The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
Page 52
Truschke, Aurangzeb, p. 66.
95
Kaushik Roy, ‘Military Synthesis in South Asia: Armies, Warfare, and Indian Society, c.1740–1849’, in Journal of Military History, vol. 69, no. 3 (July 2005), pp. 651–90; V. G. Dighe and S. N. Qanungo, ‘Administrative and Military System of the Marathas’, in R. C. Majumdar and V. G. Dighe (eds), The Maratha Supremacy, Mumbai, 1977, pp. 567–8. For Shivaji’s two coronation ceremonies the best source is the Sivarajyabhiṣekakalpataru (The Venerable Wish-Fulfilling Tree of Śiva’s Royal Consecration) dated 30 September 1596 Saka era (= 1674 ad). See Bihani Sarkar, Traveling Tantricsand Belligerent Brahmins: the Sivarajyabhiṣekakalpataru and Sivaji’s Tantric consecration, for the conference on ‘Professions in motion: culture, power and the politics of mobility in 18th-century India’, St Anne’s, Oxford, 2 June 2017; available at www.academica.edu; James W. Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, Oxford, 2003.
96
Quoted in Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800, New York, 2003, p. 232. Shivaji’s reputation as a warrior hero against Islam is still alive and even growing today in modern Maharashtra, especially Bombay, where the airport, the railway station and even the Prince of Wales Museum have all recently been named after him. Here the far right-wing Hindutva Shiv Sena party, Shivaji’s Army, is one of the most powerful political forces on the streets of the city and set the city ablaze in 1992 following the destruction of the Babri Masjid.
97
Truschke, Aurangzeb, p. 69.
98
Syed Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, Seir Mutaqherin, Calcutta, 1790–94, vol. 1, pp. 310–11. For Ghulam Hussain Khan see Iqbal Ghani Khan, ‘A Book With Two Views: Ghulam Husain’s “An Overview of Modern Times”’, in Jamal Malik, ed., Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History, 1760–1860, Leiden, 2000, pp. 278–97, and Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘History as Self-Representation: The Recasting of a Political Tradition in Late Eighteenth Century Eastern India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 32, no. 4 (1998), pp. 913–48.
99
Truschke, Aurangzeb, p. 120.
100
Ibid., p. 65, quoting Giovanni Gemelli Careri, Indian Travels of Thevenot and Careri, ed. S. N. Sen, New Delhi, 1949, p. 216. Originally published as Giro del Mondo, Rome, 1699.
101
Ahkam-i Alamgiri, f 61b quoted in Bhargava, The Decline of the Mughal Empire, p. 43.
102
Quoted in Waldemar Hansen, The Peacock Throne, New Delhi, 1986, p. 28.
103
Uday Kulkarni’s The Era of Baji Rao: An Account of the Empire of the Deccan, Pune, 2017, is both popular and exhaustively researched and makes for an excellent introduction to this period of Maratha rule.
104
Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, ‘Ibrat Nama, BL Or. 1932. 2v.
105
Jean-Baptiste Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, Paris, 1822, p. 76.
106
See Stewart Gordon, ‘The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire, 1720–1760’, in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 11, no. 1 (1977), pp. 1–40. Also Andre Wink, ‘Maratha Revenue Farming’, in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 17, no. 4 (1983), pp. 591–628; Stewart Gordon, Marathas, Marauders and State Formation in Eighteenth Century India, Delhi, 1994.
107
Voyage en Inde du Comte de Modave, 1773–1776, ed. Jean Deloche, Pondicherry, 1971, pp. 400–1.
108
Roy, ‘Military Synthesis in South Asia’; R. C. Majumdar et al., An Advanced History of India, 1978, reprint, Madras, 1991, pp. 536–46; Eaton, India in the Persianate Age 1000–1765, p. 354; Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600–1818, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 127–9, 140–3.
109
Munis D. Faruqui, ‘At Empire’s End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth Century India’, in Modern Asian Studies, 43, 1 (2009), pp. 5–43; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Un Grand Derangement: Dreaming An Indo-Persian Empire in South Asia, 1740–1800’, Journal of Early Modern History, 4, 3–4 (2000), pp. 337–78; Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707–1748, New Delhi, 1986.
