In 1836, however, the Chinese emperor issued an order that, unlike champagne, opium was no longer to be either imported or used in China. The traders were not especially worried, since they had had little difficulty in finding corrupt officials willing, for a price, to turn a blind eye. But this occasion proved to be different. In March 1839 a new, incorruptible official was appointed to enforce the emperor’s will. Apart from destroying existing stocks of the drug, Lin Zexu tried to appeal to Queen Victoria’s better nature by letter. In the name of humanity he begged her to halt a trade which was enslaving so many of his countrymen and warned her that if the British did not stop shipping opium from India, he would ensure it was destroyed on arrival in China. His letter never reached the queen, who anyway did not possess the powers which the Chinese emperor took for granted. Soon the official had laid siege to the warehouses, or ‘factories’, in which the foreigners stored their drugs in Canton. Once the dealers had surrendered their opium, he expelled them from China. Twenty thousand cases of opium were then crushed, shovelled into pits or dissolved in the sea.
Now the only way for the British traders to return to China was by force. Their problem was that not everyone shared their dewy-eyed enthusiasm for drug-dealing. Matheson was especially worried about the attitude of the Church and wrote to William Jardine suggesting that they line up some congenial journalists to make their case in the newspapers. Opposition to the trade was not without its own powerful voices. The young MP William Gladstone (who was to see the consequences of drug dependency for himself when his troubled sister, Helen, became addicted) declared that ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war calculated in its progress to cover this country with a permanent disgrace, I do not know and I have not read of’. But the traders had friends in high places, while with serpentine casuistry Jardine argued that the problem of the drug business lay not with suppliers but with buyers, claiming that once the British had sold the product to the Chinese intermediaries who would ferry it ashore it ceased to be their responsibility. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, was soon making a similar case in his speeches. While the British government did not for a moment dispute the right of the Chinese to determine what did or did not come into their country, it simply could not stand idle when they tried to stop British citizens earning an honest living.
By June 1840, British ships and troops were arriving off the coast of China. (The traders seized the opportunity to send their own vessels, too, laden with opium.) The Chinese fatally underestimated the technological superiority of the British forces. The governor of the province at the mouth of the Yangtze River sent the emperor the reassuring news that it would be deadly for the British to put soldiers ashore, since their legs were so stiff and their trousers so tight they could not get up if they fell over. His strategic advice also included the judgement that the British would be at a serious disadvantage because they had insufficient bows and arrows. In the event, the British naval force included a weapon never seen in combat before. The Nemesis, an iron-clad, steam-powered, paddle-driven gunboat of 184 feet, had been built in Liverpool and could make short work of the Chinese junks. It was commanded by a remarkably skilled captain and its draught was shallow enough to allow the invaders to navigate the rivers. Thousands more troops followed, and then more ships, including additional steam-driven gunboats. By the late summer of 1842, the British controlled the Yangtze, threatening Nanking and, beyond it, the imperial capital. The Chinese sued for peace.
The emperor’s representative appealed to the British. ‘Multitudes of our Chinese subjects consume it [opium], wasting their property and destroying their lives. How is it possible for us to refrain from forbidding our people to use it?’ he asked the British negotiator, Sir Henry Pottinger. But Pottinger had written orders and would not be budged. He also presented a massive bill for compensation due to the traders. On 17 August 1842, the emperor consented to the Treaty of Nanking, allowing the British a permanent presence at ports from Canton to Shanghai, agreeing to pay reparations and ceding Hong Kong to Britain as a colony. China was now safe for British drug traders. Unsurprisingly, when news of the outcome of the First Opium War reached London, it did not meet with universal celebration. In an editorial, The Times suggested that it ought to be Britain paying some reparation to China for a war ‘which could never have arisen had we not been guilty of this national crime’. Gladstone worried about the judgement God would pass on the nation. A change of government brought about a bizarre state of affairs when in January the following year Palmerston’s successor as foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, instructed Pottinger that the drug smugglers were to get no official protection. Pottinger shrugged his shoulders, passed on the information to Jardine, Matheson and the others and looked the other way.
