The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

  Platoons of sepoys were marched out into the countryside to enforce payment, where they erected gibbets in prominent places to hang those who resisted the tax collection.19 Even starving families were expected to pay up; there were no remissions authorised on humanitarian grounds. Richard Becher in Murshidabad was appalled by what he saw and wrote to Calcutta for instructions: ‘Am I really quietly to stand by and see them commit the vilest acts of oppression, without being able to render the aggrieved redress?’ he asked. ‘The creatures of our government enrich themselves at the people’s expense, nay even their ruin.’20 As a result of such heartless methods of revenue collection, the famine initially made no impression on Company ledgers, as tax collections were, in the words of Warren Hastings, ‘violently kept up to their former standards’.21 In February 1771, the Council was able to tell the directors in London that ‘notwithstanding the great severity of the late famine, and the great reduction of people thereby, some increase [in revenue] has been made’.22

  The Council argued that they had responsibilities to maintain the defences of Bengal and protect their military gains. They therefore authorised 44 per cent of their £22 million annual budget* to be spent on the army and on the building of fortifications, so rapidly increasing the size of their sepoy regiments to 26,000 sepoys.23 The only rice they stockpiled was for the use of the sepoys of their own army; there was no question of cuts to the military budget, even as a fifth of Bengal was starving to death.24

  Moreover, there were persistent reports of individual Company merchants engaging in grain hoarding, profiteering and speculation. At the height of the famine, Mohammad Reza Khan reported to Calcutta that the managers of private Company traders ‘monopolize the rice’.25 According to an anonymous report sent back to England by one such dissident, possibly John Debrit, and published in full in the Gentleman’s Magazine: ‘As soon as the dryness of the season foretold the approaching dearness of rice, our gentlemen in the Company’s service, particularly those whose stations gave them the best opportunities, were as early as possible in buying up all they could lay hold of.’

  When the effects of the scarcity became more and more sensible, the Natives complained to the Nabob at Murshidabad, that the English had engrossed all the rice. This complaint was laid before the President and Council by the Nabob’s minister who resides in Calcutta; but the interests of the Gentlemen concerned was too powerful at the board, so that the complaint was only laughed at, and thrown out.

  Our Gentlemen in many places purchased the rice at 120 and 140 seers for a rupee, which they afterwards sold for 15 seers for a rupee, to the Black [Indian] merchants, so that the persons principally concerned have made great fortunes by it; and one of our writers at the Durbar, who was interested therein, not esteemed to be worth 1000 rupees last year, has sent down it is said £60,000* to be remitted home this year.26

  This unnamed speculator was not alone: in 1770–71, at the height of the Bengal famine, an astounding £1,086,255 was transferred to London by Company executives – perhaps £100 million in modern currency.27

  By the end of the summer of 1770, the effects of the Company’s policies were now so horrific that they could not be avoided by even the richest and most obtuse Company officials locked away in their walled Calcutta mansions. As Debrit told his London audience, ‘The Nabob and several of the great men of the country at Murshidabad distributed rice to the poor gratis, until their stocks began to fail, when those donations were withdrawn, which brought many thousands down to Calcutta, in hopes of finding relief amongst us.’

  By this time, we were already greatly affected at Calcutta, many thousands falling daily in the streets and fields, whose mangled bodies in that hot season, when at best the air is very infectious, made us dread the consequences of the plague. We had 100 people employed upon the Cutchery on the Company’s account with doolys, sledges and bearers, to carry the dead and throw them into the River Ganges.

  I have counted from my bed chamber window in the morning forty dead bodies, laying within twenty yards of the wall, besides many hundreds laying in the agonies of death for want, bending double, with their stomachs quite close contracted to their backbones. I have sent my servant to desire those who had strength to remove further off, whilst the poor creatures with their arms extended, have cried out, ‘Baba! Baba! My father! My father! This affliction comes from the hands of your countrymen, and I am come here to die, if it pleases God, in your presence. I cannot move, do what you will with me.’

