India's ancient contacts with Europe receded from the sixth century A.D. The crotchety Byzantine monk Cosmas Indicopleustes (the man who sailed to India), a merchant engaged in the Far Eastern trade whose business took him as far as Ceylon and who in later life retired into a monastery of Sinai where he wrote the Topographia Christiana, a Christian account of the geography of the world (c. 640 A.D.), was the last to report on Indian conditions. Only a few Christian missionaries visited India during the Middle Ages, but their attention was centered on winning the heathen lands to Christianity and their writings contribute little to the history of cultural exchanges. In fact India, and generally the East, had become so remote from the European mind that Marco Polo's account of what he saw in the East was long distrusted as a fable, though much of it was quite authentic and factual, as modern research has shown. The more significant contacts between India and the West in modern times began with the arrival of the Portuguese in the last years of the fifteenth century. But they too concentrated more on religion than on trade; however, when their claims to a monopoly of trade relations with the East, based on a preposterous Papal bull, were soon challenged, and the Dutch, English and French entered the Indian ocean, there ensued a brisk competition among the rival European trading companies for securing trading privileges from the Indian powers, and this, by force of circumstances, led to their increasing interference in the political relations of the native kingdoms and principalities. By their readiness to learn from the experience of others, their astute capacity to take calculated risks, and by their good fortune, the English gained the most signal successes and became the rulers of all India by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The story of this political expansion has been told often and is well known. Our primary concern here will be with the social and cultural changes that accompanied this historic expansion of British colonial power, the influx of Europeans and other westerners for trade, conquest and other ends pursued in India, their mutual relations and their relations with the children of the soil, the social contacts and the mutual cultural influences that resulted, and the abiding results, material and spiritual, so far as they can be traced, for the civilizations of the West and the East, as they may be observed particularly in England and India.