A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  As everyone sheltered by this miraculously self-fertilizing system grew more prosperous, equally miraculous cultural changes would begin to take place. Simple peasants would become customers for British-manufactured goods and the new Bengali gentry would begin to assemble libraries, opening their eyes to the indisputable wisdoms of the European (which is to say British) enlightenment. The scales would fall from their eyes. They would abandon their disgusting idols and their devotion to gods with elephant heads, even perhaps receive the light of the Gospel. Real civilization was just around the corner. Cornwallis was sure of it.

  That, at any rate, was the theory. If it worked in Scotland – and a disproportionate number of the young administrators and surveyors who were left to work out the practical details were, in fact, Scots – why should it not work in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa? But Cornwallis’ system presupposed peace and stability. And instead of the promised peace there were almost continuous wars – with Mysore, with the Marathas and then with the French. Pressed hard for funds, many of the traditional zemindars themselves went into debt to meet their contracts with the government. Their armed men were sent to the villages to extract the last rupee. And when loans and extortion still failed to deliver what they needed to make good on their contract with Calcutta, they were dispossessed and sold up. The indebted country gentry of England had sympathetic bankers willing to perpetuate their credit, but there was no such facility in India. Not infrequently the zemindars’ creditors simply moved into their debtors’ properties, taking over their contract. So precisely the class whom the bluff Cornwallis most mistrusted – the Calcutta money-men, like the Tagores – were the main beneficiaries of his system, becoming wealthy estate owners at exactly this time. Under their impatient stewardship the capitalization of the countryside accelerated as land, some of it reclaimed from the flood delta of the Ganges, was put under cash crops like opium, silk and cotton that could make money, pots of it, very fast.

  In August 1789, when he had introduced his ‘Permanent Settlement’ of the land revenue, Cornwallis had promised the directors of the East India Company that his plan was ‘well calculated to secure and even increase your revenues’. But if the Company and the government had hoped that the profits of the new regime would translate into balanced books, those hopes were buried under the dust-storms of war. Both the directors of the Company and Pitt’s government had regarded Hastings’ military adventurism as not only immoral but also ruinously expensive, so Cornwallis’ brief was to hold the line. But India would not let him. Hastings’ prudent decision to make territorial concessions to the Marathas as the price of keeping them out of the arms of Haidar Ali had proved no more than a breathing-space. For in the twenty years after he had seized power from a Hindu dynasty the Sultan of Mysore had built the most powerful south Indian state since the demise of the empire of the Vijayanagars in the seventeenth century. Roads and bridges had been built, and the rural and market economy flourished. And though he remained a Muslim prince, Haidar Ali made sure to patronize Hindu temples and shrines. Even Cornwallis thought it a realm of gardens.

  Until, that is, he went to war to uproot it. In 1782 Haidar Ali died and was succeeded by his charismatic son Tipu Sultan. During and after the wars that ended in the annihilation of his state Tipu was demonized by the British as another Siraj-ud-Daulah, an unhinged, bloodthirsty despot, and was habitually referred to as ‘the usurper’ who had supplanted the ‘ancient Hindu constitution’ – as if the British themselves were credible judges of legitimacy. But the pattern of rationalizing conquests in terms of saving the Indians from themselves was now well established both in India and especially at home. And what could be even worse than a fanatical Indo-Muslim warlord? A fanatical Indo-Muslim warlord who thinks he’s a French republican! There’s no doubt that Tipu welcomed overtures from the French, who clung to strategically significant Indian Ocean naval bases on Mauritius and Reunion, and that he was happy to use them to train some of his native and Arab-African troops in more aggressively European warfare. Since the American war it seemed to be a French, not British, empire that was in the ascendant, so why would he not at least flirt with the temptation? What was there about British policy that would lead him to believe that they, not he, were the aggressors?

