These reforms quickly produced a revolution in landholding in Company Bengal: many large old estates were split up, with former servants flocking to sale rooms to buy up their ex-masters’ holdings. In the ensuing decades, draconian tax assessments led to nearly 50 per cent of estates changing hands. Many old Mughal landowning families were ruined and forced to sell, a highly unequal agrarian society was produced and the peasant farmers found their lives harder than ever. But from the point of view of the Company, Cornwallis’s reforms were a huge success. Income from land revenues was both stabilised and enormously increased; taxes now arrived punctually and in full. Moreover, those who had bought land from the old zamindars were in many ways throwing in their lot with the new Company order. In this way, a new class of largely Hindu pro-British Bengali bankers and traders began to emerge as moneyed landowners to whom the Company could devolve local responsibility.
So even as the old Mughal aristocracy was losing high office, a new Hindu service gentry came to replace them at the top of the social ladder in Company-ruled Bengal. This group of emergent Bengali bhadralok (upper-middle classes) represented by families such as the Tagores, the Debs and the Mullicks, tightened their grip on mid-level public office in Calcutta, as well as their control of agrarian peasant production and the trade of the bazaars. They participated in the new cash crop trades to Calcutta – Dwarkanath Tagore, for example, making a fortune at this time in indigo – while continuing to lend the Company money, often for as much as 10–12 per cent interest. It was loans from this class which helped finance colonial armies and bought the muskets, cannon, horses, elephants, bullocks and paid the military salaries which allowed Company armies to wage and win their wars against other Indian states. The Company’s ever-growing Indian empire could not have been achieved without the political and economic support of regional power groups and local communities. The edifice of the East India Company was sustained by the delicate balance that the Company was able to maintain with merchants and mercenaries, its allied nawabs and rajas, and above all, its tame bankers.66
In the end it was this access to unlimited reserves of credit, partly through stable flows of land revenues, and partly through the collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, that in this period finally gave the Company its edge over their Indian rivals. It was no longer superior European military technology, nor powers of administration that made the difference. It was the ability to mobilise and transfer massive financial resources that enabled the Company to put the largest and best-trained army in the eastern world into the field. The biggest firms of the period – the houses of Lala Kashmiri Mal, Ramchand-Gopalchand Shahu and Gopaldas-Manohardas – many of them based in Patna and Benares, handled the largest military remittances, taking charge of drawing bills of exchange in Bombay or Surat or Mysore, as well as making large cash loans, all of which made possible the regular payment, maintenance, arming and provisioning of the Company’s troops. The Company in turn duly rewarded these invaluable services in 1782 when they announced that the house of Gopaldas would henceforth be the government’s banker in the place of the Jagat Seths. Support from the Company then enabled the house to break into western India from where they had previously been absent.67
As Rajat Kanta Ray put it, ‘With regard to the indigenous systems of commercial credit, the Company was better placed than the Indian powers by virtue of its reputation as an international capitalist corporation with a developed sense of the importance of paying its debts. It was known, moreover, to have the biggest revenue surplus available in the country to offer as collateral for large contract loans obtained from sahukaras [moneylenders].’68 The Company was perceived as the natural ally of Indian traders and financiers; the British, wrote Hari Charan Das, did not ‘interfere with the wealth of any rich men, bankers and merchants, and other people who reside in their cities, but on the contrary they are kind to those who are wealthy.’69
As the Jagat Seths had discovered forty years earlier, the East India Company spoke a language Indian financiers understood, and offered a higher degree of security to Indian capital than its rivals.70 In the end, it all came down to money. By the end of the century, Bengal was annually yielding a steady revenue surplus of Rs25 million at a time when Scindia struggled to net Rs1.2 million* from his territories in Malwa.71 No wonder that Scindia reflected anxiously that ‘without money it was impossible to assemble an army or prosecute a war’.72
Ultimately it was the East India Company, not the Marathas or the Sultans of Mysore, that the financiers across India decided to back.73 Moreover, for all the rapacity of the Company, it was an increasingly easy decision for them to make. By 1792, there was little credible opposition. Tipu had just been defeated and had lost half his kingdom. For all his valour and determination, it would take a miracle for him ever again to muster sufficient resources to defeat the Company as he once did at Pollilur.
