To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  To ensure that all income from trade was flowing into the Company’s coffers, and to prevent corruption among its officials, Cornwallis banned private trading, compensating Company officials with higher wages to offset the loss. Cornwallis himself led the way, encouraging conscientious officials through the example of his own scrupulous and principled behavior, studiously refusing the customary gifts of Indian diplomacy. Though his refusal to play by the traditional rules of indigenous statecraft annoyed native rulers, it largely seems to have worked as a means of rooting out graft. Though corruption and incompetence still plagued Company rule, the sort of open fraud that angered Indians and disgusted Britons was becoming the exception rather than the rule. The replacement of rapacious officials with upright administrators did much to secure the trust of the governed, or at least to begin the process of eroding decades of mistrust, but it had more sinister consequences as well. For the young men who came out to govern British India, the ability to make a life-changing sum of money relatively quickly was one of the foremost inducements to leave behind their native shores for a dangerous career in Asia. With private trading and the acceptance of large gifts now off limits, these ambitious Company officials had to find new ways of making their India experience pay off. For many, political or military preferment replaced money-making as the primary mode of social advancement.

  The best way to ensure that one’s time in India helped one ascend the ladder of office, then, was to win a successful campaign against foreign powers or to secure a favorable treaty with an Indian ally. Careful management of existing peace and prosperity would hardly make people back in Britain stand up and take notice, but adding to British patrimony or prestige could secure favor and honors, whatever the anti-imperial rhetoric might suggest. The result was that despite near constant and unanimous repudiation of further territorial conquest by government and Company officials in Britain, a succession of senior officials in India actively pursued conflict and conquest in the years following the American War. When the Marquis of Wellesley, the older brother of the more famous Duke of Wellington, arrived as governor-general in 1798, for instance, he did so with a keen desire to secure the political advancement he had so far conspicuously failed to secure in Britain. Thus, despite instructions not to engage in war with other Indian powers, and his own later claim that he arrived with no such ambition, he quickly seized on a convenient pretext to invade Mysore. Cut off from the spoils of private trade, officials now had to turn to the spoils of war and politics.

  In his reformist search for Company fiscal stability, Cornwallis also remade the revenue system instituted under his predecessor. Hastings’ use of tax-farmers, though in line with developments in other Indian states, had proved highly unsuccessful, both in raising more revenue for the Company and in winning the hearts and minds of the Company’s subjects. The use of tax-farmers not only failed to stimulate local economic growth, but also led to greater financial burdens being passed on to the peasantry, who occasionally rose up in opposition. The zamindars, denied their hereditary rights to their lands, were likewise alienated by Hastings’ system. Cornwallis’s solution to this problem was to create what was afterwards known as the Permanent Settlement, which granted the zamindars hereditary rights to their former lands in perpetuity in return for a fixed annual sum. This system would remain the basis of the British land-revenue system in India until the mid-nineteenth century.

  The result was a drastic transformation, an authoritarian revolution, in the nature of British governance in India. Where once local rulers had possessed considerable autonomy and room to negotiate, from the 1780s, India became more thickly, more intensely governed. As late as the 1770s, only one-fifth of the East India Company’s 430 civil officers had resided outside of the three capitals of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. By the end of the century, fully one-half of the Company’s 600 officials were spread throughout the countryside, operating as tax collectors, diplomats, and judges. And while the Permanent Settlement did ensure regular income for the East India Company, it also set a permanent ceiling on the revenue the Company could extract from its lands, limiting the financial benefits of established territories and necessitating the conquest of new territory to augment the dwindling returns. For the Indian landowners, the new settlement also eliminated the previous, more flexible system that had allowed tax rates to be adjusted to reflect local conditions and temporary crises. The zamindars were no less likely to squeeze peasant cultivators for greater and greater sums than before, and in addition the peasantry now had to face a new entrenched class opposed to further reform. A new social rift was opening with the Permanent Settlement, one that “inaugurated a clear break with the past.” In the end, both landlords and the peasantry, who bore the brunt of the new financial requirements, were dissatisfied with the new revenue system.33

  Under Hastings, the judicial system had proceeded largely along Indian lines, with local law stressed, and many native inhabitants occupying places in the legal system. To many British officials and observers, the result was a confused mess. The tangle of various strands of Hindu and Muslim law, and the reliance on Indian interpreters to parse the many legal sources used, made it difficult for British magistrates and officials to be sure that the law was fairly and consistently enforced. Under Cornwallis, with the help of such officials as Sir William Jones, a polymath magistrate and a brilliant, pioneering linguist, Hindu and Muslim law were codified and translated, allowing British magistrates and advocates to take greater control of the legal process. Along these same lines, native Indians were removed from senior judicial and administrative positions and replaced by Europeans. In Cornwallis’s opinion, Indians were inferior, and could not be trusted to be honest or competent. “As on account of their colour & extraction,” Cornwallis reasoned, “they are considered in this country as inferior to Europeans, I am of opinion that those of them who possess the best abilities could not command that authority and respect which is necessary in the due discharge of the duty of an officer.” From 1791, therefore, Cornwallis mandated that “no person, the son of a Native Indian, shall henceforward be appointed by this Court to Employment in the Civil, Military, or Marine Service of the Company.” As such, central and local judicial powers were removed from the hands of Indians, and judicial power granted to Company revenue collectors and a new system of circuit courts.34

