Every jilt of the town
Gets a callicoe gown;
Our own manufact[ur]es are out of fashion.6
British and European demand for cheap calico, chintz bedspreads and hangings, silks, fine china and tea kept the price of East India stock high. During the first half of the century its annual dividends were between 6 and 8 per cent. In the two decades before Clive’s arrival in Madras, the yearly value of imported Indian and Chinese goods averaged £1 million, and in 1744 the Company had even been able to loan the government £1 million.
The beneficiaries of this success were largely men of substance. There were just under 2,000 stockholders, the majority of whom lived in Britain, although there were some foreign, mostly Dutch, investors. The Company deliberately encouraged holdings of more than £500, which qualified the shareholder to a vote at the annual meeting at its headquarters in Leadenhall Street for the election of the directors. Policy-making, therefore, was in the hands of that elite which dominated the country’s commercial and political life.7 More than a third lived in London and the Home Counties, and so a typical investor of Clive’s time was a Kentish or Surrey equivalent of Fielding’s Squire Allworthy. His investment would have been worth between one and two thousand pounds, and in all likelihood he was a figure of eminence in his county, who voted in Parliamentary elections and perhaps sat for the shire or a local borough. The opinions and interests of such men counted for something in the world, for they were the natural partners of the nation’s rulers, that small knot of great landed aristocrats who filled the ministries of the first two Georges. A Company which could lend money to the government and whose investors carried political clout was well placed to procure political favours. In 1730 its support in the House of Commons had been strong enough to see off a challenge from Bristol and Liverpool merchants who wanted to break into its monopoly of India’s trade.
The Compagnie des Indes was less fortunate in its connections and never enjoyed the same financial security as its rival. It had been formed in 1719 by the merger of three other French Asian and Far-Eastern concerns, each of which had a history of under-funding and mismanagement. Like its forerunners, the Compagnie never secured the capital needed to match its pretensions, although it somehow produced an annual profit of about £1 million during the 1730s. Its assets, acquired between 1674 and 1740, were Pondicherry, its headquarters, and subsidiary trading stations at Chandanagar on the Hughli, Yanam at the mouth of the Godvari, and Mahé and Karaikal on India’s south-west coast. Lines of communication with France were secured by the occupation of the islands of La Réunion and Mauritius, where work began in 1735 on a naval base at Port Louis to which French men-o’-war could retire to escape the autumnal monsoons.
Inside France, the Compagnie had few influential friends. Its capital was mainly concentrated in the hands of its directors, who were under official supervision. The prospects of Indian trade never captured the imaginations of French investors in the same way as it had their British counterparts. French investment flowed to the sugar islands of the Caribbean and North America, and it was in these regions that the government intended to enlarge and consolidate its colonies. Moreover, in some quarters there was hostility to trade with India: the peasantry feared an influx of Indian food, and textile manufacturers protested against imports of cheap Indian fabrics. On one occasion Indian cloth was publicly burned, an early example of what would become a traditional French reaction to foreign competition.8
For all that its agents had achieved in India, the Compagnie seemed destined to remain in second place to the East India Company. To escape this fate and avoid stagnation, the Compagnie needed to find a source of capital which did not depend upon the whims of French investors or the unpredictable fluctuations of trade. One was available: the rights of taxation which went with the ownership of territory. If the Compagnie could accumulate territory it would acquire a reliable source of revenues from the customary imposts levied on the Indian peasantry. It might also, and this was a tempting but still distant prospect, lay the foundations of a French empire in India. What today’s businessmen would call diversification seemed the only way ahead, despite the objections of the directors in Paris who wanted the Compagnie to stick strictly to what it had always done. The men on the spot were more venturesome. They had their fortunes to make and they knew local conditions and how best to exploit them. Geography was their most valuable ally: a decision taken by the governor in Pondicherry in February 1747 was relayed by a letter which reached Paris by the end of the year and was approved in January 1748. The directors’ sanction reached Pondicherry in August 1748.9 This was an extreme example of the length of time messages took to reach their destination, but even in the most favourable conditions a letter sent from India to either Paris or London might take six to seven months to deliver.10 Distance gave enormous power to local officials, enabling them to take decisions which could not be officially repudiated for at least nine months, probably longer.
