Josiah Child was instrumental in secret fortification of the British trading posts in India as he promoted the idea of colonizing India. To that end he promoted the idea of using force. In 1686, he provoked a war with the Mughals. Emperor Aurangzeb captured the British trading Forts at Surat, occupied large part of Bombay and terminated all British trading activity. The British surrendered unconditionally, paid large reparation and agreed to the surrender terms before they were allowed to start the trading activity again. The British unconditional surrender was a tactical ploy to gain time and they flouted the terms of surrender after the death of Aurangzeb.
Armenian Trade:
The Armenians arrived in India in the early part of the seventeenth century seeking wealth and opportunity. They established a thriving export business to Europe in silk and calicoes and used Danish, Dutch, French and some British shipping vessels for their export business. The Armenians were a purely commercial modern community since the days of Shah Abbas of Persia. In 1604, they were settled in Ispahan and New Julfa and they played an important part in the Inter Asiatic and silk trade. There are Armenian churches in Bengal even today.
The Armenians had a great network of modern trade and they branched over to Canton, Philippines and on the rim of Pacific Ocean in the East. Their global network spanned Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, North Western Europe and Russia. Their network spanned several companies of Eurasia that is the Ottoman, the Safa Julfa and several European sea born companies including the British, Dutch, the French, the Portuguese and the Spanish. They developed a sophisticated system of delivering commercial information and long distance correspondence. The British operated pirate ships in the southern cost of India and looted and captured commercial cargo, letters of credit and anything of value was seized as war prizes. From the Exhibition of Julfa Trader Network Display in London one can surmise the history of the piracy raids in the southern coast of India by the British.
Initially though, the British sought help from the Armenians in getting established in India. The British had poor relations with everyone else. Khoja Israel Sarhad helped the British East India Company secure grand Farman (Royal decree) from the Mughal Emperor Farrukhsiyar (1713-1719) for trade privileges in Bengal. In 1717, a Royal decree from the Emperor Farukhsiyar exempted the company from payment of custom duties for inland trade in Bengal only. The British exploited this concession and illegally used the inland permits for export trade (dastaks). They persisted in abusing this privilege and used this as an excuse for not paying taxes to the Bengal Nawab. It forced the Nawab to take the Police action in 1756 when the unpaid duties amounted to a colossal sum of over one and a half million pounds. There was no end to the British tricks and the deceptive practices. (More of that in the chapter ‘No Plassey, No Empire’).
After Plassey, the Armenians were stabbed in the back too. The British wanted to monopolize all the business. The Armenians warehouses were taken over by force; their silk winders were stolen and taken to English factories. Their silk export business dwindled to nothing. They were reduced to a state of servility. Talk of gratitude. The British silk industry was built with the stolen goods from the Armenians. French Huguenots were in silk weaving business in Ireland and the British wanted to start that business in England as well. Silk stockings had come in vogue, people generally wore it under their breaches and the silk industry in Britain was built from the loot of the Armenian silk industry in Bengal.
French Trade in India:
France was England’s serious competitor in Bengal as well as in the world. Britain and France were fighting with each other for colonial supremacy and their fight spilled over into India. While France was trying to limit its involvement with Britain on the Indian soil, the British saw an opportunity of a lifetime to go for the Indian jugular vein to solve all their financial and colonial problems. The French were competing with the British for territory in the New World, not for money, where as the primary goal of the British was money. Money was power and power was money. They had an ocean of insatiable greed to fill and they had not come to India for any common cause. Unfortunately, no amount of money could satisfy the British insatiable greed and their friction with the French was global; a prelude to the American War of Independence and France had become an obstacle in their quest for money.
