by Bruce Riedel
From the beginning, the British Empire in India was dominated by the quest for profit; it was built not to acquire territory for the greater glory of the monarchy but to make money. The East India Company represented the royal family and the state, of course, but its principal objective was to engage in and profit from trade. As it gradually expanded its influence and control over parts of India, it raised its own armies and fleets and called on the government in London for assistance when threatened by enemies, Indian or European. At its height it controlled an army of 200,000 men, but it was run from a tiny headquarters in London, staffed by only 159 employees in 1785 and 241 in 1853.3 At the same time, Britain was building its colonies in North America. The first settlement came in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia, quickly followed by others in Massachusetts and Maryland. Through conquest and settlement, the English would establish thirteen colonies in America by the end of the seventeenth century. While in 1750 the Mughal Empire encompassed 180 million people, in 1755 the thirteen colonies had only 1.2 million inhabitants of European descent.
The people living in the growing British possessions in both North America and South Asia would become participants in the series of conflicts that established Great Britain as the world’s preeminent global power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In America those conflicts are referred to collectively as the French and Indian wars, and in India they are seen as wars to conquer the subcontinent, but they were in fact global conflicts—usually pitting England against France—and British politicians, soldiers, and merchants saw them as such. British soldiers could expect to fight in both North America and South Asia. For example, in America Lord Cornwallis is famous for losing the battle of Yorktown in 1781 to a combined French and American army, setting the stage for the Treaty of Paris, which resulted in American independence. However, Cornwallis went on to have a more victorious career in India as a general and governor. He helped to expand the domain of the East India Company, not only on the subcontinent but also throughout the Indian Ocean littoral; Fort Cornwallis in Penang, Malaysia, is named for him. And Sir Charles James Napier, of the Royal Navy, who ravaged the Chesapeake Bay area in the War of 1812, conquered the Sindh in the 1830s.
The epic British-French rivalry for North America and South Asia began in earnest with the War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s, and battles raged around the world between the forces of the two great colonial empires. When the war ended in 1748 with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the two powers exchanged the conquests that each had made in America and India. France was given back the fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton Island in return for giving back Madras to the English. America and India were now pawns in European rivalries.
The first major milestone in the British East India Company’s conquest of the subcontinent came on June 23, 1757, when a small English and Indian army led by Robert Clive defeated a much larger Bengali army at the battle of Plassey near Calcutta. The Bengali army was supported by French advisers, and the war in India was part of the next major global struggle, known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War. By then the British East India Company had three main bases in India, at Fort St. George in Madras (today’s Chennai), Fort William in Calcutta (Kolkata), and Bombay (Mumbai). Louis XIV, France’s Sun King, had created the French East India Company, which had bases in Chandernagar in Bengal and Pondicherry on the coast of the Bay of Bengal. Although Clive commanded only 700 or so European troops at Plassey and his total force of around 3,200 was dwarfed by the opposing Bengali army, which was almost 70,000 strong, his victory was decisive. The East India Company acquired effective control of Bengal as a result. A decade later, the company controlled Bengal completely, putting 30 million Indians under the British crown. England’s dominance in South Asia would never be seriously challenged by another European power.
The British emerged from the Seven Years’ War as the dominant power in North America as well as South Asia. The war began with a military disaster near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when the largest British army that had yet been sent to America was ambushed and annihilated by a French and Indian (Native American) force in 1755. General Edward Braddock’s defeat (his aide-de-camp was the young George Washington) was followed by a series of campaigns that culminated in the taking of Quebec in 1759 by General James Wolfe. Wolfe’s decisive victory would lead to the British conquest of all of North America east of the Mississippi.
After the Seven Years’ War, American and Indian fortunes in the British Empire diverged dramatically. The thirteen colonies fought for their independence from England in another global struggle, the American Revolution, which ended with the American victory at Yorktown, in which France’s support had been crucial. French arms triumphed not only in North America but also in South Asia. The French navy scored impressive victories in both arenas, and by the end of the American Revolution, France had more troops in India than in America. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States of America became free and independent. America would fight a second war with Britain in 1812, in which it sought and failed to acquire Canada, but its independence was never in doubt after Yorktown. With the end of direct American involvement in the affairs of the British Empire, the formal bond between America and India came to an end as well. Trade continued, of course, but Americans no longer saw themselves as part of the larger British Empire. India, however, was moving in the opposite direction.
In India, the Mughal Empire was dissolving. The emperor in Delhi was becoming a figurehead, with no control over most of his empire. The East India Company still regarded him as the legal ruler of most of the nation and theoretically accepted his writ because the Mughal emperor had granted them their original trading rights. Even as the company chipped away at the emperor’s real authority, they maintained the façade of his sovereignty for several more decades.
