Part II / City Walk
The mid 1500s saw the initiation of Britain’s transatlantic slave trade by John Hawkins.2 At this time, an English merchant and an employee of Queen Elizabeth I named Thomas Gresham had returned from his travels to Antwerp and made 25 Old Broad Street his residence. If you look up all the way to the top of the clock tower in front of you, you can find his statue below the clock. In the 1570s, Gresham became so enamoured by Antwerp’s slave trade-driven financial model of the bourse, that he went on to replicate the model in England. This became the Royal Exchange, where we are now standing.3Around the same time, Gresham built a manor house at Osterley in West London.
Five thousand miles away, the southeastern coast of the Indian subcontinent thrived as an ancient hub of trade and commerce. This Indian Ocean littoral, called the Coromandel Coast, fell under the occupation of the Portuguese to satisfy their mercantile interests.4 In a small settlement on the coast, the Portuguese established Sao Thome as their headquarters, competing with the interests of Dutch settlers in the area.5
Walk ahead past the red phonebooth.
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 born6 and its headquarters was located a little further away to your left - at Leadenhall Street where the Lloyds Building now stands.7
Turn right and walk down the road.
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.8
© Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University.
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.9 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 a 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 I10, 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’,11 joining a very important class of bankers in England called the goldsmith-bankers and brokers.
At the junction, you will see a building with a black clock ahead of you. Walk towards the building and play the next audio when you reach.
Image: A Plan of Fort St. George and the City of Madras. 1747. Harvard Map Collection digital maps. © Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University. (Creative Commons)
2 Royal Museums Greenwich. “Who was John Hawkins?”. Accessed June 9, 2024. https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/john-hawkins-admiral-privateer-slave-trader
3 Drayton, Richard. 2019. “Slavery and the City of London”. Gresham College. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2019-10-28_RichardDrayton_SlaveryCity-T.pdf
4 Pillai, Naraina, Peter Bernhard, and Wilhelm Heine. 2024. “From the Coromandel Coast to the Straits: Revisiting Our Tamil Heritage.” Roots.sg. https://www.roots.gov.sg/stories-landing/stories/From-the-Coromandel-Coast-to-the-Straits
5 Aranha, Paolo. “From Meliapor to Mylapore, 1662–1749: The Portuguese Presence in São Tomé between the Qutb Shāhī Conquest and Its Incorporation into British Madras.” Chapter. In Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511–2011, Vol. 1: The Making of the Luso-Asian World: Intricacies of Engagement, 67–82. Lectures, Workshops, and Proceedings of International Conferences. ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, 2011.
6 Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "East India Company." Encyclopedia Britannica, July 29, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/topic/East-India-Company.
7 Roy, Malini. 2017. “East India Company headquarters on Leadenhall Street - Asian and African studies blog.” Blogs. https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2017/01/east-india-company-headquarters-on-leadenhall-street.html
8 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
9 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.
10 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. 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. Pg. 7-11
11 “Child & Co”. Natwest Group Heritage Hub. Accessed June 08, 2024.
https://www.natwestgroup.com/heritage/companies/child-and-co.html