by Simon Schama
It was not, in any case, outraged humanity so much as strategic necessity that brought retribution down on the head of Siraj-ud-Daulah. Clive had been recalled to Madras to try to extend Company influence to another state, Hyderabad, but was now diverted north to Bengal in a combined operation with the ships of Charles Watson. Calcutta was taken from the sea in January 1757, and the nawab forced to reinstate all the Company’s privileges and fortifications. At which point the gambit, which had been used successfully in the Carnatic, was reapplied in Bengal. A senior general in Siraj’s army, Mir Jafar, angry at being passed over and alienated by the petulant antics of the nawab, let it be known that he would not be excessively grief-stricken were Clive to bring him down. The money-men, Jagat Seth above all, without whose resources any nawab was a broken reed, simultaneously gravitated to the power they instinctively thought to be a better long-term bet. At Plassey on 23 June 1757 Clive’s force of 2000 red-coated native sepoys and 1000 Europeans appeared to be massively outnumbered by an opposing army of 50,000, complete with elephant cavalry. But the disparity was a mirage, for only perhaps 10,000 of the nawab’s troops were actually prepared to fight. Once it was obvious that Mir Jafar and his commanders would stand aloof from the combat, the entire army, critically dependent on command, collapsed. Siraj-ud-Daulah was swiftly murdered, and Mir Jafar was made nawab in his place.
There was, of course, a reckoning to be made for services rendered, and when Clive presented his bill (probably in advance of the battle) it was not for the faint of heart or shallow of pocket. The general was to be ‘reimbursed’ for his pains to the tune of a cool £234,000, a sum that instantly made the hooligan from Market Drayton one of the richest men in Britain, as well as ‘Baron Clive of Plassey’. In addition he was assigned a revenue territory that would yield him an annual income of nearly £30,000. The fact that, of the £80 million purported to be in Siraj-ud-Daulah’s treasury, no one could find more than £1.5 million had no effect at all on the scale of the confiscations.
Beyond the opportunism of personal plunder lay a much deeper question and one that the British Empire would face time and time again in its march across the globe. Was its military power to be used to strengthen or to weaken the native government they claimed to be ‘assisting’? Which truly served the interests of a trading empire, the empire of liberty – a strong Indian regime or a weak one? The view in Leadenhall Street habitually voiced by the directors and their fiscally conservative chairmen like Laurence Sulivan was invariably one of damage limitation: stabilizing the situation to the point where Indian institutions could be depended on to provide the stability and peace needed for commerce to flourish. The immunity of Calcutta from Indian authority that was demanded after Plassey seemed to fit this bill. But, 15,000 miles and six months’ sailing-time away, few of the Company men in India itself gave much time or credence to the practicality of self-containment. And some thought it the counsel of the weak. In a telling piece of advice, Clive told the directors in 1758 that ‘such an opportunity can never again be expected for the aggrandisement of the Company’.
Specifically, did the Company want a pliable nawab (as in south India), or did it want to all intents and purposes to be the nawab? The Company men could tell themselves that, by stripping Murshidabad of an army and making it pay for British troops instead, they were only reacting defensively to the experience of 1756–7. But even the most ill-informed of them knew that the legitimacy of the nawab’s government depended critically on shows of force – not just armoured elephants in battle array but also guards and police who could descend on a district or zemindars to pry loose the silver for the government treasury. Without that force, Indian administration was a hollow shell. Dictating to Mir Jafar that henceforth the Company would collect land revenue directly from the large district known as the 24 Parganas, and that banians (middlemen) trading under the Company flag should be allowed up-country to do business without the inconvenience of paying taxes – and doing all this on the grounds that the instability of the regime required this prudent measure of security – was, of course, to make a self-fulfilling prophecy. Predicting the collapse of viable Indian administration, the British did everything to ensure it happened. When, inevitably, Mir Jafar failed to meet his financial obligations and in desperation searched around for alternative allies, even the Marathas, he was replaced by his son-in-law Mir Qasim in 1760. When he in his turn presumed to lay down the law to British private traders, he was likewise disposed of and his aged father-in-law bounced back to Murshidabad.
