The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  The official buildings of Calcutta and their equally grandiose counterparts in Madras were a striking witness to the revolution which had occurred in India during the past sixty years. In 1740 the East India Company was purely a commercial enterprise, which imported and exported goods from its factories at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, unbothered by the internal politics of India. By 1815, the Company owned the most powerful army in India and governed, directly and indirectly, Bengal, much of the upper Ganges basin and extensive areas of eastern and southern India. Independent native princes feared its power and many sought its friendship and protection. Most important of all, the Company was flexing its muscles as a major Asian power; during the past twenty years its army and navy had seen action in Arabia, Mauritius, Malacca and Java.

  Trade still mattered, but less than before. Since 1793 the Company’s monopoly had been whittled away by the British government, which was falling under the spell of Adam Smith’s economic theories. The Company lost out; by 1810 interlopers had captured a quarter of the Indian market and were selling goods worth £2 million a year. Changing patterns of trade rescued the Company, in particular the mass importation of cheap Lancashire cottonware which was underway by the early 1800s and which, incidentally, swamped and extinguished India’s village-based cotton industry. There was also a burgeoning and lucrative two-way trade with China which imported Bengali opium and exported tea for the British market. Opium exports were worth a million rupees in 1802–3 (about £250,000), a total which rose by 20 per cent in the next ten years. And yet, despite new opportunities for trade, the Company was, by 1800, principally dependent on land taxes collected from the provinces it ruled.

  The metamorphosis of the Company was accomplished without any plan and according to no general principle. It was largely undertaken by a handful of ambitious officials and generals, who sincerely believed that they could enrich themselves while at the same time advancing the interests of their country and their employer. Their predatory and private-enterprise imperialism was ideally suited to conditions in eighteenth-century India where the central authority of the Mughal emperors was dissolving. Of course, opportunism and greed were already endemic among the Company’s servants, all of whom were in India to accumulate enough capital to return to Britain and a life of ease. ‘I may be made Governor, if not that I may make a fortune which will make me live like a gentleman,’ Stair Dalrymple told his elder brother in 1752. He was seeking a Company post and needed £500 to cover a bond for his good behaviour and a further £200 for his kit and passage out.1 This investment would soon be recovered once Dalrymple exercised his right to trade on his own account, although, like other fortune-seekers, he faced exposure to diseases and a climate which reduced his chances of returning home.

  At the time when Dalrymple was importuning his brother, new and unlooked for ways of self-enrichment were presenting themselves to the Company’s employees. In 1742 Joseph-François, Marquis Dupleix, had taken up the post of governor of the French Compagnie des Indes. In many ways he was very similar to the belligerent, greedy and overreaching British proconsuls with whom he and his successors contended for the next twenty years. During the final year of the War of the Austrian Succession, the principal French trading port of Pondicherry had been threatened by a Company army operating from Madras. Worried about its safety and knowing that a further Anglo-French war was extremely likely, Dupleix decided that Pondicherry needed a defensive glacis. To this end, he set about making the Compagnie des Indes the power-broker of the Carnatic.

  Dupleix excused this meddling in local affairs by promising his employers rich returns from the land taxes levied on those areas which passed into French control.2 There were also, although this was omitted from his despatches to Paris, vast opportunities for him and his staff to divert some of these revenues into their own pockets, along with gifts from Indian princes who sought France’s friendship. Dupleix began his excursion into the complex, uncertain and violent world of Indian dynastic politics in 1749 when he engineered the installation of his stooge, Chandra Sahib, as nawab (governor) of the Carnatic.

  The East India Company’s governor and council at Madras could not stand by and allow the Carnatic to slip into French hands and they were soon sponsoring a rival nawab, Muhammad Ali Khan. Both companies supported their puppets with troops, and a proxy war for control of the region was underway by 1750.

