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

by William Dalrymple

  These are clearly complicated matters, involving ecological as well as economic history, and the jury remains out. I have tried to argue here,however, that whether or not the Company was directly responsible for the famine, or whether ecological factors played a more important role, its incompetent response made the famine in West Bengal much more deadly, while its excessive tax collecting hugely exacerbated the sufferings of the Bengalis under its rule – which was certainly the opinion of many observers, both Indian and British, who wrote accounts of the disaster at the time.

  2

  OIOC, Bengal Public Consultations, 23 October 1769.

  3

  Datta, Society, Economy and the Market, p. 244.

  4

  Abdul Majed Khan, The Transition in Bengal 1756–1775, Cambridge, 1969, p. 218.

  5

  Datta, Society, Economy and the Market, p. 244.

  6

  Quoted in John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, Cambridge, 1993, p. 196.

  7

  For Richard Becher’s Report on Cannibalism, see OIOC, SCC, P/A/10.

  8

  Datta, Society, Economy and the Market, p. 252; Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India, Cambridge, 2007, p. 72.

  9

  I am going here with the figures of Datta, Society, Economy and the Market, p. 264, who has done the most intensive and detailed work on the famine. He rejects the widely quoted figure given by Warren Hastings (who was in London at the time) that 10 million, one-third of the population, died based on detailed village-by-village study of tax returns in the years before and after the famine. Data has shown that the famine was at its worst in West Bengal, and that large parts of Eastern Bengal were unaffected. See also Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, London, 2016, p. 114, and Abdul Majed Khan, The Transition in Bengal 1756–1775, Cambridge, 1969, p. 219.

  10

  Joseph Price, The Saddle Put on the Right Horse, London, 1783, vol. 1, p. 33. See also Wilson, India Conquered, p. 114.

  11

  OIOC, HM, vol. 102, p. 94. Also Wilson, India Conquered, p. 113.

  12

  Khan, The Transition in Bengal, p. 219.

  13

  Datta, Society, Economy and the Market, p. 259.

  14

  Syed Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, Seir Mutaqherin, Calcutta, 1790–94, vol. 3, p. 56.

  15

  W. W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal, London, 1868, pp. 43–5.

  16

  Khan, The Transition in Bengal, p. 219; S. C. Mukhopadhyay, British Residents at the Darbar of Bengal Nawabs at Murshidabad 1757–1772, Delhi [n.d.], p. 388.

  17

  Jeremy Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj: The Life & Trials of Warren Hastings, Chicago, 2000, p. 11.

  18

  Datta, Society, Economy and the Market, p. 259.

  19

  Dean Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, Berkeley, 1997, pp. 35–6.

  20

  Mukhopadhyay, British Residents at the Darbar of Bengal Nawabs at Murshidabad, p. 388.

  21

  Datta, Society, Economy and the Market, pp. 256–60; Nick Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, London, 2006, p. 90.

  22

  Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Economic History of India under Early British Rule, 1757–1837, London, 1908, p. 52.

  23

  P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead – Eastern India 1740–1828, Cambridge, 1987, p. 134.

  24

  Mukhopadhyay, British Residents at the Darbar of Bengal Nawabs at Murshidabad, p. 378; Khan, The Transition in Bengal, p. 217.

  25

  Khan, The Transition in Bengal, p. 222.

  26

  Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1771. The author signed himself merely as ‘JC’, but some passages closely mirror those in John Debrit’s memoirs.

  27

  Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World, p. 94.

  28

  Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1771.

  29

  Mukhopadhyay, British Residents at the Darbar of Bengal Nawabs at Murshidabad, p. 399.

  30

  Quoted in George Forrest, The Life of Lord Clive, New Delhi, 1986, vol. 2, p. 383.

  31

  Quoted in H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833, Cambridge, 2006, p. 16.

  32

  H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757–1773, Cambridge, 1991, p. 95.

  33

  Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1767, p. 152; Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World, p. 17.