Chinese resentment at the unfair conditions imposed by the Treaty of Nanking festered for decades,* and fourteen years later erupted into war again, after which the British carried on selling opium for the rest of the century. Periodically British statesmen wondered whether China as a whole might be added to the empire. It was decided that nothing much would be gained by taking on the responsibility – Britain was really interested only in the money to be made by trading with the country, and running India was quite enough of a headache already. ‘We have as much empire as the nation can carry,’ as the lofty Liberal Sir W. Vernon Harcourt put it in 1892. By then, the two taipans, Jardine and Matheson, were long dead, having returned to Britain and acquired Highland estates, seats in parliament and, in Matheson’s case, a baronetcy.*
As the anxieties expressed over the opium trade testify, the hard-faced capitalism which drove much imperial expansion was offset by an increasing sense that empire ought to be about some higher function. Many came genuinely to believe that the British could do good in the world. The conviction had been bolstered when the country at last tackled the injustice which lay behind much of its earlier wealth. For, fifty years earlier, the country had become the first European nation to abandon slavery. This bold act was to lay the foundations of the belief that building the British Empire had a higher moral purpose.
The enslavement of Africans had corrupted just about everything – almost the only section of British society which could be said to have entirely clean hands was the Society of Friends (the Quakers), whose experience of persecution made them more than willing to empathize with fellow human beings upon whom God’s light shone as readily as it did on white men. For the rest of late eighteenth-century Britain, from the customers of the coffeehouses to the king’s closest advisers, slavery was an ugly fact – conveniently distant. Among those who were obliged to think about the practice, a wilful blindness prevailed: as one member of parliament wrote, slavery was ‘not an amiable trade’, but ‘neither was the trade of a butcher an amiable trade, and yet a mutton chop was, nevertheless, a very good thing’. To be sure, there must have been some who shared Dr Johnson’s belief that no man is by nature the property of another. (He is said once to have raised his glass in Oxford and proposed a toast ‘to the next insurrection of negroes in the West Indies’.) But they were either mute or largely ignored.
That parliament was eventually jolted out of its complacency is testimony to the power of campaigns and campaigners to change the world, a reflection of an innate commitment to decency. The role of religion in this enormous transformation cannot be exaggerated. Thomas Clarkson had been intended for a career in the Church when, thinking about the slave trade, he decided that ‘it was time some person should see these calamities to their end’. As the eighteenth century ended and the nineteenth began, his marathon journeys across the land took the anti-slaving message to uncountable thousands, and everywhere he went – even in cities where he expected to be rebuffed – he found support. Ordinary citizens might appear powerless to change the law, but they had realized that they could change their own behaviour. ‘There was no town through which I passed in which there was not some individual who had left off the use of sugar,’ he recorded. William Wilberforce�
�s tireless efforts in parliament to have the trade made illegal were grounded in his evangelical beliefs, but the individuals trying to justify slavery were powerful and well heeled and it cannot have been easy. Even the royal family defended the slave trade, with the Duke of Clarence (who, in 1830, became King William IV) calling the abolitionists ‘either fanatics or heretics’. Yet nothing drives action like a sense of mission, and the campaign against what the poet Robert Southey called ‘the blood-sweetened beverage’ took root across the land. In Birmingham pamphlets argued that those who used the products of slavery were ‘as guilty of flagellation and murder as those actually employed in that abominable trade’. In Leicester, Elizabeth Heyrick, the widow of a young cavalry officer, organized a consumer boycott which within a year had persuaded a quarter of the town to lay off sugar. It was, as Victor Hugo might have put it later, an idea whose time had come, greater than the tread of mighty armies.