110
Salim Allah, A Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal, trans. Francis Gladwin, Calcutta, 1788; McLane, Land and Local Kingship, p. 72. See also Tilottama Mukherjee, ‘The Co-ordinating State and Economy: The Nizamat in Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 2 (2009), pp. 389–436.
111
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 450; J. H. Little, The House of Jagat Seth, Calcutta, 1956, p. 3.
112
BL, IOR, Orme Mss India, VI, f. 1455.
113
Ibid., f. 1525.
114
For the Jagat Seths the best source remains Little, The House of Jagat Seth. See also Sushil Chaudhury, ‘The banking and mercantile house of Jagat Seths of Bengal’, in Studies in People’s History, 2, 1 (2015), pp. 85–95; Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Banias and the British: the role of indigenous credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the second half of the Eighteenth century’, Modern Asian Studies, 21, 3 (1987); Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Collaboration and Conflict: Bankers and Early Colonial Rule in India: 1757–1813’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 30, 3 (1993); Thomas A. Timberg, The Marwaris: From Jagat Seth to the Birlas, New Delhi, 2014, p. 22; Lokanatha Gosha, The Modern History of the Indian Chiefs, Rajas, Zamindars, & C., Calcutta, 1881. For the wider Indian economy at this time see also Rajat Datt, ‘Commercialisation, Tribute and the Transition from late Mughal to Early Colonial in India’, Medieval History Journal, vol. 6, no. 2 (2003), pp. 259–91; D. A. Washbrook, ‘Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic History c.1720–1860’, in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 22, no. 1 (1988), pp. 57–96; K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘India’s International Economy in the Nineteenth Century: A Historical Survey’, in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (1968), pp. 31–50.
115
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Politics in Early Modern South India, Michigan, 2001, p. 106; Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, New York, 2012, pp. 353–5; Niccolao Manucci, Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India, 1653–1708, trans. William Irvine, London, 1907, vol. 3, pp. 369–70.
116
CPC 1, p. xxi; Stern, The Company State, p. 176; Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, pp. 358–9, 394.
117
Brijen K. Gupta, Sirajuddaullah and the East India Company, 1756–7, Leiden, 1966, p. 44.
118
Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639–1739, Cambridge, 1991, p. 162.
119
Ishrat Haque, Glimpses of Mughal Society and Culture, New Delhi, 1992, p. 21.
120
William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma, Princes and Poets in Mughal Delhi 1707–1857, Princeton, 2012, pp. 4–5; Zahir Uddin Malik, The Reign of Muhammad Shah 1719–1748, Aligarh, 1977.
121
Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, pp. 123–4.
122
Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions, pp. 15–16.
123
Sayid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Shah Walli-Allah and His Times, Canberra, 1980, p. 141; Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818, pp. 124–5; Zahir Uddin Malik, The Reign of Muhammad Shah, p. 133; Michael Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant, London, 2006, p. 189; Govind Sakharam Sardesai, A New History of the Marathas, 3 vols, Poona, 1946, vol. 2, p. 154; Bhargava, The Decline of the Mughal Empire, p. xv; Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, 1739–54, 4 vols, New Delhi, 1991, vol. 1, pp. 2, 135.
124
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 1, p. 302; Subrahmanyam, Un Grand Derangement, pp. 356–7; Malik, The Reign of Muhammad Shah, p. 135; Blake, Shahjahanabad, p. 150.
125
Malik, The Reign of Muhammad Shah, p. 111.
126
>
C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, pp. 8–9.
127
Malik, The Reign of Muhammad Shah, p. 265; Rizvi, Shah Walli-Allah and His Times, p. 141; Gordon, Marathas, pp. 125, 128, 129, 135; Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, vol. 2, p. 159.
128
Père Louis Bazin, ‘Memoires sur dernieres annees du regne de Thamas Kouli-Kan et sa mort tragique, contenus dans un letter du Frere Bazin’, 1751, in Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses Ecrites des Mission Etrangeres, Paris, 1780, vol. IV, pp. 277–321. This passage, pp. 314–18.
