The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  At the same time, the Great Eastern Railway Company was created in Bombay by a group of merchants and former officers, some Indian and some British, many of whom had made their money shipping cotton and then opium from central India through Bombay to China. Exports to China boomed through the 1830s, and capitalists looked to diversify their investments into other sources of revenue, including infrastructure. The most prominent figure was Jeejeebhoy Jamsetjee, the Parsi son-in-law of a bottle seller who built nineteenth-century Bombay’s greatest commercial empire. Jamsetjee ran a fleet of ships between western India and Canton, and then ploughed his profits into philanthropic projects in Bombay and Pune when the parsimonious British government refused to invest in local infrastructure. The railway was just one of the many institutions Jamsetjee hoped to divert his wealth into, alongside bridges linking Bombay to neighbouring islands, hospitals, schools and an architectural college. Despite the success of his other ventures Jamsetjee’s railway company went nowhere.20

  These India-based, commercially oriented outfits were challenged by firms that raised all their capital in London, and had closer connections to British political power. Unsurprisingly, these British firms won the battle for the first railways contracts. In Bengal the East Indian Railway Company hoped to construct a railway line upcountry from Calcutta as far as Punjab. Its founder did not begin life with any connection to engineering or India but his career tells us something about the early Victorian lure of both. It also illustrates how British organizations were displacing Indian commerce. Rowland Stephenson (no relationship to the famous Stephenson railway family) was born in Bloomsbury, London. He was educated at Harrow and initially seemed destined for a banking career. The financial collapse of 1828 caused the failure of the firm Stephenson worked for, and forced this twenty-year-old to turn to the more financially viable field of engineering. By 1838, he had become secretary of the steamship company which became the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company two years later, and which had begun to threaten Indian-owned shipping concerns. Using the connections to the East India Company that he had developed working for P&O, he began to lobby for the construction of railways in India, visiting Calcutta in 1843.

  The line Stephenson planned would transport cotton down from the fields of Awadh to Calcutta to be shipped by sea to feed the factories of Manchester. Stephenson’s arguments were designed to appeal to northern English industrialists, and to anti-slave campaigners looking for a source of cotton which did not rely on American slave labour. Stephenson also played on British fears of Indian corruption and chaos by claiming that Indian-based companies could not be trusted. Merchants in India did not engage in ‘wilful or intentional malpractice’, he said, but their interests were too widely spread for them to pay enough ‘personal attention’ to any one enterprise. ‘No undertaking of magnitude’ should be allowed to go ahead if ‘the sole and irresponsible control is placed under Calcutta management’.

  The London-based Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company similarly undermined the claims of Jeejeebhoy’s Great Eastern firm in Bombay. The Peninsula Railway Company was brought together by John Chapman, another man who had turned to engineering after a personal crisis. Chapman was a radical Baptist lace machine-maker from the East Midlands town of Loughborough, whose firm had gone bankrupt in 1834. After taking a series of odd jobs, including editor of The Mechanics’ Magazine, Chapman was hired first by Joseph Hansom to redesign his two-seater horse-drawn carriage, and then by the free trading abolitionist George Thompson to consider how to expand India’s trade. His answer was to found a train company, persuading the luminaries of the British railway world to back a railway line that cut from Bombay through to central India and then on to Calcutta and Madras.21

  The early 1840s saw railway mania in Britain but little interest from officials about railways in India. Lord Ellenborough, Governor-General of India between 1842 and 1844, believed that mechanical transportation was a distraction from his sole purpose of imposing political order on the subcontinent. As investors were uncertain about the prospects of investing so much money so far from home without state backing, capital was not forthcoming. The debate over railways was similar to the arguments made about the spice trade in the 1600s. Money would only be made available in the East with state support. Describing himself as the lone champion of railways in India, John Chapman mournfully complained that his ‘solitary efforts’ were laughed at by investors and officials alike. It was a near impossible task to raise the small sum of £2,500 to pay for a trip to Bombay to research the route in 1845. When the Bombay railway company asked the government to consider their proposals, the response was polite inaction. A committee of officials was asked to investigate, but after five months the railway company had still heard nothing. When it did report, government officers were sceptical that a railway line even to the foot of the Western Ghats would be profitable. The imperial regime was initially even anxious about giving railway companies access to the data they needed to make their case, preventing Chapman from looking at the police office’s records about people passing through particular places. By the autumn of 1846, Chapman’s firm was exasperated. ‘We are not now seeking unconditional sanction,’ they wrote, but needed to know ‘what is the proper course of proceeding.’22

  The breakthrough came when the railway companies began to argue that railway lines were a military necessity, and to make this argument in London. Rowland Stephenson suggested that a grand railway network could link Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay and Madras in order to ensure the ‘better security . . . of the entire country’. In his book Indian Railways: as Connected with the power and stability of the British Empire in the East, the Scottish soldier and engineer William Andrew suggested that a network of railway lines stretching from Calcutta and Bombay to Punjab would have prevented supply and ammunition shortages during the Anglo-Sikh war and ‘spare[d] the health and save[d] the lives of European troops’ who otherwise were forced to march in difficult weather.23 These arguments portrayed the railway as a tool of conquest not an instrument of economic expansion. They led the Company in Britain to give permission to the two London-based firms to build experimental lines, and to offer to guarantee their investors a fixed return of 5 per cent per annum, however much profit railway lines actually made. The first railway line, covering the twenty-one miles from Bombay north to Thane in fifty-seven minutes, opened on 16 April 1853. After the first steam trains were sent to the wrong port, the first line twenty-four miles from Hughli in Bengal opened a year later, on 15 August 1854.24

