The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  The Company’s way of doing business was as controversial in India as it had been in England. Company traders were usually more aggressive and less conciliatory than Indian merchants. For example, in the years before Hedges arrived, a group of Company merchants at the silk-producing centre of Kasimbazar had tried to reduce the prices they paid to weavers. Workers protested against the factory chief Job Charnock’s ‘unjust and unworthy’ dealings with them, refused to work and appealed to the town’s Muslim judge. Putting Mughal ideas of justice into practice, the kazi called the parties together to negotiate a compromise. Charnock refused to attend, so the dispute ended up being dealt with by the provincial governor, Shaista Khan. Once it reached Dhaka, a Company officer represented Charnock’s point of view to the Nawab, but Shaista Khan threw the English official out of his court, saying ‘the English were a company of base, quarrelling people and foul dealers’. Eventually, Job Charnock had no choice but to agree to the arbitration of a group of local traders.16

  Soon after his arrival at Hughli, William Hedges’ relationship with Mughal officers became fractious and difficult. The city’s chief administrator was Parameshwar Das, a member of the Hindu Kayashta community that for generations had supplied India’s Mughal empire with bureaucrats. He, too, saw his task as ensuring a balance between Hughli’s different interests, and that meant not favouring the East India Company in its conflict with private English traders. Parameshwar seems to have been well disposed to Thomas Pitt and his ‘interloping’ colleagues because they were more willing to support the Mughal regime than the Company. Pitt offered to pay 3 per cent customs duty to facilitate the flow of goods, while the Company insisted it had the right to pay nothing at all. The result was that consignments of Company goods were stopped and searched, shipments held back and taxes demanded.

  Such ‘harassment’ did not make a big difference to the Company’s profits. In fact, the late 1670s and early 1680s were good years for the Company’s exports from Hughli. In these years, Bengal supplanted other East India Company centres as the main source of Asian goods sold in London for the first time. But Hedges and his colleagues had no way of calculating the Company’s corporate profitability as a whole; their frustration and anger got the better of their capacity to judge the interests of the organization they worked for. A tiny group in a foreign city, they felt the Hughli administration’s actions on a personal, visceral scale. Hedges insisted that the ‘affronts, insolencies [sic] and abuses’ inflicted on the Company were unbearable. Again and again Parameshwar Das invited Hedges to the negotiating table, but the English continually fled, frightened they would be ambushed at a meeting.17

  It took a group of Indian merchants trading with the East India Company to get the two sides together. In October 1682, the Mughals and the English met on the waterfront at Hughli to try to negotiate a settlement. Parameshwar and Hedges strolled hand in hand, talking openly. Their meeting was intended to make public their desire to be friends, but also to demonstrate their ability to blow each other to pieces if need be. Parameshwar assured Hedges of his ‘respect and friendship’, but he was ‘guarded by Peons and Servants, and I [Hedges] by the soldiers and Peons of the Factory, with most of the Englishmen in town’.

  The meeting was an encounter between two men in very different moods. Parameshwar had time on his hands. He wanted Hedges and the English to submit to his authority, to be a source of profit for the Mughal empire and to enrich himself if at all possible. He could only maintain good relations if Hedges remained in town to negotiate. The chief officer, on the other hand, was impatient. His instructions from London were to make sure goods were sent back on time. He worried that Mughal officials would hold the shipments back, and force vessels lying at anchor in the Bay of Bengal to wait before being loaded with cotton, silk and spices. He was further anxious that interference by Mughal officials would cause the Company to lose the race to get products to the market in Europe, and thus lose money. He did not believe that a conversation on Hughli’s waterfront solved anything, so he decided to force his way to Dhaka to see Shaista Khan, the governor. The night after he had met Parameshwar, Hedges slipped out in the darkness, taking to the river in two heavily armed boats with ‘two stout fellows’, an Englishman and Spaniard, in charge of each. An armed Mughal customs boat tried to attack two hours after nightfall, but the Spanish mercenary fired his musket and ‘we saw them no more’, Hedges said. After rowing for ten days through ‘the most pleasant country I have seen in my life’, Hedges arrived in Dhaka.18