The British and the East India Company fought a series of wars with local Indian rulers to further consolidate British control over the subcontinent. The French tried to hold the British tide back, but in the end the British defeated all of India’s various warlords and kings. In the battle of Assaye, on September 23, 1803, Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, won a decisive victory that brought most of southern India into the empire. With the defeat of Napoleon by Wellington at Waterloo in 1815, British domination of the subcontinent was complete. At the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), held to resolve a number of issues of concern to European states, Britain also gained control of Holland’s last colony in South Asia, the island of Ceylon, which became part of the British Empire. British armies would go on to fight the Burmese twice, finally annexing Burma to the empire in 1852, and they also defeated the Sikhs twice, annexing the Punjab and Kashmir by 1849. Nepal too was defeated and its territory reduced; ultimately it became a satellite of the British Empire in India. The Sindh was annexed and Baluchistan made a puppet princely state.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain and the East India Company dominated South Asia from Afghanistan to Thailand and from Nepal to Sri Lanka. All of today’s India and Pakistan were under British control. Meanwhile, with the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, the acquisition of Oregon from Britain in 1846, and the acquisition of Texas following the defeat of Mexico in 1848, America had expanded from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
India and America then encountered their own most severe crises of the nineteenth century. Two wars were fought, one in South Asia and one in North America, that would be defining events in the development of India, Pakistan, and the United States. The so-called Indian Mutiny, also described as the First Indian War of Independence (1857–58), and the so-called War between the States, better known as the Civil War, would radically change each country’s fate, leaving India deeply entrenched in its colonial status and launching America as an emerging world power. Conventional histories have generally agreed that 100,000 Indians and 11,000 British soldiers perished in the 1857 war. New historians in India claim that th
e Indian death toll following the campaign and its aftermath was actually much higher, perhaps 1 million or more. In the Civil War, some 600,000 to 750,000 Americans died on both sides.
The war in India began after the British introduced a new rifle for its Indian troops, or sepoys. Rumors spread that the Enfield rifle would use cartridges greased with fat from pigs or cattle, thus alienating both Muslim and Hindu soldiers. Muslims do not eat pork, and Hindus revere cows. But the roots of the rebellion were much deeper. The British had become contemptuous of their Indian subjects. While the British had begun in India as humble traders seeking favor from the emperor and his court, now they were rulers who considered the Indian population, Hindu and Muslim alike, as second-class human beings. Indians were treated as inferior to Englishmen in their own country.
Racism was to be found in all of the East India Company’s dealings with Indians, but worse was the British effort to try to convert Indians to Christianity. The company had been very careful for two centuries to leave India’s religions alone, prohibiting missionary activity in South Asia; it understood that the combination of Islam and Hinduism was already an explosive one. If the British added Christianity to the mix, using their secular power to promote theological power, they would be riding a very angry tiger. But hubris and arrogance overtook caution. The company began to allow missionary activity, and in the great revival that swept nineteenth-century England, eager Anglican missionaries were sent to the subcontinent.
The mutiny began in April 1857 in a garrison at Meerut just north of Delhi. Soldiers who refused to use the new cartridges were sentenced by court martial to ten years’ hard labor, and the entire garrison rose up against the British. The revolt quickly spread throughout the Bengali army of the East India Company. Thousands deserted and took up arms against the company and the British. British civilians, including women and children, were massacred across the country. The rebels took Delhi and pressed the reigning Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, to lead them. Zafar, a gentle man who preferred poetry to politics, was not interested in becoming a revolutionary, but he had no choice. Soon almost all of north India was in rebel hands. The uprising rapidly gained the support of extremists in both the Hindu and Muslim communities, who saw it as a chance to oust the hated British from India and return the subcontinent to native rule. Some Muslim clerics called for a jihad against the British.
The mutiny, the most serious challenge to the British Empire in the nineteenth century, was by far the most serious challenge to British rule in India until the twentieth century. London mobilized troops from Indian garrisons that remained loyal, especially Sikhs and Gurkhas, and from bases in the Middle East and Malaya. Some troops came from England. Fed on stories of atrocities committed by the rebels, the British counterrevolution was brutal and remorseless. Captured Muslims were forced to eat pork and Hindus forced to eat beef and then executed. Often captives were tied to the mouth of cannon and blasted apart.
Not all of the Indian troops in the British army had defected, and there was never any real threat to the capital in Calcutta or to Madras and Bombay. After a siege, a relief force regained control of Delhi, killed all of Zahar’s family, and captured Zahar, who was hiding in the tomb of his ancestor Humayan. After putting him on display and trying him by court martial, the British sent him into exile in Burma, where he died. The Mughal Empire was formally dissolved. The British almost destroyed the Red Fort, where the throne was located, and the massive Jama Masjid mosque before cooler heads prevailed and it was decided that their destruction would only further inflame passions. Delhi was a ghost town for a time as the British purged it of any and all who had backed the mutiny.
