1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope

by Narendra Mehra

  Britain consumed over one billion pounds of raw cotton per year and the industry supported one fifth of the entire population of England according to an article in Times, 19-9-1861. It was remarkable when one considers that Britain did not produce an ounce of cotton in their own country. England exported about three billion yards of cloth and some two hundred million pounds of yarn. No wonder, Liverpool sent George Thompson to India to brain wash the ryot (cultivator). Britain was importing a lot of cotton from India, as despotism and monopoly practices allowed Britain to obtain cotton from India at a much lower price, less than half than what they paid to cotton exporters in Alabama and Georgia. The Export of cotton from Bombay, before the American Civil War, was quite significant and most of the exports from Bombay were going to Europe, principally England. In 1860, over half a million bales went to Europe and only about two hundred thousand bales went to other places.

  And then came the cotton famine. The American Civil War dried up the supply of cotton from the Unites States and a mad scramble for profits propelled an unprecedented amount of money into Bombay. The money chasing the profits was so huge that it became the stuff of legends There was a dramatic increase in the shipment of cotton, successively increasing from half million bales of four hundred pounds to well over a million bales per year during the five succeeding years after 1861. The speculators had a field day and for want of any legitimate means of investing those profits, it gave rise to rampant speculation. Phony companies mushroomed overnight, companies dealing in land speculation, banks and finance companies, cotton trading, cleaning, pressing and spinning, shipping and steaming companies and the like, and those companies were mostly British. The smell of money and the prospect for sudden riches attracted their inborn natural predatory talents, ultimately leading to a major financial disaster.

  The Bombay Chamber of Commerce, in its annual report of the year (1864-65), observed that the overweening greed and untrammeled spirit of gambling, led to utter ruin and disgraced the old and reputed houses into bankruptcy, destroyed credit and leveled to the ground the entire financial structure. Some fifty million-pound sterling of real wealth disappeared and the Bombay of today was built on the ruins of those days. Many firms ‘bulled’ and ‘bearded’ and participated in the schemes of those halcyon days.

  The cotton shipments stayed around one and a half million bales a year until 1869 and after 1970 it fell back to just about a million bales. To meet the cotton demand, larger and larger acreage went into cultivation. The Surat cotton began selling for 20 to 24 pence. In terms of local currency, the price of a candy of cotton jumped from 120 to 180 Rupees prior to Civil war to Rupees 600 to 700.

  The recorded value of the exported cotton was phenomenal, and yet there appeared suddenly bullion famine, which affected the commerce. That was the real story, the story of loot, because the British got the cotton and they got their gold too. In 1861, about three quarter of a million bales of four hundred pounds each fetched £5 million and in 1865, about two million bales fetched over £thirty million and the wave of bullion, gold, silver accumulating in Bombay was huge. In spite of that huge inflow of silver, in 1964 there was actually a famine of silver rupees in India. The silver did not stay in the vaults of the banks or merchants, but it flowed back to Leaden Hall Street London, to replenish their silver coffers. The East India Company always took silver and bullion out of India and it became more as now as they wanted to replenish the silver being used to buy raw staple. In Bombay, in the very vortex of the maddest time in its history, the silver copiously pouring in its lap every two weeks (there was only bi-monthly mail); Bombay was starving for want of necessary circulating medium. The share of the larger and larger profits on cotton went to the Bombay exporters, who were all British and Scottish and silver flowed back to England. England capitalized on the cotton famine, got the cotton and got the silver too. The silver shortage was so severe that the Chamber of Commerce, urged the Government to establish a gold standard with a gold currency.

  The history of the cotton industry in India dated back to ancient times. The tropical climate provided an opportunity to the native craftsmen to develop the technology to weave the fine fabrics. For centuries, the value added products calico and muslins, lifted the standard of living, but in the short span of a century after Britain raided that country, they destroyed that industry, took over its plantation industries in search of wealth and money. India introduced cotton fabrics to the West and the Indian cotton transformed the dress and hygiene of Europe and England; they used to walk around in lumpy, stiff and scratchy pantaloons. To understand the looting of the cotton harvest by the British, during those fateful days of cotton famine, one has to understand the cotton heritage of India. India had a rich heritage in cotton and cotton textiles. As early as 200 BC the Romans used the Latin word carbasina for cotton. The word had its origin in the Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, karpasa. In Nero’s time, delicately translucent Indian muslins called “woven winds” were the fashion in Rome. The quality of Indian dyeing was proverbial, and a fourth century Latin translation of the Bible referred to wisdom that is more enduring than the “dyed’ colors of India”. India exported its fabrics to the world on account of the abundance of cotton, which was a gift of nature and the Indian textiles brought, color, cheer and hygiene in their lives.