  The men who planned the railways thought they would only have to confront technical difficulties. But nature was not the only obstacle; managing people was the most difficult challenge. The railway route from Bombay to Pune through the Western Ghats only opened after a major strike, a riot and the murder of a European engineer. The contract to build the line was first given to William Faviell, the son of a Yorkshire canal builder who had worked on railways throughout the east of England before being employed to build the first experimental stretch of Indian railway, from Bombay ten miles north to Thane, in 1850. The line was funded by the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company, an organization managed by London bankers, army officers and retired East India Company officers. They thought Faviell had done a good job, so he was given a second contract to build the Bhor Ghat incline in 1855. But work was interrupted by the uprising of 1857.25

  The investors and politicians who funded the railway line insisted on low rates of pay for labourers, but the rebellion made it much harder to encourage workers to abandon their villages for little return. Railway work was tough. Labourers carried earth twenty miles a day, then slept outdoors on wet, cholera-ridden hillsides. Once the 1857 insurrection broke out, one engineer noted that labourers ‘would not leave their homes until they were sure their small Tenements would be safe from the mutineers’. Others found they could earn more money in the British army. A few probably refused to work for British engineers while a rival Indian re
gime was gaining power. Some left the Bhor Ghat incline for more remunerative work, where contractors with greater capital could pay them more money. Unlike Faviell, Parsi merchant Jeejeebhoy Jamsetjee had links with Bombay-based commercial networks which allowed him to pay twenty-five rupees a month for skilled masons, twice the rate Faviell paid, and his sections of the line were in easier, less precipitous country than the Bhor Ghat. It is hardly surprising that Faviell’s subcontractors detected a ‘mutinous spirit’ among workers by the end of 1857.26

  The limited British commitment to the railway created a crisis at the top of the incline in January 1858. Worried about having enough money to complete their section and angry at the slow pace of work, British engineers starting paying workers half the specified rate. The labourers protested. As one engineer described it, a mob ‘commenced crushing around’ the Britons’ tent, and only fell back when they were promised more money. The disturbance subsided, but the engineers were still angry and resolved ‘to go with all the arms they could muster along the lines of the huts’ to arrest the ringleaders of the ‘outbreak’. The incident ended badly. After a series of skirmishes with labourers the engineers were forced to retreat but discovered that one of their number, Mr Curran, was missing. He was found injured and died shortly afterwards, bludgeoned to death by an angry labourer. Officers of the railway company asked to investigate learnt that many of the masons and subcontractors working on the Bhor Ghat incline had not been paid for months. William Faviell complained about the monsoon, the impact of the mutiny on the cost of labour and the ‘native character’, but above all he blamed the railway company’s refusal to increase labourers’ rates of pay. Caught between parsimonious investors, a reluctant imperial regime and an insurgent workforce, Faviell decided to break his contract, quit India and return to England. The rest of his long career was spent building railways elsewhere in the British empire, in Ceylon and South Africa, but not India.27

  Faviell’s successor lasted less than a month. Solomon Tredwell was the son of a canal digger who worked his way up to be a major contractor on Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s great but doomed ship the Great Eastern. By 1859 and in his mid-thirties, Tredwell had become a man of ‘means, experience, energy and liberal and able management’. The Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company imagined he would be a safe pair of hands to complete the Bhor Ghat, and quickly appointed him. Tredwell started shipping the machinery he needed to build the incline, arriving in Bombay with his wife, Alice, on 29 October 1859. Within a month he was dead, killed by an ‘alarming’ but unnamed illness. Most probably Tredwell died of cholera, the disease which killed something like a third of the workforce on the Bhor Ghat, ‘carrying off’ two European contractors and reducing the number of labourers on the lower half of the Bhor Ghat incline from 10,000 to 1,000 in January 1860 alone. Unlike these men, Tredwell died a rich man, leaving his estate of £70,000 to his wife. Alice took over the management of the Bhor Ghat contract ‘with a degree of spirit and judgment’ that government officers in Bombay thought remarkable, given her sex and her recent loss. The project was duly completed by 1863, eight years after the contract was first awarded.

  The official story was that Alice relied on the railway company’s own managers, and they were more skilled at ‘handling’ Indian labour than William Faviell’s men had been. In reality, two decisions ensured the construction of the railway route was finished with less friction than before. First, the railway company increased the rates of pay for masons and labourers. Second, the government sent a large contingent of police to ‘preserve the public peace’ on the ghat works, as well as deputing additional magistrates to provide summary justice. These actions were a response to the danger of Indian violence, evident both in the riots on the hillside and the insurrection of 1857 more widely. The insurrection of 1857 brought a more serious commitment by the British state in India to public works.

