Like Louis’s, Alamgir’s conquests in his own continent were unprecedented: he ruled more of India than anyone else in Indian history except the British in later centuries – but pride and empire have no end. Neither of them could stop. When Alamgir’s vizier suggested they return to Delhi, World Seizer snarled, ‘I wonder how an omniscient hereditary servant like you could request this.’ All the while, the family of Shivaji still held out in Deccan, now led by Rajaram’s remarkable widow Taibai, just twenty-five years old, warrior queen daughter of Shivaji’s commander-in-chief. ‘So long as a breath of this mortal life remains, there’s no release from toil,’ said Alamgir. One of his weary officers complained, ‘Such was his longing for taking all the forts, he personally runs about, panting for any heap of stones.’ Yet his war was a gigantic enterprise: in 1695, his camp was thirty miles in circumference, with 60,000 cavalry, 100,000 infantry, 50,000 camels, 3,000 elephants and 250 bazaars ranged around his imperial red tent, where he held court with his sons and his Georgian dancer-paramour, Udaipuri.
Only the biggest economy in the world could fund war on such a scale: 24 per cent of global GDP was Indian and Alamgir’s annual revenue was ten times that of Louis. While Europeans had traditionally clothed themselves in wool or linen, now their access to Indian cotton launched such a ‘calico craze’ for Indian textiles –
Alamgir treated the Europeans in India as lucrative and useful intermediaries, buying ships and cannon from the Portuguese, but there was no doubt who was in charge. In 1686, the EIC, alarmed by French growth in India, demanded more trading rights. In 1688, Alamgir conquered Golconda, focusing his attention on the English Fort St George, Madras (Chennai). The EIC and Alamgir were expanding into the new areas at the same time, but when the clash came, Alamgir won easily.
Alamgir demanded higher taxes; the English resisted, at which Alamgir attacked Bombay and Surat: the English submitted humiliatingly, prostrating themselves before the emperor and paying a huge indemnity to get back their factories. Then in September 1695 a slave-trading English pirate, Long Ben (aka Henry Every), pulled off a remarkable heist, attacking Alamgir’s annual twenty-five-ship flotilla to Mecca and capturing the gold-packed dhow the
London sent out a veteran India merchant as the new president of Madras to negotiate. Thomas Pitt was the classic poacher turned gamekeeper. Thirty years earlier, this vicar’s son from Dorset had started trading as a non-EIC trader (an ‘interloper’), earning a fine and a fortune that enabled him to return home and buy a country estate and a seat in Parliament. Now hired by the EIC, Pitt was sent out to appease Alamgir, who was besieging Fort St George. Pitt folded and went on to negotiate a gigantic fine of 150,000 rupees before Bombay was restored and a new factory founded at Calcutta (Kolkata), while in Madras, he fortified the growing town. Taking advantage of the many Indian soldiers fighting in the Deccan, he started to hire Indian mercenaries, known as sepoys.
Pitt hated the English humiliation, complained that the ‘native governors have the knack of tramping upon us and extorting what they please’ – something they would never stop doing ‘until we have made them sensible of our power’. That was impossible while Alamgir ruled.
Pitt had depleted his first fortune, but now, about to retire, he acquired a 426-carat diamond, mined at Kollur and smuggled out by a slave who concealed it within a wound in his body. It was then stolen by a Englishman who murdered the slave and sold it to an Indian merchant. In 1701, for around £20,000, the merchant sold it to Pitt, who sent it home to England in the heel of his son Robert’s shoe and later sold it in Paris for the gargantuan sum of £135,000.* England’s rise in India and elsewhere would be directed by the Pitts.
