Thomas Roe: The English Ambassador Who Entered Jahangir’s Court Before England Became an Empire

Some travelers arrive with curiosity.
Some arrive with faith.
Some arrive with goods, gifts, letters, and instructions from a distant king.

Sir Thomas Roe arrived with all of these — but above all, he arrived with a misunderstanding.

He came to Mughal India as an English ambassador of King James I, representing both the English Crown and the East India Company. His task was to win trading privileges at the court of Emperor Jahangir, protect the English factory at Surat, and secure England’s place in the rich commercial world of the Indian Ocean. He reached Surat in 1615, traveled inland through Burhanpur and Mandu to Ajmer, and had his first audience with Jahangir on 10 January 1616.

But Roe did not enter a weak country waiting for Europe.

He entered one of the richest and most powerful courts in the world.

The Mughal Empire under Jahangir was not dependent on England. It did not need English protection, English diplomacy, or English goods in any urgent way. The English were not yet rulers. They were not even the dominant Europeans in the Indian Ocean. They were commercial petitioners competing with Portuguese influence, Indian merchants, Persian networks, Armenian brokers, Mughal nobles, Jesuit intermediaries, and the enormous weight of imperial etiquette.

This is what makes Roe so important.

His embassy shows England before empire: ambitious, proud, insecure, commercially hungry, and often confused by the courtly world it entered. Later British history would look back at Roe as an early step toward English power in India. But in his own time, Roe was not standing above the Mughal world. He was trying to be heard inside it.

His journal is therefore not simply a record of travel.

It is a record of adjustment.

Roe had to learn that diplomacy in India did not work according to English assumptions. He had to negotiate where to stand, how to bow, what gifts meant, what rank meant, how imperial access worked, and how easily a European ambassador could become just another supplicant in the Mughal system.

That is why Thomas Roe matters.

He did not conquer India.
He did not open India.
He did not command Jahangir.

He watched, complained, negotiated, misunderstood, adapted, and left behind one of the most important English eyewitness accounts of the Mughal court in the early seventeenth century.

A Courtier Before He Was an Ambassador

Thomas Roe was born around 1580 or 1581 at Low Leyton near Wanstead in Essex. He came from a family with commercial and civic connections: his grandfather Sir Thomas Rowe had been a London merchant tailor, sheriff, alderman, and lord mayor. Roe entered Magdalen College, Oxford, at the age of twelve and later became connected to court life under Elizabeth I and James I. He was knighted by James in 1605.

This background shaped him.

Roe was not an ordinary sailor or merchant. He was a courtier, a gentleman, a man trained in rank, gesture, dignity, and patronage. He understood that diplomacy was theatre. He knew that clothes, gifts, language, seating, and titles mattered.

But Mughal India would test him because it had its own theatre.

At Jahangir’s court, rank was not measured by English assumptions. A royal ambassador from a distant island kingdom did not automatically outrank Mughal nobles. A letter from King James did not automatically produce a treaty. A gift could be interpreted differently in a world where imperial generosity, hierarchy, and submission were deeply structured.

Roe went to India with courtly confidence.

India taught him that English rank did not travel unchanged.

Before India: The Amazon Episode

Before Roe went to India, he had already traveled west.

The Dictionary of National Biography records that Henry, Prince of Wales, gave him an opportunity for distant travel by sending him toward the West Indies. Roe sailed from Plymouth in 1609–10, reached the mouth of the Amazon, explored upriver, examined the coast between the Amazon and the Orinoco, and returned to England in 1611.

This earlier journey matters because it shows Roe as part of England’s wider early modern expansion of curiosity and commerce.

He was not only an India ambassador. He belonged to a generation of Englishmen looking outward: to the Americas, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Ottoman world, and Asia. England was late compared with Portugal and Spain, but it was becoming restless.

Roe’s Amazon journey did not make him famous in the way his India embassy did. But it prepared him for the world of long-distance risk, uncertain geography, and overseas ambition.

