Portuguese had captured Goa, which has become the seat of their activity

Under Admiral Alfonso de Albuquerque, Portugal had successfully challenged Arab power in the Indian Ocean and dominated the sea routes for a century.

Jesuits had come to "convert, to converse, and to record" observations of India.

The Protestant countries of the Netherlands and England, upset by the Portuguese monopoly, form private trading companies at the turn of the seventeenth century to challenge the Portuguese.

Mughal officials permit  the new carriers of India's considerable export trade to establish trading posts (factories) in India.

The Dutch East India Company concentrates mainly on the spice trade from present-day Indonesia.

Britain's East India Company carries on trade with India.

The French East India Company also sets up factories.

The Mughal emperor in 1717, Farrukh-siyar (r. 1713-19), gives the British—who by now have already established themselves in the south and the west—a grant of thirty-eight villages near Calcutta, acknowledging their importance to the continuity of international trade in the Bengal economy.

As do the Dutch and the French, the British bring silver bullion and copper to pay for transactions, helping the smooth functioning of the Mughal revenue system and increasing the benefits to local artisans and traders.

The fortified warehouses of the British bring extraterritorial status, which enables them to administer their own civil and criminal laws and offered numerous employment opportunities as well as asylum to foreigners and Indians.

The British factories successfully compete with their rivals as their size and population grow.

The original clusters of fishing villages (Madras and Calcutta) or series of islands (Bombay) become headquarters of the British administrative zones, or presidencies as they generally come to be known.

The factories and their immediate environs, known as the White-town, represent the actual and symbolic preeminence of the British—in terms of their political power—as well as their cultural values and social practices; meanwhile, their Indian collaborators live in the Black-town, separated from the factories by several kilometers.

Robert Clive's troops defeat the Mughal forces at Buxar (Baksar, west of Patna in Bihar) in 1765, and the Mughal emperor (Shah Alam, r. 1759-1806) confers on the company administrative rights over Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, a region of roughly twenty-five million people with an annual revenue of forty million rupees.

The imperial grant virtually establishes the company as a sovereign power, and Clive becomes the first British governor of Bengal.

Besides the presence of the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French, there are two lesser but noteworthy colonial groups.

Danish entrepreneurs establish themselves at several ports on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, in the vicinity of Calcutta and inland at Patna between 1695 and 1740.

Austrian enterprises are set up in the 1720s on the vicinity of Surat in modern-day southeastern Gujarat.

As with the other non-British enterprises, the Danish and Austrian enclaves are taken over by the British between 1765 and 1815.

The European factories in India serve during the wars of the eighteenth century not only as collection and transshipment points for trade but also increasingly as fortified centers of refuge for both foreigners and Indians.

British factories gradually begin to apply British law to disputes arising within their jurisdiction.

The posts also begin to grow in area and population.

Armed company servants are effective protectors of trade.

As rival contenders for power call for armed assistance and as individual European adventurers find permanent homes in India, British and French companies find themselves more and more involved in local politics in the south and in Bengal.

Plots and counterplots climax when British East India Company forces, led by Robert Clive, decisively defeat the larger but divided forces of Nawab Siraj-ud-Dawlah at Plassey (Pilasi) in Bengal in 1757.

The Dutch force the Kandyans in 1766 to sign a treaty, which the Kandyans later consider so harsh that they immediately begin searching for foreign assistance in expelling their foes.

They approach the British in 1762, 1782, and 1795.

The first Kandyan missions fail, but in 1795, British emissaries offer a draft treaty that will extend military aid in return for control of the seacoast and a monopoly of the cinnamon trade.

The Kandyan king unsuccessfully seeks better terms, and the British manage to oust the Dutch without significant help in 1796.

The British, while peace negotiations are under way in Europe in 1796, assume Sri Lanka will eventually be restored to the Dutch.

By 1797 however, London has decided to retain the island as a British possession.

The government compels the British East India Company to share in the administration of the island and guarantees the company a monopoly of trade, especially the moderately profitable—but no longer robust—cinnamon trade.

The governor of the island is responsible for law and order, but financial and commercial matters are under the control of the director of the East India Company.

This system of "dual control" lasts from 1798 to 1802.

After the Dutch formally cede the island to the British in the 1801 Peace of Amiens, Sri Lanka becomes Britain's first crown colony.

Following Lord Nelson's naval victory over the French at Trafalgar in 1805, British superiority on the seas is unchallenged and provides new security for the British colonies in Asia.

An English privateer had attacked the Portuguese off Sri Lanka's southwestern port of Galle in 1592.

This action was England's first recorded contact with Sri Lanka.

A decade later, Ralph Fitch, traveling from India, became the first known English visitor to Sri Lanka.

The English did not record their first in-depth impressions of the island until the mid-seventeenth century, when Robert Knox, a sailor, was captured when his ship docked for repairs near Trincomalee.

The Kandyans had kept him prisoner between 1660 and 1680.

After his escape, Knox wrote a popular book entitled An Historical Rela-tion of the Island of Ceylon in which he described his years among his "decadent" captors.

By the mid-eighteenth century, it is apparent that the Mughal Empire (1526-1757) in India faces imminent collapse, and the major European powers are positioning themselves to fill the power vacuum in the subcontinent.

Dutch holdings on Sri Lanka are challenged in time by the British, who have an interest in the excel- lent harbor at Trincomalee.

The British interest in procuring an all-weather port is whetted when they almost lose the Indian port of Madras to the French in 1758.

The Dutch refuse to grant the British permission to dock ships at Trincomalee (after The Nether- lands's decision to support the French in the American War of Independence), goading the British into action.

After skirmishing with both the Dutch and French, the British take Trincomalee in 1796 and proceed to expel the Dutch from the island.