Meanwhile, the great Maratha Confederacy, the power which controlled the most land and fielded the largest and most formidable armies, was slowly beginning to unravel. On 1 June 1793, at the Battle of Lakheri, after many years of open rivalry and increasingly strained relations, Tukoji Holkar was comprehensively defeated by Mahadji Scindia. When the result of the battle was reported to the blind Shah Alam in Delhi, he chuckled and commented, ‘the power of the Marathas will soon be destroyed’.74 He was right. In the next round of internecine bloodshed that followed, ‘the Maratha princes bore less resemblance to a confederacy than to a bag of ferrets’.75
It was no longer difficult to predict the future. By the 1790s the Comte de Modave, for one, had no doubt what lay in store for India. ‘I am convinced that the English will establish themselves in the Mughal empire only precariously and with much uncertainty,’ he wrote, ‘and they will no doubt, eventually, in due course of time, lose it.’
But they will certainly control it for long enough to extract prodigious amounts of money from it, which will enable them to maintain the role they have arrogated to themselves of being the principal, or rather the one and only, power, exclusive of all others, among the trading nations of Europe.
Who can stop them? In Hindustan, anarchy smothers the hope of anything good germinating or sprouting: the people live in want and misery, even though they have so many possibilities of living well. The English in Bengal are watching this curious situation attentively, hoping to profit by it, for their lust for gain is as voracious as their mania for conquest.
I have no doubt that these ever-recurring disturbances, which pin down all the armed forces of this empire, are welcomed by the English as a sure means of taking over the empire itself, bit by bit. It strikes me that their behaviour corresponds exactly to this long-term strategy as they carefully stoke the fires of civil discord, which they then offer to resolve, backing up such mediation with a show of military strength as soon as they well can.
This pattern of behaviour, from which they have not deviated for several years, has allowed them to seize control of many areas beyond the limits of Bengal, so much so that they will soon be masters of the Ganges from Allahabad to the Ocean. They play the game of advancing without ever being seen to make any step forward … In brief, they assiduously practise that old maxim followed by the Romans in their politics, that is, in the words of Tacitus, everywhere to keep in place [local hereditary] rulers, in order to use them as instruments to reduce the people to slavery.
The English Company stands alone, today, on this vast stage, preparing secretly and silently to extend immeasurably the major role they are playing here. All their schemes, their plans, their initiatives, all tend to this one great object. One by one, all the powers of India are being reduced by terror, intrigues, flattery, promises or threats. Every day the English Company takes a step closer to that goal. I have no doubt at all that, for some years now, the plan of invading Hindustan and taking over the trade of all the East Indies has been the object of their speculations and calculations, a profitable compensation for what they have lost in Ame
rica. If you also consider the power of the English navy, the strength of their military establishments on the coast of India, you will realise that, given the means already in their hands, they need make only a small effort to achieve this grand and magnificent project.
When the moment comes to act, their plan, however vast and complex, will be fully formed, down to its last details, with all necessary preliminary information ready gathered: then their operations will be carried out with a rapidity and success which will astonish the whole of Europe.76
The Company, he believed, now looked unassailable. But he was overlooking one thing. There was in fact one force which could still stop the Company in its tracks. Modave’s own homeland, now in the grip of revolution and led by a heavily accented Corsican colonel named Napoleon Bonaparte, had just declared war against Britain on 1 February 1793. Four years later, in December 1797, Tipu despatched an embassy seeking Napoleon’s help against the Company. What the Sultan of Mysore did not know was that the army he needed was already being prepared in Toulon. By the time Tipu’s embassy arrived in Paris, in April 1798, Napoleon was waiting for an opportunity to sail his 194 ships, carrying 19,000 of his best men, out of Toulon, and across the Mediterranean to Egypt. Napoleon was quite clear as to his plans.
