covered that the time had not yet come when a foreign flag could be safely set up on the Indian mainland. The Portuguese had established themselves at Goa before the Moghul Empire had extended to the west coast; the Dutch had fixed their independent settlements for the most part upon islands.
In the seventeenth century the power of the Moghul emperor, although undermined, was not yet so far reduced that he could be defied with impunity on his own seaboard. When, in 1687, the East India Company ventured to declare war against the Emperor Aurangzib, all the English settlements soon found themselves placed in great jeopardy by this rashness. It was lucky for the foreigners that the capture and execution of Sambaji, the Maratha leader, roused the Hindus of the southwest country to unite in strenuous revolt against the Mohammedan sovereign, who thereafter became too deeply entangled in the meshes of guerilla warfare and sporadic insurrections to find leisure for dealing thoroughly with comparatively insignificant mercantile intruders. Moreover, since the Moghul government maintained no regular navy, it could not keep up a blockade of the harbours and river estuaries or bar the entry of foreign ships; while on the other hand the imperial customs revenue suffered heavily from their hostility.
The Emperor Aurangzib (better known in India by his title of Alamgir) was the last able representative of a dynasty that had conquered and ruled in India from the middle of the sixteenth century. The Moghul Empire was founded by the brilliant audacity and warlike
