The real story of empire building was played out only in India in the nineteenth century, when most of India was brought under the British rule. The direct rule of the Crown started only after the Mutiny in 1857 or more precisely four years later, with the passage of the India Act. Most of the territories in East Africa, Ceylon, Malaya, Burma, Abyssinia, the Crimean wars and the Afghan wars were fought and paid for by India. Those territories were fought and won by the Indian army at India’s cost. Lord Salisbury, Disraeli’s Secretary of State for India and later the Prime Minister of Britain himself, said that
“India was an English barrack in the Oriental Seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them”,
The British had no land army of its own except a small contingent of about seventy thousand soldiers and that too was supported and paid for by India. India fought the Imperial wars and much of the offensive military resources were therefore systematically built up in India and India paid for Britain’s Imperial adventures. Commercialism and security concerns were used alternately to justify military campaigns. Britain kept running up the military tab knowing that it was not her responsibility to pay.
During the half-century before 1914, Indian troops served in more than a dozen Imperial campaigns from China to Uganda. It was that time when Britain was seeking territories deliberately; not realizing that it would collapse by its shear weight as it was beyond its capacity to play that role. The British used India and the Indian army as the primary asset of the Imperial ‘Raj’. India was used to fight the World Wars, both the first and the second and the smaller wars, the Afghan Wars in 1839 and 1879, the Crimean War from 1854-56, the Ethiopian Campaign in 1866-67 and the Burma wars from 1826 to 1886. There was a constant demand on India’s money, manpower and its resources at the expense of its people. The British taxpayer did not pay a cent for those items of Imperial expenditure. During that period, while the world advanced by leaps and bounds, on account of newer technologies, Indian resources were decimated and spent for the benefit of the Imperial Britain, leaving India impoverished and backward. As always, Britain was after money, in money matters it was always a calculating nation, calculating nickel and dimes to make profit, even for the training costs of a single soldier at India’s dime. Britain was in quest to build up the national wealth and money and profit motives determined the number of troops to be stationed in India. So the burden fell on India to train the British soldiers and to pay for their travel back and forth to England. Money always trumpeted their Imperial objectives, never realizing that it was pernicious to their goal of an all-encompassing Empire so it collapsed as fast as it was formed soon after the loss of India.
The Beginning of the Empire in India
Britain started translating its long time desire to set up a dominion in India long before the invasion of Plassey in 1757. Until then they used trickery and subterfuge to build up its garrisons mainly in the coastal port cities of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay with the pretext of securing its trading posts. After they were able to establish their foothold in Bengal, they maintained armed forces in the interior of Bengal and offered mercenary services to other Nawabs to defray the expenses. In 1773, Hastings accepted an offer of forty million rupees (£4.0 million) from Nawab of Oudh to fight the Afghan Rohillas.
By 1786, the British sovereignty in Bengal was fully established. The British fought many battles with local powers in India, the Rajputs, the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the Mughals and with the southern states in the Deccan. Their battles were knotted with trickery; they feigned friendship with one local power against the other and then turned around and stabbed the ‘friend of convenience’ in the back and continued to make territorial gains until the end of the century. The western regions were more powerful as they lay on the traditional invasion route to India and people were from the martial race and took pride in their heritage. The wars with the Sikhs and the Afghans have been covered under the predatory wars; suffice it to say that those territories also passed in the British hands after a long and an expensive protracted struggle. On the western line of control, the Sikh forces had total control on Punjab, Sind, Kashmir, and Cis-Sutlej region and that region was the gate way to Afghanistan. It was the source of many conflicts. In the north, Nepal and the Gurkhas had to be subdued in order to curb the power of the Nepalese and they had to crush the remnants of the Marathas and the Rajputs. Along India’s northwestern frontier lay Afghanistan and Afghanistan became a bloody pawn in the great game Britain played for supremacy in Central Asia. England added bit by bit to its Empire, and that strategy was perpetrated using Indian money and the Indian manpower. There was no moral justification for the various battles Britain waged except for the territories, monetary gains, reparations, revenues and looting the gold reserves in those regions. What was most troubling was that Britain had little at stake and its populace supported unbridled attacks on other economies just for financial gains. India was an occupied economy with little nationalist cohesion over a very vast territory and Britain was able to exploit that weakness to its fullest advantage. The various Imperial campaigns were waged not for any treaty obligations or any provocation that Britain was forced to go to war to defend its national honor but those raids were purely and simply for financial gains. After they were able to establish control in India, the British turned its attention to the neighboring countries. Burma, a neighbor of India, faced repeated attacks, not that Britain had a bone to pick with Burma but just for its teak wood forests and other mineral wealth. Teak wood in those days was the life blood of ship building and the British saw gold mines in those forests.
