The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  14. Parl. Hist. 21 (1780–81), pp.1201–2.

  15. NA, PROB 11/1396. Richard Smith claimed to be the real father of Amelia Cuthbert, who was born in Madras in 1766, and who married George Marsh junior in 1785. Given that ‘Smith’ is such a common surname, it is impossible to be certain exactly how Richard Smith was related to the Marsh clan. A member of the latter, yet another ‘George Marsh’, is known to have married an Elizabeth Smith in Rochester in 1705, and this may have been the origin of the connection. The crucial point is obviously that both Richard Smith and Elizabeth Marsh took some kind of kinship tie for granted.

  16. Orme writes of dining with General Smith and ‘a young lady whom he [Digby Dent] takes as a passenger’ on 30 May 1770. ‘Guard your heart,’ he adds. Other than EM and her six-year-old daughter, no other women are known to have sailed on the Dolphin: IOL, MSS EUR/Orme OV., 202, fol. 37; for Johanna Ross and EM, see IOL, P/154/57, fol. 77.

  17. IJ, pp.6–7.

  18. S.M. Neild, ‘Colonial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Modern Asian Studies 13 (1979), pp.217–46.

  19. IJ, pp.7–8.

  20. G. Quilley (ed.), William Hodges 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration (2004), p.36.

  21. IJ, pp.6, 20.

  22. Guide to the Records of the Ganjam District from 1774 to 1835 (Madras, 1934), pp.105–6.

  23. Boswell is quoted in P.M. Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p.16.

  24. IJ, p.10; F. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, MD, 1995), p.175.

  25. IJ, pp.1, 7, 10, 26, 36, 39–40; for the significance of the minuet, see J. Eglin, The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Bath (2005), pp.43, 72–3.

  26. H.F. Thompson, The Intrigues of a Nabob (1780), p.32. The description ‘European’ was often, though not invariably, applied by nominal Britons in the subcontinent to each other.

  27. See D. Ghosh, ‘Who Counts as “Native”? Gender, Race, and Subjectivity in Colonial India’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6 (2005).

  28. Thus a novelist had a character remark in 1789 how in Calcutta’s theatre ‘several country-born ladies figured away in the boxes … and their persons are genteel, and their dress magnificent’: M. Clough (ed.), Hartly House Calcutta (1989 edn), p.204; L.E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal 45 (2002), p.879.

  29. IJ, p.25.

  30. IOL, MSS Eur E 25, fol. 19; IJ, pp.30, 33–4.

  31. IJ, pp.16, 30, 33.

  32. IJ, pp.8–9.

  33. A Captain George Smith of Ellore appears regularly in the Madras army lists from 1765: see IOL, L/MIL/11/1, fols 28, 43, 74, 126, 177; for his likely birth, see IOL, N/2/1, fol. 455.

  34. IJ, p.55; for the flexibility of early modern usages of the term ‘cousin’, see N. Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2001), especially pp.149–52.

  35. I am grateful to Felicity Nussbaum for some of these details about Elizabeth Marsh’s Indian Journal.

  36. IJ, pp.4 and 38.

  37. ‘A Letter from a Lady in Calcutta to her Friend in England’, published on 12 August 1784: W.S. Seton-Karr et al. (eds), Selections from Calcutta Gazettes (6 vols, Calcutta, 1864–69), I, pp.23–4; P.J. Marshall, ‘The White Town of Calcutta Under the Rule of the East India Company’, Modern Asian Studies 34 (2000), pp.326–7.

  38. Clough, Hartly House, p.51. For an incisive discussion of European women in colonial spaces that focuses however on the nineteenth century, when female options and attitudes became in some respects more constricted, see A.L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA, 2002).

  39. Marshall, ‘White Town of Calcutta’.

  40. J.M. Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979), passim.

  41. P.J. Marshall, ‘The Private Fortune of Marian Hastings’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 37 (1964), pp.245–53.

  42. A. Wright and W. Sclater (eds), Sterne’s Eliza (1922), pp.85, 95–6; for Ross, see her will: IOL, P/154/57, fol. 77; on Cross and Persian trade: IOL G/29/20, fols 62 and 71.

  43. IOL, MSS Photo Eur 32, I, fol. 89, and III, fol. 3.

  44. J.S. Cotton et al., Catalogue of Manuscripts in European Languages Belonging to the Library of the India Office … The Mackenzie … Collections (1992 edn), p.x; IJ, p.38.

  45. F. Plowden, An Investigation of the Native Rights of British Subjects (1784), pp.108 and 159.

  46. IOL, MSS Eur. E.4, fol. 157.

  47. IJ, p.8; Sterne’s Eliza, p.162.

  48. See Francis Milbourne Marsh’s will: NA, PROB 11/1095.

  49. On Milbourne Warren’s story, see FB, fols 35–7; and the papers regarding his divorce proceedings in Lambeth Palace Library, G139/114 and E41/65.

  50. On Manila’s expanding significance from the late sixteenth century, see D.O. Flynn and A. Giráldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”: The Origin of World Trade in 1571’, Journal of World History 6 (1995), pp.201–21; N.P. Cushner (ed.), Documents illustrating the British Conquest of Manila, 1762–1763 (1971).

  51. Lambeth Palace Library, G139/114 and E41/65.

  52. IJ, p.9.

  53. Q. Craufurd, Sketches Chiefly Relating to the History, Religion, Learning and Manners of the Hindoos (1790), advertisement, and pp.8, 61; IJ, pp.9–10.

  54. IJ, pp.10–11.

  55. IJ, pp.7, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 24, 44, 62. The analogy is Edward Said’s: see his Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993).

  56. See for instance JC’s letter at NA, SP 46/151, fol. 5.

  57. ‘Translation from the Persian Respecting Slavery’, c.1774, printed in S. Islam (ed.), Bangladesh District Records: Chittagong 1760–1787 (Dhaka, 1978), pp.227–8; for the East India Company and slavery in the subcontinent, see I. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (Oxford, 1999), pp.176–224.

  58. IJ, p.28; cf. E.A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics 1716–1818 (Cambridge, 1995), p.61.

  59. FCMS (unfol), and see infra, p.152.

  60. FC, pp.101, 106. It can only be speculated whether the description the ‘fair Christian’ was in fact an assertion by EM or her publisher about her skin-colour as well as her religion. In the eighteenth century, ‘fair’ sometimes meant pale as distinct from dark; but the adjective was more commonly used to describe beauty in women. I suspect that the description in this case was intended as an allusion to Eliza Haywood’s very popular The Fair Captive (1721).

  61. IJ, pp.18, 20 and 51.

  62. Bodleian Library, Dep.d.485, fol. 140 obverse; Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, p.72.

  63. Bodleian Library, Dep. d.485, fol. 49; Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, frontispiece and pp.220–1; for Plowden, see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 (2005), pp.60–2.

  64. IJ, pp.51–2.

  65. J. Rennell, Memoir of a Map, p.57; for these and other early modern European writers on the subcontinent, see K. Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–1800 (Delhi, 1997), pp.12–108.

  66. IJ, pp.21–2.

  67. IJ, pp.26, 28, 31.

  68. IJ, pp.37–8, 41, 44.

  69. IJ, p.44; