Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/21

FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE xiii It may seem, perhaps, that I have allotted too much space to this threefold struggle of Christen- dom against Islam, of the Protestant North against the Catholic South, and of the two Protestant sea- powers of the Atlantic for the Asiatic trade. But a different law of proportion applies to Indian his- tory, as I have conceived it, from that which sufficed for a melodrama of British triumphs. We must give up the idea of the rapid greatness of England in the East. In these chapters will be found, in part, the explanation of our unique position in India at the present day. Europe, just emerged from mediaeval- ism, was then making her first experiments in Asiatic rule. Mediaeval conceptions of conquest imposed themselves on her exploitation of the Eastern world; mediaeval types of commerce were perpetuated in the Indian trade. Portugal, Spain, and Holland estab- lished their power in Asia when these conceptions and types held sway. The English ascendency in India came later, and embodied the European ideals of the eighteenth century in place of the European ideals of the sixteenth. It was the product of modern as against semi-mediaeval Christendom. Yet even Eng- land found it difficult to shake off the traditions of the period with which this volume deals, the tradi- tions of monopoly in the Indian trade and of Indian government for the personal profit of the rulers. Characteristic features of our present Indian pol- ity date from that early time. We shall see, for example, that the scheme of a European dominion