He had already learned that maps were incomplete.

India would teach him that power was incomplete too.

Why England Sent Roe to India

The English East India Company needed protection.

English merchants had already tried to establish themselves at Surat and other points in western India. But they faced Portuguese hostility, Mughal suspicion, local negotiation problems, and the difficulty of operating in a world where commercial permission depended on imperial and provincial authority.

In 1614, after being elected MP for Tamworth, Roe was ordered by James I to go to Jahangir’s court at the request and expense of the East India Company. His instructions were to arrange a commercial treaty and obtain concessions for English factories, continuing earlier privileges associated with William Hawkins’s attempts at court.

This dual position is essential.

Roe was a royal ambassador.
But his mission was funded and pushed by a company.

He represented a king, but he served commercial aims. Modern scholarship describes him as functioning in a dual capacity: both as ambassador for King James and as a representative tied to mercantile company interests.

That made his mission awkward.

A royal ambassador wanted honor.
A company wanted trade.
The Mughal court expected hierarchy.
Jahangir expected gifts.
Company factors expected results.
Roe expected recognition.

These expectations did not always fit together.

Surat: The Coastal Door

Roe landed at Surat in September 1615.

Surat was not yet the British city it would become in later imperial memory. It was a Mughal port, a commercial city tied to the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Deccan, Gujarat, and inland trade routes. It was also a place where Portuguese power still mattered and where English ambitions depended on Mughal permission.

Roe did not step into English territory.

He stepped into a Mughal-controlled port.

From there, he had to travel inland to the imperial court. The Dictionary of National Biography records his route from Surat by way of Burhanpur and Mandu to Ajmer, where Jahangir was residing.

This route matters.

Roe’s India was not only coastal. It was inland, courtly, mobile, and imperial. He followed the Mughal emperor’s moving world. The Mughal court did not sit still for English convenience. The English ambassador had to move with it.

This is one of the great differences between the Mughal Empire and the later British imagination of fixed capitals. Jahangir’s court was a moving imperial organism: tents, nobles, guards, animals, gifts, artists, petitioners, records, women of the court, servants, soldiers, and provincial business all traveling together.

Roe had to follow the empire as it moved.

Ajmer and the First Audience

Roe reached Ajmer at the end of 1615 and had his first formal audience with Jahangir on 10 January 1616. Contemporary and later accounts identify this first meeting at Jahangir’s durbar in Ajmer, where the emperor appeared publicly to receive petitions, gifts, and visitors.

The scene is one of the great moments in early Anglo-Indian history.

An English ambassador entered the Mughal court, carrying the dignity of King James I and the hopes of the East India Company. But the setting belonged entirely to Jahangir. The space, the ritual, the hierarchy, the rules of approach, the viewing of the emperor, the presentation of gifts — all of it was Mughal.

Roe had to decide how far to adapt.

Should he bow in the Mughal way?
Should he preserve English royal dignity?
Should he submit to local ceremonial expectations?
Should he resist?
Should he compromise?

This was not a small matter.

In early modern diplomacy, the body was political. Where one stood, how one bowed, whether one removed shoes, whether one kissed the ground, whether one sat or stood — these things expressed status. Roe feared that too much submission would dishonor his king. The Mughal court, meanwhile, understood ceremonial behavior as part of the emperor’s world order.

The first audience was therefore not simply a meeting.

It was a negotiation of posture.

Jahangir’s Court

Jahangir’s court deeply impressed Roe, even when he criticized it.

The Mughal court was rich, hierarchical, visual, and theatrical. Jahangir’s daily appearance before petitioners and nobles, the handling of gifts, the weighing of rank, the movements of princes, and the involvement of powerful nobles all shaped Roe’s experience. His journal became valuable because it records this courtly world in detail.

The British Library catalogue describes Roe’s manuscript journal as accompanied by copies of letters sent home or to Indian princes, officials, residents, and merchants, along with accounts of expenses and presents.

