The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  But over the next thirty years, in fits and starts the raiyatwar system was introduced throughout the parts of southern and western India that the East India Company had recently conquered. A variation of the scheme developed by Charles Metcalfe in the conquered lands of the north, collected taxes from villages combining their resources together rather than individual peasants, and other versions were tried in different places. Wherever it was implemented, raiyatwar began as a form of military rule. Its spread was initially supported by soldier-administrators like Munro and political officers like Metcalfe, but was resisted by most of the East India Company’s civilian officers. To them Munro’s scheme was costly and time-consuming, dragging the British into unnecessary complications when they should simply have settled lands with landholders and let go. Edward Strachey, a former judge in Bengal who later worked for the East India Company in London, was typically critical. He noted that the spread of raiyatwar was driven by the rising ‘influence’ of ‘collectors and soldiers’, and the decline in the influence of judges. For Strachey individuals like Munro were ‘good and able men’, but they ‘don’t like justice much’. ‘[O]ne must look with a jealous eye to everything that comes from such a quarter on such a subject.’ These arguments were overcome because raiyatwar offered a convenient response to justify the projection of British power at a moment when the Company’s authority seemed to be continually in crisis. Raiyatwar allowed the British to imagine they could dispense with troublesome local political leaders. Of course, in practice the idea that the British could govern India without intermediaries was a fantasy. In reality, the East India Company had no choice but to deal with Indian political authorities who could marshal men and resources and escalate what, to the British, seemed a frightening scale of violence.15

  After the defeat of Tipu Sultan, the East India Company handed a diminished Mysore state back to the old Wodeyar family, and concerned itself with other threats to its presence in India. In the late 1790s, the British became increasingly paranoid about the fragmentation of the Maratha regime. The devastating defeat by the Afghans at the Battle of Panipat in 1761 had shattered Maratha unity. Over the next generation, Maratha power was rebuilt in capitals throughout west-central India, notably under the aegis of Mahadji Shinde at Gwalior, Raghoji II Bhonsle at Nagpur, Manaji Rao Gaekwad at Baroda and perhaps the most skilled Maratha administrator of her generation, Ahilyabhai Holkar, at Indore. These men and women were descendants of the new leaders who had created a strong, centralized Maratha state in the early eighteenth century. Half a century later, they rebuilt authority in ordered, prosperous states, but this time they did it in their own local capitals, undermining the capacity of any central leader to hold the Maratha regime together. The Peshwa, based at Pune, had once been the supreme Maratha political administrator but was now dramatically undermined by new centres of Maratha power. Peshwa Madhav Rao felt so constrained by these competing houses that he committed suicide in 1795.

  The East India Company’s paranoia escalated intra-Maratha conflict; the Company, again, was particularly worried about one or other Maratha politics allying with France. Troops from Shinde were already being trained and led by French mercenary officers, for example. Richard Wellesley’s strategy was to entice as many Maratha leaders as he could into a grand alliance, offering to buy the support of Company troops. All five Maratha leaders resisted the British move to begin with. But after he was driven from Pune by more powerful rivals, the new Peshwa sought British help, and signed a treaty with the Company in exchange for British help in recapturing his capital. In exchange, the Company insisted on revenue from a third of the Peshwa’s domains to pay for the troops. The four other Maratha chiefs were horrified at this submission of their one-time leader to British power, and prepared to fight. As the Pathan warlord Amir Khan, then an ally of Holkar, put it, the Peshwa’s decision to submit to the Company showed he had ‘taken leave of his senses’ and deserved to be brought down. The Company and the majority of the Maratha houses prepared for war.

