1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope

by Narendra Mehra

  The British made the fatal mistake of attacking Indian nationalism. They sent missionaries to produce a class of people who would be racially Indian but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. They thought that such people would be loyal to Britain out of recognition of the superior moral worth. The British always assumed that they were superior and always looked down on the natives and treated them with contempt. They wanted Indians to become coconuts - brown on the outside and white from the inside. They wanted to convert Indians to Christianity and be disloyal to their own heritage. Christianity may be a magnificent religion, but all cant to the contrary, it was in no sense Indian religion and in no sense Indian culture. They wanted to produce a fault line, Indian converts to Christianity on one side and the natives who wanted to keep their culture whole and unadulterated on the other. The Christian missionaries did not have much success in converting; instead it produced the anti- British rebellion of 1857.

  In the 1860’s, after the Indian Mutiny & the annexation of India as a colony of the Crown, Britain went on a looting rampage. The entire national wealth of India was looted and misappropriated, even people’s homes and private property was ransacked and the British overseas trade increased dramatically. The returning soldiers precipitated a ‘white mutiny’ in Britain as the British Government usurped all the loot. There was public uproar and the government had to split the loot with the armed force increasing the ‘prize money’ depending upon rank. The export of cash crops from India’s tropical produce and the sudden increase in the revenues produced a spectacular increase in the British overseas assets and the balance of trade. There was also a sudden and dramatic increase in the local banking activities which exported capital for profit. The British balance of trade exploded exponentially in its favor, almost five to ten times the normal surpluses of may be ten to fifteen million pounds annually. The British assets abroad increased, possibly in the neighborhood of one half to one trillion pounds in terms of today’s money in the decade that followed.

  During that entire bonanza one thing was missing, Britain had not yet disclosed to the world the source of its wealth. The money had to come from somewhere even for initial seed money and Britain had none. So, Britain started coining stories about the source of its wealth. First, they said that they made money from Industrial Revolution. No one had heard of Industrial Revolution in Britain until the middle of the nineteenth century. John Stuart Mills an English economist first used that term to describe the political economy and the changes brought about by foreign trade, the changes that were happening like an Industrial Revolution. Britain was dumping British manufactured goods in India, an occupied economy and exported all the tropical cash crops and sure indeed that foreign trade was bringing in changes like an industrial revolution. There was no talk of any industrial revolution in Britain. Other countries did have industrial revolution such as France, Germany North America but not England. The closest they came to any industrial revolution was the textile industry but it was skewed and due to the partisan political discriminatory laws imposed on the occupied economy of India, which was their main market. The heritage industry in Britain however continues to make a lot of money touring the derelict industrial sites. The ultimate British game always was the money game and the British heritage industry continues to exploit the nostalgia of industrial revolution.

  Then Britain said that they grew their economy by borrowing. The world was introduced to Keynesian Theory, a deliberate policy of public borrowing to raise the level of domestic demand. It was only a concept but Britain never borrowed any money anytime in the nineteenth century. In fact, Britain lent loads of money to others, even beyond the limits of financial prudence throughout that period. Britain also had budget surpluses throughout the nineteenth century and British assets abroad grew dramatically. Britain also stashed huge amount of money in their piggy bank. The piggy bank was named ‘Sinking Fund’ so that it was difficult to identify the huge savings Britain was piling up. Other countries tried the British Keynesian theories but no one could prove that borrowings increased the national wealth. Borrowings and spending was only found to increase the national poverty. Greece is a living example that Keynesian theories have little beneficial effect and it was difficult to grow to prosperity by borrowing.

  There had not been any explanation from Britain about the source of its immense wealth. They have been successful to keep that subject under wraps possibly because Britain’s was a unitary currency, there was no other competing currency to the British pound and by virtue of its huge wealth, and any question about the British wealth got drowned out. The British also realized that some explanation was necessary for their wealth, so they focused on deconstructing the Indian economy and the Indian nation. They assigned that task to their Civil service, a cadre of one thousand civil service employees who were stationed in India to collect the loot. They started writing books about the Indian nation and the Indian economy. Their main theme was that there was nothing to loot that India was a beggar country, that the people were cannibals. They struck the theme that the British rule was purely for altruistic reasons. The British monopolized the publishing industry and it was practically impossible to publish anything contrary to the British view.

  Other countries in those times also looted the money, mostly the European countries and one example was the wealth of the Spaniards. If we scan the history, the British were not alone who were able to conquer vastly far more numerous natives in far off colonies. The conquest of Incas by the Spaniards was one such incident. The Spaniards managed their conquests by disease, trickery and exploiting the native trust in human morality and so did the British.