Oddly, anti-French hostility helped the abolitionists’ moral argument. Their supporters in parliament claimed it stood in heroic contrast to the way things were done across the Channel. The 1807 decision to ban the transport of slaves in British ships provided proof of the ethical superiority of the country’s population. ‘The people of England are not going to consent that there should be carried out in their name, a system of blood, rapine, robbery and murder,’ thundered Sir Samuel Romilly. On the other hand, he could not resist pointing out that the historic enemy was now being led by a Corsican tyrant. The French had also enslaved hundreds of thousands to work their Caribbean sugar plantations, and Romilly invited MPs to look into Napoleon’s conscience as he lay in bed, to ‘contemplate the anguish with which his solitude must be tortured by the recollection of the blood he has spilt, and the oppressions he has committed’ in the course of his ruthless climb to supreme power in France. He went on to imagine the feelings which accompanied his friend Wilberforce to bed after the vote to ban the slave trade: ‘how much more enviable his lot, in the consciousness of having preserved so many millions of his fellow-creatures, than that of the man, with whom I have compared him, on a Throne to which he has waded through slaughter and oppression’.
There was no material advantage to be gained by abolishing slavery, no territory to be conquered by the act, no gain either tactical or strategic. It was a decision taken for purely altruistic reasons, as noble as participation in the slave trade was contemptible. The Royal Navy was now ordered to begin anti-slavery patrols off the coast and up the rivers of tropical west Africa, a thankless task with few prospects of promotion and every chance of catching a nasty disease. In the first fifty years of these patrols, British citizens freed 150,000 men, women and children considered by others to be citizens of nowhere. And, apart from being a good thing in itself, it began to change the way many of the British saw their role in the world. Their unsuccessful attempt to retain the colonies in North America had cast them in the role of deniers of liberty. The abolition of slavery could attest to an idea of the British as champions of freedom. Hostility to slavery did not abate in the years which followed. When the Foreign Secretary put his signature to the Treaty of Paris in 1814, allowing the French to continue trading in slaves for a further five years, three-quarters of a million people put their own to a petition of protest.
The commercial impulse which drove traders to seek new markets and to enforce their demand to trade at the point of a gun if necessary was as powerful as ever. But the moral fervour which infused the campaign to abolish the slave trade bestowed another sense of purpose on British imperialism. The country had demonstrated its willingness to fight the good fight at home, and now it would do the same in the rest of the world. The campaign against slavery would last well into the closing decades of the nineteenth century, as the great public support for David Livingstone’s mission to root out Arab slave traders in Africa demonstrated. The moral conundrum of empire – how could we deny others the freedom we demanded for ourselves? – now had an answer. It might seem paradoxical to associate colonizers with freedom, but in this case the two were deeply connected. Before long, the British were apostles for a new gospel in which Christianity and commerce were said to be natural bedfellows.
Chapter Four
‘I stand astonished at my own moderation’
Robert Clive, 1773
On the map, the second edition of the empire – the phase which the world considers ‘the’ British Empire – was a very different thing from what had gone before. In the middle of the seventeenth century the empire, such as it was, lay at the fringes of the Atlantic. Two hundred years later, it was scattered across the world, and the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, could boast that ‘a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong’. The Atlantic empire did not become a worldwide empire according to some great plan but by the opportunism of businessmen, the ambition of adventurers, the self-confidence of the military, a gathering sense of national purpose and a series of accidents. The place where this development of imperial purpose was most observable was in the grandest of all the imperial possessions, India.
Here, in the bustle of its massive population, the complexity of its cultures, the overwhelming nature of its heat, dust and smells, the strangeness of its holy men, was a world as different from a damp, ordered north Atlantic island as could be imagined. ‘There is so much of everything!’ was the authentically awestruck exclamation of one Englishwoman when she disembarked in Bombay.
I had never seen so many people; a mixture of brown faces, and dirty white garments and spotless uniforms, and helmets, mixed up with oxen, mangy dogs, crows, and beggars, and driving through narrow streets between tall colour-washed houses, with vivid trees jammed between them, jingling victorias and bullock carts round you, and parrots shooting across the road over your head, black crows squawking. People. People. People. And your frock stuck to your shoulders.
Preventing other powers getting their hands on this bustling, unfathomable land determined the decisions of governments in the grandest buildings in London and cost the blood of young men in the sands of Afghanistan. It necessitated the raising of regiments, the acquisition of other colonies and the deployment of navies. In the heyday of imperial India men of unimaginable wealth with brown skins and Oxford drawls were manipulated by white-skinned functionaries on official salaries. The men who administered India considered themselves an elite and the most elite of all was the viceroy, who represented the Crown and acted like royalty himself. When India became independent in August 1947, the empire lost four out of five of its citizens and freedom beckoned for all the others: without India, the empire was no more than a sounding gong.
