The East India Company came to India in the fall of 1608, but they would not establish a rule on the subcontinent until decades later. The first factory they established was only in 1611, in Masulipatnam. Before all else, let’s understand the term “factory” here. Today it’s a place of industrial production, but in the pre-industrial era, it was more like a trading outpost, an entrepôt if you will. Foreign and local merchants could freely trade with each other without any trouble so long as they paid taxes to the local ruler. A number of foreign merchants even lived on site in what resembled a small township to facilitate such trades and maintain warehouses. Masulipatnam was England’s first. Another term of relevance here is “Agency.” Mostly similar to factory, an Agency had additional diplomatic, administrative, and fiscal responsibilities. In other words, an Agency carried a much broader scope than a factory. But in the context of this story, we’ll use them interchangeably.
So, Masulipatnam was their first factory. Two years later another was set up in Surat, the port on the other side of the peninsula they’d originally entered India through. From that point on, newer factories and agencies continued to sprout all along the Indian coastline. Until in 1639, when to compensate for the loss of commerce in Surat and Armagaon, the reason for which we needn’t get into here, Masulipatnam factor Francis Day purchased a large parcel of wasteland near the Dutch factory of Pulicat. Flanked by two rivers—the Elambore, which no longer flows, and the Cooum, which only flows seasonally—and the sea, it seemed to Day an excellent spot to build a settlement of merchants and officers. To the immediate north of this parcel lay the village of Madraspatanam.1 The parcel itself was named Chennapatanam, after Chennappa Nayak, the local chief whose son Day bought it from.2
On this newly acquired parcel, a fort was built and named after St. George, and factors from Armagaon were relocated to it. This would henceforth be the primary English outpost on the Coromandel Coast. The new Agency was placed under the jurisdiction of the English Presidency at Indonesia’s Bantam. This arrangement continued until 1652 when Fort St. George was upgraded to a Presidency in its own right. By now, rapid gentrification around the fort had turned Chennapatanam and Madraspatanam into a contiguous, densely populated urban agglomerate.3 The name Madraspatanam had come to signify the whole entity.
This upgrade was triggered by the downgrade of the Bantam business due to worsening Anglo-Dutch relations in the region. The Agent governing Bantam for two decades, Aaron Baker, was transferred to Madras, as Madraspatanam had come to be called by now, and Bantam was made subservient to it.4 The Presidency officially went by the name of Fort St. George, after the administrative citadel built by Francis Day, and Baker became its first provisional President. He, however, ran into problems with local chieftains and ultimately lost his position after just three years. With him, Madras too lost its Presidency status and went back to being an Agency.5
Madras, however, would continue to hold significance as the primary Company establishment on the subcontinent. Bombay would not happen until 1684, when it replaced Surat as the Western Presidency, four years after Surat’s plunder by Shivaji.6 Bengal had gotten its first factory only recently, and Calcutta was still almost half a century away. Right now, Bengal reported to Madras, and it would continue to until its separation in 1681.7 At this point, we’ll take a detour to America to meet the central character of this story. It’ll be a few years there, then another few in Britain, before we finally return to Madras once it’s back to being a Presidency again. That’ll be a good thirty years later.
A Pilgrim from Wales
Actually, let’s start from Wales. Long, long ago, in the pre-industrial era, herding and farming were the only two means of sustenance. And both require real estate tailored for the job. Forests were cleared out to create grazing areas and farms. In primitive times, this was done every year due to soil depletion. While these clearings started off as fertile grounds for food production, they’d eventually turn barren, capable of bearing neither forests nor crops. In Wales, these came to be known as iâl, as an allusion to their initial fertility. The word comes from the same root that gives us paryāríṇī, the Sanskrit term for a barren cow, as an allusion to the eventual sterility instead.
