Or, was it? It was more a century of delusion, as there was no structural strength to that edifice. After the nineteenth century, the miracle became a delusion and that edifice crumbled in the middle of the next century and the entire British Empire disappeared along with that delusion. In the meantime, the British nation was able to hoard a lot of gold and treasure and fill up the Thread Needle Street and Leaden Hall Street Treasuries for their posterity. The nineteenth century miracle was supported by the blood and sweat of the three hundred million Indian slaves. In the meantime, The British society however started assuming that they were superior people and that they could dominate and control over one third of humanity. The birth of aristocracy was owed to that false ego as well. The attitude of the British subjects was racist and contemptuous toward the ‘natives’ and they described the locals as ‘Blackman’. The British nationals in India lived better than the gentry and the aristocracy of England. Their summers were spent at hill stations such as Simla, which became the seat of the British Indian Government during the summer and at Ooty in the South and Darjeeling in the East. Their wives, their families and their mistresses enjoyed the ‘all white’ country clubs and at home they were surrounded by scores of servants, the cook, the maids, the coach, the gardener, the washerman. The Royal Calcutta golf club in Calcutta was the oldest, next to St. Andrews in Scotland and the Turf clubs, the Gymkhana and the Chelmsford Clubs and the cricket and the croquet games and the Tea parties made the life of the British in India nothing short of a Shangri-La. The natives had no rights in their own country. Such contempt towards the natives was born out of Imperial hubris which partly did the undoing. It woke up the sleeping Indian giant and brought an end to the British presence at a huge tragic cost. The British did not give up easily, which had brought it fame, fortune and grandeur to that impoverished nation. That part of the story is covered in the last chapter.
Money Making Opportunities:
By the end of the eighteenth century, the British agency houses got established in India. One feature common to them was lack of money and their financial structure was weak and they depended upon the local funds and some funds of the British free merchants, free booters and civil and military personnel working in India, who were looking for higher returns. The agency houses and other financial firms started operating in Bombay and some of the Agency Houses in the Calcutta Presidency were: Palmer & Co.; Cruttenden Mackillop & Co.; Alexander & Co.; Fergusson & Co.; Mackintosh & Co. and Colvin & Co.
Those agency houses, to operate successfully or to operate at all in a foreign culture, were dependent upon local knowledge, skill and finance. The local businessman was called a ‘banian’, which thus became a tool for those agency houses to be exploited. The ‘banian’ did the selling, the storing, and the shipping and also provided the funds and security for the merchandise. The ‘banian’ received the commission for his services and essentially acted as the conduit for the British manipulation of the Indian commerce, finance and know how. The British for its financial ends very smartly exploited the banian. The agency houses, thus equipped with the local know how, soon started the ancillary industries of Banking and Insurance, and concentrated the capital for predatory capitalism.
In the British commercial circles, the main objective was to get rich quickly as the loot and plunder was going to come to an end at some stage. It lasted longer than anyone expected. The looting of the princely treasuries in Deccan and Bharatpur, which coincided with that period added to the commercial chicanery. Those agency houses started borrowing funds from the local people and presented false statements of their liabilities and they started distributing huge dividends to their shareholders, anywhere up to 35 per cent. They hastened to part away with their funds and all of them became insolvent during the years 1830-33 and ran away with the local money. Then, they re-emerged under different names. Does not it sound familiar? To get some idea of the extent of the scam, the total liability of the Calcutta based Agency Houses was about fifteen crores (£15 million; that will be £15 billion assuming a one thousand times wage differential between then and now). The British Insolvency or bankruptcy law courts shielded the corrupt merchant bankers. Remember, it was Britain Inc. operating in India, and not a single enquiry was launched to recover the looted funds. So much for the British justice system. Any one interested in pursuing the British dishonesty should dig in to those insolvency scandals. The pubic trust in Great Britain and the British capital was totally destroyed in India, which contributed to their undoing and to some extent precipitated the Mutiny of 1857.
Coolie Traffic
In the early part of the nineteenth century, after the abolition of the slavery, the shortage of labor supply became very acute at the tropical plantations of the British Empire. A plantation without a dependable source of labor supply was not worth much. In those days, capitalism and indentured labor went hand in hand and they did not care about morality in their quest for wealth and power. After 1833, when the Negro slaves were no more available or were too expensive to hire, they resorted to signing up the jobless Indian farmers or artisans, to work at the tropical plantations of the British Empire. Those hires were shipped under duress to the West Indies or Mauritius with one way ticket. They never ever saw their families again.