What amounted to a free hand to the men on the spot was of vital importance as events unfolded during the 1740s. It allowed servants of both companies to act as they saw fit in the knowledge that their masters had no means of checking them until long after the event, by which time local circumstances might have changed radically. At the same time, and this too was highly important given that after 1744 Britain and France were engaged in a global war, the men in India were ignorant of developments on other fronts. They were, in effect, their own masters with a licence to devise strategies which best served the interests of their respective countries and employers. In exercising this liberty, the agents of both companies never forget that they had come to India to make their own fortunes and they shaped their policies accordingly.
III
In the summer of 1740 Raghuji Bhonsle’s Maratha army swept across Karnataka. It defeated the forces of the nawab, Dost Ali, and roamed across the countryside, looting, raping and murdering. Refugees poured into Pondicherry, and its governor, Benoît Dumas, defied Raghuji, who withdrew rather than assault a city defended by fortifications built in brick and in the most up-to-date European style. Dumas’s gesture raised French prestige in India. It was a straw in the wind, as were two minor engagements between Maratha cavalry and detachments using European weaponry and tactics. At Bahur a small party of musketeers routed twice their number of horsemen with volley fire, and rapid artillery and musket fire from the Dutch fort at Sadras scattered another, far larger body of Marathas.11
Dumas’s tough line was part of a new and still evolving strategy, designed to elevate France’s standing among the local princes and to cultivate their friendship and so acquire territory and revenues. This policy was already paying off; in 1739 Chandra Singh, kinsman of Dost Ali, had presented the French with the port of Karaikal as a reward for aid in his war against the Raja of Tanjore (Thanjavur). Dumas retired at the beginning of 1742 and was replaced by Joseph François Dupleix, a man of dynamic energy who combined ambition, cupidity, anglophobia and belligerence in roughly equal parts. He was forty-six, from bourgeois stock, and, like Clive, may have been driven by an urge to prove himself in the eyes of a distant and dismissive father.12 Whether or not this was the mainspring behind his actions, Dupleix saw India as a treasure house from which he could help himself while simultaneously promoting the interests of France and his employer. His greed was contagious; his accomplices, Charles-Joseph Bussy, Jacques Mainville and Jean-Louis Gonpil, all helped themselves to the taxes which the governor was channelling into the Compagnie’s coffers. For Dupleix these misdemeanours were ‘petites affaires’, not worth bothering with.13 Rumours of how much individual Frenchmen were making from Dupleix’s enterprises filtered through to their British counterparts and naturally aroused envy and emulation.14
In defence of his actions, Dupleix once observed that his ultimate objective was ‘la domination française dans l’Inde’, which may explain why his enemies considered him a megalomaniac. He understood, better than most of his contempora
ries in India, how local dynastic rivalries and power struggles between states might be exploited. But before the Compagnie could barter military assistance for land, it had to demonstrate that its soldiers were unbeatable. Quite simply, French soldiers and sepoys trained and led by French officers had to defeat British as well as princely armies.
The chance to show the Compagnie’s military muscle came in the autumn of 1744, when the news reached Pondicherry that Britain and France were at war. Intelligence was also received that a formidable British naval squadron was heading for the Indian Ocean. Dupleix had no choice but to propose a local truce, a suggestion which was welcomed by the governor of Madras, who was all too aware of the weakness of the city’s defences and the smallness of its garrison. The new Nawab of Karnataka, Anwar-ud Din, fearful that his province might become a battlefield, insisted that both companies kept the peace. There were no constraints on the commanders of British men-o’-war, who attacked French shipping in the Indian Ocean; in September 1745 the Compagnie’s China fleet was taken off the Malayan coast, yielding £92,000 in prize money.