  The encounter on the waterfront was a clash between two different styles of government and two different forms of power. The East India Company was not interested in creating authority or building an empire. In the 1680s, it was only concerned with making money, and this it was doing. But it was exclusive and belligerent, obsessed with its rights and desperate to control everything that threatened its success and survival. It wanted its position to be fixed and immutable, not vulnerable to the vicissitudes of local politics. By contrast Parameshwar Das and Shaista Khan were officers of an empire that ruled by negotiation and the flexible incorporation of potentially rival forces. The Mughal empire insisted its emperor and officials be recognized as supreme and was willing to fight those, like the Marathas in the 1660s, the Assamese in 1682 or the East India Company three years later, who threatened to deny their supremacy. But it sustained its authority by acknowledging the autonomy of different interests and nationalities, and that could include the English. Force was an important part of Mughal statecraft, but it was usually followed by some kind of attempt to negotiate as deals were struck between political leaders who had previously been rebellious or antagonistic.

  Villainous tricks

  The East India Company’s strange tactics meant that Shaista Khan’s court was divided in its opinion as to how to treat the English emissaries. Hedges’ visit to Dhaka brought the debate to a head. Shaista Khan himself was all for being lenient towards this strange and argumentative organization. Global trade boomed during the 1670s, with a 30 per cent increase in ships returning from Asia to Europe compared to the previous decade. Shaista himself had benefited from European commerce, trading horses with western Asia in partnership with English merchants, for example. The governor felt there was room within the open structures of the Mughal polity to accommodate the Company’s demands, but officers on the tax-collecting side of the Bengal administration saw the Company as an organization of tax avoiders trying to flout Mughal power rather than a source of wealth. In the 1680s, money was required to pay for the Mughal wars in Bengal and in the south of India. The Mughal empire’s chief revenue officer in Bengal insisted the Company contribute by paying the fixed rate of 3 per cent customs duty. When Hedges suggested the Company would leave if the tax demand persisted, the Diwan answered simply that ‘they might go if they pleased’. As ever, Shaista Khan tried to broker a compromise, but all he could do was write to the Emperor Alamgir asking if he would grant the Company a firman (or order) giving it the permanent right to tax-free trade, and then giving the Company an eight-month period of remission while they waited for a response from Delhi. The firman never arrived.19

  It was their need to negotiate continually with Mughal officers at Hughli, not the 3 per cent tax rate, which caused the English so much anxiety. Hedges’ visit to Dhaka did not end the ‘harassment’. While the English chief was away his junior officers were arrested, and were in ‘so great fear the Ships would not go away this year’ that they paid 4000 rupees ‘to let our goods pass to and fro without molestation’. When he got back to Hughli, Hedges complained that Parameshwar, as he put it, ‘began to play his villainous tricks with us again’. With support from elements within the Mughal regime, Thomas Pitt managed to leave Bengal in the early autumn with ships stuffed with goods to sell in England. He reached England in February 1683 where the profits from his trade enabled him to buy a manor in Wiltshire, and then the parliamentary seat of Salisbury. By contrast, the Company’s ships had sailed
late in January in 1680 and 1681, and without a full cargo in 1682. Hedges did not manage any better in 1683 but he harried and cajoled, coming down to Baleswar to try to speed the Defence (the same ship in which he had sailed to Bengal) and two other vessels on their way. They left at the beginning of February, too late to get the best prices in Europe for the load of silk, cotton and saltpetre they carried.20