  So in May 1791, for the first time since Yorktown, Cornwallis went to war. In front of Tipu’s great palace-citadel at Seringapatam his old nightmares caught up with him. His army floundered helplessly in the monsoon mud. Over-extended, lines of communication broke down. But somehow the army did manage to stay together, and in the cool weather of the following year it launched a new and ultimately successful offensive against the island fortress of Kavery. Tipu’s defeat was serious enough to force him to surrender half his territories and his two sons as hostages for his good conduct. The avuncular Charles Cornwallis, taking the hands of the little chaps in turbans, became a standard feature of the iconography of imperial self-congratulation. This was an empire that would be firm but magnanimous.

  The good Uncle Charlie Cornwallis left India in 1793. The home verdict was that he had done well by India and well by the Empire. At least he hadn’t lost it. But it was a mark of the sea-change in the presumptions about what that empire was supposed to be that, instead of dismay about a cost-efficient trading concern turning into an open-ended territorial government, there was a sense of the historical rightness, the inevitability, of that outcome. The greasy-fingered writer of Clive’s day, sweating it out in some inky hole in Madras between bouts of arrack-drenched stupor in the Black Town brothels, had turned into the lordly collector sahib doing the tour of the district in his palanquin, scrutinizing the welfare of the cultivators, consulting the collective wisdom of Edinburgh to see how that lot might be improved. Not so long before, freedom of movement and fairness of treatment for up-country traders meant knowing whom to bribe and whom to beat up. Now there were white men in wigs who would adjudicate such matters from a bench in Calcutta or Bombay. And where once fighting for the Company had rated a poor second to parading in arms on the battlefields of Germany, now it was the field for heroes, the theatre of celebrity.

  So, at any rate, the three Wellesley brothers (born Wesley) from County Meath – Richard, the oldest and the political supremo; Henry, the man of business; and Arthur, the battlefield boy wonder – imagined when they arrived in India at the end of 1797. By the time they left, eight years later, India had made them and they, for better or worse, had made (in all but formal title) the Raj. Robert Clive had never commanded an army of more than 5000 men. By 1804 Governor-General Richard Wellesley, first Marquess Wellesley, was commander of an army of some 192,000, as large as that of many of the most powerful states of Europe. The Company – which was to say now, in all but name, the British government – was unchallenged in the subcontinent as the paramount power. Mysore was gone. The Mughal empire was a pathetic joke, its present head, Shah Alam, a blind and helpless dependant of his British keepers. Delhi had surrendered to Calcutta as the arbiter not just of power but of authority too. Awadh – the mid-Ganges state studded with great cities like Lucknow and Faizabad – was a dependency. The Marathas had been divided and all but their last formidable fighting chief, Holkar, neutralized. A regional ruler who had kept his nose clean and made sure to jump on the rolling juggernaut of British military power, like the Nizam of Hyderabad, was preserved, but with a British Resident in situ to babysit his politics and a cantonment of redcoats (paid for by his own treasury) to make sure he wasn’t naughty. And the debts of the East India Company had trebled, to the point at which they no longer bore any resemblance to commercial book-keeping and had become an institutionally funded obligation. From his palatial new Government House in Calcutta, a near copy of Robert Adam’s neo-classical Kedleston in Derbyshire, Wellesley could deliver imperial utterances as if he were indeed the new Augustus: ‘the foundation of our empire in Asia is now laid in the tranquillity of surrounding nations and in the happiness and welfare of the people of India.’

