The East India Company was keen to find a direct source of Indian textiles.The Portuguese already had fortified strongholds in India but the English needed imperial permission to set up their own trading posts.
In 1608 William Hawkins, commander of the Hector, was sent to ask the Mughal Emperor. He impressed Jahangir with his grasp of Turkish and ability to drink wine but failed to get agreement for an English factory. It took the arrival of a ‘proper’ amabassador, Sir Thomas Roe, sent by King James I in 1615, before the Company was able to set up a base in India.Sir Thomas Roes’s diary is in the British Library collections. It records his audience with Jahangir in 1616 wearing ‘more jewels than any other monarch in the world’. He tells us how Jahangir was seated on a throne raised four feet above the floor, in a hall canopied with hangings of cloth of gold, silk and velvet, with rich Persian carpets underfoot and with 7 oil paintings arranged behind him.Surat was the Mughal Empire’s most important centre for overseas trade, particularly for textiles. It was the first major Asian port city within reach of the ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope. And it was here that the Company’s traders first settled after Sir Thomas Roe’s successful diplomatic mission.