  William Hedges’ mission in Bengal had been a failure. He had not successfully established a monopoly for the East India Company over England’s trade with Asia; the interlopers were still trading; he had gained no lasting concessions from the Mughal empire. Soon enough, orders came from London for him to be sacked, to be replaced by William Gyfford, a senior official based at Madras. Hedges became a renegade. Going into hiding in the Dutch East India Company’s factory at Hughli, he then escaped back to England via a long overland route through Persia, Syria and the Mediterranean in order to avoid the Company’s ships. He landed at Dover early in the morning of 4 April 1687, four years after the return of his nemesis Thomas Pitt, with no job or family but considerably more wealth than he started with. Hedges’ wife and children had died during his travels (there is no reference as to when or how in his writings), but he returned with bales of cotton and silk to sell in London and the last pages of the diary he had maintained in order to justify his actions to his peers in London. That diary would play a part in turning the mood in London towards war.

  The idea that the East India Company should conquer land in India did not begin in England. It started among officers in Bengal itself, frustrated about their fractious relationship with Mughal authorities. Hedges thought that the oscillation between ‘friendship’ and ‘insult’, the toing and froing between officials like Parameshwar Das and Shaista Khan, could not be sustained. The first half of Hedges’ diary had been sent to London in January 1784, and contained a firm message that the Company needed a strong, defensible fort if it was to trade in Bengal. The Company needed to ‘resolve to quarrel with these people’, Hedges wrote. Despite squabbling among themselves, this was becoming the consensual view. William Gyfford, Hedges’ replacement in Bengal, argued that ‘the trade of this place could never be carried on, and managed to the Company’s advantage, till [the Company] fell out with the Government, and could oblige them to grant better terms: which he thought very feasible’. The Company needed to achieve some kind of permanent, tax-free security. ‘No good was to be done with these people without compulsion.’21

  The notion of war was the response of merchants in Asia to pressures imposed from London. Initially, the Court of Directors was unwilling to follow through the implications of its rigid demands. Josiah Child and his colleagues in London were doubtful to begin with about the conquest plan, worrying that war would cost too much, and that it would antagonize their Dutch rivals. Some thought a strong base at the newly acquired port at Bombay would be a far better ‘check’ on the Mughals. No one doubted the Company needed to stand up to what they saw as humiliation by the Mughals. ‘We are positively resolved’, the Court said, ‘to assert our right due to us. . . . We shall never submit peaceably to the Custom demanded of us.’ But instead of an invasion, London initially suggested that the Company make a scene, landing a band of foot soldiers ‘with officers, drums, and colours’ before marching to Dhaka to demand redress.

  The anxious flow of messages between India and London in the second half of 1684 and 1685 changed the minds of the Company’s London governors. Men debating in the Company’s courts and councils started to panic, thinking the Dutch and interlopers were annihilating the East India Company’s share of India’s trade. They imagined that Shaista Khan ‘took advantage of the unnaturall division betwixt the English themselves to oppress us all’. Talk was of frustration, dishonour and the increasing need to act quickly before things suddenly got worse. Increasingly war was proposed as a way to overcome the ‘misery and thralldom’ in which the English in Bengal were imagined to live. The Company asked its captains and officers what they thought and found that they:

  all do Concur in this Opinion (and to us seeming impregnant truth) viz/t that since this Gov[ernmen]t have by that unfortunate accident, and audacity of the Interlopers, got the knack of trampling upon us, and extorting what they please of our estates from us by the besieging of our factories, and stopped our Boates upon the Ganges, they will never forbear doing so, till we have made them as sensible of our Power

  ‘[T]here must’, the Court of Directors wrote, ‘be some hostility used to set our privileges right again.’ The target was the city of Chittagong, a place where there had long been a big Portuguese presence, and the only port the English believed could be defended from Mughal attack. The trouble was the Company in London had not the faintest idea where Chittagong was. The port directly opens onto the Bay of Bengal, but the Court of Directors worried whether a conquest fleet could ‘get up the great Ganges as high as [Chittagong] without the aid of our pilots’.22

