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Colonial India was the part of the Indian subcontinent that was occupied by European colonial powers during and after the Age of Discovery. European power was exerted both by conquest and trade, especially in spice trade. The search for the wealth and prosperity of India led to the colonisation of the Americas after Christopher Columbus went to the Americas in 1492. Only a few years later, near the end of the 15th century, Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama became the first European to re-establish direct trade links with India by being the first to arrive by circumnavigating Africa (). Having arrived in Calicut, which by then was one of the major trading ports of the eastern world, he obtained permission to trade in the city from the Saamoothiri. The next to arrive Dutch India, with their main base in Ceylon. Their expansion into India was halted after their defeat in the Battle of Colachel to the Travancore, during the Travancore–Dutch War on the hands of Marthanda Varma.
Trading rivalries among the seafaring European powers brought other coastal powers from the empires of Europe to India. The Dutch Republic, England, France, and Denmark–Norway all established trading posts in India in the early 17th century. As the Mughal Empire disintegrated in the early 18th century, and then as the Maratha Empire became weakened after the third battle of Panipat, many relatively weak and unstable Indian states which emerged were increasingly open to manipulation by the Europeans, through dependent Indian rulers.
In the later 18th century, Great Britain and France struggled for dominance, partly through proxy Indian rulers but also by direct military intervention. The defeat of the formidable Indian ruler Tipu Sultan in 1799 marginalised the French influence. This was followed by a rapid expansion of British power through the greater part of the Indian subcontinent in the early 19th century. By the middle of the century, the British had already gained direct or indirect control over almost all parts of India. British India, consisting of the British Raj, contained the most populous and valuable parts of the British Empire and thus became known as "the jewel in the British crown".
India, during its colonial era, was a founding member of the League of Nations, a participating nation in the Summer Olympics in 1900, 1920, 1928, 1932, and 1936, and a founding member of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. Quote: "India Executive Council: Sir Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, Sir Firoz Khan Noon and Sir V. T. Krishnamachari served as India's delegates to the London Commonwealth Meeting, April 1945, and the U.N. San Francisco Conference on International Organisation, April–June 1945." In 1947, India gained its independence and was partitioned into the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan, the latter of which was created as a homeland for colonial India's Muslims. (2025). 9789042011663, Rodopi. ISBN 9789042011663
Francisco de Almeida was appointed Viceroy of India in 1505. During his reign, the Portuguese dominated Kochi and established a few fortresses on the Malabar Coast. The Portuguese suffered setbacks from attacks by Zamorin forces in South Malabar; especially from naval attacks under the leadership of Calicut admirals known as , which compelled them to seek a treaty. The Kunjali Marakkars were credited with organizing the first naval defence of the Indian coast. Tuhfat Ul Mujahideen written by Zainuddin Makhdoom II (born around 1532) of Ponnani in 16th-century CE is the first-ever known book fully based on the history of Kerala, written by a Keralite.A. Sreedhara Menon. Kerala History and its Makers. D C Books (2011)A G Noorani. Islam in Kerala.
Books [http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2704/stories/20100226270407900.htm]
Roland E. Miller.
''Mappila Muslim Culture'' SUNY Press, 2015 It is written in [[Arabic]] and contains pieces of information about the resistance put up by the navy of Kunjali Marakkar alongside the Zamorin of Calicut from 1498 to 1583 against Portuguese attempts to colonise [[Malabar coast]]. In 1571, the Portuguese were defeated by the Zamorin forces in the battle at Chaliyam Fort.
Though Portugal's presence in India initially started in 1498, their colonial rule lasted from 1505 until 1961. The Portuguese Empire established the first European trading centre at Kollam in 1502. It is believed that the colonial era in India started with the establishment of this Portuguese trading centre at Quilon. In 1505, King Manuel I of Portugal appointed Dom Francisco de Almeida as the first Portuguese viceroy in India, followed in 1509 by Dom Afonso de Albuquerque. In 1510, Albuquerque conquered the city of Goa, which had been controlled by Muslims. He inaugurated the policy of marrying Portuguese men with native women who had converted to Catholicism, the consequence of which was a great miscegenation in Goa and other Portuguese territories in Asia. The first revolt against the Portuguese was the Conspiracy of the Pintos in 1787. For decades after, the Conspiracy was used as a stick to defame and denigrate Goan missionaries and priests in British India by their opponents, the Vicars Apostolic of the Propaganda party, Goans being of the Padroado party. The incident was used to represent the Goans to the British government and to the Christians in British India as untrustworthy, rebellious and willing to compromise with their own enemies (Tipu Sultan). This became Goa's black legend.