  34

  P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America c. 1750–1783, Oxford, 2007, p. 199.

  35

  John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, London, 2003, p. 42.

  36

  Quoted in Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge, 2010, p. 87.

  37

  Jack Green, Arenas of Asiatic Plunder, London, 1767, Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World, p. 103.

  38

  Extract from Act II of The Nabob, a play by Samuel Foote, quoted in P. J. Marshall, Problems of Empire: Britain and India, 1757–1813, London, 1968.

  39

  Arthur Young, Political Essays concerning the present state of the British Empire, London, 1772, p. 518.

  40

  Alexander Dow, History of Hindostan, 3 vols, Dublin, 1792, vol. 3, p. v; Ranajit Guha points out that long before R. C. Dutt and Digby and later nationalists, the phrase ‘drain of wealth’ had come into common use through the Company officials such as Dow. Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, Durham, NC, 1983, pp. 33–4.

  41

  William Bolts, Considerations on Indian Affairs; Particularly Respecting the Present State of Bengal and its Dependencies, 3 vols, London, 1772–5.

  42

  N. L. Hallward, William Bolts: A Dutch Adventurer Under John Company, Cambridge, 1920; Willem G. J. Kuiters, The British in Bengal 1756–1773: A Society in Transition seen through the Biography of a Rebel: William Bolts (1739–1808), Paris, 2002. Lucy Sutherland cites Bolts as being responsible for turning public opinion against Clive. Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics, Oxford, 1952, p. 221.

  43

  This story is the origin of the later nationalist myth that the British themselves cut off the thumbs of workers in order to break Indian textile production and so assist the import of Lancashire cotton.

  44

  There is a good analysis of Bolts’ writings in Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, Harvard, 2006, pp. 250–4. See also Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India, pp. 61–2.

  45

  Ralph Leycester to Warren Hastings, March 1772, BL, Add Mss 29133, f. 72.

  46

  Quoted in Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, p. 15.

  47

  The Monthly Review (1772); see also Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World, pp. 78, 96.

  48

  Bowen, Revenue and Reform, p. 127; H. Hamilton, ‘The Failure of the Ayr Bank, 1772’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, VIII (1955–6), pp. 405–17.

  49

  The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross, 2nd edn, Oxford, 1987, p. 162, quoted by Emma Rothschild in her brilliant unpublished essay, ‘The East India Company and the American Revolution’.

  50

  Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, p. 212.

  51

  Bowen, Revenue and Reform, p. 117.

  52

  BL, Add Mss, 29133, f. 534, quoted in Bowen, Rev
enue and Reform, pp. 119–21.

  53

  Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj, p. 81. Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World, pp. 90–5.

  54

  Bowen, Revenue and Reform, p. 127.

  55

  Quoted in Wilson, India Conquered, p. 129.

  56

  Anon, The Present State of the British Interest in India, quoted in Monthly Review, vol. XLVIII (1773), p. 99.

  57

  Thomas Pownall, The Right, Interest and Duty of Government, as concerned in the affairs of the East India Company, revised edn, 1781, p. 4. Quoted in Bowen, The Business of Empires, p. 17.

  58

  George III to Grafton, 9 Dec 1766, in J. Fortescue, Correspondence of George III, 1760–1783, 6 vols (1927–8), vol. I, pp. 423–4. Quoted in Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, p. 209.

  59

  Bowen, Revenue and Reform, p. 85.

  60

  Forrest, The Life of Lord Clive, vol. 2, pp. 404–5.

  61

  Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 408–9.

  62

  Nechtman, Nabobs, p. 84.

  63

  28 May 1773, BL, Egerton Mss, 249, ff. 84–6.

  64

  BL, Egerton Mss, 240, pp. 221, 225–6.

  65

  For the case in support of Francis as ‘Junius’, see The Letters of Junius, ed. John Cannon, Oxford, 1978.