French East India Company, 1664–1769, was a commercial enterprise planned by Jean Baptiste Colbert and chartered by King Louis XIV for the purpose of trading in the Eastern Hemisphere. By 1719 the company had established itself in India. From 1741 the French under Joseph François Dupleix pursued an aggressive policy against both the Indians and the English. He was the French colonial administrator in India. He went to India in 1721 as an officer of the French East India Company. In 1731 he was appointed governor of Chandannagar, where he made a considerable fortune, and in 1742 he became governor of Pondicherry and was thus the chief official in French India. When the War of the Austrian Succession brought the French and British East India companies into conflict, Dupleix supervised the capture of Madras (1746) and successfully defended Pondicherry, but the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) restored the prewar situation. With the decline of the Mughal Empire, Dupleix took advantage of the situation and started meddling in the viceregal government of the Mughals; he grasped the situation much better than the British. The French found it necessary to intervene in the Indian political affairs to protect their interests and Dupleix then formed a vast project for establishing the French supremacy in India, intervening in native politics, intrigues, and warfare. He controlled the Carnatic and nearly the entire Deccan by 1751.
The French trading posts at Balasore and Cossimbazar in Bengal did brisk business. They exploited trade with Mocha, Manila, Achin, Pegu, Canton and Persia and by 1742; they had about fifteen or twenty vessels in daily use. In 1756 the war broke out between France and England and it lead to the complete suspension of trade of the French East India Company. The conflicts between the French and the British in India continued till 1754, when the French government, anxious to settle peace, sent a special commissioner to India with orders to supersede Dupleix and, if necessary, to arrest him. Dupleix was compelled to embark for France on 12 October 1754.
In 1769 the King’s Council of the State of France suspended exclusive trading privileges of the French East India Company and the French private traders started doing business in India in muslin, white cotton cloth and the like using the British private trader’s capital as they were denied opportunity by their own employer, the EIC, to remit money home using the British remittance channels. Those British private Traders and the French Traders made some kind of a partnership and the French then stopped importing silver for their purchases in Bengal; and they used the British private trader’s money instead. Indian goods were going out but bullion stopped coming in. Plenty of knavery went around; that was the beginning of the loot. The ingenuity of the British in thievery was without limit.
The French East India Company formed a new company in 1778 after the conclusion of the peace treaty between France and England. The British were already established in Bengal since Plassey (1757), so France had to enter into an agreement between Viscount de Souillac, the French Governor General at Mauritius and Lt. Col. Cathcart, Governor General in Council in Calcutta. The French were to receive annually 18,000 mounds of saltpeter and two hundred chests of opium. The French paid the 2 1/2 percent duty to the British and the British took the money home to England. It is not known what the French did to the opium, whether re-sold it to the Chinese or learnt to smoke it themselves.
Opium Profits & Narco Empire:
Since the days of Akbar (1556-1605), the Indian opium was imported into China by the Dutch but later; the British forced the sale of opium on the Chinese for exploitative profits which lead to two opium wars and a huge indemnity for Britain. In the later half of the eighteenth century, Britain used the narco profits for its Seven Year War against the French and after the capture of Plassey, (1757), poppy producers in
Bihar villages were coerced to produce more opium and all poppy growers in India were forbidden to sell opium to competitive trading companies. Britain abolished the opium syndicate at Patna, monopolized the production and distribution of opium in Bengal and later for the next one hundred fifty years, opium became a key to EIC obscene profits for tea purchases at Canton via the opium route. The empire that Britain built in those one hundred fifty years was partly funded by those narco profits.