  In the month of June, our condition was still worse, with only three seers of rice to be had in the bazaars, and that very bad, which, when bought must be carried home secretly, to avoid being plundered by the famished multitudes on the road. One could not pass the streets without seeing multitudes in their last agonies, crying out as you passed, ‘My God! My God! Have mercy on me, I am starving,’ whilst on other sides, numbers of dead were seen with dogs, jackalls, hogs, vultures and other birds and beasts of prey feeding on their carcases.

  It was remarked by the Natives that greater numbers of these animals came down at this time than was ever known, which, upon this melancholy occasion was of great service, as the vultures and other birds take out the eyes and intestines, whilst the other animals gnaw at the feet and hands; so that very little of the body remains for the Cutcherry people to carry to the River; notwithstanding, they had a very hard time of it. I have observed two of them with a dhooly carrying twenty heads and the remains of the carcasses that had been left by the birds of prey, to the river at a time.

  At this time we could not touch fish, the river was too full of carcasses, and of those who did eat it, many died suddenly. Pork, ducks and geese also lived mostly on carcasses, so that our only meat was mutton, when we could get it, which was very dear, and from the dryness of the season so poor, that a quarter would not weigh a pound and a half.

  Of this I used to make a little broth, and after I had dined, perhaps there were 100 poor at the door waiting for the remains, which I have often sent amongst them cut up into little pieces; so that as many as could might partake of it; and after one had sucked the bones quite dry, and thrown them away, I have seen another take them up, sand and all among them, and another do the same, and then by a third, and so on.28

  As Bengal lay racked by famine, ‘with the greatest part of the land now entirely uncultivated … owing to the scarcity of the inhabitants’, in London, Company shareholders, relieved to see tax revenues maintained at normal levels, and aware that the share price was now higher than it had ever been – more than double its pre-Diwani rate – celebrated by voting themselves an unprecedented 12.5 per cent dividend.29

  What they did not know was that this was one of the highest points the Company share price would ever reach; and that what lay ahead was an extended period of unprecedented ill fortune for the Company – financial, political and military – that would do immense damage to the EIC both at home and abroad, bringing it close to bankruptcy and complete closure.

  Already, by the end of 1771, the mood was beginning to change in London. Word was spreading about the Company’s inhumanity in Bengal: the number of dead and dying was simply too vast to hide. Horace Walpole’s letters reflected a growing awareness that behind the EIC’s vast profits there was something profoundly rotten at work in the Company’s Indian operations. ‘The groans of India have mounted to heaven,’ he wrote, ‘where the Heaven-Born General [Clive] will certainly be disavowed.’

  We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped – say what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company? All this is come out, is coming out – unless the gold that inspired these horrors can quash them.30

  His words were echoed in the House of Lords by the former Prime Minister. William Pitt, Lord Chatham, came from a dynasty whose
fortunes were made in India: his father, ‘Diamond Pitt’, brought back from his governorship of Madras the fortune that had made possible Pitt’s career. Pitt did not, however, like to be reminded of this, and now raised the alarm that the EIC was bringing its corrupt practices back from India and into the very benches of the Mother of Parliaments. ‘The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us,’ he declared at the despatch box, ‘and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruptions as no private hereditary fortune could resist.’31

  In early 1772, the London Post published a series of graphic articles exposing the crimes and murders allegedly committed by the Company in India.32 In April, the Gentleman’s Magazine, the same publication which had published Debrit’s piece on the Bengal famine, warned that the EIC could repeat ‘the same cruelties in this island which have disgraced humanity and deluged with native and innocent blood the plains of India … Down with that rump of unconstitutional power, the East India Company, the imperious company of East India merchants!’33