Summoning or seeing off nawabs, manipulating the polity of Bengal until it frayed and tore and fell apart altogether may have suited the short-term interests of the British. Clive and his associates may even have imagined it gave the Company greater freedom of action. But in fact it locked Britain into a cycle of intervention, war and yet more intervention which it had expressly rejected, a syndrome that transformed an empire of business into an empire of military coercion. There was a particular kind of Indian soil on which soldiers did their very best to avoid pitching tents that was known to them as ‘cotton ground’. For if it should rain at night while they were sleeping, what had in dry weather seemed to be a solid surface subsided first into dirty froth and then into a cavernous liquid sinkhole, swallowing tents, occupants and possessions. Though they imagined that what they were doing was ‘laying the foundations’ of something – and though their exploits have been treated by imperial historians as just that – Clive and his fellow-conquistadors in India were in fact setting those foundations on cotton ground. While they were airily hiring and firing nawabs, a much more decisive drama was unfolding to the northeast. On 14 January 1761, 60 miles (96 km) northwest of Delhi near the small town of Panipat, an immense battle took place between rival claimants to the legacy of the crumbling Mughal empire. On one side was the most formidable army the Brahmin Marathas had yet managed to assemble from their confederation of cavalry dynasts. On the other was an Afghan army under the command of Ahmed Shah Durrani. Like the Persian despot Nadir Shah in 1739, Ahmed Shah had invaded India essentially for the time-honoured purpose of ransacking the cities of the north. But he too had been drawn into a politically mobilized Muslim alliance – with the nawab of Awadh – to stop the Hindu Marathas from taking control of north and central India. The Muslims won the day as the Maratha horsemen were mown down by Afghan guns. But once victory was achieved the Afghans withdrew northwest along their looting route, ensuring that the result of Panipat was to open a great vacuum of power in the Mughal heartland that none of its potential successors – Bengal, Awadh or, further south, Hyderabad – was strong enough to fill.
Of course if the East India Company’s plan all along had been to move right into that space, then the decade after Panipat was too good to be true. By the time Company armies had defeated Nawab Mir Qasim and the nawab of Awadh at Baksar on the Awadh–Bihar border in 1764, it seemed to have become an unstoppable machine. By paying Indian soldiers higher wages than they were accustomed to receiving from the nawabs, and by paying them regularly, the Company was able to take on sepoys from the traditional pools of military recruitment in the villages around Banaras and southern Awadh, whose men now wore the red coats. After the nawab of Awadh’s defeat, his own treasury was required to pay for those troops who obliged him with their ‘protection’. It was the Market Drayton racket gone subcontinental. In Bengal, the army was able to be equipped with muskets, artillery, bullock trains and cavalry horses because from 1765 it became the direct recipient of the bonanza that was the land revenue. In an improvised ceremony at Allahabad that year, for which Clive provided a ‘throne’ in the form of one of his chairs set on top of his dining table, the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam had formally invested the Company with the power of the Diwani: the authority to collect taxes in his name. Though the nawab in Murshidabad still ostensibly retained powers of police and justice, the Company was now in effect the governing power, inserted into the moribund body of the Mughal empire from which it p
roceeded to gnaw its way out, parasitically and insatiably.
The paradox was that Clive had been sent back to India in 1764 by the Company not to expand its power and territories but as the agent of retrenchment. And to those in London who were painfully exercised by the costs – both financial and political – of William Pitt’s empire, the experience in India was every bit as sobering as that in America. If you were the unfortunate person responsible for balancing the books in London, acquiring an empire could be every bit as disastrous as losing one. Needless to say, this is not how it seemed to the men on the spot, their brows garlanded with victory, their exploits celebrated in songs and paintings exhibited in Vauxhall Gardens, their coffers swollen to bursting with extorted Indian silver. With Clive himself setting the pace they began to spend freely in Britain itself, buying country houses and sometimes, as at Sezincote in Gloucestershire, hiring architects to give them the air of an Indian palace. They began to throw their weight about in London and their money at parliamentary seats. As the ‘nabobs’, they displaced the West Indian planters as the most envied and detested plutocrats of the age.
Acutely aware of the debate about the costs of empire in America, in the two years that Clive remained in India he continued to rationalize this metamorphosis from business to self-perpetuating military state as a golden fiscal opportunity. ‘Bengal is in itself an inexhaustible fund of riches,’ he wrote to the Directors, ‘and you may depend on being supplied with money and provisions in abundance.’ Specifically, the difference between what the Bengal land revenues would reliably yield, and what it cost to administer and police them, would be, he cheerfully predicted, pure profit, perhaps £1 million a year. And that profit would, in turn, provide all the capital needed to invest in the Company’s cargoes, destined to be auctioned off at its London sales rooms. If you believed this then you believed in dreams come true, specifically the dream of equalizing the terms of trade rather than endlessly pouring silver down the great Indian drain. The self-sustaining neatness of the plan must have seemed even more irresistible when compared to the fiscal nightmare in America, where British troops and armed customs men had to wrest taxes from an infuriated population who accused the home government of instituting tyranny. In India, the Company reasoned, no one expected anything but tyranny, and under the auspices of the Union Jack they were likely to get less of it than under the nawabs. Better yet, they would do all the collecting themselves as they had since the beginning of the Mughal empire. What could go wrong? The peasants would go on complaining. That’s what peasants did. But they would cough up. The zemindars would hand over cash in advance to the Company and turn their men on any recalcitrant villages as they always had. Nothing was going to change except the ultimate ownership of the teak chests into which all this Bengal bounty would be spilled.