This tells us what kind of document it was.

It was not only a travel diary.
It was a working diplomatic archive.

Roe recorded gifts because gifts were politics.
He recorded expenses because embassy required money.
He recorded letters because correspondence carried strategy.
He recorded audiences because access was power.
He recorded delays because delay was negotiation.

His journal is valuable precisely because it shows diplomacy as daily labor.

The Mughal Empire Did Not Need England

One of the most important truths about Roe’s embassy is that England was weak in Mughal terms.

The English wanted trade. The Mughals had many trading partners. Indian merchants, Armenians, Persians, Arabs, Gujaratis, Portuguese, Dutch, and others already operated in the commercial world of the empire. English goods were not irresistible. English power at sea was useful but limited. English prestige did not automatically translate into Mughal respect.

This is why Roe’s mission was difficult.

He wanted a formal treaty between James and Jahangir.
The Mughal court did not necessarily need such a treaty.

Modern scholarship stresses that Roe’s embassy failed in its original goal of brokering equal “articles of treaty” between the English and Mughal sovereigns, even though the mission later became a classic reference point for early Anglo-Indian encounters.

That distinction is crucial.

Roe did not obtain everything he wanted.
But his mission still mattered.

It helped improve the English position at Surat. It gave the English more secure commercial standing. It created a major written record. It taught the Company how Mughal diplomacy worked — or at least how an English ambassador struggled with it.

Failure and significance can exist together.

The Problem of Equality

Roe wanted to be treated as the ambassador of one sovereign to another.

But the Mughal court did not automatically accept English equality. Jahangir was one of the greatest rulers in the world. James I ruled a distant kingdom whose merchants were requesting trade privileges. From the Mughal point of view, English envoys could be incorporated into imperial hierarchy, not necessarily treated as equals.

This clash is central to Roe’s story.

European diplomatic theory emphasized sovereign equality among rulers, at least in formal language. Mughal diplomacy emphasized hierarchy, service, rank, favor, and incorporation into imperial order. The English wanted treaty language. The Mughals often gave farmans, permissions, protections, and orders within their own administrative system.

Modern scholarship on Mughal-European diplomacy argues that imperial government tied commercial privileges to expectations of submission and service, incorporating foreign actors into a domestic political framework.

Roe resisted this.

But he could not escape it entirely.

To get trade, the English had to enter Mughal politics.

Gifts and Misunderstandings

Gifts were one of Roe’s greatest frustrations.

The English brought presents for Jahangir, hoping that they would support diplomacy. But the Mughal court had a deeply developed gift culture. Presents were not simply objects; they were symbols of status, generosity, hierarchy, obligation, curiosity, and imperial possession.

European gifts could impress, disappoint, amuse, or be absorbed into Mughal luxury without producing the desired political result.

This is one of the great lessons of Roe’s embassy.

A gift does not mean the same thing everywhere.

For the East India Company, gifts were investments.
For Roe, they were tools of negotiation.
For Jahangir, they were part of courtly exchange and royal collecting.
For Mughal nobles, they were opportunities, obligations, and signs of access.

When Roe gave, he wanted policy.

When the Mughal court received, it did not necessarily accept the English interpretation of the exchange.

This difference produced repeated irritation.

Roe and Jahangir

Roe’s relationship with Jahangir was complicated.

He admired the emperor’s power and courtly presence, but often judged him through English and Protestant assumptions. He watched Jahangir’s drinking, ceremonies, humor, curiosity, justice, and imperial habits. He also complained about court politics, delay, favoritism, and the influence of powerful courtiers.

We should read Roe carefully here.

He is a source, not a neutral camera.

He sees Jahangir from outside, with frustration and cultural bias. He does not fully understand the Mughal court from within. His religious and political assumptions shape the way he describes people, rituals, and power.

Yet his observations are still invaluable.