  66

  See Linda Colley’s brilliant article: ‘Gendering the Globe: The Political and Imperial Thought of Philip Francis’, Past & Present, no. 209 (November 2010), pp. 117–48. See also Sophia Weitzman, Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, Manchester, 1929; Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings, London, 1954, p. 138.

  67

  W. S. Lewis et al., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols, New Haven, CT, 1937–83, vol. 32, pp. 61–2.

  68

  Quoted in Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India, London, 1974, pp. 300, 356. Patty Ducarel was a sister of General Gustavus Ducarel (1745–1800).

  69

  Nechtman, Nabobs, p. 87; Bence-Jones, Clive of India, p. 299.

  70

  Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India, pp. 150–1.

  71

  Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 133.

  72

  Ibid.

  73

  Sophia Weitzman, Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, Manchester, 1929, p. 227.

  74

  Ibid., pp. 221–2.

  75

  Ibid., p. 224.

  76

  Feiling, Warren Hastings, pp. 232–3.

  77

  Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 3, p. 168.

  78

  Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, London, 1989, p. 148.

  79

  Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India, p. 139.

  80

  Sir Penderel Moon, Warren Hastings and British India, London, 1947, p. 113.

  81

  G. R. Gleig, Memoirs of the Life of the Rt Hon Warren Hastings, First Governor General of Bengal, 3 vols, London, 1841, vol. 1, p. 317.

  82

  Hastings to J. Dupre, 11 November 1772, BL, Add Mss 29,127, f. 63v. Hastings to L. Sullivan, Kasimbazar, 7 September 1772, ibid., f. 38v.

  83

  Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj, pp. 89–90.

  84

  Quoted in ibid., p. 57.

  85

  Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, p. 149.

  86

  Moon, Warren Hastings and British India, p. 87.

  87

  Quoted in Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj, p. 147. For Jones see S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study of Eighteeth-Century Attitudes to India, Cambridge, 1968.

  88

  Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 138.

  89

  Bhagavad Gita, 2, 47–51, translated for me by Sir James Mallinson. For Hastings’ attachment to these verses, see Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 238.

  90

  Colley, Gendering the Globe, p. 121; Moon, Warren Hastings and British India, p. 348.

  91

  Some post-colonial historians have taken a more benign attitude to Francis, notably Ranajit Guha, one of the founders of Subaltern Studies, who has written admiringly of his wide reading of radical French thinkers and the intellectual rigour which he channelled into projects for agrarian, administrative and monetary reform in Bengal. See Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal, especially chapters 3–4.

  92

  Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 3, pp. 184–6.

  93

  Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 160.

  94

  Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800, New York, 2003, p. 230, quoting the Bhausahebanci Bhakar.

  95

  Ibid., p. 231. See also the always excellent Uday S. Kulkarni, ‘Solstice at Panipat: An Authentic Account of the Panipat Campaign’, Pune, 2012; Jadunath Sarkar, ‘Events Leading up to Panipat and Panipat, 1761’, in India Historical Quarterly (June 1934), pp. 258–73 and pp. 547–58.

  96

  Irfan Habib (ed.), Resistance and Modernisation under Haidar Ali & Tipu Sultan, New Delhi, 1999, Introduction, p. xxii.

  97

  Letter from the Court of Directors to the Council in Bengal, 27 April 1765, in Fort William-India House Correspondence, London, 1949–58, vol. 4, p. 96.

  98

  For the bore of the Mysore artillery see Jean-Marie Lafont, Indika: Essays in Indo-French Relations 1630–1976, Delhi, 2000, p. 157. For the rockets see Linda Colley, ‘Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire’, in Past & Present, no. 168 (August 2000), p. 190.

  99

  Captain Mathews, cited in Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power, Princeton, 2012, p. 85.

  100

  John Carnac to the Bombay Council, 1 January 1779, BL, OIOC, P/D/63, f. 132.

  101

  Replies to Resolutions, 24/01/1782, BL, IOR, bscc P/D/68, ff. 617–18, 24, quoted in Mesrob Vartavarian, ‘An Open Military Economy: The British Conquest of South India Reconsidered, 1780–1799’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 57, no. 4 (2014), pp. 486–510, p. 494.