129
Willem Floor, ‘New Facts on Nadir Shah’s Indian Campaign’, in Iran and Iranian Studies: Essays in Honour of Iraj Afshar, ed. Kambiz Eslami, Princeton, 1998, pp. 198–220, p. 200.
130
Anand Ram Mukhlis, ‘Tazkira’, in Sir H. M. Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India as Told by its Own Historians, London, 1867, vol. VIII, pp. 82–3.
131
Subrahmanyam, Un Grand Derangement, pp. 357–8.
132
Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, p. 207.
133
Mukhlis, ‘Tazkira’, in Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, vol. VIII, p. 85.
134
Michael Edwards, King of the World: The Life and Times of Shah Alam, Emperor of Hindustan, London, 1970, p. 15.
135
Floor, ‘New Facts on Nadir Shah’s Indian Campaign’, p. 217.
136
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 1, pp. 315–17.
137
Mukhlis, ‘Tazkira’, in Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, vol. VIII, p. 86.
138
Floor, ‘New Facts on Nadir Shah’s Indian Campaign’, p. 217.
139
Mukhlis, ‘Tazkira’, in Elliot and Dowson, The History of India, vol. VIII, p. 87.
140
Mahdi Astarabadi, Tarikh-e Jahangosha-ye Naderi: The official history of Nader’s reign, Bombay lithograph 1849/1265), p. 207.
141
Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, 1739–54, vol. 1, pp. 2–3, 4, 13.
142
BL, Add 6585, Shakir Khan, Tarikh-i Shakir Khani, ff. 34–6.
143
Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput & Sepoy, Cambridge, 1990.
144
Washbrook, ‘Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c.1720–1860’, p. 67.
145
Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 3, pp. 160–1.
146
Subrahmanyam, Un Grand Derangement, p. 344.
147
S. P. Sen’s book, The French in India, 1763–1816, Calcutta, 1958; Arvind Sinha, The Politics of Trade: Anglo-French Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 1763–1793, New Delhi, 2002; Ferguson, Empire, pp. 30–2.
148
Jean Marie Lafont and Rehana Lafont, The French & Delhi, Agra, Aligarh and Sardhana, New Delhi, 2010, pp. 41–4.
149
The introduction of infantry drill to India occurred on a small scale before Dupleix. See David Harding’s Small Arms of the East India Company 1600–1856, London, 1997, vol. 4, pp. 150–65, and Randolf Cooper’s important essay, ‘Culture, Combat and Colonialism in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century India’, International History Review, vol. 27, no. 3 (September 2005), pp. 534–49 esp. pp. 537–8.
150
Henry Dodwell, Dupleix and Clive: The Beginning of Empire, London, 1920, pp. 1–9.
151
Ferguson, Empire, p. 31.
152
The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Dubash to Joseph François Dupleix, ed. J. F. Price and K. Rangachari, 12 vols, Madras, 1922, vol. 3, p. 90.
153
Ibid., p. 9; Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions, p. 14; Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, Oxford, 1988, p. 133.
154
The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, p. 96; Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions, p. 14; Parker, The Military Revolution, p. 133; Bert S. Hall and Kelly De Vries, ‘Essay Review – The “Military Revolution” Revisited’, Technology and Culture, 31 (1990), p. 502; Knud J. V. Jespersen, ‘Social Change and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Some Danish Evidence’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), pp. 1–2; Michael Howard, War in European History (1976, reprint), Oxford, 1977, pp. 61, 78; Hew Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War (1983, reprint), London, 1993, p. 33; Roy, ‘Military Synthesis in South Asia’.
155
Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, London, 1989, p. 19.
156
Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power, New Delhi, 2012, p. 11.
157
Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions, p. 19.
158
Gupta, Sirajuddaullah and the East India Company, p. 36.
159
Bryant, Emergence of British Power, p. 9.
160
Voyage en Inde, pp. 67–8. Modave’s thoughts were echoed by his old friend Voltaire: ‘Finally there remained with the French, in this part of the world, only the regret that they had spent, over the course of more than forty years, immense sums of money in the upkeep of a Company which never provided the least profit, which never paid anything from its trade profits to its shareholders and its creditors, which in its Indian administration survived only by means of secret brigandry, and which has been upheld only by the share of the farming of tobacco accorded to it by the king: a memorable and perhaps useless example of the lack of intelligence which the French nation has had up to now in the grand ruinous trade with India’, Voltaire, Précis du siècle de Louis XV, p. 1507, in Oeuvres historiques, ed. R. Pomeau, Paris, 1962, pp. 1297–572.