In a book about Turkish warfare he had scribbled in the margin before 1788 the words, ‘Through Egypt we shall invade India, we shall re-establish the old route through Suez and cause the route by the Cape of Good Hope to be abandoned.’ Nor did he anticipate many problems: ‘The touch of a French sword is all that is needed for the framework of mercantile grandeur to collapse.’77 From Cairo in 1798 he sent a letter to Tipu, answering the latter’s pleas for help and outlining his grand strategy:
You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an innumerable and invincible army, full of the desire of releasing and relieving you from the iron yoke of England. I eagerly embrace this opportunity of testifying to you the desire I have of being informed by you, by the way of Muscat and Mocha, as to your political situation. I wish you could send some sort of intelligent person to Suez or Cairo, possessing your confidence, with whom I may confer. May the Almighty increase your power, and destroy your enemies!
Yours &c &c
Bonaparte9
* £5,250 today.
* The modern equivalences of these sums are: £2 million = £210 million; £1.3 million = £136 million; £2.4 million = £252 million.
* The modern equivalences of these sums are: £5 million = £525 million today; Rs28 million = £364 million.
** Rs2.5 million = £32.5 million today.
* £3 million = £315 million; Rs300 = £3,900; Rs192 = £2,496; Rs48 = £624; Rs80 = £1,040.
* £195,500 today.
* £390 million today.
* The modern equivalences of these sums are: Rs25 million = £325 million; Rs1.2 million = £15.6 million.
9
The Corpse of India
On 17 May 1798, two days before Napoleon’s fleet slipped out of Toulon and sailed swiftly across the Mediterranean towards Alexandria, a single tall-masted ship, this time a sleek East Indiaman, was tacking into the River Hooghly after seven months at sea. On board was a man who would change the history of India as much as Napoleon would change that of France; indeed, though his name is largely forgotten today, in the next seven years he would conquer more territory in India, and more quickly, than Napoleon conquered in Europe.
When Robert Clive had turned into the same river in December 1756, noting in his letters the point where the waters of the Bay of Bengal took on the distinctive colour of Ganges silt, the only Company men left in Bengal had been the beaten and malaria-stricken refugees from Calcutta, dying in droves amid the Sunderban mangrove swamps at Fulta. Calcutta itself was a ruin. Now, only forty-two years later, Calcutta was one of the largest cities in Asia, the Company completely dominated eastern and southern India and had successfully encircled the entire peninsula. As the passenger looked out from his berth in the roundhouse, he was conscious that he was being sent east specifically to bring this work of corporate conquest and consolidation to its climax.
This was his first glimpse of Bengal and he was excited by what he saw: ‘Nothing could equal the magnificence of my approach,’ he wrote to his wife on his arrival. ‘For nearly three miles the river, which is as large as the Thames at London, is bordered by lovely, well-built country houses with porticoes and colonnades. The town is a mass of superb palaces in the same style, with the finest fortress in the world. The green of the lawns surpasses anything you have ever seen … an extraordinary effect in so hot a country. The trees are more beautiful, their foliage more luxuriant, than in any European country … Arthur met us a few miles from the town, and on arrival at the fort I was saluted with a salvo of artillery.’1
The passenger was the new Governor General, Richard, Marquess Wellesley;2 ‘Arthur’ was his younger brother, who had also recently been posted to India, and who would, in time, eclipse Richard and be ennobled as the Duke of Wellington. Between them, the two would transform both India and Europe.