The British lured those jobless Indian workers in the pretext of hiring coolies. A porter in India is called a coolie, like one hires a porter at a railways station or in a grain market to lift a load, so the Indian workers thought they were getting the job of a porter. Little did they know that they were being deported with one way ticket to hell? They never came back and they became the pariah at the ‘white man’s tropical plantation. The Colonial Capitalists, the ‘nabobs’, could not depend on the Irish paupers, servants kidnapped in Europe or ‘redemptioners’, to work on the tropical plantations, as the European workers were too individualistic and they were all small capitalists in the making. They did not want any competition. Land was cheap and the labor was expensive in the new tropical colonies. So, in the interests of colonial capitalism, they resorted to coolie traffic. The white labor was expensive and unreliable and needed higher standard of living with diminishing returns. The steam transport, railways and the steam ship accelerated the growth of the tropical plantations and gave a boost to the search for new sources of labor. Both the Indians, as well as the Chinese, contributed to the coolie traffic. The Chinese were good at mining and were shipped to the Straits Settlements and the Indians were used in agriculture. The pecuniary interests of the tropical merchants were always of the greatest concern to the British Government as they were bringing in wealth for the British nation.
The colonial policy was thus to use the coolie labor for the maximum benefit for the plantation owners. The British were indifferent to the needs of the native ethnic groups; their main concern was to get most benefit for colonial purposes. The coolie traffic was organized to meet the needs of the economic enterprise that needed the labor. The sugar estates of Guyana and Trinidad were unable to meet the wages that free labor demanded, so they imported the Indian coolies at next to nothing wages. The Indians were also imported into Fiji and Mauritius to grow sugar cane. In Ceylon, the Indian Tamils (residents of the Madras Presidency) were brought in to work on the tea estates. They also brought in the Indian labor to keep in check the wage demands of the ethnic groups; the underline theme was to cut the wage rates for large scale production. The flexibility of the indigenous people was therefore destroyed and they were forced to work at cutthroat wages, below the prevalent wages, in the highly organized British plantations. In Malaysia, the British brought in Chinese to work on the tin mines and the Indian coolies were brought in to work the Rubber Plantations.
The British always couched the justification of coolie traffic in terms of moral qualities and went to endless meaningless elliptical studies to demonstrate their concern for moral leadership. One Mr. Barham moved a motion in the British House of Commons to set up a committee to study the suitability a
nd expediency of supplying labor from the East to the British West Indies colonies and yet nothing ever changed for the coolies. The Recruiting Offices for coolie traffic were opened in port cities of Calcutta and Madras as early as 1830. Fraud, swindling, coercion and kidnapping were common and crimps were used to bring in indentured labor from Indo -Gangetic Plains, as well as the Malabar Coast. Coolies were shipped from the other ports such as Pondicherry, Cochin and Bombay. The coolies had no idea of the location of Mauritius or West Indies, let alone the content of those indentures, which they were forced to sign. The coolies were given ‘visions of Heaven’. Just as the dungeons of Cape Coast Castle in Ghana for slave trade, the coolies were kept in lock and keys with armed guards and during the voyages were treated like the beasts of burden. The Indian coolie helped the Plantation owners and the colonial capitalism survived after the abolition of slavery; they went through the same abuses as the Negro slave. An Indian coolie proved more economical to the plantations owners in Mauritius and Jamaica than the former slaves because of his lower basal metabolism and smaller physique and required lower protein consumption and less food and clothing. So, the Indian ryot, (cultivator), the Indian craftsman, the Indian trader, the Indian merchant and the Indian moneylender became the backbone of the British colonial enterprise. The Nabobs of India bred more ‘Nabobs’ of the British Empire.
The British also took care of their public relation image, so they started creating a perception that it was normal for the coolies to be away from home. Some voices appeared about this neo-slavery but the British did their best to defuse it. In many reports of the times, they started spreading the belief that it was normal for the natives to leave home for a living, for extended periods, and visit the family homestead only periodically so that they could save and accumulate a tidy sum. Did the coolies ever make any money? No. At home, the coolie could easily earn five rupees a month. Non payment of wages became the frequent charge of abuse against the plantation owners in Mauritius. A coolie at best earned eight shillings per month (four rupees per month; exchange rate: 2s to a rupee), whereas a Negro earned two shillings per day at the same tropical plantation and those meager wages were seldom paid. Most often those wages were off set against charges for travel and up keep.
It was difficult to determine the precise number of coolies shipped to Mauritius, Wet Indies and Bourbon. The British Imperial records might throw some light on the subject, so also the local Indian coolie population in those times. There were also coolies in British Guyana. Trinidad also had coolies and some coolies arrived in Australia as well. The farmers of New South Wales also received some coolies in 1837. The British colonial office had to ban the importation of Indian coolies to Australia to preserve the purity of the white race. They were afraid of miscegenation though it was normal for the white man to marry an Indian woman, but it was taboo the other way around. The white women did marry the rich Indians, the rajas, the Nawabs and the wealthy, but that is another story.