  Jared Diamond described the moral trap set up by conquistador Francisco Pizarro in Guns, Germs and Steel. The Inca Emperor Atahualpa was promised to be received by Francisco as a friend and a brother, however when Atahualpa arrived, he was ambushed by Pizarro’s troops and captured. He was promised to be freed if a huge ransom was paid. After receiving the ransom. Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahualpa. To achieve their colonial aims, the Europeans resorted to trickery, treachery, deception and fraud in alien cultures. The British designs on India followed from a similar law of necessity in pursuit of their goal of building their nation’s wealth.

  The Incas or the natives in India, it would appear, led their lives by a different cultural norm and they attached a different moral value to their word. The British thought that the Indians were imbecile, because they were able to lay their hands on their wealth so easily, not knowing that India’s moral code was dictated by its religious epics, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, which are celebrated till this day. In the epic story of Ramayana, the kingdom changed hands and the heir apparent went into fourteen years exile just to honor a promise once made. In warfare too, Indians followed a different code of morality, Rani Padmani, Queen of Chittor, committed jauhar (suicide) in a huge pyre instead of living a dishonorable life in defeat. Indians have kept alive such deeds by bards and songs. The British way of getting ahead was foreign to their culture. It was a perfect clash of East and West. The comments of Lord Macaulay brought home the point.

  Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), a British Member of Parliament for Edinburgh, a Scottish Highlander, Secretary to the Board of Control of East India Company and the First Member of the Governor General’s Council, went to India in 1834, made a fortune and realized the British good fortune in having been able to set up a dominion in India. He gave the following warning to the British Parliament on second February 1835:

  “I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief, such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual culture, heritage and therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture for if the Indians think that all that is forei
gn and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

  The British did indeed try all the tricks in their efforts to strip the Indian nation of all they had, including its dignity but they found that their spiritual and culture heritage was stronger than any weapons the British possessed. After the Mutiny, Britain discovered that they lost total trust of the natives and instead of achieving a truly dominated nation they created an un-repairable breach. Britain did not build any alliances during the two hundred years in the sub-continent other than depending on a few lackeys and toadies to help them with the Administration. With every passing day, the native resistance to their rule became stronger and stronger which finally resulted in their exit.

  The exit was as painful or worst as their stay. Britain it seems was a sore and bitter loser. They tried to break India into a hundred different parts before they were forced out. Pakistan was their creation; the idea of Pakistan was first floated in the First Round Table Conference in London where their King presided. There was no grass root movement for Pakistan, even M.A.Jinnah who was credited for the creation of Pakistan was a domicile resident of Britain where he lived for four decades before he showed up in Lahore and pressed for a resolution to create Pakistan. Britain granted separate political representation to every minority or religious group in India to damage the freedom movement and precipitated a civil war where anywhere from one to two million people perished and ten million became homeless.

  The British did not have any common goal in India. They came for loot, they were self- centered and they succeeded brilliantly in their mission. Britain and India were engaged in trade and commerce for over two hundred years but their interests never converged. Britain got progressively richer at India’s expense and India got progressively poor and in the end when the British departed from the Sub-continent India was reduced to a back water of the third world and Britain became one of the richest nations on Earth.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  TRADE

  The Seventeenth Century Britain was a vile place to live because of the religious climate of those times. The religious climate was savage in its brutality. The various nation states in Europe were engaged in their religious and civil wars. In Britain, the religious strife between the protestant reformers and the catholic faith was brutal and accompanied by animal passions. The protestant reformers just wanted to wipe out any images of the medieval Catholicism. The orgy of destruction was mind boggling; the punishment of death by fire was used against heresy. The People were fearful for their lives and were haunted by the prospect of death at any time more than its inevitability, as anyone could be accused of heresy. The People lived in a state of acquiescence. Falling from the favor of the Church and the State could result in horrible death, people were burnt alive, hanged, drawn and quartered and tortured at the rack. The population was steeped in poverty and religious prejudice and when the religious conflict finally ended and the passions cooled, there emerged from the debris of those conflict two classes of people, the bureaucrats and the merchant classes. The merchant classes had India in its sights as a solution to their national woes of poverty and misery.

  Beginning in the Seventeenth century, India was swarmed by the European merchants in search of El-dorado. The business philosophy in Britain was greed or none; it was basically laid down by the merchant community. In France, the rules were set by the government and they followed a certain code of conduct and so did the other Europeans who did brisk business long before the British arrived. This difference between the English and the French approach was monumental in their trade dealings in India. Both those groups however recognized the symbiotic relationship between the wealth of merchants and the power of the State. The state could secure the profitable trading routes and grant the monopolies desired by the merchants in pursuit of their goal, which was ‘wealth’. Money, in those days, was gold and silver. Thus, in order to increase the national wealth, the early British merchants made every effort, fair or foul, to ensure that bullion in the form of gold and silver stayed in their country and as little as possible left the country. In that quest for wealth, after they got the guns, the British were guided by greed and gangsterism. The greed and the cultural differences between Britain and India provided the fuel and the passions, which devastated India and plunged her into darkness in the eighteenth century.

