Spain in 1598, in the regions westward of the Canary Islands tout serait à la force; and although Spain and Portugal claimed immense jurisdictions, political and ecclesiastic, in the East, yet these were of a nature too impalpable and fluctuating to be acknowledged distinctly by international law. The Chartered Companies therefore represented a device, invented to suit these conditions of existence, for extending commerce and for securing it by territorial appropriations, without directly pledging a government to answer for the acts of its subjects. The charter expressed the delegation of certain sovereign powers for distinct purposes; it amounted from one point of view to a license for private war; and the system has since had a long, eventful, and curious history, which is even yet by no means ended.
The point to be observed is that this system, under which the foundations of the British Empire of India were laid, was something very different from the kind of scrambling haphazard adventure to which the establishment of that empire is by common imagination so often ascribed. On the contrary, it provided, in the hands of a free and wealthy people, a very powerful instrument of colonial and commercial expansion. The prize in dispute was a share or, if possible, the monopoly of the commerce between Western Europe and all the ports of Asia from the Red Sea to China and Japan. The early records of the East India Company show that along the whole accessible coast line of the Asiatic continent and among the islands, at every point