  How did India take that abuse? Britain had fastened a colonial economy on India, which had impoverished the country, and she was reluctant to relax its grip. So, the Indians responded the typical Indian way, peaceful, non-violent and with maturity of the ages. They stopped using British textiles, which were flooding the country, and ‘khadi’, the traditional hand spun fabric, took the center stage. Khadi symbolized the spirit of self-reliance, and ‘khadi’, along with the rich brocades of the Mughal era and delicate muslins took its place in its colonial history against the foreign yoke. Today, the influence of Indian calicos and cotton have entered into the English lexicon, which is evident from names such as calico, pajama, gingham, khaki, that India gave to the West.

  Indigo Trade:

  Indigo is another tragic story and mirrors the Englishman’s oppression of the colonies in its pursuit of easy money. Money was made, by looting the poor, the indigent and the helpless in the countryside of Bengal and nothing ever changed whether it was the East India Company or the Crown. They chose the easy way to exploit the riches afforded by the sudden surge in the indigo trade, due to the growing use of cotton in Europe. Indigo had been in use in India since times immemorial and it was an article of ancient trade. During the later part of the eighteenth century, when the British were able to extend their rule in Bengal, they resorted to thugs to cash in on the indigo crops by resorting to black mail, suppression and violence in the countryside of Bengal. Other parts of India, such as Punjab, Bihar, Gujerat, and Madras produced indigo too, but those areas were spared because the British had not yet extended their hegemony there. With the growing use of cotton in Europe, indigo use accelerated and use of woad, a European dye plant, suffered a decline. With the growing demand and profits, the British traders resorted to monopoly practice since they were then ruling the countryside of Bengal. It was the money factor that brought in the violence, the oppression and the robbery in the indigo equation.

  By 1829, there were about one and a half million acres under indigo cultivation in Bengal and about ten million pounds of indigo was exported to England and Europe with a value of the crop at over £ three million sterling. Britain had not seen that kind of money even in their dreams prior to Plassey (1757), so the industry remained under the dominant control of the British throughout its production. They monopolized indigo trade completely. There was no indigo dye without the indigo plant, so the monopolists used thugs and gangsters to control the indigo plant.

  To understand the gangsterism part, one has to understand the production of Indigo crop. The process is simple; the indigo plant is typically submerged in relatively warm water (which was the typical summer temperature in t
hose provinces) for about ten hours to leach out the coloring. The coloring from the plant is leached in the water and the spent plant is removed and discarded. That was the easy part. It was the cultivation, which was the devil’s brew. The British indigo merchants wanted rights over the peasant’s land life and liberty so that he was ever in debt and was forced to continue to producing indigo for him. The indigo merchants, never brought any money from home (England), they were averse to bringing any money; mostly they borrowed from the natives or looted by making claims against the cultivator on frivolous grounds. They had done the same to the silk and cotton piece goods weavers a few decades earlier, so it appeared that it was the standard British operating procedure. Once they established a claim against the ryot, that claim was never settled and the ryot, his family, his children and his children’ children remained under the debt of the ‘white man’. That claim was never settled, and the ryot was “never after wards a free man”. It went on for generations, the deceit, the fraud, the extortion and the blackmail continued forever with the active participation of the British judiciary. The ryot’s phony debt was never settled, the son inherited the father’s debt and the grandson inherited the grand father’s debt. The British administration supported and abetted the crimes and extortion by the white man.

  Then, came the Charter Act when the white settlers learned to grab the land of the native zamindar as well and made the ryot work for him. The British administration facilitated this process by increasing the taxes and refused to accept the tax in any other manner other than cash. Avery time, there was a default, the land passed from zamindar to the white merchant. Once they grabbed the land, they hired the villagers with their implements and animals and forced them to use their know how, paid them a meager wage and then they cultivated and produced the indigo by themselves. The process of annexation was completed. By the late nineteenth century, in Bihar, the British planted about quarter million acres of indigo that way. So was done by the Bengal Indigo Company, a large British firm of ‘repute’.

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth, the indigo production waned on account of the emergence of coal tar based aniline dyes. The British did not improve their methods of usurpation and control by oppression; the aniline dyes came to the rescue of the ryot and the indigo production eventually got extinct. There is a very interesting story behind the discovery of the aniline dyes where the British discovered the revolutionary aniline dye by chance but let it slip from their fingers to the Germans for lack of knowledge, competency and enterprise.

  Jute Trade

  After the Crimean War, the availability of hemp from Russia, to the Scottish mills in Dundee dried up and the Scots knew that they could replace hemp by jute grown in the country side of Bengal. Bengal had produced jute for bags and cheap wrapping cloth for a long time. Jute was grown in Bengal in small family farms. The manufacture of jute fiber into coarse cloth by hand spinning and weaving was a very old industry in India. Jute needed both heat and moisture to grow and the combination was available aplenty along the shallow streams for “retting”. In the family farms, labor was a non-issue and the families managed their farms efficiently. Like cotton piece goods during the eighteenth century, jute woven material was also exported to the western countries and the Europeans were familiar with jute bags and piece goods. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, over a million pieces were exported per year both to Europe and America and the British East India Company did the export. In 1850, before the Scots took over the Indian Jute industry, about ten million pieces were exported, fetching over two million Rupees. The East India Company also experimented using jute as a cordage material for the company’s ships and they also shipped jute fiber to Dundee to produce bags. They had to develop the process as they were not familiar with this new material. They used flax and tow to soften the fiber but later they were able to use jute by itself. In 1838, the Dutch bought large quantities of jute bags in Dundee for packing of coffee,