Over time, these iâls developed into large estates owned by wealthy landlords and nobles. One such estate was Plas-yn-Iâl, and it was owned by a cadet branch of the House of Mathrafal, the rulers of Wales before it fell to Britain. Welsh last names, until fairly recently, derives not from the father but the estate. This is why the family in question came to bear the last name of Iâl. One member of this family was David who sailed across the Atlantic for a new life in the New World on the other side of the ocean. Just as Francis Day was negotiating a land deal with the Nayakas in India, the Puritans were negotiating one with the Quinnipiac natives in America. Both deals worked out almost simultaneously. David’s family settled as one of the pioneers in this new township which a couple of years later got the name New Haven. In short, Madras and New Haven are the same age.
A most underrated driver of America’s colonization was religion. It all started when Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, and the Pope declined. After much drama over several years, the king had it annulled by the archbishop of Canterbury in open defiance of Rome. The mess that followed led to creation of the Church of England and Henry VIII’s excommunication in what came to be known as the English Reformation. The new Church leaned Protestant without participating the larger Protestant movement. The Reformation carried on full steam through the remainder of the century, except for a five-year thaw under a Catholic-leaning Mary I. By the time of Elizabeth I, a new breed of Protestant fundamentalists, influenced by the Swiss theologian John Calvin, had started making its presence felt on the British Isle. They vehemently disagreed with the Anglican Church’s hierarchical structure and what they considered lax moral standards.
Things came to a head under her successor James I when the Calvinists grew more impatient than ever for reforms and yet landed none. With no hopes of the monarchy relenting, many looked to other realms where they could practice their own fundamentalist brand of Christianity without royal or papal interference. For a while Amsterdam showed promise, but ultimately, they had to look outside Europe. That’s when this New World on the other side of the ocean presented itself as a viable alternative. In 1620, about fifty Calvinists or Separatists as they called themselves, boarded a ship named Mayflower and left for America. We call them Pilgrims.
Over the following years many more Pilgrims would arrive in the New World for a new life. Many wealthy families came along too. David’s was one such family. He personally, however, remained sympathetic to the Anglican Church which caused him a great deal of friction with fellow settlers first in New Haven, then in Boston. Ultimately, he returned to London. His second child Elihu—the protagonist of this story—was just three at the time. It was a strange time for a someone like him to return to England because the country was then under a very Calvinist Oliver Cromwell who had assumed power after beheading Charles I. At any rate, Cromwell proved to be a mighty tolerant ruler and David’s enterprise flourished despite his Calvinist convictions. By the time the Commonwealth ended in 1660, Elihu was eleven.
The dead king’s son, Charles II was now on the throne. Cromwell was dead. The following year, the new king married Catherine of Braganza in fulfilment of a political deal started by his father and left incomplete due to his abrupt end. The wedding brought him in dowry, among other things, the settlement of Bombay. Which he eventually leased out to the East India Company for an annual rent of ten pounds sterling. Thanks to Shivaji’s raids and the silting of Tapi, Surat had become untenable as a trading outpost and Bombay offered a welcome alternative with its deep harbor. The capital of all Company holdings on the west coast soon moved from Surat to Bombay. Madras, meanwhile, continued to hold fort as the epicenter of all Company activities on the subcontinent. For anyone in England seeking a windfall along with some adventure on the side, this was the place. Elihu took note.
Elihu in Madras
In 1670, at the age of twenty-one, Elihu Iâl—or, as he’d come to spell it, Yale—joined the East India Company as an apprentice and eventually became a clerk. Two years later, he was on a ship to India. While the young boy would go on to prove his merit beyond all doubts, the foot in the door still owed it to a letter of recommendation from his influential father who, as a wealthy London merchant, had deep contacts in the corridors of East India House. At Fort St. George, young Elihu worked his way up the ranks rising from apprentice to bookkeeper or “writer,” to factor in less than fifteen years. By 1680, he was already the second highest authority in Madras.
