1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope

by Narendra Mehra

  Tea Plantations

  From the early days of the British presence in India, Tea was a big business. Soon after they established their hegemony, they maximized the Tea gains by monopolizing the production of opium in India, which was the currency of trade for the Chinese Tea. The British Traders were therefore able to secure the exclusive monopoly with China to trade in tea. The balance of trade however was always in favor of China and the Chinaman accepted only two items in payment for their Tea; either it was silver or opium. The British had to bring silver from Home, which was taboo, so the only option the British had was to pay in opium and opium became a principle source of revenue to the British. The politics of opium therefore became deadly and the British fully exploited and monopolized the production of opium in India. By the end of the eighteenth century, the British were in total control of the poppy and opium production regions in the Province of Bihar and the East India Company set the production of opium on a very firm basis. It was gold. The Chinese took opium for cash. The export of opium by the natives was banned by the British Governor General Cornwallis. The British banned the cultivation of tea in Assam (Eastern India) as well, to protect the British monopoly of China Tea. The Chinese government in the meantime banned opium and the British East India Company could not carry the contraband to China in its own vessels, so the private British enterprise became the new conduit for illegal marketing of opium. The lure of money was sufficient for the British to participate in contraband traffic. The production and distribution of poppy and the production of opium by the natives was totally banned and totally monopolized by the British. The local businesses that cultivated and grew the poppy and produced opium lost their businesses to the British.

  After the Charter Act, because of the heavy influx of the British nationals in India, the tea monopoly of the East India Company became unsustainable and regular cultivation of tea was started in India. Indian lands in Assam were given to the British cultivators free of any rent. In 1873, the land was sold, fee simple, at ridiculous prices; for two and a half Rupees an Acre (5 British shillings). Typical plantation size at that time was one hundred Acres, which fetched just £ 50 to the British Colonial Government in India. The British sent that money to England as well as ‘Revenues’ of India.

  Tea was found to grow naturally in Assam, (North East of India). Some tea also grew in neighboring provinces like Bengal and Darjeeling. Tea grew on hilly slopes with frequent rain and the monsoons and the terraced hilly slopes provided the essential conditions for the tea industry. By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, there were probably close to three hundred Plantations which continued to mushroom in Assam. The Tea Plantations in the neighboring District of Darjeeling were much bigger in size, two to three times in size and there were over fifty Plantations there. Those Plantations were started by the British insiders, people who were connected with the British Government or the senior military officials. There was always graft in the British dealings in India and the British monopoly practices were not uncommon to those people. The identity of all the Plantation Owners was never known, as the Colonial Government kept many things to their chest to avoid embarrassment or to hide graft by the Government or the Royalty. Many lot owners could never be identified; it was common to call the British as Europeans with no titles, which provided them the cover to hide their identities. The British acquired monopoly over the Indian tea as well, like everything else they did in India. They registered their companies in England, probably too uncomfortable to register in India, as it was not known whether they met the legal muster or fear of nationalization if the natives ever came to power. That did happen in 1947 but the Indians allowed them to keep the plantations, which they sold at a hefty profit to the Indians. The Indians were just milk puddings compared to the British aggressive pursuit of money.

  The tea acreage grew exponentially along with the profits. London was the principle Tea market of Europe and the demand for Tea from Europe and Russia was met by auctions at Mincing Lane two days every week. The Tea from Assam and Darjeeling Tea Plantations was shipped to London where it was ware housed and the quantity of Tea put at auctions was controlled to keep a tight control over the profits. As the demand for Tea increased, the acreage under cultivation continued to grow from a low of about quarter million acres to very close to a million acres by the early part of the twentieth century. Likewise, the actual Tea produced averaged from a low of about one hundred million pounds to about half a billion pounds over the same period. The British Managing Agencies took over the Tea Plantation from the individual Proprietary Concerns to maximize the profits as many operations were centralized and there was central control over production and distribution. Those Managing Agency Houses operated in Calcutta until the end of the British Rule, when they cashed out at exorbitant profits and took the money to England. Remnants of those Managing Agency Houses are still in India, they sold the businesses to Indian Entrepreneurs, who continue to sport their aging signs. Some popular names were Duncan Bros.; Jardine Anderson, Rallis & Co. etc. on their bill boards.