  In Britain, the economic conditions were harsh and cities were dirty and filthy. Britain had not yet learnt about public health. There was no drainage or sanitation and clean water supply was rare. Cholera was common and urine was used for many purposes and people in remote country places used to store it. Women’s dress showed resemblance to the renaissance Venice. It was customary to expose the breast freely, paint the face and dye the hair. ‘A ship was soon rigged, than gentlewomen made ready’, said Stubbs. The economy of England was static. Adam Smith remarked that the money price of labor remained the same for half a century together and the wages did not vary with the price of provisions. The craftsman’s wages were 6d a day for ten hours of work and that rate did not vary for a hundred and twenty years until the Reformation. People were poor and there were no market forces to push the wages higher. Industry did not occupy much space in the economic life of the people. The society was feudalistic and the monarchy made a conscious effort to maintain a conservative social order. Social differentiation followed on economic inequality and sumptuary laws controlled what various classes could wear. Only higher classes could afford to eat wheat bread, the poor ate coarse bread made of beans, oats and acorns.

  There was despair and despondency in Britain as other European nations had overtaken the British. Before that, most of Europe was under the Ottoman (Muslim) over lordship. The Portuguese were the first to become a sea faring nation as they wanted to follow the trading practices of the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Turks and the Persian Safavids denied them the land route so they had no choice but to develop the sea routes to the East and so did the Dutch and the French who followed the lead of the Portuguese. The Dutch were at the cutting edge of the European capitalism and they made an early start, as early as 1595, and they were successful in establishing business ties with Java, Sumatra and the Far East before they started trading with India. The Dutch also developed the sea routes and wrote the navigational manual for travelling to the East via the Cape of Good Hope, which became a standard for others to follow including the British. The British used the Dutch manuals to travel to the East via the Cape of Good Hope.

  In the sixteenth century, Britain took stock of its limitations and discovered that the inventions and technical advances of the Renaissance had left her behind. It was basically an agrarian society, national wealth lay in its fields, land was more important than all other interests put together. National pride was at its lowest. So England sought help from others. Britain did not have the capability to produce its own gunpowder and the other essentials to pursue wealth in the far off places. England had no brass industry, little gunpowder and copper was not mined. So, it went to Germany for help. In 1561, Germany entered into an agreement to make gunpowder for England; before that all the gunpowder came from the Flanders. A patent to manufacture sulfur was granted to Wade and Herle for thirty years and George Evelyne got a monopoly to make gunpowder and set up several mills in Surrey. Britain did not know the art of making brass. German firms helped develop the mines and the art of mixing zinc with copper. Once Britain was able to develop the essential industries it was able to manufacture its own cannons, gunpowder and equip its ships with such tools that it started undertaking sea faring voyages.

  The British were thus the last to arrive in India. Their impoverished condition had limited their opportunities and their prospect for foreign trade stayed bleak. The British did try earlier trade mission in their own hemisphere such as Gilbert’s failure in New Foundland. They also went to the new world, such as Raleigh’s failure in Virgin
ia, and the lands south of the Chesapeake Bay, but that offered little profitable outlet for trade and they were not any more successful. China was a closed society and Russia was semi barbaric. Ivan the terrible, the Russian Czar, was of no help. Caravans were looted and there were shipwrecks and loss of cargo. So out of desperation and no other recourse, the British realized that the only answer to their economic woes was to trade with India, but they had nothing to sell and they had no money to pay for the goods in India.

  Two London merchants therefore took the initiative of sending William Harborne with the backing of Queen Elizabeth to make contact with Turkey. Other entrenched interests prevented the British merchants travelling the land route; both the French and the Venetians objected and later forbade the English merchants in to the Adriatic. The British wanted presence in India like the other Europeans so the mercantile community in London sent John Newberry and a small party of Englishmen to Jaffa by sea, crossed the Lebanon Mountains to Aleppo and joined a caravan for the Euphrates. Sailing down the river to Basra and the Persian Gulf, they took a ship to Ormuz and crossed the Indian Ocean in a Portuguese vessel to Goa. Then they went east to Golconda, turned north and eventually arrived at Agra the seat of the Mughal Emperor in India. Newberry presented to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, the fourth Mughal Emperor (1605-1627), the letter he was carrying from Queen Elizabeth. The Mughals did not consider the British of any consequence, their reputation was well known to the Mughals and Newberry was rebuffed by Jahangir and could not get royal audience for trading privileges. Among the group was Ralph Fitch, the only man to get home alive by the same route after wandering for eight years that took him to Bengal, to Pegu in Burma and the Portuguese stronghold of Malacca. Others died of disease and starvation over the long hostile journey back, but the journey served its purpose. The British learnt a lot which proved very useful in the later attempts.