  Among the British officers engaged was Robert Clive. He had come to India, aged nineteen, in 1744 as a clerk and had drifted into soldiering four years later. In England he had been an idle misfit whose despairing family (Shropshire gentry) arranged his shipment to India. There he might have remained in obscurity, but for a French sally against Madras in 1748 which released in him remarkable talents. He swiftly absorbed all that was needed to master the art of war as it was waged in India, and revealed a knack for commanding the Company’s Indian troops, or sepoys. He was physically brave at a time when, like their British counterparts, Indian soldiers responded to daring and courageous officers. Clive was also highly ambitious: he craved what his age called ‘glory’, that public lustre which attached to victorious generals, and once his career was underway he used his fortune to propel himself into the British ruling class.

  As a soldier and later as an administrator, Clive came in close contact with Indians and he later believed himself the possessor of that arcane branch of human knowledge, an understanding of the inner working of the Indian mind. All Indians, he imagined, were accustomed to that form of arbitrary government which his liberal-minded countrymen called ‘despotism’; were mesmerised by temerity, and awed by ‘prestige’, an abstraction which blended military prowess and moral authority in roughly equal proportions.

  The siege of Arcot in 1751 gave Clive the chance to display his flair as a commander. He held off a superior Franco-Indian detachment and his leadership was, allegedly, so charismatic that a battalion of French-trained sepoys later deserted and demanded to serve under him. The small-scale operations which characterised the struggle for the Carnatic dragged on for three more years, by when it was clear that Dupleix had bitten off more than he could chew. Nonetheless, he had every reason to persevere and so did the British; Robert Orme, an officer serving with the Company’s army, heard that in 1753 the Compagnie des Indes had extracted £535,000 in land tax from the territory it occupied.

  The stakes were high and, as Orme observed, winning presented few difficulties for Europeans or European-armed and trained troops. ‘The actions of a single platoon in India may have the same influence on the general success, as the conduct of a whole regiment in Europe.’ The key to victory lay in what he called the ‘superiority of European arms’ and Clive agreed, writing later that ‘the terror of our arms’ was so great that Indian armies were often psychologically defeated before they even offered battle. Both the British and the French companies stepped up the recruitment of Indians, who were equipped with flintlock muskets, and drilled to manoeuvre in the European manner to deliver the devastating, close-range volleys which scared their adversaries and won battles. White troops were also imported, which was not an easy task since soldiering in India was as unattractive as it was elsewhere; Orme, surveying a body of recruits who disembarked at Madras in 1752, noted that they were all ‘as usual the refuse of the vilest employments in London’.3

  The French too were learning the lessons of Indian warfare and Dupleix, faced with a stalemate in 1753, resolved to end it by an infusion of French professional troops. To even the local balance of power, the East India Company asked the British government for reinforcements, and received the 39th Regiment and four warships. The French and British governments’ decision to intervene in what hitherto had been a contest between rival commercial interests had momentous consequences for India. Backed by the military and naval resources of Britain and France, the two companies were now a formidable political force in India. For the moment they were roughly equal in terms of manpower and equipment, and their energies were wholly
consumed by the war in the Carnatic. Even if one side gained the upper hand there it was quite likely, given the nature of Franco-British diplomacy, that gains made in India might be bartered during peace negotiations.

  European power in India was tested not in the Carnatic, but in Bengal, in an unexpected war which broke out in June 1756. While Robert Clive, now commander of the Madras army, the Madras Council, and Admiral Charles Watson were planning an offensive against the French in the Carnatic, Siraj-ud-Daula, nawab of Bengal, attacked and occupied Calcutta.

  Siraj-ud-Daula was a product of the dissolution of the Mughal empire, a prince in his early twenties who had inherited an independent state created a generation earlier by the sword of his great-uncle. Relations between him and the Company had previously been cordial, but, as his declaration of war showed, he was nervous about the spread of its influence in Bengal. New fortifications were being set round Calcutta and Company officials were abusing their commercial privileges at the expense of local traders and the nawab’s revenues. Seizing Calcutta was a surprisingly easy operation and astonished the Bengalis, who afterwards mocked the British as ‘banchots’ (cowards).

