Place · European river ports · India
Hooghly–Chinsurah
The 30-kilometre stretch of the Hooghly riverbank between Chinsurah and Serampore in West Bengal where Portuguese (Hooghly 1537), Dutch (Chinsurah 1635), Danish (Serampore 1755), French (Chandannagar 1673) and English (Calcutta 1690) settlements were strung along one river. The Mughal-sanctioned Portuguese pirate state at Hooghly was destroyed by Shah Jahan in 1632; the Dutch VOC held Chinsurah until 1825 when it was ceded to the British for Sumatra; the Danes sold Serampore to the British in 1845; the French held Chandannagar until 1950 when it joined India through plebiscite. The strip is the fullest surviving case of competing European enclaves on one subcontinental river.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.900, 88.390
Connections (6)
- Successor capital ofKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
The Hooghly carried Portuguese Bandel, Dutch Chinsurah, Danish Serampore, French Chandernagore and English Calcutta within about thirty kilometres of each other, each a sovereign patch on one riverbank. Calcutta swallowed the trade of all of them after Plassey, and the smaller settlements were bought or taken one by one — Chinsurah in 1825, Serampore in 1845, Chandernagore not until 1949. The river's Europeans are a useful reminder that British India was not inevitable.
- CampaignPlassey (Palāśī)
Plassey was fought a day's march north of the Hooghly settlements in June 1757 and decided by Mir Jafar's defection rather than by fighting — a few hundred casualties, and the revenues of Bengal. The European river towns downstream had been trading posts under Mughal licence for a century and a half; within eight years one of them was collecting the province's land revenue, which is the transition from trading to ruling in a single document.
- Power passed toOld Goa
Portuguese private traders had a fortified settlement at Hooghly from 1579 until Shah Jahan's governor Qasim Khan stormed it in 1632 for piracy and slave-raiding in the delta. The survivors regrouped downriver at Bandel. Portugal never recovered a position in Bengal, and the river that the Estado lost is the one the Dutch, French, Danes and English then divided between them.
- Site adjacencyBanquibazar
Add the Ostend Company's Banquibazar to Portuguese Bandel, Dutch Chinsurah, French Chandernagore, Danish Serampore and English Calcutta and six European flags stood within thirty kilometres of one another on one river. None of them held more than a few square miles. What they were competing for was access to Bengal's weavers and the Nawab's customs terms, not land.
- Trade routeSonargaon
Sonargaon in the eastern delta and the Hooghly reach in the west were the two ends of Bengal's export economy, and both depended on channels that moved. As the Ganges shifted east the Bhagirathi-Hooghly declined as a river and rose as a European settlement, while Sonargaon was left inland. European companies followed the water, not the towns.
- Alternative toThe Ganges' eastward migration
As the Ganges moved east the Bhagirathi-Hooghly declined as a river and rose as a European settlement: shallow enough to keep out rivals' large ships, deep enough for the companies' own. Calcutta's whole existence depends on a dying channel, which is why the Farakka barrage was built in 1975 to force water back down it, and why that is still disputed with Bangladesh.
On these journeys
Sources
Company factory records
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