  That commitment was evident in the speech given by the Governor of Bombay, Sir Bartle Frere, on the opening of the route from Bombay to Pune. On the evening of 21 April 1863, after a day spent travelling up and down the new railway track, Frere stood in a banqueting hall in Bombay to announce to a gathering of grandees that India had entered the ‘railway age’. He said nothing about the difficulties engineers and labourers had faced. His words flattened the true, unsteady history of infrastructure in India into a celebratory account of British progress. Big public works were the way Queen Victoria’s new Indian Raj would project its power. But the speech was riven with all the contradictions that marked British attitudes to their presence in India in the years which followed the Indian mutiny. Frere talked about the apparent improvement of India under British rule, predicting the quick transformation of the country from a society of bullock carts to one of steam locomotives. He wondered if one day British engineering would be worshipped in the place of the Hindu gods sat in ancient temple caves. Yet his celebration of the positive effects of public works was incredibly vague. Frere’s speech praised the scale and power of the British presence for its own sake, not for its consequences. The viaducts on the Bhor Ghat were bigger than all the bridges of London, he said, and more stone had been quarried than for the breakwaters of Plymouth and Portland, or the pyramids of Giza for that matter. Nothing specific was said about the commercial advantages of the new route. More vital was the use of railways to protect and project British power, allowing military supplies and manpower to be transported quickly to sites of conflict. Frere argued that the railway would ‘quadruple the available military strength of India’. The greatest benefits for Indians would come, he suggested, not from travelling in but working on the railways, particularly from the close proximity between supposedly ‘indolent’ Indian workers and their newly arrived middle-class British masters who had ‘habits of method and punctuality’. For this imperial bureaucrat, railways were not a means for economic or social transformation. They were a vehicle to project British power and character.28

  Moral and material progress

  In February 1858 the great Victorian liberal John Stuart Mill drafted a crucial piece of East India Company propaganda. War was raging in India. Company officials in London felt impotent, and frightened, fearful that violence in India would undermine their institution. Mill was the senior examiner of correspondence for the Company in London, a position that gave him an income and a field of public activity, but also left him enough time for liberal journalism and political activism. In the first half of 1858, Mill was the main advocate of the East India Company’s survival. Mill lost that argument, and the Company was abolished in October 1858. Yet the case for the Company he made in 1858 became the staple argument justifying British authority in Asia.

  Mill’s essay, the ‘Memorandum of the Improvements of the Administration of India during the Last Thirty Years’ was circulated to British Members of Parliament. It was perfunctory and inelegantly written, replete with long sentences and double negatives. The overall story Mill conveyed was, though, clear. British power had been exercised steadily and firmly over India’s social fabric and physical landscape in order to bring ‘improvement’ to ‘the physical and mental condition of the inhabitants’, he claimed. The British regime in India had achieved good, Mill argued, in three main ways. First, through low and fair taxes, by limiting the government’s capacity to extract resources from India society. Second, by maintaining law and order. And, third, ‘through improvement of the country by public works’. Mill afforded ten pages to each of these themes, with the final few pages of his essay dedicated to other sources of change, including two pages on education, and a few paragraphs on plans to introduce superior kinds of cotton and tea.

  Mill framed his argument in classical laissez-faire language, but he argued that India needed to be treated differently. Low taxes and law and order were necessary for ‘securing to every one the full fruits of his industry’, providing an incentive for people to work. In England sufficient energy and capital existed for irrigation or railways to be built thr
ough private enterprise. But the relative poverty of India, Mill argued, meant that ‘direct aid of Government to industry’ was needed. India’s difference meant it was peculiarly suited to the direct imposition of state power. Expenditure on public works should not be extravagant, Mill thought. But in India it was to be the state, not private enterprise, which provided the main impetus to economic growth.

  John Stuart Mill’s emphasis on infrastructure marked the peculiar form of liberalism which he and other mid-Victorians wanted to introduce to India. Mill thought the state in Britain and India needed to do very different things in each place. In Britain, he emphasized the regenerative power of the free human intellect. In his metropolitan political visions, education was the most important public service, as it cultivated the capacity for freedom. Mill’s most famous tract, On Liberty, written in the summer of 1857 while news kept flashing into England of the outbreak of the Indian mutiny, argued that the progress of any people depended on their capacity to educate one another in open debate. Mill thought progress in the west depended on a nation’s common sense of purpose, and on the exchange of views between free, educated citizens. ‘The only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty,’ Mill said, ‘since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals.’29

  Mill’s account of progress in the subcontinent was based on drier, narrower principles. There, the fact of Britain’s despotic power made it impossible for Mill to imagine people could have any say in their own government. Without the energizing language of liberty, improvement was reduced to a function of people’s automatic responses to physical incentives, to the rule of law and to irrigation works. In Britain, Mill was sure that progress came from an argumentative public spirit, from the clash of opinions he described in On Liberty. In India, it was about the lonely calculation of a peasant thinking how much extra land he could plough if he had access to more water.