He was present.
He watched closely.
He wrote often.
He dealt with the emperor, nobles, merchants, Jesuits, and Company factors.

His journal gives a rare English view of Jahangir’s court, but it should be read beside Mughal sources, Persian chronicles, paintings, farmans, court histories, and modern scholarship.

Roe gives one angle, not the whole Mughal world.

Nur Jahan, Asaf Khan, and Court Politics

Roe arrived in a court where access depended not only on Jahangir but also on powerful figures around him.

Nur Jahan, Jahangir’s wife, was one of the most influential people in the empire. Asaf Khan, her brother, was a major noble. Prince Khurram, the future Shah Jahan, was central to imperial politics. Roe’s mission unfolded inside this world of faction, family, rank, and influence.

The English ambassador had to learn that the emperor was not the only gate.

Mughal politics moved through households, nobles, princes, women of the court, eunuchs, interpreters, brokers, and merchants. Getting a permission was not only a matter of speaking to Jahangir. It required managing relationships across the court.

This frustrated Roe because it made diplomacy indirect.

But that indirectness was not disorder. It was how power worked.

The Mughal Empire was a court society. Roe had to negotiate not only with the emperor, but with the system that surrounded him.

Prince Khurram and English Difficulty

Prince Khurram, later Shah Jahan, was a difficult figure for Roe.

He held power, commanded campaigns, and influenced commercial permissions. English hopes at Surat and elsewhere could be blocked or delayed by Mughal officials and princely interests. Roe’s negotiations therefore had to account for future power, not only present authority.

This is important because the English East India Company was not yet strong enough to force decisions.

It had to survive through patience.

English agents needed imperial favor, provincial permission, local brokers, and protection from rivals. A prince’s hostility could make trade difficult. A noble’s friendship could help. A local governor’s order could matter as much as a royal audience.

Roe came to obtain a grand treaty.

He found that commerce depended on many smaller negotiations.

This was one of the lessons the Company absorbed from India: empire was built through paperwork, favors, permissions, brokerage, and persistence long before it was built through conquest.

The Portuguese Rival

The Portuguese were one of Roe’s greatest obstacles.

By the time Roe arrived, the Portuguese had been in the Indian Ocean for more than a century. They controlled Goa, held naval power, maintained Catholic missionary networks, and had long experience dealing with Indian rulers. They were not always dominant, but they were deeply embedded.

The English needed to displace or bypass Portuguese influence.

Roe’s mission was part of this European rivalry within Asian power structures. But it is important not to frame the story only as English versus Portuguese. Both operated within a larger Mughal and Indian Ocean world. Mughal permission mattered. Indian merchants mattered. Gujarati trade mattered. Persian Gulf routes mattered. Red Sea routes mattered.

Europeans were competitors, but they were not the only actors.

Roe’s India was not a European chessboard.

It was a Mughal-Indian commercial world in which Europeans fought for limited room.

The East India Company’s Real Aim

The Company wanted trade, not yet territorial empire.

This does not make it innocent. Trade could be aggressive. Commercial privilege could become political leverage. Factories could become fortified spaces. Company demands could grow. Later history would show how trade became rule.

But in Roe’s time, the immediate aim was protection for English merchants and factories, especially at Surat.

The older Dictionary of National Biography says Roe’s mission sought a commercial treaty and concessions for English factories, and that he obtained redress of wrongs and future immunities that helped place the Surat establishment in a stronger trading position.

This should be read carefully.

Older imperial historians often treated Roe’s work as the foundation of British greatness in India. Modern readers should resist inevitability. Roe did not know that Britain would one day rule large parts of India. Jahangir did not see him as the beginning of British Raj. The Mughal court was not imagining the future British Empire.

Still, small privileges matter.

The factory at Surat was one of the roots of later English power.

Why Roe Did Not Want Forts

Roe is often associated with a policy of seeking trade without territorial conquest.

