The political objectives and ideology

In 1721 when a squadron of the Royal Navy was sent to the Indian Ocean to suppress some European pirates who had been molesting local shipping, its commander, Commodore Mathews, demanded that the Company's ships should strike their pennants to him and that he should receive the first salutes from the land settlements. The Bombay Council protested to the authorities at home that these instructions, if they were official, lessened the status of the Company's servants in the eyes of the Indian political rulers. For the President of Bombay had always appeared in India as a public minister and the king's governor. The statement highlights an important aspect of the Company's trading methods in Asia. The claim made by Bombay could not of course be sustained in a strictly legal sense, but it bears witness to a de-facto position in which the distinction between delegated political power and direct representation of national sovereignty was not always observed in practice. This is not to say that questions of legitimacy and diplomatic protocol were unimportant in Asian political order. From the point of view of Mughal officers who had to deal with the English and Dutch East India Companies, it made little difference whether the political power possessed by the Companies was direct or indirect. What mattered to them was the indisputable fact that the European traders were totally different from any other Asian commercial groups with whom they came into contact.