There was nothing inevitable about this. The brothers were neither great noblemen nor distinguished politicians and they possessed no great fortune. They came from minor, provincial Anglo-Irish Protestant stock; their main assets were their steely self-confidence, quick brains and extraordinary chutzpah. Like Clive before them, they were both aggressive and autocratic pragmatists who believed that offence was the best form of defence; like him they seemed to lack self-doubt and managed to remain undaunted by odds which would terrify more anxious, or sensitive, men.
At this stage in their lives, it was Richard, not Arthur, who was the star of the family. He had entered the House of Commons at twenty-four, was soon made a Lord of the Treasury and became close friends with the Prime Minister, William Pitt. Now, at the age of thirty-seven, when he stepped ashore at Calcutta to succeed Lord Cornwallis as Governor General of the Company’s possessions in India, Richard Wellesley was an unusually self-possessed young man with a high forehead, thick, dark eyebrows and a prominent Roman nose. He had deep-set, compelling blue eyes and a firm chin, the prominence of which was emphasised by his three-quarter-length sideburns. There was a purposeful set to his small mouth and an owlish gleam in his expression that hinted at his brilliance, and perhaps also at his ruthlessness. But there was also a look of suspicion, and even a paranoia there, too, apparent in all his portraits. It was a flaw that he increasingly came to disguise with a mask of extreme arrogance.
Where Wellesley differed quite markedly from his predecessors as Governor General was in his attitude to the Company he was expected to serve. For just as Calcutta was now quite different from the small, battered town familiar to Clive, so the Company was a very different beast from that which Clive had served. In India it might be immeasurably more powerful, with an army now roughly twenty times the size of that commanded by Clive; but in London, Parliament had been steadily chiselling away at its powers and independence, first with Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773 and then with Pitt’s India Act of 1784. Between them, the two bills had done much to take control of political and military affairs of British India out of the hands of the Company directors in Leadenhall Street and into those of the Board of Control, the government body set up in 1784 to oversee the Company, across town in Whitehall.
Wellesley was, unrepentantly, a government man, and unlike his predecessors made no secret of his ‘utter contempt’ for the opinions of ‘the most loathsome den of the India House’.3 Though he would win the directors a vast empire, he came within a whisker of bankrupting their Company to do so, and it was clear from the beginning that he had set his sights on far more ambitious goals than maintaining the profit margins of the Company he was supposed to serve, but whose mercantile spirit he actually abhorred.
Unknown to the Company’s directors, Wellesley had come out east with two very clear goals in his mind. He was determined to secure India for Br
itish rule and was equally determined to oust the French from their last footholds on the subcontinent. In this he was following the bidding of Henry Dundas, the Board of Control’s president, whose Francophobia was transmitted to a receptive Wellesley at a series of lengthy briefings before the new Governor General embarked for India.
In particular Dundas had instructed Wellesley to ‘cleanse’ those pockets of Indian princely power that had been ‘contaminated’ by French influence – namely the courts of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad and those of that network of rival chiefs that ruled the great Maratha Confederacy – all of whom had raised sepoy armies trained by French mercenaries and renegades, and all of which could, potentially, be used against the British and in favour of the French. At a time of national crisis, when Britain was at war not only with France but also with Holland and Spain; when its last ally – Austria – had just laid down her arms; when a naval mutiny had broken out in the Channel Fleet; and when Napoleon was drawing up plans for seaborne invasions of both Ireland, then on the verge of rebellion, and the English south coast, this was not something the British government was prepared to tolerate.4
Wellesley’s ideas about the renewed French threat to the Company in India came into much closer focus when, halfway through his outward voyage, his ship docked on the Cape to refit. There, at the end of January 1798, he had met a senior Company diplomat who was taking the waters at the Cape mineral baths to treat his gout and attempt to recover his shattered health. Major William Kirkpatrick was as much a Francophobe as Wellesley, but unlike the new Governor General knew India intimately, having spent all his adult life there, latterly serving as Company Resident in both Delhi and Hyderabad. There he had come into direct contact with the French mercenaries Wellesley was determined to defeat and expel.
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire Page 42