  The real game of the Tea trade was money and secrecy and they never revealed how much money they made. It was a big game considering that the British were profoundly aware of their history of impoverishment and making money to them was a real game, a national mission, to build up the Nation’s wealth. They were careful not to reveal how much money they carted away to Britain, as that might give rise to the native ire and bring to an end to their presence in the sub- continent. The profits in the Tea trade were huge but were declared in terms of percentage gain or loss by the British Joint Stock Companies. It was hard to know the actual wealth flowing to the British Nation. For instance, the Assam Tea Company, the oldest English Company, registered in England, declared a dividend of about twenty percent, in the beginning of the Twentieth century, which revealed little about the money they made. So here is a hypothetical answer based on an assumed one-shilling profit per pound.

  The arithmetic is startling. Between 1870 through 1947, the average tea produced by the British Companies in India was close to four hundred million pounds per year. The average production ranged from five hundred pounds to about one thousand pounds per acre. If they made one-shilling profit, on the sale of that quantity, the profit would be £Twenty Million per year. (That may be close to £Two Billion per year in today’s money). During the seventy seven years under review, that would be a colossal amount. India made little money for the Tea produced on its soil with the sweat and labor of its manpower. A big Zilch. Instead, India inherited the ‘debt’ of those Tea Planters. As this narrative proceeds, the reader will see examples of fraudulent book keeping, so was the case with the cost of development of a Tea garden. Those development costs became the debt of India. In 1934, a modern tea Plantation could be developed at an outlay of about five hundred rupees per acre, whereas the cost of development in 1887 was booked at £seventy per acre (Rupees 1400 per acre). One can scoff at those figures as “too high”. In 1887, the acreage in tea cultivation could have been developed at a cost measured in thousands and not in millions of Rupees, which became the debt of India.

  Tea plantation and cotton plantation had one thing in common. Labor. Women and children mostly did the picking of tea leaves and the Tea Board Commercials proudly displayed women carrying the long tea basket in a tea garden hanging from their head. One needed both hands to pluck the tealeaves. Labor was therefore essential to developing a tea garden. The labor was cheap, too cheap, because the labor did not get paid. A plantation without labor was worthless. The planters hired security guards and the labor, which they called ‘coolies’, was not allowed to leave the tea plantation and were flogged if they attempted to escape. There was no way to leave anyway. No roads and remote hilly sites had any food and water, unless the British Planter provided it. Half of the labor perished on account of hunger and disease and those who survived probably never saw their families again. Coolie traffic ran parallel to the slave trade, except it did not make t
he headlines. The typical wage was about 2 to 2 ½ rupees per month (one British shilling); they never saw any money, as the wages were garnished for transporting the coolie from far off places in Bengal, Nepal or United or Central Provinces. A typical plantation of 100 acres employed 200 coolies. For the acreage under cultivation in 1885, there could have been six hundred thousand men, women and children working on those plantations and they worked for nothing. The coolies fell prey to the rosy promises made by the plantation owner, they were enticed on promises that they were going to a garden in a country where the means of living were plentiful and cheap; where they would receive very high wage and have little to do. They found themselves set down in a swampy jungle, far from human habitation, where food was scarce and dear as the food prices were set by the Plantation owners. The British left behind many victims of wage fraud.

