This is the final paradox of her Asiatic progress: that, despite all the time she spent away from James Crisp and in the company of George Smith, her marriage may still have been something that at a certain level she took seriously. Her husband’s bankruptcy, her own authorship, and perhaps his slave dealings and the original circumstances of their marriage, had put her relationship with Crisp under strain even before she arrived in the subcontinent. In every sense, her extraordinary travels widened the distance between them further, not least because of how much she changed over the course of them. Neither she – nor indeed Crisp – was likely now to remain content for long with staying amidst the waterways of Dhaka. Yet the evidence suggests that she still saw herself as caught up with Crisp in a joint enterprise, and that she was prepared to invest some effort in this. She might not live with him. She would not even necessarily stay close to their children. But she would strive to help him to make money, and to aid their collective survival and worldly advance. It was late July 1776 when she eventually returned to ‘my dear Crisp and precious boy’, barely a fortnight after the signing of the American Declaration of Independence.
6
World War and Family Revolutions
THE EVENTUAL SCALE of what began as a rebellion and a civil war along the eastern coastline of North America shattered Elizabeth Marsh’s life, and obliged her to reconfigure it. The American revolutionaries’ success in securing first covert, then open support from some of the main European colonial and naval powers – France, Spain, and the Dutch – together with Britain’s own imperial and naval reach, ensured that the war proliferated across multiple land boundaries, and reached into every one of the world’s oceans. Almost immediately sweeping into Canada, and soon into various Native American lands, the conflict spread progressively into British, French, Spanish and Dutch territories and areas of rivalry in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and northern Europe, sections of the Indian subcontinent, and parts of northern and southern Africa and Central America; while its economic and diplomatic ramifications, and in some cases its demographic repercussions, extended still farther, into South America, Russia, West Africa, China, and ultimately New South Wales.1
Since the livelihoods of so many of them were bound up with the British state, the British Empire, the Royal Navy and the sea, the East India Company and long-distance commerce, the men of the Crisp and Marsh families were ineluctably caught up in the disruptions and violence of this war, and in some of the issues and ideas involved in it. This in turn affected Elizabeth Marsh, not least because of a persistent paradox of her life. Original, determined, selfish and irrepressibly mobile, she was also a dependent being. There was a sense indeed in which her deviations from customary female norms actually rendered her less self-sufficient, not more so. The publication of her personal testament as The Female Captive, like the free passages she repeatedly sought out aboard naval ships, like her ambitious travels overland with scores of guards and guides, all required her to have recourse to, and to seek aid from, men. Consequently, the onset of transcontinental warfare that increasingly sucked in and distracted very large numbers of men necessarily curtailed and changed the quality of her activities. There could now be no further explorations of the Indian subcontinent on her part, along routes of her own choosing, and with a uniformed escort, because the East India Company’s troops soon had more urgent and dangerous things to do. The war’s onset cost her auxiliaries in a more intimate fashion. It coincided with, and contributed to, the deaths of some of her closest relations and supporters. As a result she was forced to hunt out additional sources of income, to embark on new, grimly functional rather than revelatory voyages, and to adjust the conditions of her own and her children’s lives.
These shocks and alterations may help to explain why her extant writings come to an end along with her Asiatic journey, and her return to Dhaka and her husband, in July 1776. Her intense, intermittent accounts of her evolution in the face of new encounters and sceneries cease abruptly at this point, and no further journals or copies of her manuscripts are known to exist, and there are no letters. So her ideas and emotions after mid-1776 have to be deduced substantially from her actions; and these in turn have to be reconstructed at one or more removes, by drawing on and patching together the records and accounts of others. In particular, Elizabeth Marsh’s experiences during her final years have to be recovered from the testimonies of a series of men who powerfully influenced what happened to her and what she was able to achieve, but whom she was also able at times to turn to use.
The first of these witnesses who both determined and eased her progress is necessarily her husband, James Crisp. While Elizabeth was travelling and exploring in eastern and southern India, he had remained behind in Bengal making money, for himself and his family through his dealings in north Indian textiles, and for the East India Company by overseeing the local production and sale of salt.
