Bombay came under English East India Company control in 1661 as part of what?

A dowry from the Portuguese to the English crown. Bombay came to the English king in 1661 as part of a Portuguese princess's dowry, and was then handed to the East India Company. Read more: ModHist0367 — Colonial Cities: Urbanisation, Planning and Architecture.

Colonial Cities: Urbanisation, Planning and Architecture

By 1800, Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay were India’s three biggest cities. Each began as a fishing or weaving village.

This article covers colonial urban planning, the White Town/Black Town divide, hill stations, and the architectural styles the British built with, from neo-classical to Indo-Saracenic.

Victoria Terminus (CST), Mumbai, designed by F.W. Stevens — the most spectacular example of neo-Gothic colonial architecture in India. Photo by Usernamekiran, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

📑 Contents

1Three Villages Become Three Cities
2White Town, Black Town
3Planning Calcutta: Defence and Disease
4Census and Maps as Sources
5Bombay’s Boom, and Bungalows
6Three Architectural Styles
7Test Yourself

🏛️ Must Know

Three Villages Become Three Cities

Company Settlements Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay each began as fishing or weaving villages. The Company settled in Madras in 1639 and Calcutta in 1690.
A Royal Dowry Bombay came to England in 1661 as part of a Portuguese princess’s dowry, then passed to the East India Company.
Old Capitals Decline As Mughal power eroded through the eighteenth century, Delhi and Agra lost importance. New regional capitals like Lucknow and Hyderabad rose instead.
Colonial Ports Overtake All After the 1757 Battle of Plassey, Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay grew fastest of all. By 1800, they were India’s biggest cities.

📘 Good to Know

White Town, Black Town

Fort St George, Madras Fort St George became the walled, racially exclusive White Town. Indians, artisans, and interpreters lived outside it in the separate Black Town.
Caste-Specific Quarters Madras’s Black Town had distinct neighbourhoods: Chintadripet for weavers, Washermanpet for dyers, and Royapuram for Christian boatmen.
Fort William, Calcutta After the Nawab Sirajudaula’s 1756 attack, the Company built a stronger Fort William in Calcutta, clearing a vast open Maidan around it for a direct line of fire.
The Same Logic After 1857 After the revolt, the British used this same “line of fire” logic in Delhi, clearing buildings around the Red Fort.

Planning Calcutta: Defence and Disease

Wellesley’s Minute Governor General Wellesley’s 1803 Minute on Calcutta called for planned roads, drains, and building rules, treating town planning as a government duty.
The Lottery Committee From 1817, the Lottery Committee funded town improvement through public lotteries, clearing huts and displacing the poor to the city’s outskirts.
Disease Drove Demolition Cholera from 1817 and plague from 1896 pushed officials to demolish “insanitary” bustis, since dense housing was blamed for blocking sunlight and air.
“Healthy” Became a New Divide By the late nineteenth century, the old White Town/Black Town split was reinforced by a new “healthy” versus “unhealthy” zoning divide.

✅ Test Yourself

🎲 More Modern History Practice

🌟 Great to Know

Census and Maps as Sources

The First All-India Census A first all-India census was attempted in 1872. From 1881, a decennial census became a regular ten-yearly feature.
Data Had Real Biases Census categories were often arbitrary. A person who both farmed and traded, for instance, was hard to classify into a single neat occupation.
Maps Erased the Poor The Survey of India, set up in 1878, made detailed maps. But poor settlements often went unmarked, making it easier to declare that land available for other projects.

Bombay’s Boom, and Bungalows

Seven Islands, One City Bombay began as seven separate islands. Land reclamation gradually joined them into a single city.
Opium and Cotton Bombay’s Indian merchants grew wealthy on the opium trade with China, then on the 1860s cotton boom during the American Civil War.
“Urbs Prima in Indis” After the 1869 Suez Canal opened, Bombay’s government and merchants proudly called it “Urbs Prima in Indis,” Latin for India’s most important city.
The Bungalow’s Bengali Roots The colonial bungalow took its name from “bangla,” a traditional thatched Bengali hut, despite becoming a symbol of British domestic life.
The Bombay Chawl Overcrowding produced the chawl: a multi-storeyed building of single-room apartments around a shared courtyard, still distinctive to Bombay today.

Exam Point of View

Three Architectural Styles

Neo-Classical This style used lofty pillars borrowed from ancient Rome. Bombay’s Town Hall, built in 1833, is a classic example.
Neo-Gothic Marked by pointed arches and high roofs, this style produced Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, its High Court, and its University buildings.
Indo-Saracenic This twentieth-century hybrid style fused Hindu and Muslim (“Saracen”) architectural motifs with European elements. The Gateway of India, built in 1911, is its most famous example.
Not Just Decoration The British believed European-style buildings marked out their distance and superiority from Indian subjects, not merely their taste in architecture.
Indian Money, Indian Buildings Wealthy Indians often funded these buildings. Banker Premchand Roychand funded Bombay University’s Rajabai Tower, named for his mother.

🔗 Related Topics

IndGeo0077 — Hill Stations of India — covers the colonial military origins of Simla, Darjeeling, and Mount Abu, the hill-station side of this same story.
ModHist0358 — Lord Cornwallis: The Permanent Settlement and the Cornwallis Code — the countryside counterpart to this chapter’s story of the colonial city.

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