Burma Wars
Britain was playing the money game in the region and they were convinced that they had the winning hand. The wining hand was made possible because Britain had India in its pocket and the British people decided to exploit it to the maximum. Britain therefore tried to build up wealth and power using the resources of India and India became a pawn in that money game. Like the strategic expansion in Afghanistan, the British interest in Burma was not for any geo-political reason, but purely for money as Britain wanted to control the resources of that region and whisk away the money to Britain. Their ambition was no longer for territorial or political expansion, but for wealth so that they could secure their country’s future financially and to become a dominant economic power. The economic strength, Britain assumed, would ensure political domination anyway as that would be able to strangulate the weaker economies at will.
They followed liaises faire policies; there was no check on their predatory capitalist policies. Those policies were followed in the quest for money and power, what was called in capitalist societies by different names, such as free market economy, globalization, colonial economy or unbridled capitalism, where a stronger economic power trampled a weaker economy in search of cheaper labor and raw materials. Such a relationship was pursued in the colonial economies, between the British and the subjugated economies and the economic benefits always disproportionately flowed to the British. Free market economy by itself, did little unless it was supported militarily and the regulatory powers were suspended in collusion with the ruling local political bodies, which had been bought over. The predatory practices were tolerated by decriminalizing the statues and the capitalist economic and political agenda was implemented by the local bureaucrats who were lackeys and toadies of the Imperial power. Those predatory practices were practiced in India and they used India to implement those policies in other economies, such as Burma, Kenya. Those policies decimated the Indian economy and made the once thriving economy, a pauper nation. Britain and India were locked up in trade for two hundred years, one got richer and the other got progressively poor and their standards of life never converged, because India was used by the British to build its economy and wealth.
The same model was used in Burma. Money was the ultimate goal of the British and there was plenty of money to be made from the teak jungles of Burma; the lifeblood of ship building. There was
no risk on the part of Britain; it was the Indians, who were going to do the fighting. The only job for Britain was to invent an excuse to attack the Burman territory. So they invented an excuse, that there were scores of nameless cruelties reported from Ava, the effete Monarchy of Burma. They fabricated a politically sensitive story and accused the Burmese government that they were scheming the cessation of East Bengal, which at that time was under the British suzerainty, so an invasion was attempted in 1826. The entire operation was a farce, it was mismanaged and the English lost at a tremendous cost to India; both monetarily as well as in manpower.
The hostilities ended with the treaty of Yandaboo. Next twenty-six years were a period of appeasement, but in 1852, the British launched another attack on the pretext of a commercial dispute. The British were successful in capturing the lower Burma and credited Dalhousie, the governor –general of India, in organizing a superior campaign. This victory was made at a cost of over several million pounds, bank rolled by India together with loss of life. Britain was not done with Burma yet, there was upper Burma still, the seat of the Burma race. They had to wait until 1886, the time of Duffrin, to attack it again and that time the pretext was the security concerns as Britain wanted to neutralize the French influence in Indo-China region. Burma became a part of the British East India in 1886.