  Wage secrets were part of the “real game”. When the British came to India in the middle of the seventeenth century, Indian wages and prices were linked to gold and silver. Trade, commerce, wages and the value of the rupee were linked to the value of gold. In 1880, during the one hundred fifty years of British rule in India, the Indian wages did not budge at all, while the grain or food prices kept going up. The Indian worker got poorer and poorer. He did not earn enough to subsist. Just two rupees or one English shilling a month. That is the legacy Britain left behind in India. A tea plantation worker, or an agriculture worker, earned one third of what he earned during the Mughal rule. This wage rate was scandalous. The tea plantation worker did not even earn what he could, as agriculture worker in Bengal, Bihar or UP. This was the root cause of the extreme poverty of India. British maximized its profits and its ‘revenues ‘at the expense of the blood and sweat of the helpless Indian labor. The main concern of the British was profits and money. They did not care about people.

  Cotton Plantation:

  The story of the cotton Plantation in India was intimately linked with the story of the American Civil War. The Cotton Traders in the American South sensing the onset of the American Civil War, made preemptive shipments of cotton to mills in Manchester and to other mills in Europe. This glut temporarily slowed the cotton famine, but by 1862, the price of cotton jumped from a low of six to eight pence to over twenty five pence a pound. In Manchester, the Plants closed and thousands of workers were thrown out of work. So, the Mill owners in Manchester turned to India, one of the only few places on Earth one could grow cotton. Egypt was another place, and some cotton was shipped from Egypt but the story of Egypt is very different; it was not a possession of Britain but a part of the Ottoman Empire. The French moneymen were seriously involved in their finances and Britain did not have an upper hand in their affairs. Besides, Egypt decided to build its own textile mills and became a threat to the British textile industry. Surprisingly, all twenty-four of the Egyptian mills caught fire mysteriously, one after another, and the suspicion pointed to only one direction. It was not hard to figure out who was desperate enough behind those fires.

  The British mill owners therefore turned their direction to India for their cotton needs. They started the cotton plantations, like they did for Tea as it afforded the opportunity to making a lot of money. India was a colony of the Crown and the laws of supply and demand did not apply there, because they bent the laws in their own favor. The Indian economy was a subjugated economy and the tactics the British employed to take over cotton cultivation were identical to those used for Tea. The taxes on the cotton cultivators were increased. The burden of taxes on the riot (cultivator) were increased so high that the cultivator struggled to stay alive than to grow cotton. The ‘white man’ owned the harvest before it was planted as he had advanced the money for seed and subsistence and at the same time, the fear of the Tax collector was so crippling that many of the Peasants had to tear up their crops and flee. The ryot lived in fear of the white man.

  During the cotton famine, the British people got together to lend a hand, as England was a highly chauvinistic society, where people believed in united action. On account of the shortage of cotton, the sight of labor without work gave them a sense of national crises, it motivated some of them to reach to India and the cotton lobby decided to send George Thompson (1842) to India, to preach extensive cultivation of cotton. He was a conscious lobby of the Manchester and Liverpool Textile Mills. George Thompson was a zealot with plenty of hubris, preaching in the service of his country, so that the Mills could continue to produce the textiles, which they exported to Europe and India and earned a lot of gold for their country. George Thompson, in his flowery language and insincere motives preached that it was an honorable act to cultivate larger and larger quantities of cotton as it would elevate millions in India financially, while at the same time he was pitching patriotic commerce embracing the dearest interests of England. What a hypocrite; his main goal was to divert land from grain production to cotton and grab the native lands to set up British monopoly of cotton plantations in India. His motive was for Britain to get cotton and spur their economy at the expense of India. George Thompson delivered a series of lectures in Manchester regarding India and cotton was his main theme. He delivered a series of speeches in Calcutta and elsewhere and the culling of his speeches had the same theme.

  That Britain was the Occupier and Britain could demand India to do its bidding. The most reprehensible part of his speeches were the threats he made and missed no opportunity to remind the natives that Britain’s specter swayed over the heads of one hundred million population and Britain could demand anything of the natives, for its necessities and luxuries. He did not stop at cotton, he went beyond, and he was sowing the seeds for the influx of British Europeans to monopolizing the tropical plantation industries in India after the enactment of the Charter Act. He saw such a need for his country and foresaw that Britain could take over the rice, cotton, tobacco and the sugar, which were then obtained from other nations, most of them foreign, sugar from Mauritius, jute from India to replace Russian hemp, tobacco from Virginia and rice from Carolinas. Bravo, and that was exactly what happened and Britain continued to find tremendous opportunities to get rich at the expense of India ushering in a century of miracles.

