The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  Mill’s post-mutiny Memorandum laid the foundation for the approach to empire adopted by imperial bureaucrats and British politicians over the next half-century and more. From 1858, the imperial regime began to actively propagate a story about its physical ‘improvement’ of India. Beginning in 1861, the Government of India published annual ‘Moral and Material Progress’ reports that took and expanded John Stuart Mill’s Memorandum as a model. Each began with a list of laws passed, then discussed finance, the Post Office, telegraphs, steamships, public works and the Indian geological department. This was a vision of the state as commander and builder, not a nurturer of human capacity and talent. Reports concentrated on law first, then physical infrastructure and public works, only then education. The documents from each province listed the funding going to universities and schools; in 1859–60, education took the modest sum of 1,032,021 rupees, or £68,800, in Bengal, roughly the same as the amount spent rebuilding army barracks that year.

  With limited capacity to quantify India’s productive activity, and no means at all to gauge Indian opinion, the country’s ‘progress’ was measured by the increase in official transactions which could be counted. Improvement was assessed by expenditure on roads, irrigation and barracks, by the pace at which railway lines lengthened or the increase in the number of letters passing through British India’s Post Office (from 224,000 in 1855 to 556,000 in 1860). The imperial state’s proudest boast was having the cheapest postage rates in the world.

  The expansion of public works brought with it a heavily calculating approach to the power of the British state in India. Immediately after the rebellion was suppressed in 1858, the Government of India started to minutely classify public works. The physical infrastructure needed to keep the imperial regime working from day to day, things like barracks and law courts, was to be funded from the government’s ordinary revenue collection without any concern for remuneration. Beyond this limited core, central and provincial governments only authorized expenditure they thought would lead to a direct return, most importantly in increased revenue payment. Works needed to be ‘profitable in a pecuniary point of view . . . to the entire body politic of the State’. Anything ‘not profitable in this sense, should not be undertaken’.30

  The imperial regime experimented with different ways of directing investment into the most remunerative kind of works. In the 1860s, engineers and officials imagined that state-guaranteed private companies were the best vehicle. That decade saw the birth of irrigation companies and the expansion of railway firms, each of which built public works without placing their costs on public accounts. But their narrow revenue base meant these companies quickly sank into financial difficulty. By the 1870s, the British political mood was more emphatically in favour of the direct assertion of state power over waterways and railway lines. The 1870s were a decade when British governments were newly confident about their ability to direct the course of large enterprise. In 1869, the Suez Canal had been completed through the collaboration of French engineers and bankers and Ottoman Egypt; initially, the British government opposed the project, and argued that infrastructure was best completed through the initiative of private finance. Even though the canal did not shorten the time of the journey between Britain and India, Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative government bought £4 million worth of shares in the Suez Canal Company in 1874. His purpose was to ensure an increasingly vital transport link could not be used against British interests.

  The motivation for taking over the government-backed irrigation and railway companies in India was similar: a desire to ensure the continued viability of politically important assets, and a belief that only government control would ensure they operated in the interests of the British state. The imperial regime argued it would be better able to control costs and could ensure benefits to the broader community were factored into pricing. From 1869, railway lines started to be built by the government itself. In 1878, the government bought the Madras Irrigation Company; a year later, it purchased Rowland Stephenson’s East India Railway Company, and took over the remaining private firms over the next few years. Instead of relying on investors to support private initiatives, public works were funded from the government’s own revenues or from loans.

  With more emphatic government backing, public works expanded and brought with them a greater demand for professional engineers. The 836 miles of railway line that existed in 1860 grew to 15,806 by 1890, then doubled again to 35,327 in 1921. By 1867, nineteen out of India’s twenty most populous cities were linked by steam locomotive. The acreage of Indian land irrigated steadily increased, as barrages were built on the River Krishna, Thomas Cautley’s Ganges canal was expanded and large new irrigation systems constructed in Sind and Punjab. Momentum finally lay with the advocates of technological progress. The Engineer, Britain’s first journal for the engineering profession, noted in 1869 that ‘India appears likely, for some time to come, to create the greatest demand on the energies of our profession.’ The Public Works Department tried to recruit engineers from Britain quickly, but first found demand for trained professionals exceeded supply. In the late 1860s, it was recruiting fifty engineers a year, but still had vacancies. By 1879, the Government of India employed 1,004 men (only seventy-four Indian, the rest European or mixed race) in its engineering service, and recruited roughly thirty engineers a year. These figures remained stable over the next few decades, with 938 in India’s engineering services in 1913. Throughout these years, there were almost as many professionals in the Government of India’s engineering service as there were members of the Indian Civil Service.31

  By the 1880s public works had become an integral part of the landscape of British power in India. Infrastructure was central to the argument Britons used to justify their presence in India. As well as a thousand middle-class British engineers employed directly by the imperial government, public works provided employment for thousands more contractors and workers in British engineering firms that built everything from steam engines to sluice gates. These individuals had interests firmly outside of British authority in India. In the eighteenth century, trading outposts, forts, barracks and law courts had created a commitment to political domination in India which had been hard to abandon in previous years. In the same way, the physical intervention of the British in India’s landscape, the construction of steel tracks and stone channels, created a practical, emotional attachment to the institutions of imperial power which Britons found difficult to give up.