&
nbsp; And this is always what Richard Wellesley of Castle Dangan, Eton, Oxford and a nice pocket borough thought he was supposed to do. At Eton, Caesar, Livy and Tacitus had been drummed into him. But walking around Rome on the inevitable Grand Tour, Wellesley kept company with the ghosts of Trajan and Hadrian. At Posilippo he made the pilgrimage to Virgil’s tomb, the imminence of his own epic romantically flickering inside him. When he met the nawab of Arcot in May 1798 – a mere satrap of the Company, after all – Wellesley’s head was turned by the sight of the escort of fifteen elephants, ‘decorated with superb hammered cloth, embroidered in gold, silver and jewels and with golden turrets on their backs’. Established in Calcutta, the long-faced, charismatic Irishman moaned in letters to his voluptuous French wife Hyacinthe about how sexually aroused he became in the tropical heat. But he exercised his virility in other ways, demanding and acquiring the kind of political and military authority that neither Warren Hastings nor Cornwallis could have dreamed of. The pretext – or, as he would have insisted, the occasion – was the global war with the French that had the home government frantically on the defensive. Bonaparte, whose run of military victories in Italy had astonished and terrified the Coalition powers, had now sent an immense expedition to Egypt, which, if successful, could directly threaten the lines of communication and trade with India from the Red Sea. No one, least of all Wellesley, was underestimating the continuing French capacity to project their power all the way to Calcutta and to inflict serious damage through their proxies.

  The most dangerous, or the most foolhardy, was Tipu Sultan, who, even as he pretended to abide by the terms of his treaty with the British, was plotting with the French to escape its stranglehold on his territories and power. As usual, Wellesley took the betrayal personally and represented Tipu’s desperate attempt to cut loose from the shackles of British domination as the action of an unhinged aggressor bent on annihilating the Company: ‘Professing the most amicable disposition . . . he has manifested a design to effect our total destruction . . . he has prepared the means and instruments for a war of extermination.’ A huge army, with Arthur Wellesley one of the commanders, smashed its way into Seringapatam, where Tipu’s body was found buried beneath a mound of the dead at the Water Gate. Among the cartloads of plunder taken by the British was the octagonal throne of the padshah – the Muslim emperor that Tipu had declared himself to be – with its canopy surmounted by a golden homa bird, the beak glittering with inlaid stones, the eyes and tail studded with pearls. The homa was said by some to resemble an eagle, by others a vulture. The same could be said of Wellesley’s war machine.

  Everything that could be removed from Tipu’s palace – his sword, his battle helmet, the mechanical tiger that when wound up would devour a British soldier and produce satisfyingly plaintive cries – made its way back, first to Calcutta and then to England (where it all ended up at Windsor or at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London), but the real prize was a quarter of a million head of white bullocks and milch cattle. With this huge logistical asset, Arthur Wellesley could deploy a completely supplied mobile army wherever he needed, and, together with Lieutenant-General Gerard Lake, he took the war to the Marathas and the threat of war to Awadh.

  Though many of the battles were still intensely fought, Richard Wellesley had brought a new generation of cavalry horses, mostly bred from Arab stock, to India and that, together with an edge in field artillery and supply wagons, told. In September 1800 the generalissimo wrote exultantly to his brother, ‘We always kill the chief general and we always have the luck to be able to identify the body . . . truly my star is in the ascendant in India. I ought to leave the country before my luck changes.’ To Hyacinthe, whom he suspected of casual infidelity (the suspicion was mutual), Wellesley bragged like an adolescent, as if India had been mastered specifically to impress his wife and keep her out of anyone else’s bed: ‘Behold me covered with glory . . . I have done in two months [at Mysore] what took three years in Cornwallis’s time. Farewell dear soul, now all is quiet I am about to arrange the affairs of a conquered country.’ He would disclaim most honours except the Garter, but if the king insisted – well, he might allow himself to be known as ‘Viscount Wellesley of Mysore’.

  This was a bit premature. Wellesley knew that, when the bills came in, the men whom he called ‘the cheesemongers of Leadenhall Street’ would have a fit. But the six months it took for news from India to arrive gave him all the time he needed to present the directors and the government with faits accomplis. He would make the rhetorical challenge over and over again: who knew better the true state of peril confronting British power in India – the men who were there, or the men poring over maps in an office in Westminster? And once the deeds had been done and the body of yet another Maratha general slung on a cart, what was he supposed to do? Give back the territories? Restore the vanquished to their powers? Lay up trouble for the future? India, he said, did not set much store by magnanimity. India responded to unapologetic supremacy.