Abbé Faria teamed up with the revolutionaries of the French Revolution and participated along with the "juring" clerics in the Revolutionaries' brutal persecution of the Catholic Church in France and elsewhere. Two Pinto brothers Lt. Col Francisco and Jose Antonio joined the army of the Maratha Empire under Baji Rao II and fought against the British in the Second Anglo-Maratha War and Third Anglo-Maratha War.
While the revolt failed, Goans did achieve stronger forms of Government and when the Portuguese Constitution of 1822 was adopted, two native Goans Bernardo Peres da Silva and Constâncio Roque da Costa were elected to the first parliament in Portugal, a practice that continued till the Annexation of Goa in 1961
An account of this was done by the Portuguese civil servant Joaquim Heliodoro da Cunha Rivara which is one of the major accounts of the Pinto Revolt and subsequently translated into English by Dr. Charles Borges. Goa was annexed by India on 19 December 1961. Another feature of the Portuguese presence in India was their promotion of Catholicism by sponsoring missionaries from various orders, such as the Jesuit missionary Saint Francis Xavier, who is revered among the Catholics of India.
Ceylon was lost at the Congress of Vienna in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, where the Dutch having fallen subject to France, saw their colonies captured by Britain. The Dutch later became less involved in India, as they had the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).
The Netherlands' more advanced financial systemFerguson 2004, p. 19. and the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th century left the Dutch as the dominant naval and trading power in Asia. Hostilities ceased after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Dutch prince William of Orange ascended the English throne, bringing peace between the Netherlands and England. A deal between the two nations left the more valuable spice trade of the Indonesian archipelago to the Netherlands and the textiles industry of India to England, but textiles overtook spices in terms of profitability, so that by 1720, in terms of sales, the English company had overtaken the Dutch. The English East India Company shifted its focus from Surat—a hub of the spice trade network—to Fort St. George.
British policy in Asia during the 19th century was chiefly concerned with expanding and protecting its hold on India, viewed as its most important colony and the key to the rest of Asia.Olson, p. 478. The East India Company drove the expansion of the British Empire in Asia. The company's army had first joined forces with the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, and the two continued to cooperate in arenas outside India: against the French campaign in Egypt and Syria, the capture of Java from the Netherlands in 1811, the acquisition of Singapore in 1819 and Malacca in 1824, and the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826.Porter, p. 401.
From its base in India, the company was also engaged in an increasingly profitable opium trade to Qing dynasty, which had begun in the 1730s. This trade helped reverse the trade imbalances resulting from British imports of tea, which saw large outflows of silver from Britain to China. The Chinese authorities banned the importation of opium, and in 1839, 20,000 chests of opium were confiscated and destroyed in Guangzhou by Lin Zexu. This led to the First Opium War, which was concluded in the Treaty of Nanjing, re-legalizing the importation of opium into China.Olson, p. 293.
The British had direct or indirect control over all parts of present-day India before the middle of the 19th century. In 1857, a local rebellion by a group of escalated into the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which took six months to suppress with heavy loss of life on both sides; with British casualties numbering in the thousands and Indian casualties numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The trigger for the rebellion has been a subject of dispute among historians. The rebellion, although short-lived, was triggered by attempts from the East India Company to expand its control in India. According to Olson, several reasons may have triggered the rebellion. For example, Olson concludes that the East India Company's attempt to annex and expand its direct control of India, by arbitrary laws such as Doctrine of Lapse, combined with discrimination in employment against Indians, contributed to the 1857 Rebellion.Olson, p. 653 The East India Company officers lived lavish lives, the company finances were in shambles, and the company's effectiveness in India was examined by the British crown after 1858. As a result, the East India Company lost its powers of government and British India formally came under British Raj, with an appointed Governor-General of India. The East India Company was dissolved the following year in 1858. A few years later, Queen Victoria took the title of Empress of India.Olson, p. 568
The slow but momentous reform movement developed gradually into the Indian independence movement. During the First World War, the hitherto bourgeois "home-rule" movement was transformed into a popular mass movement by Mahatma Gandhi, a Pacifism lawyer. Revolutionaries such as Bagha Jatin, Khudiram Bose, Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekar Azad, Surya Sen, Subhas Chandra Bose differed from Gandhi in their use of violence during their campaigns against British rule. The independence movement attained its objective with the independence of Pakistan and India on 14 and 15 August 1947 respectively.
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