Chapter III / Osterley Walk
The Birth of Fort St. George
You should now be near the sign that reads “Nine Acre Trail”. Take the path on the left.
With the ambition to dominate trade in Asia over other European competitors, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to an English corporation of wealthy, rapacious merchants. The charter led to the creation of a ruthless imperial corporation that would colonise and plunder most of south Asia, changing the world for the worse.
In 1600, the English East India Company was born.13
Not long after, seeking a strong foothold in the Indian subcontinent, the Company purchased and fortified a small piece of land on the Coromandel Coast in a village called Madrasapattnam.
The newly-built Fort St. George became ‘White Town’- the governing body of the village settled by the British and everything outside of the fort was known as the Black Town inhabited by those who were native to the land.14
These coloured, racial walls of division were built around the white colony of Fort St. George by its corrupt British-American governor: Elihu Yale. Yale was actively involved in the Indian Ocean slave trade, by ordering the export of slaves from Fort St. George into Europe and many of the Company’s colonies.15
© Yale University Art Gallery.
As the village around the fort grew, the town of Madras was born and it became a major trading port of the Company in the Indian Ocean. Madras became the capital of the Company’s provincial territory, the Madras Presidency, which spanned the present-day Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh in their entirety, and in parts the states of Kerala, Karnataka and Odisha.
The wealth that Yale amassed from his time as slave-trading Governor of Madras aided the creation of one of the wealthiest and most celebrated institutions in the world, Yale University.
Much of Yale’s fortunes came from trading diamonds in India where he was one of the biggest traders in the business. Among the many merchants that he traded precious gems with was Francis Child I,16 a seasoned goldsmith and merchant in London.
At Fleet Street in London, Francis Child had partnered with Robert Blanchard to run an establishment named ‘Blanchard and Child’,17 joining a very important class of bankers in England called the goldsmith-bankers and brokers or the GSBs. ]
At the end of the winding path, turn left onto Osterley Lane. Play the audio for Chapter IV at the location pinned in the map below.
Images:
1. A Plan of Fort St. George and the City of Madras. 1747 (990126042500203941) Harvard Map Collection digital maps. © Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University. (Creative Commons)
2. Seeman the younger, Enoch. 1789. Portrait of Gov. Elihu Yale (1648-9–1721). © Yale University Art Gallery. (Public Domain)
13 Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "East India Company." Encyclopedia Britannica, July 29, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/topic/East-India-Company.
14 Smith, Stefan Halikowski. 2018. “A Prospect of Fort St.George and Plan of the city of Madras”. British Library: Untold Lives Blog. Accessed August 28, 2024.https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2018/02/a-prospect-of-fort-stgeorge-and-plan-of-the-city-of-madras.html
15 Pandey, Geeta. 2024. “Elihu Yale: The cruel and greedy Yale benefactor who traded in Indian slaves.” BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-68444807.
16 Sharma, Yuthika and Davies, Pauline. 2013. ‘'A jaghire without a crime: the East India Company and the Indian Ocean material world at Osterley, 1700-1800.’, East India Company at Home (February 2013), p. 88.
https://bpb-eu w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dist/1/251/files/2013/02/Osterley-Park-PDF-Final-19.08.14.pdf. Pages 7-11
17 “Child & Co”. Natwest Group Heritage Hub. Accessed June 08, 2024. https://www.natwestgroup.com/heritage/companies/child-and-co.html