  These commitments existed despite the very limited tangible advantages public works bestowed on Indian society. For India’s residents themselves, the lure of new technology was limited until well into the twentieth century. The rhetoric of British India’s evangelical engineers obscured the very limited real demand which existed among Indians for water transported through irrigation canals or for rail transit. In many places, irrigation increased the marginal cost of production beyond subsistence levels for peasants. Often, it was more efficient to cultivate crops which used less water than to pay for the new waterways. Only a small number of rich farmers benefited, most of whom were cultivating cash crops for European markets, and there were not enough of those to fund big irrigation projects. Gains on investment in new irrigation projects were minimal – 0.57 per cent per year for the decade preceding 1876. New waterworks transformed life in some places, creating new settlements, the ‘canal colonies’, in central Punjab for example. Even here, a quick boom was followed by a long decline in agricultural productivity. But the only really cost-effective British irrigation works were those which repaired existing, pre-imperial dams and canals.

  Similarly, the most important technological change for the transportation of heavy goods in nineteenth-century India was not the arrival of the quick, expensive railway: it was the move from pack animals to carts pulled by two or four beasts in the first half of the century. This was the process historian Amalendu Guha calls ‘the bullock cart revolution’. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s railways
found it impossible to compete not only with bullock carts, but also with human-powered river transport. Rowing boats along the Ganges and Jamuna won a price war with the railways over the cost of transporting heavy goods. Vessels powered by human beings were able to undercut steam vessels elsewhere.32

  Eventually, of course, railways changed social conditions, allowing large numbers of workers to congregate in centres of production as never before, speeding up the flow of commodities and creating new settlements. They intensified the flow of primary produce from India’s hinterland to the great port cities. They also allowed Indian enterprise to disperse out from these increasingly European-dominated cities into small towns and settlements on railway lines. But these changes were slow, and did not work out in the way British officers imagined. Neither railways nor irrigation systems had much of an impact on the livelihood of most Indian workers for some time. Most importantly, they did not prevent famine. Canal-building didn’t prevent some of the world’s worst famines occurring in India during the 1870s and 1890s. Without the kind of political leadership able to coordinate the productive activity of Indians for the benefit of society as a whole, the dreams of ‘improvement’ projected by the prophets of modernity in the 1840s and 1850s ended up as illusory fantasies.33

  10

  THE LEGALIZATION OF INDIA

  Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, visited India in 1875. With a retinue of a dozen doctors, journalists, churchmen and lords, he hunted and dined through every part of India with splendid self-confidence. A year later Queen Victoria had herself officially declared Kaisar-e-Hind, Empress of India. In 1877, an elaborate ceremony was held in the old Mughal capital of Delhi to confirm the new title. With these acts, officials said, ‘the union of India with England has been asserted to be indissoluble’.

  Motivated more by Britain’s status in Europe than the administration of India, the new pageantry was very shallow. Beneath their new elaborate costumes, the British officers charged with the day-to-day administration of India were still gripped by panic. Twenty years after Britain had reconquered the northern provinces of India, the imperial bureaucrats who ruled India were newly fearful about the security of their regime.

  There was paranoia on India’s borders, which led to war against assertive neighbours in Afghanistan and Burma. There were new concerns about internal resistance, where memories of the mutiny gave imperial officials a heightened sense of their insecurity. The murder of two British judges in the late 1860s persuaded British officers that ‘sources of anxiety’ were very real. Bureaucrats saw seditious conspiracies everywhere, blaming them on the ‘fanaticism’ of Muslims and the hostile ‘national sentiment’ of Hindus. Muslim radicals were incarcerated, tortured and convicted of waging war against the Queen, despite thin evidence. At the same time, British officers started to note the emergence of new political associations organizing in the urban centres of the subcontinent from Lahore and Dhaka to Madras.

  Western India was the area of greatest worry. Two developments particularly concerned the British.

  The first was the birth of the Pune Sarvajanik Sabha, an organization founded in 1870 by a group of men who wanted to voice criticism within the institutions of the imperial regime, led by the judicial officer and social reformer Mahadev Govind Ranade. Born in 1842 to a family of Brahmin government officials, Ranade was one of the first students to be educated at the University of Bombay. He started off as a fervent critic of British rule. Ranade’s scholarship was suspended after he wrote an essay saying India was better off before the British conquest. Throughout his life, he sought to revive the ‘national’ spirit of self-rule he saw in Shivaji’s Maratha state; Ranade wrote a history, the Rise of the Maratha Power, which attributed its growth and survival to popular patriotic sentiment. But Ranade’s celebration of India’s past was increasingly coupled with a clear sense of the opportunities that lay open in modern, British-ruled India. If they were ‘roused’ by institutions articulating their voice and left for the most part to rule themselves, Ranade thought there was scope for ‘the mass of the people’ to flourish under British sovereignty. He compared the British conquest in India to what he saw as William the Conqueror’s beneficial invasion of England in 1066.1

  His style of critical loyalism did not prevent British officers from suspecting that Ranade supported violent opposition to British power. Appointed to the government’s judicial service in his mid-20s, Ranade progressed quickly through the junior ranks of British India’s judicial service to start with. In 1879, however, to prevent seditious activity, he was posted to one of Bombay presidency’s most remote districts. Even in the remotest part of Gujarat he was tracked by the secret police.