  The effects of this new authoritarian “Cornwallis Code” were drastic. For the first time, official British policy enshrined race or ethnicity as a primary consideration in the appointment of administrative officials. The codification of Hindu and Muslim law, though done with real care and intellectual rigor by William Jones and his colleagues, could not help but alter and interpret Indian law in British ways. The result was what one historian has called an “unreal guide to current usage in evolving legal traditions” and a hybrid Anglo-Indian law that would largely remain in force until the present day. The Anglicizing of Indian law, however, did allow some abuses, which had been overlooked or excused because they were thought to be legitimate under Indian law, to be addressed and reformed. Of greatest import was new legislation, Cornwallis’ “Proclamation against the Slave Trade,” designed to outlaw child slavery and the slave trade, which had been previously allowed as consistent with native law.35

  On the whole, the reforms instituted by Cornwallis reflected the conser­vative, authoritarian reaction that swept the British world as a result of the American War. In the face of dwindling coffers, the revenue of the Company and of British India were to be placed on more sound footing by weeding out corruption, eliminating private trading, and reforming the land-revenue system. In the face of global competition with European powers and the threat of regional rebellions on the model of America, the administration of India was remade, emphasizing the centralization of power in the hands of Calcutta, ensuring government oversight from Britain, and replacing native officials with European administrators. As centralization and Europeanization replaced a more diffuse, syncretic sy
stem, squeezing out native peoples and practices, British India began to move ineluctably from a loose trading federation to an authoritarian administrative unit of the British crown. According to one veteran of colonial administration:

  The fundamental point necessary to be established and which ought to precede all others is the supremacy of Government; or in other words that no persons excepting its delegates should be permitted to exercise any act of authority, which properly and exclusively belongs to the controlling power; the zamindars should of course be compelled either immediately or gradually to disband the bodies of armed followers which they retain that the sword may exclusively be held by the company.36

  The American Revolution had spurred Britain to rethink the nature and aims of imperial governance, ensuring that a rebellion in one corner of the world would not bring the entire system to its knees. For Hastings, the goals of Company rule were to create a system that maintained British control, but did so in a way that was consistent with Indian history and amenable to Indian sensibilities, “to rule this people with ease and moderation according to their own ideas, manners, and prejudices.” Power was to reside ultimately in British hands, but the exercise of governance was left to the Indian people, on whose behalf the government was assumed to operate. For Cornwallis, the Company’s Indian possessions were first and foremost a resource to be used by and for the British. As such, the priorities of his administration were, in the opening words to a draft of Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement, “to ensure its political safety, and to render the possession of the country as advantageous as possible to the East India Company and the British nation.” With such goals in mind, Indians, who Cornwallis maintained were incompetent, untrustworthy, and irredeemably corrupt, could not be trusted with positions in the administration. In the years after the war, an Orientalist regime had been replaced by a colonial regime and the tools of this brave new world would be information, bureaucracy, and violence.37

  Though the peace of 1784 was viewed differently by the various combatants, almost everyone realized that the cessation of hostilities brought on by the end of the American War was a pause in, rather than an ending of the imperial scramble for southern India. The new casus belli was Tipu Sultan’s invasion of the Kingdom of Travancore, a British ally on the very south-west tip of the Indian peninsula. Tipu had long coveted the territory of Travancore, and had attempted to seize it by force in the previous fighting. Aware of the predatory designs of their powerful neighbor, Travancore had built a series of forts along the border with Mysore and even purchased two forts from the Dutch East India Company. Tipu was alarmed by this aggressive posturing and angered by the fact that some of the newly built and newly acquired forts were located in territories that were client states of Mysore. In 1789, Tipu responded with an invasion of Mysore, which alarmed both the Tavancore and the British, to whom the Raja of Travancore appealed for military aid. Company officials had long known that Travancore was a likely place for the renewal of hostilities with Mysore, and had gone so far as to warn Tipu Sultan that an attack on their ally would be considered a declaration of war against the East India Company as well.

  Tipu was well aware of this British threat, and had used the intervening years of peace to strengthen his army and to seek allies among the other regional powers. In an attempt to break up the alliance between the Marathas, Hyderabad, and the Company that had so vexed his expansionist agenda, in 1790 Tipu made an agreement with Peshwa of Pune, nominal leader of the Maratha Confederacy, for Mysore to pay an annual tribute of 1.2 million rupees to the Marathas. In return, the Marathas were supposed to abandon their alliance with the British, or at least remain neutral in the coming war. Given the almost constant fighting between the Marathas and Mysore in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the very recent warfare over local land rights on their borders, it is perhaps unsurprising that the peshwa declined the offer and instead joined the British attack on Mysore in 1791.38