  The key to victory for the British was to secure the supply of food and armaments to their army. In the two years running up to the beginning of the conflict, Arthur Wellesley spent much of his time harassing and cajoling British officers and Indian political leaders into sending supplies. These years saw massive bullock droves crossing central India, laden with rice: 32,000 bullocks were sent from Sriringapatam to the Company’s northward marching armies in a single month, January 1803, for example.16

  Belligerent as ever, Thomas Munro believed that conquest and the dispossession of local elites was the only way to put the Company’s supply lines on a sound footing. By the beginning of 1803, when war with the Marathas seemed likely, he sent an increasingly excited stream of letters to Arthur and Richard Wellesley proposing the capture of territories that lay to the south of Pune in order to supply the army. His plan was to seize Dharwad, ten miles from Hubli and the largest fort between Mysore and Pune, and establish his raiyatwar system to allow the Company to tap the region’s resources. Brought under British power, Dharwad would become a permanent centre of power and supplies, drawing rice from Kanara to ‘be converted into a grand depot capable of subsisting the most numerous army for a whole campaign’.17

  Arthur Wellesley and his political agent John Malcolm thought this project was mad. Rather than concocting impossibly hawkish invasion plans, their preparations involved a difficult process of bargaining with possible allies. Instead of dispossessing, Wellesley enticed. While marching from Sriringapatam to Pune in April 1803, he talked with a succession of chiefs, discussing the terms on which they would supply goods to the Company and support the campaign to reinstate the Peshwa at Pune. Most importantly, he negotiated to establish a series of markets to supply his army’s route north. These chiefs had been strong allies of the Peshwa, so were inclined to support the old Pune regime, but they bargained hard. Wellesley and Malcolm worked out a series of deals, offering financial guarantees, promising protection in case other rulers attacked, negotiating a truce between rivals, and in the process constructed as broad an alliance as they could. Arriving at Pune in April 1803 with 20,000 troops under his own direct command and 20,000 recruited by six Maratha sirdars, the city was taken without a fight.18

  The capture of Pune was followed by a chase throughout northern India, as Company armies tried to pin down those of Shinde, Holkar and Nagpur. The British Commander-in-Chief, General Gerard Lake, commanded an army of 10,000, which left its garrison at Kanpur in northern India in August 1803. Lake’s force then defeated Shinde’s armies at Aligarh, Delhi and Laswari, in the process extending British domination of north India 300 miles north-west up the Jamuna and Ganges rivers. The East India Company’s victory at Delhi ‘liberated’ the old, blind Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II from what Richard Wellesley called his ‘abject condition’ under the control of the Marathas. For the next fifty years, it was to be the British not Maratha soldiers who would act as the Mughal emperor’s protectors and prison guards.19

  Arthur Wellesley’s southern army followed Maratha troops on a similar seek and destroy mission, starting from their base at Pune. Wellesley’s force marched north-west. In June 1803, they captured the fort city of Ahmednagar in an attack which saw heavy casualties. Wellesley’s army marched on in September, unexpectedly encountering Maratha forces 150 miles further north on 23 September. What followed was the savage Battle of Assaye, which Wellington would later describe as being tougher than Waterloo. The battle was fought between big guns on one side and horses on the other, as the Maratha army’s technically advanced artillery tried to stop British cavalry charges. ‘Nothing’, one British artillery officer said, ‘could surpass the skill or bravery displayed by their golumdauze [gunners].’ Eventually, Wellesley managed to take Maratha forces by surprise, attacking while ‘the bullocks of Shinde’s artillery were away grazing and the men quite unprepared’. Company casualties were enormous, above all because the British misjudged their rivals: a third of Wellesley’s
army were either killed or seriously wounded. The 74th Infantry regiment was so badly decimated that it had to be temporarily dissolved. It took eight months for the wounded to be transported back to Bombay. As the Afghan warrior Amir Khan reported, ‘there was an immense slaughter on both sides’. ‘This’, one British officer noted, ‘was the only time I ever saw heads cleanly cut off.’20