He believed that the Company should focus on commerce rather than costly military occupation in India. In this respect, he was different from later Company men who built fortified settlements and armies.

But this too must be placed in context.

Roe’s advice was practical. England did not yet have the strength to dominate the Mughal Empire. Forts could provoke hostility and drain resources. Trade under Mughal protection was more realistic than conquest.

This was not anti-imperialism in a modern moral sense.

It was strategic modesty.

Roe saw that English success in India depended on operating within existing power structures. The Company was too weak to behave like a sovereign power in Mughal territory.

His wisdom lay partly in recognizing limits.

The Journal as Travel Literature

Roe’s journal is one of the great English accounts of Mughal India.

The Hakluyt Society’s edition, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–1619, was edited from contemporary records by William Foster and includes Roe’s journal and correspondence. The British Library manuscript shows the working texture of the archive: journal entries, copies of letters, expenses, presents, and correspondence with officials and merchants.

This makes Roe a major travel writer, even though he did not write in the same mode as a romantic wanderer.

His travel writing is bureaucratic, observational, irritated, ceremonial, and political. He records what an ambassador had to notice: distance, movement, court access, cost, etiquette, gifts, trade, delay, audiences, officials, and misunderstandings.

His India is not mainly temples and landscapes.

It is court and paperwork.

That may sound dry, but it is historically rich. Empires are often built through exactly such details.

What Roe Saw Well

Roe saw the Mughal court’s power of spectacle.

He understood that Jahangir’s court was a world of visibility: the emperor appeared to be seen; rank was performed; petitions moved through public rituals; nobles displayed loyalty; gifts circulated; audiences were staged.

He also saw that English merchants could not succeed by force alone. They needed permission, diplomacy, patience, and local allies. He understood that a royal embassy could raise English prestige above ordinary trading agents, even if it failed to produce an equal treaty.

He saw the importance of Surat.
He saw the danger of Portuguese rivalry.
He saw the complexity of Mughal court politics.
He saw that trade was inseparable from diplomacy.

These insights made his journal valuable.

Roe may not have loved India, and he often judged it harshly. But he did watch it closely.

What Roe Misunderstood

Roe misunderstood much.

He often treated Mughal ceremony as vanity or obstruction when it was actually a sophisticated political language. He could not fully see the court from within Persianate and Indo-Islamic norms. He often measured Jahangir and Mughal nobles against English expectations of monarchy, religion, masculinity, and reason. He underestimated the ways Mughal politics deliberately incorporated foreigners into imperial hierarchy.

He also overestimated the dignity of his own position.

To Roe, he was the ambassador of King James. To the Mughal court, he was a foreign petitioner from a relatively minor European kingdom, useful perhaps, interesting perhaps, but not central.

This mismatch produced much of the drama.

Roe’s frustration is historically useful because it shows England’s early weakness.

The English were not yet masters.

They were learning how to be tolerated.

The Court as a School

Roe’s years with Jahangir became a school for English diplomacy in India.

He learned that success could come through small permissions rather than grand treaties. He learned that gifts needed careful handling. He learned that provincial officials mattered. He learned that English merchants had to negotiate at multiple levels. He learned that insisting on European diplomatic equality could limit flexibility.

Modern scholarship argues that Roe’s highly formal royal embassy was actually atypical compared with the more common, lower-profile diplomacy practiced by English and Dutch Company agents with Mughal power-holders at imperial and regional levels.

This is a crucial correction.

Roe is famous, but he was not the whole story. Company diplomacy usually worked through many smaller contacts: brokers, factors, interpreters, governors, nobles, merchants, letters, gifts, and favors.

Roe’s embassy was exceptional partly because it was so grand.

The ordinary work of empire was quieter.

Leaving India

Roe took leave of Jahangir in early 1618 and eventually left India.