Meanwhile, tensions started brewing in Bengal where a new imperial tax triggered bitter confrontation between the Company and the local Mughal governor, Shaista Khan. By 1686, all talks had broken down and the friction had escalated to open military confrontation. The man at the helm of Company’s affairs in London those days was Josiah Child and that’s why we call this engagement Child’s War. The following year, in a harsh letter to Madras, Child abruptly and unceremoniously dismissed Governor William Gyfford. The reason for this dismissal is immaterial to our story. All that matters is that it elevated Elihu as the new Governor of Fort St. George.
Elihu’s role proved challenging. Within nine days of assuming it, he learned that the Mughals were gaining ground in the war against Bengal, and Aurangzeb had turned his ire toward all Company holdings across the subcontinent. To make matters worse, Mughal forces had already laid seize on the fort of Golconda. Should the siege end in success, Madras along with the rest of Golconda would fall in Mughal domain. The risk of losing Fort St. George was substantial as Golconda’s prospects didn’t look very bright.
The siege ended toward the end of September and as feared, the Mughals had won. Golconda had fallen and Madras was now in Aurangzeb’s domain. The risk of losing everything was now more imminent than ever. Something needed to be done very quickly. But it took a while for a plan to materialize. It’s only in December that Elihu and the rest of the Council crystallized the plan to send out peace overtures to Aurangzeb. With money, of course. An amount of fifty thousand pagodas was earmarked as peace offering.8 Pagodas were gold coins minted by the Company and earlier by the Vijayanagar Empire, with each coin valued at three and a half rupees. These were the preferred currency for transactions between governments involving large sums, such as tributes and peace offerings like this one.
On the question of logistics, it was decided to send two White men along with some natives to Mahabat Khan, the Mughal general stationed in Golconda at the time. One of the men was French Protestant Daniel Chardin, the brother of Elihu’s business partner in London. Chardin was not a Company employee, he was just a merchant who lived in the White Town—another name for the European quarters of the Fort—of Madras. More specifically, he was a diamond merchant and had many reasons of his own to visit Golconda where lay the only known diamond mines in the world at the time. The plan worked and a deal came through, although the Directors back in London weren’t very pleased with the idea of Elihu picking Chardin for the job. They suspected that the motivation behind the move was Chardin’s own diamond trade and Elihu’s interest in it, something they felt should not have been done at the Company’s expense.9 These reservations weren’t entirely unfounded.
The Diamond Rush
The region between the Krishna and Godavari Rivers had been noted for diamonds at least since the days of Ancient Rome. For the longest time, this was the only source of diamonds known to man. The first alternative only appeared in 1728 when they found diamonds in Brazil.10 And diamonds were mighty popular among Europe’s elites. Being the only source meant Golconda attracted a lot of attention for now. Much of this attention came from Jewish diamond merchants, most of whom had traditionally based themselves in mainland cities like Antwerp and Amsterdam but now relocated London to work with the English East India Company.11 Many of these even relocated to India to more directly engage with the miners in Golconda, a place that had by now come to mean assured windfall. After the “spice rush” that had brought the first modern Europeans to the Indian shores, history had now entered a new “diamond rush.” Until fairly recently, Portugal had enjoyed a monopoly on the Golconda trade. The British wanted to break it.
According to tradition, Jews first arrived in India when King Solomon still lived, but a significant wave came only after the Alhambra Decree expelled them from Spain in the same year Columbus crossed the Atlantic. These later arrivals, known as Sephardic Jews, differed from the Jews who had been in India for centuries, having originally come from Israel. In India, they became known as Paradesi, or foreign Jews. One such Jew was Jacques de Paiva who came to India at the very beginning of the seventeenth century diamond rush and quickly bought a number of mines in Golconda. But he faced stiff resistance from the British when he tried to settle in Madras.
Since the settlement happened to be in Golconda’s domain, de Paiva reached out to the local ruler and lobbied hard for the settlement of Jews in Fort St. George. This worked but unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to enjoy its fruits. De Paiva died the same year Elihu became Governor who then took his widow as partner. This stirred up quire the controversy not only because a Christian was involved with a Jew, but also because it was a Company executive himself associating with what they called a “Jewish interloper.” Hieronima and Elihu never married because those days marital alliances needed episcopal sanction, something that could never come for a Jewish bride. But the couple went on to have a child anyway, they named him Charles.