But everything did change. Seen from their palanquins borne along the trunk roads by a tottering quartet of bearers, or from the plush of their river barges, the countryside may have looked impervious to trauma, soaking up fiscal punishment along with the monsoon rains and still able to feed itself. But what would happen if the monsoons failed to deliver? This is exactly what happened in 1769 and 1770 when northeast India was plunged into desperate famine. Between a quarter and a third of the population of Bengal and Bihar died in those two years. Travellers remembered seeing saucer-eyed living ghosts, unfleshed ribcages sitting waiting to expire, massed flocks of kites descending on the carcasses – nothing quite fit for recording in Company school paintings. The famine was not the fault of the British regime. But the havoc and misery it had unleashed in Bengal during the 1760s had not helped the countryside to survive the blow.
It had been picked clean by the fortune-seekers, both native and British. In the face of the threats posed by the Marathas and the French, the pressure for land revenue had been fiercer than ever. The government in Calcutta had leaned on the zemindars, who had leaned on the villages. The proportion of their produce taken rose; their ability to save for the following year’s seed dwindled. If they lost a cow to the collector, or because there was no straw to harvest, they lost milk, draft labour and dung bricks for fuel. Freed from all oversight, merchants with their own armed entourage flying the Company flag would invade the villages looking for cloth but imposing prices on the weavers and dyers – another species of legalized extortion. Burke’s scalding polemic against ‘the just and punctual hand that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant, or wrung from him the very opium in which he forgot his oppression and his oppressor’ was, to be sure, hyperbole. But it was not altogether misplaced. A much less partisan commentator who knew whereof he spoke, Richard Becher, confessed that ‘the fact is undoubted . . . that since the accession to the dewanee, the condition of the people of this country has been worse than it was before’.
What Robert Clive had done in 1765 was to set a will o’ the wisp scampering through Anglo-Indian history, the vain pursuit of which would decide the fate of its empire. For although at the very end of his career he insisted that the British should not recklessly extend their governmental supervision deep into the Mughal empire, he had held out the promise that grasping the nettle of Indian finances would sting only for a moment. Thereafter it was the answer to the Company’s prayers – not just the harbinger, but the condition, of commercial profitability. By 1800 this principle had hardened into an unchallengeable truism, notwithstanding the fact that the Company’s finances were turning an ever deeper shade of red and that it was the reverse of every principle that had been laid down by the founders of the empire of liberty and commerce. It was also, of course, the opposite of the precepts being codified in Scotland by the economist Adam Smith, that the less a government imposed itself the more easily the Invisible Hand could do its work (although Smith himself would make an express exception for military contingencies and for the ‘special’ circumstances of India). In a crude sense, of course, Clive was right, since no one coming from Devon or Dumfries who managed to survive their stay in Calcutta or Madras was likely to get poorer by the experience. Even as he pretended to have the interests of both colonizers and natives at heart, Clive himself stood out as the most outrageous profiteer of all. Reproved for his conduct in parliament, he typically brazened it out with a famous defence. After Plassey, ‘a great prince was dependent on my pleasure, an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.’ Moderation, though, was not a word anyone else used of the Baron. In 1774, immoderately sunk in opium, Clive’s life ended in an overdose.
Paradoxically, Clive’s personal notoriety spared the logic of his interventionist imperialism from the scepticism it deserved. For if, somehow, with the best will in the world, British government in Bengal had failed to bring about general peace and prosperity, it could only be because wicked men, selfish men, perhaps led astray by greedy, opportunist natives, had abused their trust in order to line their pockets. The proper correction was not to examine the assumptions behind the proposition, but merely to find the right men and the right measures. The rest of British history in India was a search to do just that.
If the Company was looking for someone who represented the polar opposite of Robert Clive’s brutal flamboyance, they could not have done any better than Warren Hastings. The son of an improvident clergyman who ended up in Barbados, he was from the beginning a solemn outsider. The clever but impoverished Westminster schoolboy, painfully shy, carried with him a tight-wound sense of dignified superiority that provoked, often on first encounter, either admiration or hatred. A writer with the Company at seventeen, Hastings worked his way through the ranks, spending some time at Murshidabad. It was there, necessarily dealing with the nawab’s administrators, judges and money-men, that Hastings realized, to a degree still unusual in the Company, that i
ts fortunes would depend on plunging, not just into the politics of late Mughal India, but into its culture too. After learning Persian, Arabic, Hindustani and Bengali he became familiar with both the Hindu and Muslim codes of law and with the great works of their sacred and mythic literature. Whatever his other failings, it could not be said that Warren Hastings suffered from any of the cultural arrogance that became the hallmark of later generations of Britons in India.