  Assaye was followed by Wellesley’s capture of two more Maratha forts, and the nervy British defeat of Raghuji Bhonsle’s army at Argaum. There was no complete victory. By the end of 1803, peace treaties with Shinde and Bhonsle reduced both states but still left them powerful. At Gwalior Shinde signed over land around the old Mughal capital that Lake had captured for the Company, but retained an army of 30,000 soldiers until as late as 1844. The Bhonsles of Nagpur gave Orissa to the East India Company, making the British rulers of the entire sweep of eastern India’s coastline from Chittagong to Madras for the first time. But the Nagpur regime was still in control of most of central India. And Holkar, by 1803 the most powerful Maratha state, continued fighting. The Company’s troops were defeated to the south of Delhi, when the Mughal emperor was very nearly freed from his British ‘protection’ in the old Mughal capital. Holkar had created an innovative way of fighting, in which light cavalry were supported by small, manoeuvrable artillery, allowing them to move quickly and still blow British infantry positions to pieces. Eventually, it was the British who sued for peace in 1805. Holkar was left in possession of lands throughout Rajasthan. Two years later, rumours began to circulate that Holkar’s leader Yashwant Rao had recruited an army of 100,000 men to drive the British from India. Only his death prevented them from marching to Calcutta.

  Nonetheless, their limited victories over the Marathas made the East India Company just about the strongest power in India. British authority and Company administrators had extended throughout every part of India for the first time. Victory was not the result of Britain’s technological or tactical superiority over opponents. The East India Company won because it was much better at mobilizing money than its rivals. Here, the big difference was the Company’s unrivalled ability to borrow money from global money markets. Revenue collection did not keep up with military demands, but the Company’s fiscal gap was made up by bullion borrowed from London. Ostensibly, gold and silver were sent to fund the East India Company’s growing trade in tea with China; but in practice cash was siphoned off into the war effort. More than half of £1.3 million (£84 million in 2016 prices) in gold and silver shipped from China to India between 1792 and 1809 ended up buying guns not tea. In addition, the Company relied on money borrowed from Indian merchants and bankers around the rivers and deltas of eastern India, from Calcutta, and from the burgeoning commercial capital of Benares. In these years Company officers stationed in commercial towns also went door to door, trying to tap into the resources of mercantile corporations and families, getting Indian merchants to subscribe to the Company’s loans at 5 or 7 per cent. None of the Company’s rivals had such financial reach. When Shinde or Holkar ran out of cash, their only recourse was to send mounted soldiers into the countryside to extract payment from villagers. The Company’s capacity for deficit financing allowed it to buy the supplies and allies needed to defeat its rivals.21

  British expansion was funded by debt, but debt created animosity in London towards the Company’s governors, leading to the downfall of Richard, by then first Marquess Wellesley. As conflict with the Marathas expanded, Wellesley demanded that the East India Company in London channel more and more cash to India to fuel wars that, he argued, were in Britain’s national interests. His concern about Indian powers demanded intervention far more frequently than the Company in London was willing to countenance. By contrast, the Court of Directors thought money should fund trade not war. They still had their shareholders to think about.

  By 1804 there was open hostility between the advocates of trade or war. Wellesley believed cutbacks would endanger British power; the Court of Directors believed the Governor-General saw himself as a despotic sovereign, not the leader of a mercantile corporation. The Company’s dividend payments had dramatically diminished. In the end, it was the British government which had the power to decide. It supported Wellesley as long as his armies were successful. In 1805, the tide of victory had turned. The cost of war was growing but the Company’s armies were finding Shinde’s soldiers impossible to pin down. Prime Minister William Pitt admitted that Wellesley ‘had acted most imprudently and illegally and that he could not be suffered to remain in the Government’. With no ministerial support, Wellesley decided to quit. When he left on 15 August 1805 his successor, the Marquess Cornwallis once again, was already on his way.22

  Civilized predatory powers

  The Wellesley brothers’ wars eradicated the threat to the Company which came from the armies of early nineteenth-century India’s great states. ‘[O]ur policy and our powers have reduced all the powers in India to the state of mere cyphers,’ as Arthur Wellesley put it in the last days of 1804. Seen from the misleading perspective of global geopolitics, Britain’s position in India seemed secure. But closer to the ground the picture was very different. The Marathas’ defeat did not impose British order over newly conquered territories in the north and west, just as the conquest of Mysore had not brought peace to southern India. Paradoxically, military victory often weakened British authority because it freed soldiers and local lords to plunder and fight on their own terms. The British were no longer confronted by large standing armies, instead by dispersed clusters of violent Indian political power. The violence which confronted the East India Company had disaggregated and dispersed; but the British constantly worried it would organize into a full-scale onslaught.23