  102

  Stewart Gordon, The Marathas: 1600–1818, Cambridge, 1993, p. 164.

  103

  For Nana Phadnavis and his celebrated intelligence network, see C. A. Bayly, Empire & Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 31–2.

  104

  Govind Sakharam Sardesai, A New History of the Marathas, 3 vols, Baroda, 1948, vol. 3, pp. 97–8.

  105

  Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1765–1818’, in Peter Marshall, The Eighteenth Century, Oxford, 1998, p. 519.

  106

  Mark Wilks, Historical sketches of the south of India, vol. 2, 1820, pp. 261–2; Vartavarian, ‘An Open Military Economy’, pp. 486–510, p. 491.

  107

  Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj, p. 134.

  108

  Ibid.

  109

  Ibid., pp. 113–14.

  110

  BL, Add Mss 39, 878, f. 36; Moon, Warren Hastings and British India, p. 249.

  111

  Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj, p. 82.

  112

  Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 3, p. 125.

  113

  Captain Muat’s Account of the Defeat at Pollilur, BL, IOR, HM 223, p. 117.

  114

  Ibid.

  115

  John Baillie’s Account of Pollilur, BL, IOR, HM 223, pp. 160–6.

  116

  Ibid.

  117

  Captain Wood’s Account of Pollilur, BL, IOR, HM 211, f. 246.

&nbs
p; 118

  Captain Muat’s Account of the Defeat at Pollilur, BL, IOR, HM 223, pp. 83–5.

  119

  A lieutenant of the 73rd Highland Regiment, in Alan Tritton, When the Tiger Fought the Thistle, London, 2013, pp. 271–2.

  120

  Tritton, When the Tiger Fought the Thistle, pp. 243, 248–53, 262–3.

  121

  John Baillie’s Account of Pollilur, BL, IOR, HM 223, pp. 160–6.

  122

  Tritton, When the Tiger Fought the Thistle, pp. 272–4.

  123

  Quoted by Mohibbul Hasan, History of Tipu Sultan, Calcutta, 1951, p. 15.

  124

  Ross to Macartney, 07/06/1781, IOR, HM 330, ff. 259–61; Davis to Coote, 02/07/1781, Add. Mss 22439, f. 9, quoted in Vartavarian, ‘An Open Military Economy’, p. 507.

  125

  It was actually the job of boys and young men from some hereditary drummer castes to dance as girls. From the Mysore perspective, this may not have been anywhere near as extraordinary or outrageous as it sounds, though of course the British would have found it hugely humiliating. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850, London, 2002, pp. 276–91; Colley, ‘Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire’, in Past & Present, no. 168 (August 2000).

  126

  James Scurry, The Captivity, Sufferings and Escape of James Scurry, who was detained a prisoner during ten years, in the dominions of Haidar Ali and Tippoo Saib, London, 1824, pp. 252–3.

  127

  G. J. Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 16oo–1784: A Grand Strategic Interpretation, Woodbridge, 2013, p. 291.

  128

  BL, OIOC, HM 246, f. 335.

  129

  Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 246.

  130

  Moon, Warren Hastings and British India, p. 5.

  131

  Incomplete Draft (1785) of an account of the Mysore War (1780–84), BL, OIOC, Mss Eur K 116, f. 84. Quoted in Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850, London, 2005, p. 158.

  132

  Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, pp. 330–2.

  133

  Quoted by Emma Rothschild in her unpublished essay, ‘The East India Company and the American Revolution’.

  134

  Narrative of all the Proceedings and Debates … on East India Affairs (1784), p. 89, quoted in Colley, Captives, p. 272.

  135

  Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 230.

  136

  Parliamentary History, 21 (1780–81), pp. 1201–2, quoted in Colley, Captives, p. 275.

  137

  Lewis et al., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols, vol. 29, p. 123.