Thanks to his association with de Paiva, Elihu had also started dabbling in the Golconda business. Although the trade had remained a Portuguese and Jewish stronghold, Elihu too made quite the fortune for himself. He would buy rough stones from the Mughals and send them to his contacts in Amsterdam and Antwerp for cutting and faceting. The finished rocks would then be sold in the European market, mostly to royalties, for huge sums. Over time, he became one of the three top names in diamond trade in the world, the other two being his friend Jean Chardin and the famous traveling merchant, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier.
The Indian Ocean Slave Trade
The European factories dotting the Coromandel those days were bustling centers of trade. That this trade was in spices and precious stones is common knowledge. What isn’t, is that it was also in slaves. Most of them children. The Dutch colony of Pulucat was the biggest such center having shipped no fewer than forty thousand Indians as slaves to Dutch outposts in Batavia and South Africa between 1621 and 1665 alone.
But while the Dutch were industry leaders, the British weren’t at rock bottom either. The year Elihu became Governor, more than six hundred slaves were shipped out of Fort St. George in one month alone. Frequent famines and territorial violence ensured a constant supply of starving families who willfully entered slavery to escape death. A big part of this trade were children. Families often sold off their kids in hopes they won’t starve to death under their new masters. A life of servitude seemed preferable to a life cut short prematurely and painfully. But not all slaves were acquired this way. Many also came involuntarily, via kidnapping. Young native boys were often abducted and sold off as slaves in distant markets. Some even made it as far as America.
Compared to the Dutch, however, the English were a late participant in the Indian slave trade. For the longest time, they had contended with Black slaves bought from local chieftains in Mozambique the African mainland, mostly Mozambique. Sometimes these were spoils of wars and straight up kidnappings too. It’s only in the middle of the seventeenth century that they started dabbling in Brown slaves. That’s probably because their arrival in India itself was delayed. Once Indians started being trafficked, Madras quickly became a thriving center with its low custom duties and liberal supply.
For Madras, the biggest windfall came in 1646 when a deadly famine killed hundreds of thousands in a single season. This is when many native Indians voluntarily entered servitude to escape starvation and death.12 But slavery hardly offered the respite they hoped. Cruel practices persisted across all three colonies on the Coromandel—English Madras, Portuguese San Thome, and Dutch Pulicat. In Madras, these practices grew so brutal that some British officers too began to protest. But more than internal dissent, it was the Mughals, whose domain Madras fell in, that posed a threat. Aurangzeb had expressly banned the trafficking of slaves out of his realm. The Fatawa-e-Alamgiri that came out in 1672 as the official law code of the Mughal Empire, further crystallized this prohibition with heavy penalties. Do note that it did not prohibit slavery itself. Only they could not be trafficked. Even domestically, the stipulation was that a non-Muslim could not own a Muslim slave.
Ultimately in 1682, the administration placed a ban on slave export, although domestic slavery remained legal.13 Elihu was instrumental in getting this it passed. Under this prohibition, violators were to be fined fifty pagodas for every slave illegally exported. Only five years later, however, another famine struck, and inexpensive voluntary slaves once again became abundant. The law was slightly relaxed for a while but quickly proved unworthy of the potential scandal. Thus, in 1688, Governor Elihu Yale once again decreed that no resident of the City of Madras were to engage in the transportation of slaves of any age at any port at any time in any way. Violations were to be fined at fifty pagodas per slave at first, then chopping off of the ears at the pillory for repeat offenses.14
This way, Madras became the first colony on the subcontinent to impose a complete and permanent ban on slave trade. The slaves that had already been shipped to Bantam made immense contributions to the economy of the region. Few appreciate today that it is these early Tamil slaves that introduced paddy cultivation to Indonesia.15 Elihu himself never owned slaves, at least there’s no evidence confirming that, but some assert that he did benefit from the trade. It ought to be noted, however, that he had already amassed an enormous fortune from other avenues, such as diamonds, porcelain, textile, and spices, before his elevation to Presidency.
