Place · capital & Company headquarters · United Kingdom
London
Also known as London, East India House, Leadenhall Street, Court of Directors
The city the East India Company was chartered in on the last day of 1600 and directed from, first out of Founders' Hall and then from East India House in Leadenhall Street. Thomas Roe's embassy to Jahāngīr was commissioned here by James I and paid for by the Company.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 51.507, -0.128
Worth knowing
The Company's own records, some fourteen kilometres of shelving, are now the India Office Records in the British Library, and they are the largest single archive of Indian administrative history anywhere. The Tower of London, which holds the Koh-i-Noor, is a separate entry in this repository.
Connections (4)
- Imperial administration ofAgra Fort
Roe was sent from London to get a commercial treaty under seal and came back with farmans — revocable imperial permissions rather than a binding agreement between states. He regarded that as failure. In practice the farmans allowed factories at Surat and on the Bay, and the Company built on them for a hundred and forty years until Plassey made treaties unnecessary.
- Alternative toVenice
Venice priced the Indies for four centuries by holding the Levant end of the overland route; London chartered a joint-stock company in 1600 to go round the Cape and buy at source. Roe's embassy is the early, unimpressive stage of the second arrangement, and within a century it had made the first irrelevant.
- BirthplaceAnnie Besant
Annie Besant was born Annie Wood on 1 October 1847 at Clapham in south London to William Burton Persse Wood (an Anglo-Irish surgeon) and Emily Morris. Her early public life in London — her 1870s involvement with Charles Bradlaugh's National Secular Society, her 1877 trial for publishing Charles Knowlton's birth-control pamphlet (acquitted on appeal 1878), her 1884 Fabian Society membership, her 1888 London Matchgirls' Strike organising, and her 1889 school board election for Tower Hamlets — shaped the political and secular reform ideas that she later brought to India after joining the Theosophical Society in 1889. London thus marks the pre-Theosophical formation that preceded her 1893 move to India.
- TransmissionPachīsī / Ludo
Britain is where pachisi turned into Ludo. Alfred Coller marketed it in England in 1896 and later patented it as British patent 14636, selling it as Royal Ludo: the cross-shaped track kept, the cowrie shells replaced by a single cubic die, the name taken from the Latin for “I play”. The Royal Navy took it to sea as Uckers, and the game came back to India under its English name, so that the Ludo board sold in Indian shops today is pachisi returned by way of England.
On these journeys
- Sir Thomas Roe — the first English embassy (1615–19)
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Porbandar to Rajghat (1869–1948)
Sources
Wikipedia, “London”. The Royal Charter of 31 December 1600; The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India 1615–19, ed. William Foster (1926); the India Office Records, British Library.
Open London in the repository →