161
Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, 1754–63, New York, 2014, pp. 52–4.
162
Ibid., pp. 59–60.
CHAPTER 2: AN OFFER HE COULD NOT REFUSE
1
NAI, Bengal Select Committee, Letters from Court, 25 May 1756, vol. 23 (1756–71), 13 February 1756
2
Ibid.
3
Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, 1754–63, New York, 2014, p. 462.
4
John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company, London, 1991, pp. 111–12.
5
K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Pre-Modern Multinational Organisation, The Hague, 1981, p. 29.
6
Sir William Foster, The East India House: Its History and Associations, London, 1924, pp. 132–3.
7
Holden Furber, ‘Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800’, in Maritime India, intro. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, New Delhi, 2004, pp. 128–9; Tirthankar Roy, East India Company: The World’s Most Powerful Corporation, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 116–17.
8
Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth Century Britain, Cambridge, 2010.
9
P. J. Marshall, ‘The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion, 1700–1765’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, Oxford, 1998, pp. 267–9; Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings, London, 1954, p. 13; Burton Stein, ‘Eighteenth Century India: Another View’, Studies in History, vol. 5, 1 n.s. (1989), p. 20.
10
George Forrest, The Life of Lord Clive, 2 vols, London, 1918, vol. 1, pp. 232–3; Percival Spear, Master of Bengal: Clive and his India, London, 1975, pp. 62–3.
11
Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India, London, 1974, p. 3; A. M. Davies, Clive of Plassey, London, 1939, p. 7.
12
Forrest, The Life of Lord Clive, vol. 1, pp. 4–5.
13
Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 31.
14
Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, London, 1989, p. 29.
15
&n
bsp; Spear, Master of Bengal, p. 61.
16
Bruce Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars, 1688–1783, Harlow, 2001, pp. 99–100.
17
Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, pp. 30–1; Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, p. 67; G. J. Bryant, Emergence of British Power Power in India 1600–1784: A Grand Strategic Interpretation, Woodbridge, 2013, p. 59; Forrest, The Life of Lord Clive, vol. 1, pp. 194–201; Bence-Jones, Clive of India, pp. 65–7.
18
Forrest, The Life of Lord Clive, vol. 1, p. 218.
19
Ibid., p. 233.
20
P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America c. 1750–1783, Oxford, 2005, pp. 84–5.
21
Quoted in John Keay, India Discovered, London, 1981, p. 21.
22
Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 10.
23
Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, p. 148.
24
Brijen K. Gupta, Sirajuddaullah and the East India Company, 1756–7, Leiden, 1966, p. 14. But at this stage it was still the Asians and not the Europeans who were the major importers of bullion into Bengal in the early eighteenth century. One of the responsible officials of the EIC who lived in Bengal in the 1750–60s writes that it was the Asian merchants and not the Europeans who were the major importers of bullion into Bengal and that their imports of precious metals far exceeded those of the Europeans. Another Company official, Luke Scrafton, corroborates this finding. See Sushil Chaudhury, Companies Commerce and Merchants: Bengal in the Pre-Colonial Era, Oxford, 2017, pp. 389–95. According to Richard Eaton, ‘Even as late as the mid-eighteenth century, Asian traders – especially Gujaratis, Armenians, and Punjabis – played a more important role in Bengal’s commercial economy than did Europeans.’ Eaton points out that in exchange for manufactured textiles both Asian and European merchants poured into the delta substantial amounts of silver, which, minted into currency, fuelled the booming agrarian frontier by monetising the local economy. Relying on Mughal documents, Eaton has done excellent work on the Bengal delta, the long-term expanding agrarian frontier and the changing courses of rivers in the eighteenth century which allowed the Mughal rulers to extend a rich and fertile agrarian base of rice cultivation – a process which was disrupted with the Company’s intervention in Bengal by the late eighteenth century. See Richard M. Eaton, Essays on Islam and Indian History, Oxford, 2000, p. 263.