  As the year progressed, and as more and more articles, pamphlets and books were published revealing the catastrophic death tolls in Bengal, India became ‘part of the daily newspaper diet’ of London, and public opinion swung increasingly against the Company, its returned Nabobs in general, and Clive, their most prominent and conspicuous exemplar, in particular.34 One pamphlet talked of ‘Indians tortured to disclose their treasure; cities, towns and villages ransacked; jaghires and provinces purloined; these were the “delights” and the “religions” of the Directors and their servants.’35 Walpole was now railing loudly about ‘the iniquities of our East India Company and its nest of monsters … and their spawn of nabobs’ to any of his correspondents who cared to listen.36

  That summer, the Company became the focus for much scandalous gossip in London. There was already in print a brilliant satire attacking the directors of the EIC – Debates in the Asiatic Assembly. Among its characters were Sir Janus Blubber, Shylock Buffalo, Jaundice Braywell, Sir Judas Venom, Donald Machaggies, Caliban Clodpate, Skeleton Scarecrow and the villainous Lord Vulture, a character clearly modelled on Clive. As the parade of Company grotesques praise Lord Vulture, only one character – George Manly – dares denounce the others as ‘a troop of desperate banditti … a scandalous confederacy to plunder and strip’.

  Manly demands that we ‘enquire more deeply into … [Lord Vulture’s] avarice and oppression and tyrannical management of our affairs, his inhumanity and breach of order … Shall we tamely behold all his engines employed in every dark practice of promises and threats, of corruption and prostitution?’ Lord Vulture, says Manly, is ‘utterly deaf to every sentiment of justice and humanity’, and demands that the Company must be rescued from ‘the wanton profusion of this insatiable harpy, whose ambition is unparalleled, and whose avarice knows no bounds’.37

  Then, in June 1772, the Haymarket Theatre, just off Piccadilly Circus, mounted a play, The Nabob, newly written by the Haymarket’s proprietor, Samuel Foote. In this bawdy satire, Sir Matthew Mite is an obnoxious India-returned parvenu ‘Nabob’ hoping to use his Bengal loot to marry into an ancient family and corruptly buy election to Parliament for the constituency of Bribe ’em. At one point in the play, Mite’s assistant, Touchit, explains the methods by which Mite and his cronies made their fortunes:

  Touchit: We cunningly encroach and fortify little by little, till at length, we are growing too strong for the natives, and then we turn them out of their lands, and take possession of their money and jewels.

  Mayor: And don’t you think, Mr Touchit, that is a little uncivil of us?

  Touchit: Oh, nothing at all! These people are little better than Tartars or Turks.

  Mayor: No, no, Mr Touchit; just the reverse: it is they who have caught the Tartars in us.38

  That summer, the attacks on the Company took many forms. Some accused the Company of near-genocide in India; others of corrupting Parliament; others again focused on the social mountaineering of the returned Nabobs, with their dripping Indian diamonds, their newly bought estates and their rotten boroughs. Many raised the valid point that a private corporation enjoying a government trading monopoly ought not to be running an overseas empire: ‘Trade and the Sword ought not to be managed by the same people,’ wrote Arthur Young in a widely circulated pamphlet. ‘Barter and exchange is the business of merchants, not fighting of battles and dethroning of princes.’39

  One especially powerful attack on the Company’s record was published by a returned EIC official, the Scottish philosopher, historian and mercantilist Alexander Dow, who concluded his scholarly translation from the Persian of Ferishta’s History of Hindostan with an excoriating attack on the Company’s rule of Bengal. Humane, informed and well argued, Dow’s attack was the product of one individual’s appalled anger at the incompetence and barbarism of the Company’s tenure of Bengal and is an invaluable eyewitness account by an intelligent insider: ‘Bengal, from the mildness of its climate, the fertility of its soil, and the natural industry of the Hindus, was always remarkable for its commerce,’ he wrote. ‘The balance of trade was against all nations in favour of Bengal, and it was the sink where gold and silver disappeared, without the least prospect of return … [But since the Company took over] the country was depopulated by every species of public distress.’