The Fall from Grace
In 1687, a letter from London had summarily removed William Gyfford and placed Elihu in his stead. Only six years later, another summarily removed Elihu and placed someone else in his stead. And almost on same charges—private profiteering. History had repeated itself verbatim. What happened?
It started with a cargo of precious clove bark brought from the Philippines by one Ambrose Moody. Elihu, as it turns out, had significant private interest in it. It’s on the question of its disposal that he and the Council fell out. While he proposed shipping only half of it to London, keeping the remainder for a later shipment, due to its enormous volume, the Council favored shipping it all right away. Shipping in parts would have also benefitted the traders, which included Elihu himself. Several members of the Council saw his plan as motivated by his private interests rather than that of the Company, hence outvoted his proposal decisively.
From this point on, the gulf between the Council and the Governor only widened further with every episode of mutual disagreement, of which there were numerous. A major flashpoint came when Daniel Chardin was denied permit to ship to Britain some goods he had brought from Bengal and China. The Governor lobbied hard with the Council, even assuring them of a handsome seventeen percent assured profit, but the Council voted against the petition anyway. This vote, again, was motivated less by commercial pragmatism and more by envy given Elihu held considerable interest in the cargo thanks to his very public friendship with Cardin.16
Just months later, another episode drove the wedge further between the Governor and his Council. On April 7, a shipment of timber arrived from Pegu, today part of Myanmar, which Elihu intended to bring in without paying the customary duties. Fraser, the officer responsible for customs, pointed out that customs had always been collected on timber, just like other goods. The Governor argued otherwise. With Pegu timber now being plentiful and cheap, he proposed using it to build a footbridge over the river near the Fort, citing strategic benefits for transporting provisions during sieges or rainy seasons. The Council reluctantly approved the purchase for two hundred pagodas, a decision that earned Elihu a fat profit. Many similar incidents followed and as the year wore off, Elihu’s command on the Council diminished exponentially. The constant power struggle had left the Council fractured and Elihu politically diminished.
The climax came in the summer of that year when the Governor’s own brother, Thomas, returned from China where he was on business. The captain reported to the Council grave irregularities in Thomas’ dealings in China whereas the Secretary, at the behest of the Governor, reported the exact opposite. The Council saw this as a serious case of nepotism and conflict of interest and launched a concerted attack on Thomas’ and Elihu’s personal integrity. It’s around the same time that Hieronima de Paiva delivered an illicit child with Elihu, which further worsened the latter’s standing with Company elites.
All this friction culminated in a detailed document titled “Charges against Governor Yale,” signed by four hostile members of the Council and addressed personally to Josiah Child in October 1690. Although the letter brimmed with gross exaggerations and fabrications, it wasn’t entirely unfounded. Elihu was steeped in financial corruption and his tenure witnessed gross misappropriation of funds and abuse of power. Steep taxation triggered numerous revolts as well. Finally, two Octobers later, a letter came from London, signed by Child himself, bearing orders to dismiss Elihu from Governorship.
The Nabob of London
At this point, Elihu’s personal fortune, equivalent to approximately forty million pounds today, rivaled that of Josiah Child, the East India Company’s largest shareholder at the time. He did not leave the Fort right away though. Instead, he stayed on for another seven years in hopes of clearing his name of all allegations. His corruption itself, by the way, was not exceptional. Company employees at all levels were involved in extensive wheeling and dealing, amassing immense fortunes in the process. Even entry-level positions in India were highly lucrative at that time. The routine was straightforward. Secure a position with the East India Company by any means necessary. Take up a post in India—bribe your way through, if necessary—and accumulate as much wealth as possible, as quickly as possible. Return to England, use your fortune to buy a seat in the House of Lords, and then enjoy a retirement of unparalleled luxury.