Gandhi’s complaint that the taxes on salt levied by the British Raj were ‘the most iniquitous of all from the poor man’s standpoint’ conveys exactly why so many rulers over the centuries and in different parts of the world have found it advantageous to impose them. Salt lent itself to taxation for the same reason that it served in some societies as a form of payment in kind, and as an instrument of barter: it was an article that no one, however impoverished, could entirely do without.2 Salt is found in virtually every part of the human body, and is essential to life. In the past, it was also vital for the manufacture of gunpowder; and before refrigeration, it was indispensable for preserving food. The Nawabs of Bengal had acknowledged the mineral’s indispensability by establishing a monopoly on it; and after the East India Company assumed authority over the province, it treated salt in a similar, but more rigorous, fashion. In 1772, salt production in Bengal, which was estimated conservatively at some ninety thousand tons annually, became a Company monopoly. Indian salt-farmers were introduced throughout the province to supervise production on the Company’s behalf, shunting aside much of the authority traditionally exercised over the industry by local landholders.3
In his official employment as salt agent for Bhulua, a huge, partly waterlogged region that approximates now to the Noakhali district of Bangladesh, James Crisp was thus in a position that was at once politically sensitive, economically significant, and physically very arduous. He had to monitor the productivity of thousands of malangis, the peasant workers who produced the salt, and collect regular samples of it in order to check for quality. He had to oversee the condition of the salt stores, or golas, of which he calculated there were at least 286 in Bhulua. Many of them, he complained, searching for a simile from home, looked ‘more like cow-houses than golas’. It was Crisp’s job to ensure that these low-lying, tumbledown structures were not overwhelmed by water from Bengal’s latticework of rivers, especially during the ‘inundations in the time of the rains’, between June and September. He also had to arrange for his region’s salt to be weighed, and for its transportation by boat and bullock cart to set locations on certain dates, so that it could be auctioned; and notices of these salt sales had to be prepared and displayed throughout the region in Persian, Bengali and English. Finally, it was Crisp’s responsibility to ensure that indigenous merchants purchasing salt at auctions received what they paid for promptly, and did ‘not have any cause to complain’.4
In order to accomplish these tasks James Crisp was assisted by a deputy, and together they oversaw forty Bengali assistants, without whom this system had not the slightest chance of working. Crisp himself was expected to tour Bhulua on horseback, elephant and by boat, make monthly (sometimes fortnightly) reports to his immediate superiors in the Provincial Council of Dhaka, and submit detailed accounts. Once checked, these accounts were dispatched to the Governor General, Warren Hastings, and his Council in Calcutta, who had every reason to scrutinize them in turn, since profits on salt made up a substantial part of the Company’s Bengal revenue. As Hastings warned James Crisp and his fellow salt agents in
a circular in March 1775, any negligence ‘or any connivance’ on their part, any failure of ‘vigilance and punctuality’, would ‘injure an important branch of the government’s revenue, [and] will subject you to our severe displeasure and must consequently be attended with disgrace and loss of station’.5
Initially, Crisp’s salt agency in Bhulua went well. Production levels seem to have risen under his stewardship; and, like most people who met him, the members of Dhaka’s Provincial Council were immediately impressed by his energy. ‘We have every reason to be satisfied with his industry and regularity,’ they assured Hastings late in 1775.6 In some respects, too, Elizabeth Marsh’s husband was fortunate in his new position. Salt agents did not enjoy job security, and they were not covenanted servants of the East India Company, the self-regarding aristocracy of the British community in the subcontinent. But, at the equivalent of £450 per annum, Crisp’s basic salary was generous; and while the terrain and the manufacturing networks he now had to deal with were in every sense alien, he possessed experience in the salt trade, and in dealing with different peoples and different languages. Elizabeth Marsh might strive to get by for much of the time in pidgin ‘Moors’, but in addition to Hindustani, her husband had little choice but to learn some Bengali, and to acquire a smattering of Persian, the embedded language of administration, law and revenue-collection.7
Despite all of James Crisp’s efforts, however, success in his new post progressively eluded him, in large part because the most relentless challenges confronting him were beyond the scope of any individual’s competence. As a leading north Indian intellectual, Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, subsequently argued, East India Company officials had only very recently shifted from working mainly as traders and soldiers on the coastal fringes of the subcontinent to assuming the roles of governors and administrators within Bengal. ‘Oppressive, irregular, capricious, unsteady, and peculating’ in some cases, with no developed ethos of public service, and manifestly no accumulated bureaucratic memory, the Company’s men were almost invariably also out of their depth. They were ‘quite strangers to the methods of raising tribute’ in Bengal, Ghulam Hussain complained, and ‘to the maxims of estimating the revenues, or of comprehending the ways of tax gathering’; and these strictures certainly applied to James Crisp and to his immediate superiors in Dhaka.8
Himself a recent migrant to the subcontinent, James Crisp had to implement a salt monopoly that had only been introduced by the East India Company in 1772, in a district, Bhulua, it had only started to govern since 1765, working directly to Dhaka’s Provincial Council, that had itself only been put in place in 1774, and whose British members possessed only limited local knowledge. Not just Crisp himself, but also his Company superiors were substantially making it up as they went along. Partly as a result of this, there was often a striking absence of capacity to get things to work. In response to an early request by him on behalf of his Indian clerks and auditors for essential office supplies, for instance, Dhaka’s Provincial Council informed Crisp that it was ‘not in our power to furnish you with a supply of stationery’. By the same token, Crisp’s Company superiors demanded that he construct new, water-resistant golas throughout Bhulua in which to store the region’s salt. Since ‘the land is so very low all over that country’, this meant employing large numbers of men to raise the riverbanks on which the golas were situated; yet, as Crisp complained, he was expected to pay for this entirely out of his own funds.9 The gulf between what he was expected to accomplish and the means afforded him was torture to an enterprising man who knew he must perform well and show a profit to have any chance of his contract as salt agent being extended.