The British had arrived in the east for much the same reason as other Europeans: they saw a chance to make money. In 1616 Sir Thomas Roe had presented himself to the Mughal emperor to request trading rights. He stayed at the emperor’s court for three years, ingratiating himself with presents including an English coach, swords, hats, mastiffs and liberal quantities of alcohol, which the notionally Muslim emperor enjoyed very much indeed. Roe did not anticipate the creation of a massive British colony: having looked at the way the existing Dutch and Portuguese trading missions operated, he concluded that it was a mistake to seek a land empire. ‘Let this be received as a rule that if you will profit, seek it at sea, and in quiet trade,’ he told the East India Company.
It is easy enough to imagine the seductive impression Mughal India must have made upon foreign visitors, for it was almost certainly the richest empire in the world at the time. Inside the vast Red Fort in Delhi (constructed a few years after Roe’s departure) cool water in pools set into the floor reflected gold and silvered ceilings. The walls were decorated with delicate mosaics and fountains played in the gardens. At the fort’s heart was a marble audience chamber where the emperor sat on a gem-encrusted peacock throne; above his head, picked out in gold on the ceiling, were the wor
ds ‘If there be paradise on earth, it is this, it is this.’ India was a place where anyone willing to take a few risks might make immense sums of money very quickly, as the experience of Thomas Pitt, the son of a West Country vicar, showed. He had first set himself up at Balasore in the Bay of Bengal as a dealer in sugar and horses in 1673, after jumping ship. His business career culminated in his purchase of a 410-carat diamond (‘the unparalleled jewel of the world’) which was smuggled to Europe and finally sold for many times its original price to become part of the French Crown Jewels. ‘Diamond’ Pitt had by then acquired the usual perquisites of wealth – English country estates and a seat in the House of Commons. His grandson and great-grandson both became prime minister. ‘Get rich quick’ might have been the recruiting slogan for the East India Company, which by the early eighteenth century had established four trading stations in forts at Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta.
The man who did more than anyone else to transform the British presence in India into something distinctly imperial was Robert Clive. He had never looked likely to follow his father into the law – too headstrong, too unstable, too daredevil. Local legends in his home town of Market Drayton, Shropshire, talked of his climbing the local church tower and sitting there atop a gargoyle, of protection rackets in which his gang threatened to smash the windows of merchants who refused to pay up. There was certainly plenty of fighting. His family must have let out something of a sigh of relief when at the age of seventeen he took ship to become a clerk with the East India Company. The story of his rise from clerk to colonel, tearaway to tycoon, is the story of the British transition from trade to empire. When Robert Clive arrived at the Company’s Fort St George in Madras in June 1744 to begin work as a ‘writer’, the British presence in India was still confined to a handful of forts on the coast, of which St George was the oldest, with high walls and barracks and spired church within. The French were established in a similar toehold, along the coast at Pondicherry. Clive was ill suited to life as a clerk and prone to depression: he tried to shoot himself and was saved only because his pistol failed to fire. Twice. Then, in September 1746, a French warship appeared off the coast and with minimum inconvenience captured St George. Clive escaped and by three days of night marching reached Fort St David,* the next British base, 50 miles away. Here Clive enlisted as a soldier. It was the making of him, his reputation secured when he led the defence of Arcot in 1751 against a vastly greater Indian and French force, including cavalry, infantry, elephants and artillery. He returned to England ‘the Conqueror of the Indies’ and a national hero. His magnificent suits of clothes (including the full costume of an Indian prince) made little dent in the £40,000 he had piled up from his management of the army’s supplies – there was plenty left over to pay off his parents’ mortgage, and to buy a London townhouse and a seat in parliament. Then, in 1755, the East India Company offered him the post of governor of Fort St David. It was too enticing to refuse.
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