On the 24th of August, 1608, a ship named the Hector dropped anchor at the port of Surat. It was the first vessel of the English East India Company to touch Indian soil. Its commander, Captain William Hawkins, stepped onto the quay carrying a message from King James I of England, addressed to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir— a letter soliciting, in the most elaborate diplomatic language available to Jacobean England, the right to trade in India.
The Portuguese, already entrenched on India's western coast, moved immediately to block him. They told the Mughal port officials that the English were pirates, that their letters were fraudulent, and that no European power traded in India without Lisbon's sanction. But Hawkins was fortunate in one unusual accomplishment: he spoke Turkish. Jahangir, delighted at hearing his ancestral language from an Englishman's mouth, took to Hawkins with immediate warmth and called him “English Khan”. He appointed him as a mansabdar with command of four hundred horses and arranged his marriage to Mariam Khan, an Armenian merchant’s daughter. A licence for an English factory at Surat followed, then collapsed under Portuguese pressure. Hawkins left India in 1611 and died at sea two years later, having secured nothing permanent for his king.
The Portuguese, already entrenched on India's western coast, moved immediately to block him. They told the Mughal port officials that the English were pirates, that their letters were fraudulent, and that no European power traded in India without Lisbon's sanction. But Hawkins was fortunate in one unusual accomplishment: he spoke Turkish. Jahangir, delighted at hearing his ancestral language from an Englishman's mouth, took to Hawkins with immediate warmth and called him “English Khan”. He appointed him as a mansabdar with command of four hundred horses and arranged his marriage to Mariam Khan, an Armenian merchant’s daughter. A licence for an English factory at Surat followed, then collapsed under Portuguese pressure. Hawkins left India in 1611 and died at sea two years later, having secured nothing permanent for his king.
The English East India Company sent its next envoy, Sir Thomas Roe, in 1615. By 1757, the Battle of Plassey had transferred the sovereignty of Bengal to a trading corporation headquartered in Leadenhall Street, London. The rest is history that India has spent its entire independent existence attempting to recover from. England, which was a secondary European power with a textile surplus it could scarcely export and a navy it was still constructing, unravelled its fortunes that India granted it, tolerantly and at its own discretion, and then paid the most catastrophic price in the economic history of the modern world.
 |
The India-United Kingdom (UK) Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) goes into effect on July 15, 2026. |
“We Did It”
On 17 June 2026, at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, a microphone caught Indian PM Narendra Modi turning to his British counterpart, Keir Starmer, and saying, with evident satisfaction, “We did it.” Starmer answered, “We did it. Yes, yes, yes, I hear. We got it over the line. So this is good.”The microphone had broadcast, to the world’s mild amusement, the resolution of the last dispute holding up the India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, the CETA. Concluded in May 2025 after fourteen rounds of negotiation and signed in London that July, the agreement enters into force on 15 July 2026. The British government projects that it will add roughly £4.8 billion a year to the UK’s GDP and lift bilateral trade by £25.5 billion annually by 2040; London calls it the most comprehensive trade arrangement India has yet entered with a G7 nation.
Four hundred and seventeen years separate Hawkins’s letter from Starmer’s handshake, and the essential request has aged remarkably well.
England in 1608 was a country of modest means seeking access to the wealthiest market on earth. Britain in 2026 arrived with 125 business leaders, the largest such delegation it has sent to India in recent memory, seeking access to the fastest-growing major economy in the world. The direction of need has travelled full circle in four centuries.
The Architecture of an Unequal Bargain
Britain’s enthusiasm for this agreement owes more to arithmetic than to generosity. A report by Cambridge Econometrics, commissioned by the Mayor of London and released in January 2024, found that Brexit had already cost the UK economy £140 billion, shrunk London’s economy by more than £30 billion, and eliminated nearly two million jobs nationwide. The average Briton was £2,000 worse off in 2023 because of it; the average Londoner, £3,400 worse off. The Office for Budget Responsibility separately assumes a permanent four per cent hit to long-run productivity, and a 2025 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research put the cumulative damage by that year at six to eight per cent of GDP, with investment down by as much as eighteen per cent. The figures have drawn methodological criticism from some economists, yet even the critics broadly accept that Brexit has proven expensive, and Britain has gone looking for someone to help cover the bill.This is the country that arrived with a hundred and twenty-five business leaders bearing the proposition that free trade between Britain and India is a mutual triumph. It is worth asking what each side actually surrenders in the bargain.
The CETA cuts tariffs on 99 per cent of Indian export lines into Britain and on roughly 90 per cent of British export lines into India, a pairing that sounds symmetrical until one examines what those tariffs were protecting. Half of India’s merchandise exports to Britain, worth about $6 billion of an $11.41 billion total in 2022-23, already crossed the border duty-free: petroleum, medicines, diamonds, machine parts, aircraft components.
The Global Trade Research Initiative, a New Delhi think tank, concluded that the agreement would have a limited effect on Indian exports for precisely this reason, since the average British duty on Indian goods had already fallen to a modest 4.2 per cent.