The companies could no longer hope to stand aloof from the global war. During the winter of 1744–45, Bertrand Le Bourdonnais, the Governor of Mauritius, had been building up and training a scratch squadron of French merchantmen, stiffened by a ship of the line. This force gave Dupleix the wherewithal to launch a land and sea attack on Madras, which fell after a half-hearted defence in September 1746. Soon afterwards, a monsoon storm sank two of Le Bourdonnais’s ships and dismasted the rest. The crippled flotilla limped back to Mauritius for repairs and the balance of sea power swung back in Britain’s favour. Backed by Royal Navy warships, the garrisons of Fort St David and Cuddalore were able to beat off French assaults in December 1746 and March 1747.
In the meantime, Anwar-ud Din had taken the field, ostensibly to forestall the attack on Madras and so demonstrate his authority in Karnataka. His army, 10,000-strong and commanded by his son, Mahfuz Khan, collided with a force of 230 Europeans and 700 sepoys led by a gallant and daring engineer officer, Captain Louis Paradis, near Saint Thomé at the beginning of November. Formed up in lines, the French troops fired a conventional musket volley and then charged their adversaries. Unnerved by this novel form of attack, the Indians crumbled and fled with their general, mounted on an elephant, making the pace. Paradis’s men gave chase and added impetus to the rout by firing further volleys into the flying men. This spectacular victory, secured so quickly and against what seemed overwhelming odds, astounded everyone. Thinking of the Turks, a British officer remarked that hitherto Muslims had always enjoyed a reputation as formidable warriors, but the small French force had ‘broke through the charm of this timorous opinion by defeating a whole army with a single battalion’.15 It soon became axiomatic that European leadership, soldiers, weaponry and tactics were infinitely superior to Indian. A Royal Navy officer who witnessed engagements at Fort St David, Cuddalore and Pondicherry concluded that Indians ‘are ill-calculated for war, and except when they are led on by English with other Europeans, seldom make any great figure in the field’.16
Another lesson emerged from the war: sea power held the key to success on the Indian battlefield. Lack of it had frustrated Dupleix’s campaigns and made possible a British counter-attack on Pondicherry in the summer of 1748. The Royal Navy now enjoyed complete command of the seas, thanks to a squadron of thirteen battleships and twenty smaller vessels under the command of Rear-Admiral Edward Boscawen, which had hove to off the Coromandel coast in July. Dupleix had nothing with which to challenge this fleet. In May 1747 a sixteen-strong squadron, bound for Pondicherry, had been intercepted and largely destroyed by Admiral Lord Anson off Cape Finisterre. So long as the British dominated the Atlantic, France’s Indian, and for that matter West Indian and North American possessions, could expect only intermittent and fragmentary help from home. Nonetheless, Pondicherry withstood a seven-day bombardment and, on the approach of the monsoon, British land and sea forces pulled back. In January 1749 news reached India of the signing of the preliminaries of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Not long after, the representatives of the two companies heard that nothing was to be changed in India; bargaining for boundaries and strongholds in the Caribbean and North America had been the chief concern of the peacemakers.
IV
It had been a hard fight under the walls of Pondicherry. The besiegers had shown, in the words of a recently arrived young officer, ‘all the conduct and courage that men could do’.17 Among those who conspicuously distinguished himself was Robert Clive. In a war that had been undertaken by hastily improvised armies, command had been almost entirely in the hands of former clerks who, like Clive, learned the art of war on the march and on the battlefield. He was an adept pupil, who quickly revealed bravery and a knack of winning the obedience and devotion of Indian soldiers. Once, in the forward trenches, Clive found himself isolated with a none-too-steady platoon which was about to receive a French sally. He rallied his men by reminding them of the honour and glory they were about to win. The result of his harangue was reported by an eyewitness:
All the company’s troops had an affection for this young man, from observing the alacrity and presence of mind which always accompanied him in danger; his platoon animated by his exhortation, fired again with new courage and great vivacity upon the enemy.18
The volley brought down twenty of the French and sent the survivors scrambling back to their emplacements.