Ill-informed and ill-equipped in its implementation, the East India Company’s salt monopoly was further undermined by some of its own officials. After 1773, it was illegal for Europeans in Bengal to be ‘concerned directly or indirectly with the salt trade’, unless they were working on behalf of the Company. By contrast, Bengal’s native inhabitants were to possess ‘a natural right to an open trade’. Within the necessary and benevolent framework of the Company’s overall monopoly, or so the theory went, trade in salt in Bengal was to be the business of Indians only, and it was to be free. In reality, individual Company officials continued to take a cut, often operating behind a front of indigenous agents. A fellow salt agent described the kind of subversion from within the Company machine that James Crisp was obliged to contend with:
A salt digger. Anonymous painting, c.1825.
At certain periods it [the salt] is brought up in large boats to Dacca, and there exposed to public sale … In the mode of exposing the lots to sale I could perceive no small intrigue was carrying on, for I saw that the natives had not that free access to the public sale to which they were entitled, and that the lots fell, as they were put up, to the dependents of the members in Council, who by this means gained to themselves a considerable advantage.10
Even if Crisp himself refrained from such illicit salt dealings (and there is no proof either way), he would still have needed to tread very deftly around the sharp practices of some of his Dhaka superiors.
The passive and active resistance he encountered from some of Bhulua’s native inhabitants was a still more pervasive challenge. His problems in this regard began with the malangis. These were the desperately poor people whose job it was in late autumn to dig salt ponds near the sea and salt-water rivers. This was the start of the salt-making cycle. The men would then build
sluices to let in saltwater during high tide. Salt was absorbed into the earth and then more saltwater taken in with the spring tides. The additional seawater combined with the salty soil to produce concentrated brine, which they put in oblong pots, about 200 of which were cemented together by mud in a dome-shaped kiln. The salt makers placed vents at the north and south ends of each kiln so that fire would be fanned by prevailing breezes. As the brine in the pots evaporated, workers … added more brine, one ladle at a time, until each pot was about three-quarters full of salt crystals.11
Malangis often tried to supplement their incomes by making additional salt, working at night in Dhaka’s dense woodlands, or in their own huts with the help of their wives, and then selling their ‘illicit’ product to smugglers. The pykars (agents) whom the Company employed to purchase salt from the malangis also subverted the system by frequently selling quantities of it on their own behalf. They would cover up these private sales by adulterating their remaining salt supplies with sand, or fiddling their accounts. Or, as James Crisp complained, pykars might simply refuse to produce any accounts at all (‘after being deceived by their repeated promises of compliance, I find it is in vain any longer to expect the least satisfaction from them of this kind’). In addition, Bhulua’s golas, which were generally unguarded earth buildings, leaked salt into the surrounding communities. About fifty thousand maunds of salt had been illicitly removed from his golas, Crisp reported in June 1775, much of it by boat at night-time.12 Such raids on golas were sometimes sponsored by local landholders, who were angry at being stripped of their former profits from salt works. ‘The people of these districts are a set of desperate smugglers,’ Crisp wrote from Lakshmipur in 1776, ‘who keep an armed force, and … pay no regard to so small a one as I have.’ There were repeated reports from Bhulua, and from the other salt districts in Bengal, of attacks on the East India Company’s salt boats as they sailed slowly towards the auction sites. On occasions, salt smugglers would fire at the boats’ flags, blazoned with the Company’s colours and with the Union Jack.13
It is important to remember that James Crisp had himself once been a smuggler. That he was having to function now as a fiscal enforcer, and deal with multiple levels of resistance from Britons and Asians alike, was a novel, thoroughly unwelcome experience that he increasingly came to resent. Yet, as he tried unavailingly and ever more from a distance to carry out his salt duties in Bhulua, Crisp was not simply a lonely individual operating out of his depth and out of his element in a particular imperia
l environment. He was also a single figure in a global landscape marked out both by more intensive revenue-raising expedients, and by sharper resistance to them.
In parts of the Americas, Asia, Northern Africa, and within Europe itself, levels of taxation and other fiscal duties were rising at this time, and so were serious protests against them. Growing competition and conflict between states, and a ‘pre-industrial arms race in which fiscal strength was as essential to military power as advances in strategy and technology’, had made rulers ever more hungry for additional revenue. It is open to debate just how far this raging fiscal hunger provoked a ‘global crisis’, but it is beyond dispute that increasing exactions by many different rulers were fostering popular revolts across the continents, and that these became more serious and more widespread during the second half of the eighteenth century.14 Pugachev’s revolt among the Ural Cossacks in 1773–74 and the Comunero revolt in New Granada (Colombia) in 1781 were both fired in large part by resentment at increased wartime taxation. In the former case, the spark was Catherine the Great’s need for more money in order to pay for Russia’s war against the Ottoman Empire. In the case of the Comunero revolt, one of the triggers was Spain’s want of extra funds in part so that it could join the American Revolutionaries in their war against Britain. Nor was this drive to raise more revenue so as to finance greater military effort and effectiveness the preserve only of Christian rulers. In Morocco, Sidi Muhammad’s policies of seeking out new commercial treaties, and of levying increased duties on incoming and outgoing trade, were also driven by the desire to build up his armies and his authority.15
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh Page 26