  In the space of six years, half the great cities of an opulent kingdom were rendered desolate; the most fertile fields in the world laid waste; and five millions of harmless and industrious people were either expelled or destroyed. Want of foresight became more fatal than innate barbarism; and [the company’s servants] found themselves wading through blood and ruin, when their object was only spoil.

  A barbarous enemy may slay a prostrate foe, but a civilised conqueror can ruin nations without the sword. Monopolies and an exclusive trade joined issue with additional taxations … The unfortunate were deprived of the means, whilst the demands upon them were, with peculiar absurdity, increased … We may date the commencement of the decline from the day on which Bengal fell under the dominion of foreigners; who were more anxious to improve the present moment of their own emolument than to secure a permanent advantage to the nation. With particular want of foresight they began to drain the reservoir without turning into it any stream to prevent it from being exhausted …

  ‘The Bengal carcase is now bleaching in the wind,’ concluded Dow, ‘and is almost picked to the bone.’40

  However, by far the most influential and damaging of the many tracts against the EIC to be published in 1772 was William Bolts’ Considerations on Indian Affairs.41 Bolts, who was of Anglo-Dutch origins, had actually been one of the Company’s most unscrupulous operators, an associate of William Ellis of Patna, who had been involved in the Company’s brutal transactions during the reign of Mir Qasim. But having fallen out with Clive and been expelled forcibly from Bengal for illegal trading, he vowed to bring down the former Governor. He returned to London, where he promptly set himself up as a whistleblower. Considerations on Indian Affairs was his attempt to destroy Clive by lifting the lid on the Company’s most disreputable transactions in Bengal, many of which Bolts himself had actually had a direct hand in.42

  Bolts wrote of Company officials ‘unjustly imprisoning the natives and black [Indian] merchants and by violence extorting great sums of money from them’. He also mentions the self-mutilation of weavers who ‘cut off their own thumbs’ in order to prevent them being press-ganged to wind silk in prison-like factory camps.43 There was no justice available against the perpetrators: ‘We behold the impotency of power on this side of the ocean that not one delinquent in India is brought to justice in Europe.’

  Bolts’ most thought-provoking idea was that the Company’s claim to have obtained the Diwani by the Treaty of Allahabad was in fact a legal nonsense
, invented by Clive to mask the reality of his military conquests. The Company, he wrote, ‘are become sovereigns of extensive, rich and populous Kingdoms, with a standing army of above 60,000 men at their command’. The Nawab of Bengal and Shah Alam were merely ‘nominal nabobs … puppets’, dangling at the EIC’s whim, and the land held not by law or treaty but ‘possessions acquired and held in reality by either violence or usurpation’. This was so because ‘no [Mughal] laws or empire [still] exist’. The Company had become ‘an absolute government of monopolists’ which was impoverishing Bengal and working against long-term British interests. In comparison, wrote Bolts, the Mughal government which preceded the Company Raj was a model of fair-trade principles in its steady encouragement of merchants and artisans.44

  Bolts’ solution was for the Crown to take over Bengal as a government colony, so ending the asset-stripping of the province by a for-profit Company. Throughout, Bolts addressed himself to the King, suggesting that he should assume his rightful position and extend his benign hand to protect his ‘subjects in Asia’, whether British or Indian.

  The book was full of embittered half-truths and false accusations; and many of the worst abuses enumerated were actually the work of Bolts himself, along with his friend Ellis. But Considerations was nonetheless hugely influential. It anticipated many later criticisms of Empire, and it broke much new ground in confronting issues which were then novel problems, but later would become much more common: for the first time a writer grappled, for example, with the question of how to deal with a multinational whose tentacles extended well beyond national frontiers. It also asked important questions about containing an over-powerful and unusually wealthy proprietor: what would happen, asked Bolts, if one very rich magnate were to become too wealthy and powerful for a nation state to control? What would happen if someone could buy the legislature and use his wealth to corrupt MPs for his own business ends?