Poppy cultivation was common in the District of Bihar in India. The Portuguese started carrying cargo of Indian opium through Macao directly to the Chinese beginning around the year 1600. The Dutch picked up the trafficking of opium from the Portuguese around the year 1700 and exported the Indian opium to China. The Dutch introduced the practice of smoking opium in a tobacco pipe and the use of opium took off. Opium became the grand magazine for the Dutch and other Europeans. Opium itself had been manufactured in China since the fifteenth century for medical purposes but The Qing Emperor (Dao Guang) banned opium in China in 1729, citing harmful effects on health and social productivity, however the opium wars forced the Chinese to continue to import opium so that Britain could make obscene profits. In 1730, the opium sale by EIC was about 15 tons, in 1767, the sale of opium by EIC to China reached a staggering 2000 chests (140 pounds per chest) to pay for the seven year war earning Britain a 300,000 rupees (£30,000) profit on every 1000 chests. It will be about £ thirty million in today’s money. The sale of opium continued to grow and by 1838 it reached a staggering quantity of 20,000 chests annually. The opium trade by the British East India Company and the ‘new imperial policy’ which negotiated trade concessions, permanent missions and a small colonial possession, such as Hong Kong placed such a burden on China and Persia and parts of the Ottoman Empire that the effective power of those countries’ own governments was compromised.
Regardless of the moral issues involved, the British lust for profits was the engine that drove the opium trade. The British just did not want to use their own silver for purchase of Chinese tea. Indian Opium was bartered for the Chinese tea and the tea was auctioned to the Russians and the Europeans thus earning huge equity and profits for Britain. Initially, Britain paid for that opium by their own silver, but by 1757, they stopped bringing any silver, so did the Europeans as the British were using French and Dutch channels to remit money to England. The Europeans were flushed with the funds given to them by the British and they used those funds to make their purchases of Indian merchandize for export to Europe. See next chapter, ‘No plassey, No Empire’.
The practice of sending silver from Bengal to China commenced early in 1757. The French and Dutch private traders did not provide any competition to English private traders as they were dependant on the English to supply the mercantile capital. Both the EIC and its private traders had complete monopoly over raw silk and cotton piece goods. After Plassey, EIC had denuded the country of all its bullion reserves and the French were encouraged to bring some silver that was badly needed for china trade. For years, the French East India Company shipped a large amount of silver to India. Before the American War of Independence broke out, EIC was trading in Chinese tea for which they had paid either by Indian opium or Indian silver. Chinese tea was being procured from the revenues of Bengal. Silver or opium went from India to China, Chinese tea went to Europe or North America and sale proceeds and huge equity started piling up in England. Goods bought for a pound in India fetched five pounds in Europe or more in North America. The outbreak of the French Revolution and subsequent hostilities between France and England brought an end to this gravy train. Britain made full use of the political power to extract unprecedented amount of wealth out of India through the opium route and shipped it to England.
In 1906, China and England signed a treaty thus restricting the Sino-Indian opium trade but by that time Britain had become banker to the world supported by those narco profits. The untrammeled scramble for wealth really started after the Plassey episode and so it is appropriate to write the next chapter ‘No Plassey, No Empire’.
CHAPTER THREE:
NO PLASSEY, NO EMPIRE
Money is power
Power is Money
The Mughal central power at Delhi went into a precipitous decline after the death of Emperor Aurangzeb. Under the late Mughals, the Provinces became practically independent and the foreigners took advantage of the chaos and found India an easy target for loot and plunder.
First to take advantage of the situation were the Persian and the Afghan rulers from the adjoining areas and the Mughal governors at Delhi came under constant attack. In 1739, Nadir Shah of Persia invaded India defeating the Mughals, destroying its prestige and power. Nadir Shah was assassinated in 1747 and Ahmed Shah Abdali continued the looting started by Nadir Shah. From 1748 until 1767, Ahmed Shah Abdali attacked India eight times and plundered and looted on an enormous scale. Tarikh-I-Ahmed chronicled the loot. The looted treasures were loaded on twenty eight thousand beasts of burden along with an army of eighty thousand horses. Along with the loot, the Afghans took captive a large number of women. Punjab a boarder territory, was on the invasion route and the people of Punjab lived a life of terror; people fled from the cities to the hills and jungles. To fight that tyranny, obscure men rose up in arms to provide the relief and security to the masses. A nation was up in arms against the foreign invaders.
Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdali, were birds of passage, their goals were limited, basically loot and plunder and some hegemony in the adjoining areas of Afghanistan. There was another foreign threat, a very sinister and a potent threat, posed by the British in the disguise of East India Company (EIC), which on the surface was a commercial entity, but the British had deliberately and systematically transformed it into a political entity with colonial ambitions. The British had its eyes on the wealth of India. Unfortunately, the disruptive political forces in India coincided with the British and French wars in Europe, which had become a war of survival for Britain. The British saw the power vacuum in India as an opportunity of a lifetime to solve all their financial woes. They lived on borrowed money and had no resources to build an empire. They targeted the Mughal Bengal treasury at Murshidabad, as it was known to hold over forty million British pounds worth of gold and silver, besides it was the most wealthy and prosperous region of India. The treasury was far removed, almost a thousand miles from the Mughal central defenses and strategically located on the banks of the Hoogly River and accessible to British warships.
In fact, since the days of Josiah Child, the powerful governor of EIC in London, the British had fortified their factories clandestinely in violation of their lease terms. They started establishing more factories all along the Indian coast particularly in the Bay of Bengal as it was India’s undefended coast line, closer to the Bengal treasury. They set up factories along the Hoogly River leading to Murshidabad as well, at Serampore, Hugly, and Fulta and in all they set up over twenty three factories, each under the command of a master merchant or a governor. With the pretext of providing security to their factories, they recruited a lot of local manpower as sepoys (Hindi word for a policeman) and started secretly equipping those factories with guns, cannons and weapons. Their business in India was much smaller and it would be hard to justify the number of factories they established, well in excess of their commercial needs.
Much to the disappointment of the British, the Mughal Imperial Rule did not collapse in Bengal because of the very powerful noblemen who ruled Bengal. The Mughal Diwans, Murshid Quil Khan, Sarafraz and Alivardi Khan, provided Bengal with powerful rule unaffected by the problems at Delhi and Bengal continued to enjoy prosperity, trade flourished and wealth continued to accumulate. The Mughal rule in Bengal also flourished because of the peasant cultivators who had a very different agrarian view of the Islamic culture. In the west of India, the Mughals had allowed the influx of elite classes from Persia who excelled in Persian art and literature. To them, the Islamic piety was subordinate to the ethos of Mughal I
mperial Rule. In Bengal however, the Muslim cultivators assimilated Islam in its basic form more suited to their agrarian worldview which did not allow the ideological and bureaucratic structure of the Mughals to expand. The Mughal architectural monuments were built only in the western part of their burgeoning empire, Shalimar Gardens at Kabul and Lahore, fancy musoleums like Jahangir’s tomb at Lahore and Taj Mahal at Agra and Humayan’s tomb at Delhi and many more such monuments, commemorated their elitist rule. There was little elitist expenditure on splendor under the influence of powerful Diwans and Bengal experienced unparalleled growth as vast new areas of additional forestlands were cleared for cultivation. The Mughal treasury overflowed with revenue, which became a talk of the Europeans traders like the Dutch, the French and the British who were in Bengal for buying its merchandise. The Mughal revenue collection system described in Ain-e-Akbari since the days of Emperor Akbar was very well developed and diligently followed.
The three important Diwans to impact the events and the British colonial ambitions were Murshid Quil Khan (Ja’far Khan 1713- 1727), who was appointed Diwan in 1700 and Subhedar in 1717. Murshid Quli was by birth a Brahmin boy who as a child was adopted by Haji Shafi Ispahani, who made him a Muslim and took him into Persia. Murshid returned to India after the death of his patron and began a rapid rise in Mughal service. The next Mughal Diwan Sarafraz Khan governed Bengal from 1729 to 1740, and he was the most powerful nobleman who continued to maintain administrative control despite the problems at Delhi. After 1740, the power passed in to the hands of another very remarkable man, Alivardi Khan (1740-56) and under his administrative control, Bengal became the most peaceful and prosperous part of India providing the administration and financial resources for success. The presence of Alivardi Khan was anathema to the British.
1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope Page 6