The English public had been horrified by the news of massacres of English civilians and terrified by the thought that Britain could lose the “jewel in the crown” of its empire, as the young Queen Victoria had labeled India. On August 2, 1858, the government dissolved the East India Company, transferred all its rights to the British monarchy, and took formal control of India for the British monarchy and nation. No longer would profit be the overriding mission of the British in India; now imperial objectives would come above all others.
India would indeed be the jewel in the crown of the empire, and the British viceroy in Calcutta would rule as a sovereign power not only over the subcontinent but over the entire Indian Ocean basin. British possessions in the Persian Gulf and at Aden in Yemen as well as Singapore and Malaya were under the control of the British Indian Empire. India became the base for British military expeditions throughout the region. For example, in a short Anglo-Persian war in 1856, 4,000 British and Indian troops dispatched from Bombay to the Persian Gulf captured the Iranian city of Bushire to compel the Qajar Shah to make peace.4 Of course, ultimate decisionmaking authority resided in London, but the viceroy was, in effect, master of the largest part of the British Empire. The government would now spend resources developing its new jewel. In 1876 Victoria took the title of Empress of India, after Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli pushed approval of the title through Parliament.
Americans watched the spectacle of the mutiny largely through the eyes of English newspapers. Not surprisingly, their sympathies lay with their fellow white Christians, especially in the American South, where the mutiny fed fear of slave uprisings. Americans were not generally friends of the British Empire; after all, they had fought it twice. However, they had no affection for Indians. Racism ran deep in America, and most Indians, whether Muslim or Hindu, were dark-skinned people. The New York Times, for example, called the mutiny “a Mohammedan conspiracy” to restore the Mughal Empire.5
But in the late 1850s American attention was increasingly riveted on the crisis brewing at home between the slave-holding South and the industrializing North. The four-year civil war that erupted after President Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 was the bloodiest conflict in American history. Traditional estimates put the number of war dead at more than 620,000 (360,000 for the North and 260,000 for the South), although more recent research puts the total at around 750,000.6 The Federal government was transformed by the struggle. More than 2 million soldiers were under arms for the Union, and in 1865 General Ulysses S. Grant commanded the largest army in the world; for a brief period, the United States also had the largest and most advanced navy in the world. The American economy too was transformed by the war effort.
Above all, the war propelled America onto the global stage. In its aftermath the Grant administration built what would come to be called the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House to provide quarters for the departments of state, war, and the navy and the nation’s nascent national security bureaucracy. Upon completion it was the largest office building in the world. It was a concrete manifestation of a new reality: America was a global player as never before. Having defeated Mexico, its only rival for dominance in North America, before the Civil War, America was the preeminent power in the Western Hemisphere, with a navy that rivaled the British Royal Navy in size and quality.
Grant also became the first American president to visit India. After leaving the White House in 1876, he embarked on a world tour, during which he visited British India. He traveled from Egypt to Bombay, New Delhi, Jaipur, Agra, Benares, and Calcutta. He and his wife Julia visited the Taj Mahal and were entranced by its beauty. They stayed at Government House in Bombay on Malabar Point, where they and the viceroy discussed the Second Anglo-Afghan war, which was then under way; as a result of the war, a British protectorate was established in Afghanistan. From India they went on to Rangoon, Burma, and then China and Japan. Plans to visit Lahore, Madras, and Ceylon were scrapped due to lack of time, but Grant saw more of India than any American president since.7
Washington’s relationship with London changed as a result of the Civil War. In its early months, there was a real danger that the British Empire would recognize the Confederate States of America and even intervene on their behalf. Once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that danger receded. Alt
hough some of his cabinet, especially Secretary of State William Seward, longed to seize Canada, war was avoided. After the war the two English-speaking North Atlantic powers would increasingly engage in peaceful cooperation and trade. The long border between America and the new Canadian federation that emerged right after the Civil War would become increasingly open.
In short, while India was becoming an integral part of the British Empire after the middle of the nineteenth century, America was becoming Britain’s equal. The paths of the two countries were diverging dramatically. In 1911 George V became the first monarch to visit the subcontinent, and he announced the decision to move the capital from Calcutta to New Delhi. A grand new city was designed by Edwin Lutyens to impress the world with the power of the Raj and to symbolize the enduring strength of British rule in India. But the Indian economy was stunted by colonialism. India did not undergo an industrial revolution like that in America and Europe, and many Indians blame the Raj.8 Nonetheless, India would be a vital part of the British war effort during World War I. More than 1 million Indian soldiers fought for the empire, some 140,000 in France alone, in the trenches on the Western Front. Indian forces conquered Iraq and Tanganyika. For the most part, Indians saw service as a patriotic duty. Mahatma Gandhi, the rising star of Indian politics, organized an ambulance corps to assist the war effort (he had done the same thing a decade before, during the Boer War in South Africa).