ABSTRACT
The East India Company (EIC) was a joint stock company established by a group of merchants in 1600 to trade with India. Its primary aim during the seventeenth and for most of the eighteenth centuries was to establish monopolistic control over trade in India by defeating the competing European powers, such as the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, and the Danes. The British and Indian interaction during this period, according to Michael Edwards, was ‘unselfconscious.’ This chapter looks at the early interactions and the educational institutions it created and why it changed into a rigid hierarchical relationship of the ruler and the ruled.