  For all his instinctive Bonapartism Richard Wellesley was not, in fact, a pure military adventurer, still less someone tempted by visions of personal dictatorship – though some who watched the lantern-jawed magnifico process through Calcutta, led by an escort of sixteen horsemen, wondered (especially in contrast to bluff old Cornwallis, who preferred to drive his own little trap like a country squire off to the whipping fair). However misguided, Wellesley was quite sincere when he claimed that the full-tilt drive to paramountcy could be justified by the long-term economic blessings that would make, as he had predicted in one of his rare speeches in parliament, ‘London, the throne of commerce of the world’. The short-term fiscal pain had to be absorbed in order to lay down what we would call the infrastructure necessary for a mutually benevolent economic relationship between Britain and India. If his predecessors thought this could be done by defensive half-measures, they had been deluding themselves. As long as there had been competitive Indian powers capable of causing trouble, neither peace nor profit could ever be expected. It never occurred to Wellesley that an India shared among smaller, internally coherent regional states – Bengal, Awadh, Mysore, Hyderabad – might be at least as viable as his paramount Raj, any more than it would have occurred to the boy from County Meath that a federal Britain of four nations made any sense. He was not interested in an empire run by accountants. Fatehpur Sikhri and the Taj Mahal told him that India had last been happy when ruled by one great authority, and he would see to it that the new Raj would be the proper heir of Akbar and Jahangir.

  In 1800, Wellesley set the capstone on the arch of his triumphalism by opening the new College of Fort William. It was, he often boasted, the achievement he was proudest of: the nursery of a new generation of proconsuls educated in the laws, languages and religion of the races and nations to whose government they were now irreversibly committed. Along with munshis (teacher-secretaries), many of the young men initially patronized by Warren Hastings now took up posts at the college. After Wellesley had gone the college would be sacrificed to the needs of fiscal retrenchment and replaced by Haileybury College in England, but not before it had inculcated its official version of how what had begun as a commercial company, trading from modest posts on the sufferance of the Mughals, had ended up holding sway over a subcontinent. The chaotic and stumbling route to dominion, strewn with acts of self-deception and self-enrichment, was remade as a broad historical highway at the end of which was Wellesley’s classical house of government. Instead of being part of India’s problems (perhaps the main problem), Britain was the solution. It was meant to be. ‘The position in which we are now placed’, Wellesley declared in 1804, ‘is suited to the character of the British nation, to the principles of our laws, to the spirit of our constitution, to the liberal and comprehensive policy which becomes the dignity of a great and powerful empire.’ Britain would be the new Rome in a subcontinent that the Romans had never reached.

  Was it really only seventy years since the inspirational inscription had been set
in Stowe’s Temple of Gothic Liberty, thanking the gods for not making the free British Romans? Was it only three generations since the founders of a maritime empire had insisted that theirs would be a dominion uniquely blessed by liberty, unencumbered by the pompous trappings of conquest? It was supposed to have been a minimalist empire: no big, expensive standing armies; no regiments of tax collectors; an enterprise built on mutual interest, not on military coercion. Hampden and Milton would bless it for minding its own business.

  It had not worked out that way. There was business all right, along with the edicts and the elephants, but it was not exactly what the founders had had in mind when they had imagined a flow of raw materials coming into the metropolis and a flow of manufactures going out to the empire. India had never wanted what Britain produced, and it still didn’t. Raw cotton was now being shipped from Bombay to England, but in the volumes and at the prices dictated by the likes of Henry Wellesley. Yet those who turned it into manufactured cloths in the spinning and weaving sheds of the industrial north needed something from Asia to reconcile them to their grinding labour and inadequate wages, and that something was hot and sweet: sugared tea. So East India Company ships sailed back from Canton loaded with black Bohea, and its profits would go some way to paying for 150,000 sepoys (for the fabled bounty from Indian land revenues seemed more than ever a mirage). But the profitability of the business depended on the Chinese being induced to take something other than silver in exchange.