The older DNB account says he remained close to the court, following Jahangir in progress to Ujjain and Ahmadabad, until January 1617–18, when he took leave after achieving as much as seemed possible. On his way home, he went to Persia to deal with silk trade issues and was reported back in London in 1619.

His departure did not end English problems in India.

Trade remained difficult. Portuguese competition continued. Mughal officials still had to be negotiated with. The Company still had to learn how to survive in a complex commercial world.

But Roe left behind improved standing and a record of how to approach the court.

His mission did not create British India.

It created knowledge that later English actors could use.

That is the more careful way to understand his legacy.

After India: The Ottoman Embassy

Roe’s career did not end with India.

In 1621, he was sent as ambassador to the Ottoman Porte and arrived at Constantinople in December of that year. He remained there until 1628. During this mission, he worked to expand English mercantile privileges, dealt with Barbary piracy, helped improve relations with Algiers, and became involved in wider European diplomacy during the Thirty Years’ War.

This part of his life is important because it shows that Roe was not only an “India man.”

He was one of England’s most experienced diplomats across several worlds: Mughal, Ottoman, Mediterranean, European, and Protestant alliance politics. He understood that trade and diplomacy were joined. He dealt with merchants, sultans, patriarchs, prisoners, princes, and parliaments.

His Ottoman embassy also produced a major correspondence collection, later published as The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe in his Embassy to the Ottoman Porte, 1621–1628.

Roe’s travel life therefore stretched from the Amazon to India to Constantinople.

He was a global courtier before England had a global empire.

Algiers and Captives

During his Ottoman mission, Roe tried to address the problem of English captives taken by Barbary corsairs.

The DNB notes that suppressing Algerine piracy was beyond diplomacy alone, but Roe’s negotiations improved England’s relations with Algiers and led to the liberation of seven to eight hundred English captive mariners after a 1624 treaty.

This episode matters because early modern travel was not only elite diplomacy.

It was also captivity.

English sailors in the Mediterranean could be captured and enslaved. Merchants could disappear. Diplomats had to negotiate not only trade privileges but human freedom. Roe’s career therefore connects India’s commercial diplomacy with Mediterranean captivity politics.

He lived in an age when mobility always carried the risk of enslavement, imprisonment, piracy, disease, or debt.

Travel was not romance.

It was exposure.

Roe and Manuscript Culture

Roe was also a collector and mediator of manuscripts.

During his Ottoman mission, he developed a relationship with Cyril Lucaris, patriarch of Constantinople. The DNB records that Cyril presented through Roe to James I the famous Codex Alexandrinus, a major biblical manuscript, and that Roe himself collected Greek manuscripts, later giving twenty-nine Greek and other manuscripts to the Bodleian Library in 1628.

This aspect of Roe’s career is easy to overlook.

He was not simply a trader’s diplomat. He also belonged to the world of books, manuscripts, antiquities, coins, and learned collecting. His diplomacy moved objects as well as letters.

A manuscript could be a gift.
A coin could be evidence.
A book could be prestige.
A diplomatic relationship could become a library treasure.

Roe’s career reminds us that early modern ambassadors were also cultural brokers.

Parliament and Later Service

After his great embassies, Roe continued to serve in English and European politics.

He took part in diplomatic work connected with Sweden, Poland, Denmark, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Thirty Years’ War. The DNB records his later role in negotiations at Hamburg, Regensburg, and Vienna, his membership of the Privy Council in 1640, and his election as MP for Oxford University. He died in 1644 and was buried at Woodford in Essex.

This later career confirms his stature.

Roe was not a one-mission figure. His India embassy made him famous, but his expertise extended to trade, currency, Protestant diplomacy, Ottoman politics, and European balance-of-power negotiations.

He was a diplomat of systems.

He understood that commerce, religion, war, monarchy, and information all moved together.

This makes him a key early modern figure, not only a visitor to India.

Compared With William Hawkins

Before Roe, William Hawkins had already gone to Jahangir’s court.