  For Britain, taking over the cotton monopoly in India was more than a temporary shortages caused by the American Civil War. Cotton fabrics had become a very big economic factor for Britain. Before the year 1800, Britain imported about sixty million yards of cotton fabrics from India, as the British women became used to wearing cotton and Britain was making money re-exporting the goods to Europe. Britain was busy developing the cotton spinning machines, so that they could produce cotton fabrics at home. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, they had perfected the self-acting mule which made spinning an automatic operation. The Indian industry had invested a huge amount of money and manpower in their handicraft industry to meet the British demand and Britain had to destroy that Industry by unfair taxation so that they could give birth to their own machine made cotton industry. After the native industry was decimated, cotton was purchased at ridiculously low prices because the demand had died down, leaving nothing for the cultivators. Before the American Civil War and until the first half of 1861, the mills of Manchester paid the United States 71/2 pence per pound. The cotton that Britain imported from Surat India was sold in the Liverpool market at 3 to 5 pence per pound. It did not leave much for the cultivator after taking away the freight, the profits of the exporter and the taxes.

  The English man considered India as its personal property and did not care if the cultivators were not paid fair price for their produce. The British employed the same tactics with the dadni merchants in Bengal with all the power that despotism brings. Bombay was the center of activity for the cotton trade and there were forty-two European firms who did the import and export business. They were all English or Scottish starting with the eminent name of Messrs. Graham & Co.; Nicole & Co. and Messrs. Ritchie Stewart & Co. Among the European private banks that handled the cotton export business were t
he names of Messrs Remington & Co. and Forbes & Co. which were the household names. There were others too, equally devoted to finding cheap and plentiful cotton. The same private banks were involved in the share mania and the collapse that followed after words

  The cotton trade was carried out in a primitive way at the Apollo Bunder, which was the principle pier for embarkation or disembarkation of passengers and goods. In the months of April and May, there was immense activity when thousands of docras (pressed bales were yet to come) used to be landed from the picturesque but primeval native crafts. Those stretched the narrow road from Apollo pier to where stand the Wellington fountain today. The harbor during the busy season presented quite a sight with hundreds of wooden ships and thousands of native crafts. The customhouse and the cotton green and the hydraulic presses hummed with activity. The raw staple was balled at the presses for export. As to Steam Navigation Companies, the only one was the British P.O. (Peninsular and Orient) which also carried the fortnightly mail. Sanitary conditions were sub human, the Municipal Corporation did not exit, and there was perennially high death rate due to fever and cholera. The British used to die young in their own country, due to poor hygiene (and always blamed the Jews for poisoning their wells) and unfortunately they duplicated those conditions in Bombay. The British had ruled Bombay for about two hundred years. They said that they had obtained Bombay in dowry from the Portuguese.

  After Britain destroyed the cotton handicraft industry of India by levying exorbitant duties, the cotton Industry in England was promoted vigorously. India was a great manufacturer of cotton textiles and Britain dumped machine made Manchester stuff in that country after dramatically lowering all the duties and tariffs. Agents of Liverpool and Lancashire, in participation with Bengal, Bombay and Madras Chambers of commerce, which were comprised of all British companies and British nationals, acted as the clearinghouse for local information, provided the marketing data on Indian tastes, styles and custom. The role Britain played on the destruction of the Indian economy was best described by Marx in New York Tribune of June 25, 1853: “British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindustan, the union between agricultural and manufacturing industry.” India was essentially an occupied State; people had lost control of their lives and liberties. It was the foreign agriculture enterprise, which exploited even the ruins of what was left of the once thriving economy. The rural pauperization and the heart breaking poverty started setting in after the skilled workers from the traditional handicraft based industries were totally displaced without any avenues for work.