  It was the damage inflicted on the Company’s prestige as much as the loss of revenues from Calcutta, now needed to boost the war effort in the Carnatic, which convinced Clive that the city’s recapture had to be given priority over operations against the French. Calcutta was retaken in January 1757 by Clive and Watson and war was declared against Siraj-ud-Daula. It was masterminded by Clive who proceeded by diplomatic stealth and cunning against an adversary whose weak character, capriciousness and predatory sexuality made him an Indian Caligula. Like the Roman emperor, Siraj was encircled by courtiers and soldiers of brittle loyalty who were easily seduced into a conspiracy against him. Mir Jafir, the commander of Siraj’s army, needed little coaxing to accept Clive’s bribes and the promise of the Bengal throne, and Siraj’s financial props, the Seth banking clan, were also enticed into Clive’s web. Politically undermined by Company cash, Siraj was finally destroyed by the Company’s firepower at Plassey on 23 June 1757.

  Plassey was a spectacular demonstration of the Company’s military muscle and one which made a deep and lasting impression on the Indian mind. Outwardly, the two armies were unequally matched: Clive commanded 1,000 European troops, 2,000 sepoys and eight small-calibre cannon and a howitzer, while Siraj mustered a host of at least 50,000 cavalry and infantry and a large train of massive, bullock-drawn cannon. This vast, sprawling and loosely-commanded horde was driven by internal dissension. (Mir Jafir’s contingent deliberately stayed aloof from the fighting) and was soon unnerved by the unfamiliar tactics of its adversaries. Those who retained some will to fight soon lost it when faced with volleys of musketry and close-range bombardment. Clive’s gunners knew from experience how to create havoc by aiming at artillery bullocks and the elephants which carried Indian commanders. The wounded beasts stampeded and careered wildly through the ranks of infantry and cavalry. What tipped the balance was Clive’s overwhelming self-confidence and offensive spirit which made his army like a tiger, who ‘never charges if he can scatter his enemies with a roar’.4 The roar proved too much for Siraj’s army; it fell apart and fled. Shortly after, he was taken and murdered by Mir Jafir’s servants. The Company’s losses were seventy-three killed and wounded.

  Plassey proved, crudely but effectively, that the Company was a force to be reckoned with in India. For the next fifty years, the rulers of Mysore, Hyderabad, the Mahratha states and the Punjab scrambled to acquire the new military technology and the specialists, usually Europeans, who would train their soldiers to use it. Other Indian princes chose to preserve their independence by seeking an accommodation with the Company through unequal treaties, in which they agreed to surrender revenues and some of their authority in return for the Company’s protection in the form of a permanent garrison.

  The pattern of expansion by coercion and treaty was first seen after Plassey when Clive played kingmaker and installed Mir Jafir as nawab of Bengal, Orissa and Bihar. All the customary land taxes of these provinces passed to the Company and Mir Jafir was left responsible for justice and policing, functions that were taken over by the Company in 1772. All Frenchmen were expelled from Bengal, and soon some of its taxes were flowing into the Carnatic to subsidise the war effort against France. After some awkward moments, including an amphibious assault on Madras, the war in the Carnatic went in the Company’s favour. Pondicherry fell in 1761 and its fortifications were levelled. French pretensions in southern India were in shreds, even though Pondicherry was returned to them in 1763 under the terms of the Treaty of Paris.

  * * *

  Bengal gave the Company the wherewithal to sustain its new position as a major military power within India. The circumstances of its acquisition gave impetus to further wars of conquest and pacification as civilians and soldiers discovered that the profits of war far exceeded those of trade. Looking back on twenty years of intermittent campaigns, Edmund Burke told the Commons in 1785 that, ‘The great fortunes made in India at the beginnings of the conquest, naturally excited emulation in all parts, and through the whole succession of the Company’s servants.’