Then Britain looked towards Kenya to establish more plantations of cash crop. Essentially, they saw the opportunity to monopolize tea gardens, coffee plantations and sisal plantations worldwide and they saw unlimited money making potential. Those were cash crops and provided ready money for the British except that Britain did not have the manpower to exploit the Kenyan economy. Here India became very handy again, with its vast resource of manpower and pliant creatures, which went along with the British dictates. Britain needed railways to bring the products of the plantation industries to the port city of Mombasa, so Britain brought a lot of Indians to build the railroad from Mombassa to Kissomo, a town on Lake Victoria. Britain also needed the manpower to govern the country, as there were very few British nationals available, so they filled that need with people from India, who provided such duties as railroad operators, medicos, teachers, clerks and the rest. People from India, the natives, soon occupied the African cities. The Africans lived in the countryside and worked as domestic help or came to towns to sell their produce. The British shipped Indians from Calcutta, the center of their governance in India and used local brokers to bring Indians from the interior on various promises and they were shipped to Kenya. The British were very resourceful when it came to making money; money was the nerve center of all their activities and during the two hundred years of their colonial rule, they amassed such huge sums that they became a world economic power in a very short time.
Other Imperial Wars
During the second half of the nineteenth century and until the First World War, Indian troops served in more than a dozen Imperial campaigns. It is not the intent here to detail all of them. Two of those conflicts are included in this narrative, one because of the stupidity of the campaign, that was the Abyssinian conflict and the other the Crimean war to show how unrelated it was to the Indian nation and was fought to protect the British honor and her treaty obligations. India was also involved in the Boxer conflict with China.
In September 1895, Tsar Nicholas II received a painting from the Kaiser of Germany depicting Christianity under threat from Buddhism. “The arch-Angel Michel sent from heaven a message to Christian nations in Europe to unite, in resisting the inroads made by Buddhism, heathenism and barbarism in defense of the cross”. Seven nations joined together, Britain, France, Italy, Russia, United States, Austria and Hungry in subjugating that Asian nation and the nascent anti Christian movement known as the Boxer rebellion in China. Indian forces fought for Britain at its own expense in capturing Chinese territories, imposing hefty reparations, something like close to a hundred million pounds and other insulting conditions. India did not share in the reparations. The Crimean conflict occurred in 1854 and the Abyssinia conflict in 1866 and both illustrate how India was used by Britain for its Imperial games.
Crimean War
The Crimean War lasted from 28 marches 1854 until 1856 and was fought between Russia and an alliance of the United Kingdom, France, the Ottoman Empire and Piedmont-Sardinia. It was fought in the Crimean Peninsula, Balkans Black Sea and the Baltic Sea.
During the winter of 1854/55, the short comings of the British military supply were thrown in to sharp focus which resulted in heavy casualties. Those losses are memorialized in poems like the “Charge of the light brigade’ and the loss of life. One regiment, nominally over a thousand strong, was reduced to a total of seven men. By January 1855, thousands of men died from illness, exposure and malnutrition, many times larger than the losses suffered in the battlefield. About a quarter million men participated in the campaign, and you got it, they were mostly Indian who suffered a loss of life close to twenty thousand men. India paid the bill for the conflict.
Britain never had more than seventy thousand soldiers in England at any time and those soldiers were rotated with British soldiers in India. What was most reprehensible was that they called the Indian soldiers as British soldiers. They never acknowledged the sacrifices made by the Indian soldiers; instead they took credit for the sacrifices they made. The contributions of Indian soldiers and of India are hidden in obscurity. The Indian soldiers never existed as far as the British historians were concerned. They were called British soldiers. Britain was comfortable in coercing them to fight and die. It was true for all Imperial wars. The other European nations who were locked in a race with Britain for colonial conquests found the situation with dismay as they did not have the Indian men, the Indian money and the Indian blood and it was an unequal match.