Over time, such corruption had become the hallmark of a Company job and in the decades following Elihu’s dismissal, spawned a whole new breed of nouveau riche socialites with impressive titles of nobility bought with fortunes made in India. Given their opulence but more than that the dishonest means of its acquisition, they came to be resented in the British society as nabobs. The colloquialism was a reference to Indian Nawabs whose wealth was understood to be similarly unearned.17 The repudiation of this aristocracy in a class-conscious Britain might surprise but it was likely a simple case of old money resenting new money more than anything else. One could say Elihu set a precedent even though he wasn’t the first corrupt head of Company affairs in India. Although the term itself goes as far back as 1612, it’s only after Elihu that some of the biggest names like Warren Hastings and Robert Clive entered the landscape.
Having salvaged his reputation finally, Elihu returned to London in 1699 with a fortune that is estimated to be roughly a quarter of Britain’s GDP at the time. Much of this was from diamonds, although some allege a non-zero contribution from slave trade as well. Truly a nabob, he invested it all in real estate, collectibles, and clout. By 1717, he was the Fellow of the Royal Society, cementing his position in the crème de la crème of the English aristocracy. In this capacity, his superior—the President—was none other than Isaac Newton. While he parked much of his fortune in the five-year-old Bank of England, he also spent a great deal of it on acquiring a new property in London’s Queen Square where among his neighbors were the movers and shakers of the British royalty.
A Letter from the New World
By now, Elihu’s influence had crossed the Atlantic and the following year he received a letter from Boston, the city of his birth. It was Cotton Mather, a prominent New England minister best known for his involvement in the Salem Witch Trials. Mather’s works include Magnalia Christi Americana, a comprehensive history of New England, and Wonders of the Invisible World, a defense of the notorious witch-hunt. He was himself a graduate from Harvard where his father had been the rector before being forced out of office. Mather’s disenchantment from Harvard stemmed partly from its treatment of his father but mostly from the abundance of what he described as “ungodly students” in his class, something that lines perfectly well with his religious zeal. We will return to this letter after a little detour.
One of Mather’s cousins was part of a group of ten Congregational ministers collectively called “The Founders.” Founders because together they had met in 1701 to establish a new educational institution in the Colony of Connecticut. This was going to be a place where new ministers could be trained in religious matters and prepared for future leadership in the Puritanical Church. They named it the Collegiate School and opened its first class in one of the Founders’ homes in Killingworth. Two years later, a wealthy merchant donated land in nearby Saybrook and the School moved out of Killingworth.
Elihu was a veritable nabob, possessing immense wealth and a vast estate. Regrettably, he had no surviving heir to inherit any of it, only three daughters. Therefore, in 1711, he dispatched a man named Dixwell to America, where he still had relatives. Dixwell’s mission was to bring back David, a first cousin once removed, so Elihu could name him his heir. In the same year, another Englishman, Jeremy Dummer, wrote to Reverend James Pierpont, one of the Founders, about Elihu’s intentions. The letter informed Pierpont that Elihu planned to make an endowment to Oxford and urged him to persuade Elihu to instead contribute to the Collegiate. The rationale provided was that, as a native of New England, it would be more appropriate for Elihu to support an institution located there. In short, Drummer wanted Pierpont to write a letter to Elihu and have it dispatched through David, who at the time was a boy of twelve.
Without going much into what followed, we’ll now just skip over to another letter two summers later in which Drummer told Pierpont that Elihu had contributed thirty-two books to the college library and little else. Although sizable in and of itself, the contribution paled against Drummer’s expectations given the nabob’s immense affluence. It is reckoned that he was probably not much impressed by the potential of an institution deep in the wilderness of Connecticut which is how he remembered the place from his childhood. Isaac Newton too donated a copy of his Principia.