  Desperate for allies, Tipu had also reached out to the Ottomans and the French for assistance against the British. What Tipu needed above all was ships. He was well aware that Britain’s naval advantage had played an outsized role in the previous war, and was likely to do so again. He would have surely agreed with his father’s comment, “I can defeat them on land, but I cannot swallow the sea.” Tipu had attempted to build up Mysore’s navy, with an eye toward creating a trading company to rival the British and to reduce his tactical disadvantage at sea. He made some strides, but the technological deficit was too difficult to overcome in so short a time. With this in mind, Tipu sent ambassadors to the Ottoman sultan in 1785 and to France in 1787. Both countries had been drained of men and money by the costly combat of the American War, the Ottomans in their war with Russia and Austria and the French by their global contest with the British. Neither was in any position to send troops or funds to aid Mysore, nor were they willing to risk antagonizing the British by directly supporting Tipu Sultan. The French officially recognized Tipu’s status as monarch of Mysore, but would not even go so far as to allow his ambassadors to arrive on a Msyorean ship, instead insisting that they travel up the Seine to Paris in a smaller group aboard a smaller French vessel.39

  The weight of France’s debt was already beginning to tell in the 1780s. Far from emerging from the war with its global position strengthened and secured, ready to challenge the British for world supremacy, France’s financial quagmire meant that in reality it was forced to withdraw from foreign commitments. Already, France had found itself unable to intervene in the vital contest for the fate of its neighbor and erstwhile ally, the United Provinces of the Netherlands. When Tipu Sultan’s pleas for help arrived in 1787, France was thus deep in the midst of the financial crisis that had followed close on the heels of the ruinously expensive American War, teetering on the brink of revolution and in no position to help their erstwhile Indian ally. When the Third Anglo-Mysore War began in 1790, France would remain strictly neutral, once more undermining Tipu’s prospects at the very moment where French aid might have proved decisive.

  The newly independent United States, which had valorized Haidar Ali and the Tiger of Mysore as brothers in the anti-imperial struggle, abandoned their subcontinental allies as well. In the years since the Peace of Paris, America had been concerned to avoid foreign conflicts, to remain neutral, and to secure and restore the lucrative trade with Britain. As such, American merchants in India avoided their old French and Mysorean trading partners, opting instead to trade with the British. Full intervention in the Anglo-Mysore War was never a serious option, but America put profit before former allies, helping to fill British coffers and denying the French much-needed revenue from trade. Calcutta and Madras quickly became the favored centers for American trade with diplomatic relations following apace. While American consulates were set up in Calcutta in 1792 and Madras in 1794, Mysore, which had been one of the first states to recognize American independence, received no formal ties of trade or diplomacy.

  Meanwhile, Cornwallis had arrived in India with designs for defeating Mysore already developing. The previous war with Mysore had been viewed by most in Britain as a loss, eroding British power and prestige in India. Cornwallis had himself been plagued by responsibility for British defeat in America after his capitulation at Yorktown in 1781 and was in desperate need of victory and redemption. As a result, from the moment of his appointment as governor-general, he was searching for a pretext for another war with Mysore. He began shoring up allies almost immediately, granting the Nizam of Hyderabad a detachment of British troops, and agreeing to share any territories taken from Mysore should war come once more. Realizing that Travancore might well be the flashpoint for the next conflict, Cornwallis almost ensured that war would come by guaranteeing Travancore British protection with full knowledge that the raja was doing his level best to provoke Tipu Sultan.40

  Rather alarmingly, the Third Anglo-Msyore War that burst forth in 1790 did not begin more auspiciously than the previous war had
ended. Tipu once more drove into the Carnatic, threatening Madras and putting Cornwallis on the back foot. It was at this moment, however, that the Company’s success in securing and maintaining native alliances paid off. Tipu had alienated the Marathas and the nizam, and his other erstwhile ally—the bankrupt French—hoped only to survive the fighting unnoticed and unscathed. With memories of Tipu’s belligerent imperial drive, and promises of a dispersal of rich Mysorean territory, the Marathas invaded the heartlands of Msyore, relieving Cornwallis to march on Bangalore and Sriringapatam. By February 1792, Tipu’s capital was under siege, and though the British ultimately failed to take the city, Mysore was forced to sue for peace and accept a debilitating settlement.

  In the end, Tipu lost 67 forts, 801 guns from his beloved artillery units, and fully half of his entire kingdom, annexed by the East India Company. For their timely intervention, the Marathas and Hyderabad also gained huge swaths of Mysore’s territory. The cost to Tipu and his future power was immense. He had lost Mysore’s foremost food-growing region (Dindigul) and its primary outlets to the western coast, on which Tipu had depended as the entry point for French aid from Mauritius. The loss of half his lands also meant a huge loss of tax revenue, and when combined with a massive indemnity placed on Mysore (estimated to have been three times Tipu’s annual gross revenue), the fiscal-military state Tipu and his father had done so much to construct was fatally undermined. The British victory in 1792 could rightly be said to have “paved the way for British supremacy throughout India,” and to have fundamentally undermined one of the last native states with the economic and military power to challenge Company rule. The Third Anglo-Mysore War had proved decisive, ending for good Mysore’s challenge to British hegemony, but by freeing up British resources to fight in India and by bankrupting the French, thus depriving Tipu of his greatest ally, it was the American Revolution that had been the real turning point in the imperial scramble for India.41