Hawkins arrived earlier as an English representative and spent time at the Mughal court, even gaining some personal access to Jahangir. But Hawkins did not carry the same formal royal embassy structure that Roe did. Roe’s mission was more official, more ceremonial, and more directly tied to the Crown’s diplomatic dignity.

The comparison matters.

Hawkins shows the experimental phase of English contact.
Roe shows the formalization of English diplomatic ambition.

Hawkins tried to work through personal favor.
Roe tried to work through ambassadorial status.

Both reveal English weakness in different ways.

The English did not yet have a stable formula for dealing with Mughal India. They were testing methods: merchant petition, court residence, royal embassy, gifts, letters, and negotiation through nobles.

Roe’s mission was one experiment among many.

Compared With François Pyrard

François Pyrard de Laval, the French traveler shipwrecked in the Maldives and later caught in Portuguese India, offers a useful comparison.

Pyrard saw Portuguese Asia from the perspective of a vulnerable French survivor. Roe saw Mughal India from the perspective of an official English ambassador.

Pyrard’s India is captivity, illness, Goa, Portuguese suspicion, and shipwreck.
Roe’s India is court, ceremony, gifts, trade privilege, and imperial access.

Both show early modern Europeans before later colonial dominance.

Neither man rules India.
Both depend on Asian and Portuguese systems stronger than themselves.

Pyrard’s vulnerability is physical.
Roe’s vulnerability is diplomatic.

Together, they show that early seventeenth-century Europeans in Asia were often weak, dependent, and improvising.

Compared With Afanasy Nikitin

Afanasy Nikitin reached India more than a century before Roe.

Nikitin was a Russian merchant moving through the Volga, Caspian, Persian, and Deccan trade worlds before the Portuguese sea route changed European access to India. Roe came later, after the Portuguese, in the age of chartered companies and royal embassies.

Nikitin’s India was the pre-Portuguese Deccan of horse markets and spiritual dislocation.
Roe’s India was Mughal India seen through English commercial diplomacy.

Nikitin traveled almost alone, vulnerable and anxious.
Roe traveled as an ambassador with letters, gifts, and Company expectations.

Both were outsiders. But their status differed sharply.

Nikitin shows India before European maritime empires.
Roe shows India before British territorial empire, but after European companies had begun competing for Asian trade.

Compared With Tomé Pires and Duarte Barbosa

Tomé Pires and Duarte Barbosa wrote from Portuguese Asia in the early sixteenth century.

They belonged to an older European phase: Portugal’s attempt to understand and dominate Indian Ocean trade through ports, fortresses, interpreters, and written surveys. Roe belonged to a later English phase: entering the Indian Ocean after Portugal and trying to secure trade under Mughal authority.

Barbosa and Pires wrote like information-gatherers for Portuguese maritime expansion.
Roe wrote like a diplomat frustrated by an empire that would not treat England as equal.

Portugal had forts.
England had petitions.

This difference is crucial.

Roe’s embassy shows England before it learned how to become a military power in India. The Company’s later empire was not born fully formed. It began with men like Roe asking for permission.

Compared With Fernão Mendes Pinto

Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação is chaotic, dramatic, and full of shipwrecks, captivity, piracy, and moral disorder.

Roe’s journal is more controlled, official, and diplomatic.

Pinto shows Portuguese Asia from below: sailors, pirates, captives, mercenaries, missionaries.
Roe shows Mughal India from a formal embassy: court access, ceremonial rank, trade privilege, letters, and presents.

Yet both reveal the instability of early European expansion.

Pinto’s Europeans are often physically lost.
Roe is politically lost.

Pinto survives danger at sea.
Roe survives humiliation at court.

Both men remind us that Europe’s later imperial confidence should not be projected backward. In their own time, Europeans often stumbled through Asian worlds they did not control.

Compared With Heliodorus

Heliodorus, the Greek ambassador from Taxila who raised a Garuda pillar for Vāsudeva at Besnagar, is far older than Roe, but the comparison is useful.