  The ‘quarrel’ started in earnest when nineteen warships were hired in London in January 1686 and sent with six companies of soldiers. The first soldiers sent from England landed at Hughli, not Chittagong. Mughal troops were sent to the city in response. By then Job Charnock had taken over as chief of the Company’s operations in Bengal, and complained that the Nawab ‘ordered downe for the guard of this towne two or three hundred horses and three or four thousand Foot’. With Mughal troops flooding into Hughli tensions rose. War began in the middle of October as the result of an ‘unhappy accident’, when a fight broke out between three English soldiers and a larger group of Mughal sepoys in the bazaar and sparked a conflict between already edgy troops. Mughal forces burnt the East India Company’s factory. The English tried to attack Hughli from the river. Their ships captured ‘a Greate Mogull’s ship, and kept firing and battering for most of the night and the next day’. Charnock described these acts of ‘conquest’ as a ‘great victory’, but the English had left 14,000 bags of saltpetre onshore. Commodities mattered more than revenge against the Mughals, so the Nawab’s offer of peace was accepted. Writing home, Charnock’s greatest concern was that the Dutch had managed to use the disturbance ‘to make their markets’ in time.23

  Charnock then ordered English forces to Sutanati, a village forty-nine miles downriver from Hughli on the spot where the city of Kolkata now lies. He wanted to retreat to an isolated base distant from the Mughal army to load the ships and negotiate a treaty, while the Company had force at their disposal. The Company in London was not happy with this kind of ‘timid’ conduct. The Court of Directors wanted to stick to its guns, and ‘undauntedly pursue the war against the Mogull until they’d conquered a fortified settlement’. Charnock was criticized for putting the Company’s financial interests before the honour of its institutions and the country: the Company was very clear that honour came before profit. ‘We know’, they wrote to Charnock,

  your interest leads you to returne as soon as you can to your Trades and getting of Money, and so, it may, our interest prompts us; but when the honour of our King and Country is at Stake we scorn more petty considerations and so should you.

  Wishing Charnock ‘were as good as soldier as he is . . . a very honest merchant’, the English King and Company sent a new force of fifteen ships.

  Captain Heath, the commander who had first brought William Hedges to Bengal, was sent back to lead the fight against the Mughals from his ship the Defence. But Heath fared no better than Charnock. He sent Shaista Khan a series of threatening letters, to which Shaista responded by arresting the small English contingent in Dhaka and keeping them in chains in the city’s red fort from March 1688. There they complained about being kept in ‘insufferable and tattered conditions’, imprisoned ‘like thiefs and murders’ until the end of June. Heath then bombarded the city of Baleswar, ‘committing various outrages against friends as well as enemies’ as Job Charnock put it. He then sailed to Chittagong, but found the city too heavily defended for his force to capture. The port’s
Mughal governor sent a message asking the Company to stay and talk, believing that the Company’s ships might be useful for ferrying their own soldiers to fight the neighbouring state of Arakan, if terms with the English could be agreed. As usual, Indians wanted to prolong negotiation, but the English were impatient, concerned as ever about their markets. Heath fled back to Madras, arriving on 4 March 1689. With his retreat, England’s first war with a state in India came to an end.24

  As well on this Side of India as the other

  While Captain Heath’s fleet was shambolically cruising around the Bay of Bengal, a similar series of political breakdowns led to an outbreak of war on India’s west coast. The centre of conflict was the island of Bombay, still populated by Portuguese priests, Marathi toddy-tappers, merchants and mercenaries from many nations. Bombay had been English ever since the marriage of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II in 1661, and was the concern of the Company since Charles offloaded it on them in 1668. It did not become a major centre for the Company’s operations until the late 1680s. As in Bengal, English commerce in western India began in a Mughal port, in this case Surat, the entrepôt of the Mughal empire. As also in Bengal, expanding trade led to fractious relations with the Mughals and caused Company officers to assert their power more decisively and to try to separate themselves from Indian society behind gun embankments and fortified walls. In Bombay (unlike Bengal) they got as far as retreating behind the bastions of such a fort, but they didn’t survive there for long.