Sir John Child, 1st Baronet (died 1690) was a governor of

Bombay Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...

, and

de facto ''De facto'' ( ; , "in fact") describes practices that exist in reality, whether or not they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms. It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with ''de jure'' ("by la ...

(although not officially) the first governor-general of the British settlements in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

. Born in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

, Child was sent as a child to his uncle, the chief of the factory at Rajapur. on 27 October 1681, he was appointed chief of the

East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southea ...

's affairs at

Surat Surat is a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The word Surat literally means ''face'' in Gujarati and Hindi. Located on the banks of the river Tapti near its confluence with the Arabian Sea, it used to be a large seaport. It is now ...

and Bombay, while at the same time his namesake, stated to be unrelated by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Sir Josiah Child, was governor of the company at home. The two men guided the affairs of the company through the period of struggle between the Mughals and

Maratha The Marathi people (Marathi: मराठी लोक) or Marathis are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group who are indigenous to Maharashtra in western India. They natively speak Marathi, an Indo-Aryan language. Maharashtra was formed as a M ...

s. They have been credited by history with the change from unarmed to armed trade on the part of the company; however, both were actually loath to quarrel with the Mughal Empire. War broke out with

Aurangzeb Muhi al-Din Muhammad (; – 3 March 1707), commonly known as ( fa, , lit=Ornament of the Throne) and by his regnal title Alamgir ( fa, , translit=ʿĀlamgīr, lit=Conqueror of the World), was the sixth emperor of the Mughal Empire, ruling ...

in 1689, but in the following year Child had to sue for peace, one of the conditions being that he should be expelled from India. He escaped this expulsion by his death on 4 February 1690, and was as English president of Surat and Bombay succeeded by Bartholomew Harris.

Armorials

Burke's Armorials 1884 gives his arms as follows: (Child of Surat, East Indies and Dervill, Essex, bart. created 1684, extinct 1753): ''Vert, two bars engrailed between three leopard's faces or''. Crest: ''A leopard's face or between 2 laurel branches proper''. Motto: ''Spes Alit'' (Hope Nourishes). These arms are in no way similar to those of Sir Josiah Child or Sir Francis Child, of Child & Co bankers, which seems to confirm the lack of any family relationship to the other Child baronetcies.

References

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www.thepeerage.com
Year of birth missing 1690 deaths Governors of Bombay British East India Company civil servants Baronets in the Baronetage of England {{India-gov-stub