Power and Distant Display: Early English "Ambassadors" in Moghul India

Abstract

A t Sir Thomas Roe's 1615 landing on the beaches of Surat, the English fleet and royal actor performed an inaugural scene that was less than novel to its native spectators. Although Roe was the first English ambassador to set foot in India, belatedness nagged the embassy. Across the Indian Ocean, trade had thrived for centuries, the last hundred years under Portuguese coercion of the sea-lanes.1 More recently, several London Company merchants had presented themselves in India as ambassadors and thus degraded the dignity of the tide. When government agents from Cambaya boarded the fleet's flagship and learned that, on another vessel, an English ambassador was about to land at Surat, this name of an ambassador, wrote Roe, laughd one upon a nother; it being become ridiculous, so many hauing assumed that tide, and not performed the offices. The agents did not bother to visit him. For all they could tell, Roe added mordantly, I might be an imposture as well as the rest.2 It was the first of many ironies to ensnare his embassy. Moghul India was an empire of immense cultural complexity, sophistication, opulence, and power. It had small need of England's goods, and its state pomp eclipsed analogous English shows. At Surat, where East India Company merchants hoped to establish a factory (a house for the storage and sale of goods), the English were tolerated rather