  This was true. Those who played the game of high politics and war in India found themselves tantalisingly close to huge sources of wealth which could be easily tapped. It was, Clive correctly stated, ‘the known and usual custom of Eastern Princes’ to make generous gifts to those who helped them. Mir Jafir followed tradition and between 1757 and 1766 gave Clive a total of £234,000 and, during the same period, extended his largesse to other officials in Calcutta, who individually received sums of between £5,000 and £117,000. The goodwill and influence of powerful men were purchasable commodities in Indian political life, as they were in eighteenth-century Britain, and the Company’s agents saw no reason why they should not benefit from the accepted practices of a country where they were now power-brokers. Corruption was also endemic in the day-to-day administration of India, and officials who were placed in charge of the tax-collection in Bengal and elsewhere soon ‘went native’, channelling revenues into their own pockets.

  These were all the fruits of conquest. War also generated profits, most of which found their way into the hands of soldiers, which was why so many of them always favoured aggressive policies. Clive made £40,000 between 1744 and 1753 during which time he held relatively junior posts, while the more scrupulous Arthur Wellesley (younger brother of the Marquess and later Field-Marshal, the Duke of Wellington), who held more senior commands between 1798 and 1805, returned home £43,000 better off.5 Junior officers were always itching for action, especially if it offered chances of promotion, campaign allowances and, most welcome of all, loot and prize money. In September 1797, young officers in Madras were plunged into despair when they heard that an expedition against Manila had been cancelled. One wrote to his parents, ‘Judge of the gloom, the disappointment, and vexation which overspread the faces which a few moments before had exhibited the highest symptoms of hope, and ardour for distinction.’6

  No doubt there were some fire-eaters genuinely dismayed that they had missed a chance to show their prowess in the field, but there were many, perhaps the majority, who had been dreaming of plunder. The official, and therefore suspect, total of loot taken from Nagpur in 1758 was £25,000. The actual value of the booty was probably far greater, since much of what had been stolen would never find its way on to the Company’s reckoning sheets. This was understandable since the procedures for prize-money allocation were slow and heavily weighted in favour of senior officers. Participants in the 1817–19 Mahratha War had to wait eight years for the pay-out of the £2 million owed them, so it was inevitable that many soldiers grabbed what they could and never declared it.

  Acquisitiveness at the top was transmitted downwards. An unknown private of the 11th Dragoons recalled the wave of excitement which animated British and Indian other ranks in 1825 after they heard the news that they were about to besiege Bha
ratpur. When the city fell in January 1826, he watched seven cartloads of gold and silver auctioned, and a soldier offer two gold moidores (about £3.50p) for a bottle of spirits, which would normally have been sold for a tenth of that amount. He also noticed soldiers carrying off gold necklaces, jewellery and camel-hair shawls, while others dug up the floors of houses in search of cash buried by their owners, a common precaution against looters and tax-collectors.7 This kind of behaviour had attended every war in India during the past eighty years and was beyond the control of officers. When Lieutenant Robert Blakiston apprehended some British plunderers after the capture of Gawilghur in 1803, he was threatened with a bayonet and called a ‘meddling rascal’ for having dared to prevent them from exercising what they regarded as a natural right.8

  Over and above the often considerable windfalls which came their way on campaign, officers could expect to earn enough from their pay and maintenance subventions either to provide a nest egg for retirement or to provide an annuity for their families at home. John Malcolm, in many ways a model of administrative probity, who entered the Company’s service in 1781, had accumulated £13,000 twenty-three years later and was still able to send home £400 annually to support his parents and sisters. He calculated that when he retired in 1806 his pension and savings would yield him £1,500 a year, enough to place him firmly in the ranks of the gentry.9 In the 1790s the poet Samuel Coleridge’s family was sustained by his elder brother, a junior officer in the Company’s army. Colin Mackenzie, an engineer attached to the Madras army in 1790, was willing to risk contracting local diseases working in the interior as a surveyor of forests (he knew nothing of botany) in order to qualify for higher rates of pay, some of which he sent back to his family on the Isle of Lewis.10