Crimean war was provoked by an obscure religious dispute. France was the guardian of the Roman Catholics in the Ottoman Empire under treaties negotiated during the eighteenth century. Russia was the protector of Orthodox Christians. Both Catholics and Orthodox monks disputed possession of the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Palestine. In 1850, the two sides made demands on the Sultan simultaneously that he could not meet. Despite vehement protestation of the monks, the Sultan adjudicated in favor of the French. The Tsar of Russia, Nicholas I attempted to negotiate a new treaty under which Russia was to be allowed to interfere whenever they found the protection provided by the Sultan inadequate. Lord Stratford (British) convinced the Sultan to reject the treaty. Lord Stratford knew that it was the Indian blood that would be spilled and not that of the British.
Abyssinian Conflict
The Abyssinia Emperor, Theodore (Tewodros), took some British hostages as he felt slighted and demeaned by the British. The Abyssinia capital Magdala was 400 miles away from the Red Sea coast, a very mountainous parched country, but the British wanted to teach him a lesson. So, what did the British do? Send in the Indian army to capture him and his country. The British Secretary of State for India, Sir Stafford Northcote, wrote from London to his counterpart, the Viceroy in India, to start planning the attack, and money being the nerve center of all British activities, he also felt compelled to remind the viceroy that the Government of India will bear all the expenses, as usual. The Bombay Presidency was the closest to the Red Sea, so the Indian troops from Bombay Presidency bore the brunt and Lt. General Robert Napier was given the assignment to put together an estimate of the forces. His estimate makes an interesting reading ranging anywhere from field and horse artillery to elephants, donkeys, sheep and camels including a prefabricated harbor with a light house. Those British army men used to feel like the Sultan, like the Sultan in a Persian night tale, and they always thought that India was the magic lamp which will provide them all that they ever wished for.
Four regiments of native cavalry; One squadron of British cavalry; ten regiments of native infantry; four batteries of Field and Horse Artillery; one mountain train; a battery of six mortars 5 ½ inch, if possib
le, two of them to be 8-inch and a coolie corps of 3,000 strong for loads and working parties. On August 15, 1867 he was offered the command of the expedition.
After a period of about two months, sometime in 1867, the invasion force set sail for Massowah on the Red Sea. It was quite a flotilla, consisting of thousands of soldiers and an unimaginable hoard of livestock. The Abyssinian country side became a grave yard for that livestock during the three month long journey Thousands of animal carcasses littered the long road. Theodore was no match for that overwhelming force, a simple assault on his fortress annihilated his force and he himself committed suicide. The British annexed his territory and all the loot. India got a statue of Napier, which was installed at the vice regal lodge at Barrack pore Calcutta. How much it cost India to avenge British honor, only the Secretary for State for India and the Viceroy knew it. India was governed by secret correspondence between the two.
India had enough. The people in India rose up against the British in 1857; they just could not put up any more with the exploitation. The revolt termed as ‘Mutiny’, originated with the infantry soldiers at Meerut, a small town fifty miles east of Delhi and the British added fuel to the fire, when they started annexing the princely states. The bad situation was made worse with the introduction of evangelical Christians in an attempt to convert the population to Christianity. The British opened the door to Christian missionaries hoping to pave a path to permanent hegemony. The missionaries focused on the poor and the dispossessed and offered them cash inducements, health care, Christian schooling. They were able to enroll a few million poor souls in South India but it made no real difference. It however did provide the ultimate flash point for the mutiny or the first war of independence. All that loot & plunder had to have an effect in India. There was great unrest in the masses; India had no voice in what Britain was doing. Dwarka Nath Tagore, a Nationalist, demanded representation of each of the three Presidencies of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in the British Parliament, but to no avail and he lamented that “Britain has taken all which the natives possessed; their lives, liberty and property and all the Indians were held at the mercy of the British government. People in India could no longer accept the foreigners taking over their life, liberty and religion. They saw decadence every where and they began to view the British as evil, some kind of a boil on their side, which had to be removed.
1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope Page 24