The coolies from Calcutta were generally known as Hill coolies as they hailed from the Hill districts of the Bengal Presidency. Some Muslim peasants from UP (United Provinces) also joined the traffic. The coolies shipped from the Madras Presidency were generally from Malabar, Mysore and other regions in the South. The British authorities of those times struggled to provide steady supply of coolies to the Plantation Owners and passed laws to show that the Imperial Authority was trying to prevent the abuses. Temporarily, the export of coolies was even banned, but it led to an uproar from the Planters. The mercantile interests of the East India Company and the Planters were more supreme and various committees appointed to study the abuses reported that no abuses existed.
The governor General in India, Auckland, wanted to help the Planters in Mauritius and other British colonies by an adequate supply of labor, so he reopened the emigration by a number of enactments under the indenture system. Government as a protector of the coolies helped recruit the coolies, but the evils of coolie traffic continued despite the policing by the Government. The indenture system was abrogated in 1921. The whole thing was an exercise in futility. It was just a grand exercise in moral hypocrisy.
To insulate against this criticism, the British authorities passed a laws to ensure that the coolies understood what they were getting into. The Planters had lawyers but not the coolies, so the laws miserably failed. The laws were passed to protect the legal liability of the British merchant, trader and planter and not of the labor. The British authorities indulged in cultural and moral hypocrisy; from the right side of their mouths they told their citizens to loot and get rich and on the left side of their mouths they blamed the coolies.
The coolies they brought in to those British plantations rarely ever found the social mobility. The Tamils in Ceylon never assimilated the Indian Tamils who were brought in to work on the Ceylon tea estates. The coolies were prevented from owning land, at least in certain areas as a matter of colonial policy and were generally governed by a separate administration. The colonial authorities specified the rights of those coolies and their children were allowed to go to separate schools only. They created backward classes and yet they used the moral rouse through out their presence in India. In Ceylon at least they left behind a political problem as well. The Indian Tamils became a political body and have fought for a separate State. It became a violent political entity, using guerilla tactics. The colonial rule was not an isolated act, it left behind many political and a social problem in most colonies where the Plantations thrived and exploited the ethnic disparities, but that is a subject for the political historians.
Plantation Industry:
The Court of Directors of the British East India Company, which was supervised by the British Government, started facilitating and advising the company officials in India to facilitate the transfer of land to the British Europeans. Their dispatches singularly focused on the process of acquiring that land and nothing was to stop the British to acquire the needed land. Land was essential to building the capitalist’s wealth by the way of the European Plantations. India was a vast country and the potential of building huge wealth was immense. So, the effort was intensified to grab the land as fast as could be done as it provided new avenues for money and power. European entrepreneurs on Indian soil took up silk, indigo, tea, cotton, coffee and rubber plantations. The modus operandi was to intensify the land taxes, crop levies and custom duties with all the vigor of despotism. Excessive tax burden on the ryot (farmer) forced him to sell larger and larger share of his crop to procure the silver and pay confiscator taxes to the British government. The British India policy was, ‘do as little as possible within the country, take out as much money as possible’ at the expense of local welfare, Public sector projects and social spending. There were no social programs in the country, infant mortality was rampant because of the tropical diseases but the British were callous and it did not bother them. They never built any roads, schools or health care facilities. The result was that progress that took place in the rest of the world in the nineteenth century just eluded India and it made her a backwater of the third world.
The British East India Company therefore designed the revenue policy and custom duty policy to tilt the scale in favor of the British Europeans, so that they could acquire land from the natives. Assessments were made in terms of money and exploited the population suffering from the collapse of their traditional handicraft based industries. Modern industries were not allowed to be started in India by levying heavy import duties on the machinery. Any local control of the strategic industries was totally denied and it remained in the hands of the Occupiers with all the abuses and force of despotism.
The British government actively enacted laws and instructed their governors or commissioners to apply those laws in India ignoring the prevailing land tenure laws and the relationship that existed for centuries between the zamindar (land owner) and the Ryot (cultivator). The arriving natural born subjects of Britain were authorized to reside in the country, were also
authorized to hold lands or any interest in the land for any term of years and that right was granted on account of the paramount power of the government.
The British government micro managed the land commissioners. They directed them to establish offices for the registration and transfer of land to the arriving British nationals and such registration was to be compulsory, disregarding the prevailing land tenure laws, under the penalties of law. The laws were intended to facilitate the transfer of land to the British nationals and nothing contained in the Act was to prevent them from acquiring the land, or any interest in it, in any part of the Indian territories and the local administration was prevented from any relaxation or deviation from the laws without referring the matter to the Home Authorities in London.
The stage was therefore set by the British to start the Plantation based industries on the Indian soil. How much wealth the Plantation based industries generated for Britain can only be discerned by giving a bird eye view of those industries and Tea is an excellent industry to start with because it earned a lot of gold for Britain from the European and Russian exports.
1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope Page 17