  What happened was complicated and uneven, but local violence and the Company’s response shaped the variegated political geography of north, west and central India in the nineteenth century and beyond. To explain the reality of conquest it is necessary to break down the story of British power into different elements, tracing the history of the Company’s relationship with particular local regimes. It is impossible here to consider what happened everywhere. We can only offer a flavour of the process by showing how three independent chiefs were diminished, in different ways, by British power.

  First, Amir Khan, the founder of a stable and successful princely state. Amir Khan was born in 1775 into an Afghan family living in Moradabad, in the Rohilkhand region of northern India where Afghans had settled since the days of Nader Shah. Like other Afghan chiefs in India, Amir Khan intended to live the honourable life of a gentleman within the Mughal polity, with land and a retinue of soldiers to guarantee his livelihood and status. The only way to achieve this ambition was through military service. He left home with a group of friends at the age of twelve and spent most of his youth in the army of the Afghan-ruled state of Bhopal. Amir Khan’s commander noted his ‘signs of high destiny’ and tried to marry him off to his daughter, at which point he moved on. Before he left Bhopal, Amir Khan was earning perhaps ten to fifteen rupees a month commanding sixty troops. Over the next few years he served numerous different princes, building his own following of troops and acquiring scattered rights over land. By 1798, he commanded 1,500 men based at the fort of Fatehgarh.24

  Amir Khan always saw himself as a territorial chief, the loyal, honourable ally of the ruler he was serving. He was quick to castigate those who arbitrarily switched allegiance. In 1798 he allied with Yashwant Rao, the Maratha ruler of Holkar, who granted him land in the town of Tonk in Rajasthan and the title of Nawab. Soon afterwards, Arthur Wellesley tried to ‘gain over’ Amir Khan, sending allies with credit notes for 60,000 rupees. In his own version of events, Amir Khan insisted on his loyalty to Yashwant Rao, tearing the notes up and saying he would not ‘separate from the cause to which I am pledged’ even if ‘the sovereignty of the whole world’ were offered him.

  In 1803 Amir Khan was at Pune when the Peshwa fled, and then tracked Arthur Wellesley’s force, but wa
s too cautious to attack. Two years later, in the last months of the Maratha war, Amir Khan harassed the convoys of goods sending supplies to General Lake’s army, which was trying – and failing – to seize Holkar’s fort at Bharatpur. As he put it himself, Amir Khan was ‘held in greater awe’ than any of the other Maratha chief by this time, playing a critical role in forcing the East India Company to sue for peace. During these years Amir Khan’s army varied in size, but depending on the scale of the opportunity numbered between 500 and perhaps 20,000 men: and when he needed to he could call on 200 pieces of artillery. Sir John Malcolm reported that his soldiers believed in the prophecy of a ‘holy mendicant’ that Amir Khan ‘would be sovereign of Delhi’.25

  By 1805 the life of an Afghan gentleman-soldier had become difficult to sustain. With the British squeezing their sources of cash, Maratha states found it harder to finance their wars. Instead of being paid from state revenues or the plunder of military targets such as Company supply trains, a warlord’s income came from ‘collections’ (in other words extortion) his band of troops made from the countryside through which they marched. In practice, this mode of subsistence made it difficult for Amir Khan to keep his army together. With no stable source of revenue, soldiers lived from hand to mouth and were often unhappy. British officers noted that his military targets were increasingly dictated by the demands of troops, not by their leader’s own strategy.

  Driven by the demand of his troops for plunder Amir Khan raided Indian states in Rajasthan and then, in 1809, made sorties into territory 500 miles to the south-east, in Berar in central India. Here he attacked the Company’s factories and undermined the British ability to collect revenue. As raiding proliferated, travel throughout central and western India became more difficult.