British officials expect Scotch exports to India to grow by £1 billion a year as a result, a transfer of market advantage substantial enough that the GTRI has warned it will pressure India’s own automotive and beverage industries while eroding the very tariff space India might once have used as an industrial policy tool. India, in turn, gains improved access for textiles, leather, and marine products. The gains are real but, by GTRI’s own data, modest: between 2018-19 and 2023-24, India’s exports to Japan (its other major Asian FTA partner) grew just 6 per cent even as its exports to all FTA partners combined grew over 14 per cent.
The Services Question
Britain is the world’s second-largest exporter of services, a sector that dominates its economy and its export earnings. Under the CETA, British firms in telecommunications, construction, and environmental services may operate in India without setting up a local office. British banks and insurers receive treatment equal to Indian firms, including access up to the 74 per cent foreign investment ceiling in insurance, and there are no numerical caps on the number of British service providers India must admit. A parallel Double Contribution Convention, also taking effect on 15 July, lets UK nationals working in India for up to sixty months keep building their UK State Pension while paying National Insurance at home instead of social security contributions in India.India’s own services sector, now some 55 per cent of national output and the most globally competitive part of its economy, has built its position in Britain over decades through sheer competitiveness, treaty or no treaty. What emerges from the comparison is a country with high tariffs and a fast-growing market lowering its defences, in exchange for formalising terms it had mostly extended already.
Data generated by a billion Indian users is processed and monetised on servers outside India’s jurisdiction, governed by laws India did not write, adjudicated in courts where India has no standing. India has so far declined to join the WTO’s moratorium on customs duties for electronic transmissions, has stayed out of the WTO’s Joint Statement Initiative on e-commerce, and has resisted the “Data Free Flow with Trust” framework pushed by some of its own close partners, precisely because each of these arrangements would lock in commitments on cross-border data flow before India has finished deciding what its own data sovereignty should look like. But a concession, of any sort, is a dilution of our efforts to safeguard our people.
The Ghost of Ottawa
In 1932, with the Depression in full grip, Britain convened the Imperial Economic Conference at Ottawa and built a system of Imperial Preference: tariffs lowered within the Empire and raised against the rest of the world, designed to compensate for Britain’s declining competitiveness by tightening its hold on the Dominions, India among them. Dr Gautam Sen, who taught international political economy at the London School of Economics for over two decades, has observed that the CETA carries a striking parallel to that earlier system, one response to economic collapse echoing another, with India once again cast as the dependable market that absorbs Britain’s surplus and helps it recover from its own mistakes. Neville Chamberlain called the Ottawa Agreements an attempt to bring the Empire together again. Keir Starmer, in Évian, called it getting the deal over the line.A smaller market seeks entry, secures a foothold through trade, and converts that foothold over time into a structural advantage. Whether some version of it is happening once more is a question India would be wise to put to itself before the toasts run too long.
The Price Paid in Europe
There is a further cost India may discover only later. At the same summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that India and the European Union will sign their own trade agreement, calling it “the mother of all trade deals” and confirming that it will cut tariffs on 99 per cent of Indian exports to the EU and 97 per cent of EU exports to India. Dr Sen’s warning extends to this question too: a generous India-UK FTA, agreed with a country that left the EU and now sits outside its customs union, opens the theoretical possibility that British goods could find their way into the European market through India, the very market Britain forfeited by leaving in the first place. India, having courted London and Brussels in the same year, is being treated like a conduit to rebuild UK-EU trade.The Tribunal in The Hague
After India opened its economy to foreign investment in 1991, it signed a long series of bilateral investment treaties, eighty-three of them by 2015, seventy-four still in force. Each one promised foreign investors fair and equitable treatment, and each one gave them a right that few Indian citizens possess: the right to bypass Indian courts entirely and take a grievance against the Indian state straight to a private arbitral tribunal sitting in Geneva, Paris, or The Hague. In 2011, an Australian coal company named White Industries won the first adverse award against India under one of these treaties, after Indian courts took years longer than the treaty allowed to enforce a separate commercial ruling in the company’s favour. The award opened what one law firm later described as a flood of similar claims.Two more followed in 2020, after New Delhi tried in 2012 to tax, retrospectively, transactions structured years earlier. Vodafone and Cairn Energy both took their disputes not to Indian courts but to international arbitral tribunals, and both won. In Cairn’s case, the tribunal ordered India to return the value of shares, dividends, and tax refunds it had seized while pursuing the disputed demand. When New Delhi was slow to comply, Cairn’s lawyers obtained a French court order permitting the seizure of Indian government property in Paris to satisfy the award. A private oil company, acting under the authority of a 1994 investment treaty, came within a court order of directing the confiscation of the sovereign assets of the Indian Republic on foreign soil. Few clearer illustrations exist of what an economic treaty can do to a nation’s freedom of action, once it has been signed.
It is a vivid reminder that colonisation was never only about flags and armies, but who writes the rules under which a country operates, who holds the final word in a contract dispute, and who can reach into a state’s own treasury when a private ruling goes against it. Only the instruments have changed their shape across four centuries.
History, it seems, arranges its ironies with patience.
About the Author: Ashutosh Sharma
A researcher and author, Sharma has contributed to projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and currently is a Junior Analyst at the Military Operations Research Society, where he writes on technology, policy, and strategic affairs.