In the fall of 1717, the Collegiate moved one more time, this time about thirty miles west to the bustling township of New Haven, a city founded by Elihu’s own ancestors more than seventy years earlier. This is when it caught the attention of Reverend Cotton Mather who was in Boston at the time. As someone freshly disenchanted with Harvard and its deviant ways, Mather saw in the Collegiate a new hope for congregational education. Mather’s influence transcended national and geographical boundaries. Eager to rally support for the institution in every way possible, Mather wrote to Elihu. The letter, dated February 14, 1718, appealed to the nabob’s reputed fondness for flattery and impressed upon him his New England roots to solicit a substantial donation for the college. Interestingly in this letter he referred to New England as “these parts of western India.” An appeal was also made to Elihu’s religious proclivities with a detailed sermon on tolerance and Christian values. The most important incentive, however, was the offer to rename the college after Elihu’s family. In sum, Mather left no stone unturned.
Elihu, like his late father, leaned Anglican. Do recall that the very reason for his family leaving America twenty-eight years ago. And Mather was a Calvinist hardliner. The two had little in common doctrinally. But a charity from the wealthy nabob could do wonders for Mather and Anglicanization of New England churches could do wonders for Elihu’s legacy. A marriage of convenience could not be argued against at this juncture. But the nabob remained hesitant. He literally called himself a Son of the Church of England in his will and saw financial contribution to an “Academy of Dissenter” an act betrayal to his faith. This had to be remedied.
A couple of months later, in a meeting in Connecticut, two new names were added to the list of fundraising overseers. One of them was the Archbishop of Canterbury. This marked a significant shift in the dissenters’ attitude and served to mitigate the animosity between them and the Anglicans. The other name was that of Elihu who had come a long way being accused by the Company of crimes like poisoning Madras officials before the King and his council. This worked. Serious contributions started flowing in from England. The institution was renamed, just as Mather had promised, after Elihu’s family. Mather continued to believe it was flattery that worked. In reality, it was more likely that the contributions came predicated on the progress of Anglicanism in Connecticut.
The Legacy
Elihu died three years later leaving behind a contested legacy and an institution that continues to bear his name to this day. The institute would upgrade to a university nearly 170 years later, becoming the renowned Yale University. Paid in full with the spoils—diamonds, textiles, and slaves—from a colony in southern India. Long story short, Golconda diamonds funded the institution that gave America five Presidents, thirty billionaires, ten Founding Fathers, and no fewer than fifty-two Nobel Laureates.
References
Government of Tamil Nadu. “History | Chennai District | India.” Chennai District, https://chennai.nic.in/history/. Accessed 5 September 2024.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Great Britain India Office. “Chronological List of Presidents and Governors of Fort St. George in Madras.” The India List and India Office List, London, UK, Harrison, 1905, p. 121.
Ibid.
Hunter, W. W. “Chapter XII. Early European Settlements (1498 to 18th Century A.D.).” The Indian Empire: Its History, People, and Products, London, UK, Trübner & Co., 1882, p. 278.
Ibid.
Bingham, Hiram. “XVII Problems of Administration.” Elihu Yale, the American Nabod of Queen Square, USA, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1939, pp. 148–49.
Bingham, op. cit., “XX Orders from London,” p. 184.
Pointon, Marcia R. “2. A Fine Brilliant Glittering on the Little Finger.” Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gems Stones and Jewellry, and Their Imagery, USA, Yale University Press, 2009, p. 41.
Pointon, op. cit., “1. Fault Lines and Points of Light,” p. 16.
Natarajan, B. “Slave Trade in Madras.” The Madras Tercentenary Commemoration Volume, UK, Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 248.
Ibid., 251.
Ibid., 252.
Ibid., 253–54.
Bingham, op. cit., “XXVI A Quarrelsome Period,” p. 226.
Rorabacher, John Albert. “7. Company Actions and Parliamentary Reactions: Changing Social and Political Ideologies in Britain.” Property, Land, Revenue, and Policy: The East India Company, c. 1757-1825, UK, Routledge, 2017, pp. 235–36.