  The Scots descended on India in the second half of the nineteenth century and took over the jute industry. Another plantation industry was born for Britain. The British Army and Navy personnel after leaving the service, found it remunerative to settle in the country side of Bengal and later all over India instead of going home. In 1854, George Acland came to Bengal and brought with him the jut machinery that he had used in Dundee and erected a mill at Rishra, near Calcutta. He produced jute yarn, erected handlooms and started competing with the native family sack weavers.

  On the heels of Acland, the attraction of money brought in focus the attention of the British Administration and they sent Scottish people with experience in power machinery and the principal player was George Handerson. He erected power spinning and weaving in 1859 and used both powers and hand looms and started making a lot of money. Those mills were very profitable and other people from the British managing agencies in Calcutta soon joined the very profitable industry and there ensued the ‘gold rush’. Soon a real boom set in and by 1900, there were fifteen thousand looms operating in Bengal and by 1932, the industry was totally mechanized employing about a quarter of a million workers and there were well over sixty or seventy thousand looms in operation.

  Jute became India’s second cotton textile industry. The Scots monopolized the industry in Bengal; reason: cheap labor, very cheap labor because the labor received a scandalously low wage for a very difficult work. The Scots made staggering amounts of profits as the power loom jute industry was totally monopolized and the natives found insurmountable odds for the import of power loom machinery. The Scots were particularly money hungry and the labor paid the price for their greed.

  The profits in jute industry were characterized by secrecy like everything else the British did in India, but the profits in the jute industry were particularly horrendous as those were made under tortuous labor conditions. The acreage under jute cultivation was in the neighborhood of about four million acres and stayed in that range on account of topography and the production ranged between eight to ten million bales of four hundred pounds each in the early part of the twentieth century and at least half of that production was exported to England, Europe and the United States. These figures are only approximations because the industry was very secretive like other plantation industries. The profits of the Jute Mills around that time were in the range of about forty million rupees or about four million pounds per year. During a century of jute monopoly, Britain made £400 million, which partly was denied to the Indian entrepreneur by blocking their entry in to the trade by the British Administration.

  Work in plantation industries under the British management was harsh. The people were searching for ways to earn a living. All opportunities for decent work had evaporated under the British rule. The rapid decline and disappearance of the native craft resulted in hoards of people in search of work. That floating population consisted of artisans, peasants, hill coolies and ordinary plain dwellers. No attempt was made to provide employment in modern industries for those masses except in the Plantation industries, which were monopolized by the British. That was not all. Indian shipbuilding also disappeared, as the British banned the ship building industry in 1814, in order to monopolize the Indo- British trade as well. The village smithy, boat building and leather works produced a second wave of unemployed workers after the introduction of steam vessels in the thirties and the British Administration made no alternate employment opportunities for the ever increasing mass of unemployed natives. They remained unemployed decade after decade until the British rule came to an end.

  The jute plantation industry employed the peasants as independent contractors and later on as salaried cultivators. Harvesting was done in water and retting compelled men to work submerged in water, literally to their necks. The laborers who carried the 400 pounds jute bale, carried on the heads of three men, learnt to walk very close together, developing a very complicated step, like a six legged horse. The Scots did not invest on carts or hand trucks
. Sorting was the dirtiest work after the jute left the farm and women and children performed it. The environment was very dusty; the Scots greed for money did not allow them to install dust extractors or to even provide soap to the workers to wash off the oily dust from their filthy bodies. The working conditions were awful and it did not concern the Scots who resided in beautifully landscaped villas adjacent to the Mill compound in lush green tropical surroundings with flowers and bougainvillea providing the serenity and beauty. It was quite a contrast, those villas were mostly located at idyllic surroundings, mostly on River banks where the families of the Scots played crocket, sipped fancy wines and enjoyed the comforts provided by the native house hold servants. The jute labor lived in shacks.

  The Scots were generally described as unnecessarily cruel who stripped the natives of human dignity. It was possibly because the lives they lived before they saw the Indian money was painfully harsh bereft of any comforts and surrounded by filth and squalor. Their streets were littered with garbage and they used to pile up on that every night with the beat of a drum by throwing more garbage from their apartment windows. They slept on straw mattresses, wore filthy unwashed clothes and the only meat they could afford to eat was hunted birds or animals. The Scots were British minorities who were treated harshly by the British and it was not surprising to see them treat human labor at Jute mills so cruelly. It is a sorry commentary and it was not any different in the coal industry, where they employed young women and children as beasts of burden for lack of any mechanization.