  Ranade’s exile was sparked by the second event that increased British suspicion, an insurgency which briefly gained support in the countryside around Pune. The uprising was led by a former official in the British government’s military accounts department, Vasudev Balwant Phadke. There were, as government officers suspected, connections between the Pune Sarvajanik Sabha and the revolt, but their leaders had very different objectives. Phadke had attended the lectures which Ranade gave criticizing the economic record of the British regime in India. But unlike members of the Sabha, Phadke began to believe that violence was the only way to change the situation. He began making incendiary speeches in 1875. In 1878, at the age of thirty-three, he left his wife, retreated to the forests of Maharashtra and began building a revolutionary army. Phadke linked up with gangs of low-caste jungle-dwellers, people who had once been an integral part of every Indian army but were marginalized by the extension of British power. His band raided villages around Pune announcing that unless the salaries of imperial bureaucrats were cut and the money redistributed to poor peasants, Europeans would be attacked and assassinated. Eventually parts of the city of Pune were captured for a few days and two old Maratha palaces burnt down in the chaos.2

  As the elite leader of a movement to mobilize India’s poor masses, which had the sympathies of many middle-class Indians, Phadke might be said to have inaugurated the modern history of anti-imperial protest. When they wrote about the uprising, the British belittled the campaign and its supporters, describing Phadke’s actions as a series of mere ‘gang robberies’.3 But the uprising was not suppressed until July 1879, when Phadke was captured, tried and transported to Aden. Brought before the court at Pune for trial, British officers were shocked when middle-class Pune residents applauded Phadke from the gallery. ‘Sympathy’, one judge said, ‘was on the side of the accused in spite of the injuries which he had done to his countrymen.’4

  The rise of the Pune Sarvajanik Sabha together with Phadke’s revolt coincided with a resurgence of criticism in Britain itself towards policy in India. The idea of Britain as an Asiatic power was important to Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative government, in power from 1874 to 1880. Disraeli imagined that exotic pageantry would be popular in Britain and the subcontinent, but by 1879 the costs and violence of imperial war were being vigorously condemned throughout the UK. In the run-up to the 1880 general election, William Gladstone campaigned against the Tories’ ‘dangerous’ and ‘impractical’ imperial policy. His Liberal Party won a landslide. Gladstone argued that Britain had pushed its power in Asia beyond the limits of safety. Wars in Afghanistan and Burma were signs of imperial overstretch. Events like Phadke’s revolt demonstrated the fragility of British power. There were, he argued, ‘a multitude of unsolved problems connected with the administration of our Indian Empire’.5

  For the men who staffed the highest positions in the imperial bureaucracy, 1879–80 was a time of crisis for Britain’s Indian empire. The result was a new spate of propaganda justifying the exercise of British power. This was the period when the idea of the British empire as Pax Britannica was invented and popularized. Mistakenly interpreted by historians as showing British confidence during the high noon of empire, the texts which extolled the virtues of British power drip with anxiety, sometimes even panic. For example: Sir Richard
Temple’s India in 1880 conveyed a sharp sense of the ‘grave responsibilities’ and ‘recondite problems’ faced by the British in India. The first edition was written on his retirement, as Temple journeyed back to Britain to begin a career as a Conservative politician. Worried that readers had not understood his message properly, the third edition of his work began by outlining fifty-three specific ‘troubles’ which threatened British power, listing everything from bad ventilation to cyclones, but focusing on the different forms of Indian ‘disaffection’, ‘discontent’ and ‘hostility’ towards the British took. The Indian government’s statistician Sir William Hunter noted ‘British rule in India is on trial again’ in his book England’s Work in India. Temple and Hunter were joined by dozens more imperial judges, council members and district officers, publishing books that defended the practice of British power in the subcontinent.6

  If public works provided the main justification for British rule in the propaganda which immediately followed the 1857 uprising, law was the main ideological prop for imperial power two decades later. Sir William Hunter celebrated British officers for the ‘splendid and difficult task’ of introducing ‘order in place of anarchy’. The British had, Hunter claimed, ordered India so successfully that ‘the modern Englishman ‘complains that he can seldom get a shot at a tiger’. Sir John Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s uncle and Richard Temple’s successor as finance member of the Viceroy’s council, told how ‘[t]he energies of the Government’ had first been applied to the consolidation of British power, then to the ‘evolution of an ordered system of administration out of the chaos bequeathed to us by the old rulers of the country’. For these men, British power was no longer characterised by the soldier and tax collector but the police officer and judge. By the 1880s, ‘conquest’ was no longer solely about military power. It also involved the paradoxical process of forcing Indians to regulate their conduct by contracts and rules rather than brute force. The purpose of British violence was to introduce the peaceful rule of law.7