Both were ambassadors in India.
Both entered powerful Indian political worlds.
Both had to navigate court and culture.

But Heliodorus left a religious monument in an Indian sacred landscape. Roe left a written diplomatic archive for English readers.

Heliodorus participated in local devotional life.
Roe often resisted local ceremonial incorporation.

Heliodorus’s memory survives in Brahmi inscription.
Roe’s memory survives in English journal and correspondence.

Together, they show two very different ways foreign envoys entered India: one through dedication, one through negotiation.

Compared With Wang Xuance

Wang Xuance, the Tang envoy to India, also helps us understand Roe.

Wang traveled from China to India in a Buddhist-diplomatic world of mountains, embassies, Tibet, Nepal, and post-Harṣa politics. Roe traveled from England to India in a commercial-diplomatic world of ships, Surat, Mughal court politics, and Company trade.

Wang’s mission collapsed into violence after Harṣa’s death.
Roe’s mission struggled through ceremony and negotiation under Jahangir.

Wang returned with military support from Tibet and Nepal.
Roe returned with letters, partial privileges, and experience.

Both show that India was a major diplomatic destination for distant powers. But neither China nor England simply controlled India through an embassy. Each envoy entered an Indian political world with its own strength.

The Danger of Reading Backwards

Thomas Roe is often treated as the beginning of British India.

There is truth in that, but also danger.

Yes, his mission helped strengthen English trade at Surat.
Yes, his journal became a foundational English source on Mughal India.
Yes, the East India Company would later become a territorial power.
Yes, later British writers looked back at Roe as an early figure in that story.

But Roe himself did not command the future.

In 1616, the Mughal Empire was vastly stronger than England in India. Jahangir did not see Roe as the first step toward British rule. Roe did not bring an army. The Company did not yet have Bengal revenues, sepoys, Bombay power, Madras, Calcutta, Plassey, or imperial administration.

Reading Roe only as “the beginning of the British Empire in India” flattens the seventeenth century.

The better reading is this:

Roe shows the moment when England was trying to enter a Mughal world on Mughal terms, while imagining itself as more equal than the court was willing to admit.

That is more accurate and more powerful.

What Roe Teaches About Travel

Roe teaches that travel is not only movement across geography.

It is movement across status.

A man can leave England as an ambassador and arrive in India as a petitioner. He can carry royal letters and still wait outside court. He can represent a king and still need a broker. He can bring gifts and still fail to control their meaning. He can write about another empire and reveal the limits of his own.

This makes Roe an important traveler.

He did not travel to find himself.
He traveled to make England visible.

But in the process, he revealed how small England still was in Asia.

That is the most interesting part of his journey.

Why Thomas Roe Still Matters

Thomas Roe matters because his embassy captures a turning point before the turning point.

He came before British territorial empire, but after English commercial ambition had entered the Indian Ocean. He stood between merchant adventurers and later colonial power. His mission to Jahangir did not create an equal treaty, but it improved English trading prospects and produced one of the most important English records of the Mughal court.

His journal matters because it shows the Mughal Empire through the eyes of an English diplomat who was both observant and biased, impressed and irritated, ambitious and powerless. It records the ceremonial world of Jahangir, the commercial anxieties of the East India Company, the rivalry with Portugal, the importance of Surat, the difficulty of gifts, and the mismatch between English sovereign diplomacy and Mughal imperial hierarchy.

He also matters because his later career shows the wider world of early modern diplomacy: Ottoman negotiations, English captives in Algiers, Protestant alliances, European war, manuscripts, coins, and Parliament.

In the long history of travelers, Thomas Roe stands as the ambassador before empire: the English courtier who entered Jahangir’s world seeking trade and honor, discovered that Mughal India did not need England on English terms, and left behind a journal that preserves both the grandeur of the Mughal court and the insecurity of the early English presence in India.