Incidents like this enhanced Clive’s growing reputation as a cool-headed, self-confident commander who led by example from the front. A public emergency had released hidden talents in a young man, who had hitherto been regarded as ‘a very quiet Person’ with, as he frequently admitted, a distaste for his dull existence as a tally clerk. War gave him excitement and, since he was good at it, satisfied his craving for admiration. This was the age in which a man’s honour and public standing were closely bound to his ability to display courage, that indispensable virtue of a gentleman. It also mattered to Clive that soldiering would bring him rewards far richer than those he could have expected from pen-pushing. As events turned out, he was soon in a position to fulfil deeply felt obligations to his family in England and, at the same time, make himself wealthy. So long as he grasped at the opportunities which were now emerging, Clive could only move upwards.
Dupleix and the Compagnie had come out of the war badly. The Royal Navy and British privateers had inflicted losses which totalled £750,000, and the value of the Compagnie’s stock had fallen to a tenth of what it had been in 1741.19 A financial crisis, possibly bankruptcy, could only be averted by making the Compagnie a territorial power rather than a commercial enterprise. Desperate to recoup recent losses, Dupleix redoubled his efforts and raised his sights; by mid-1749 he was preparing to make the Compagnie the kingmaker of southern India. The East India Company had been invigorated by the war which had reinforced its garrisons and placed a powerful fleet at its agents’ disposal. The Company could afford to be truculent and in June 1748 the directors ordered that, if the Nawab of Bengal proved refractory in trade negotiations, he was to be reminded that George II
having the Protection of the Company greatly at heart, as they [the directors] may perceive by the Strong Force he hath sent to the East Indies to chastise the French for their Insolence at Madras, His Majesty will support the Company in whatever they think fit to do for their further Security.20
The fleet was in fact used to assist Company forces invited into Tanjore by its deposed raja, Shahaji, who had appealed for help at the end of 1748. Once restored to his throne, he promised to hand over the port of Devikott together with an annual revenue of between ten and twelve thousand pagodas (£40–£48,000). The Madras council agreed, with strong support from Boscawen, and a short and far-from-easy campaign followed in which Clive’s conduct was again praised. The port and the annuity (the raja could only manage £9,000 a year) were welcome, and by extending its influence over Tanjore, the Company strengthened
its commercial position. The upheavals of the 1740s, particularly the Maratha incursions, had severely disrupted the production of the handloom weavers of the hinterland on whom the Company depended for cotton. Obviously any measure which encouraged them to remain in the same place was welcome, and once the Company gained physical control of an area it was free to eliminate Indian middlemen and deal directly with producers.21
Further north, Dupleix was engineering the overthrow of the Nawab of Karnataka, Anwar-ud Din, and his replacement by a French stooge, Chandra Singh. In August 1749 the nawab was killed and his army trounced at the battle of Ambur where, again, a larger Indian army was overcome by a smaller one using European weapons and tactics. The thankful Chandra gave the commander, Louis-Hubert D’Auteil, an annual grant of 4,000 rupees (£640) and doled out 75,000 rupees (over £10,000) to his soldiers, who had already taken their pick of the treasure abandoned in Anwar’s camp, which was thought to be worth three and a half lakhs of rupees (£38,500).22
Dupleix now turned his attention to making his ally, Muzafar Jang, ruler of the Deccan. This was achieved by yet another victory against overwhelming odds, this time roughly ten to one, at Velimdonpet in December 1750. Even the French commanders were stunned by what they had witnessed. Bussy described it as: ‘A victory which no one could believe possible in Europe.’ Chandra’s gratitude was boundless: gifts and grants of land were showered on French commanders, with Dupleix picking up £77,500 and a jagir (annuity) worth £20,000. Lesser men got lesser presents: 400,000 rupees (£64,000) was distributed among the 5,300 soldiers according to rank and, at the end of the pecking order, the Compagnie picked up two lakhs (£22,000).23
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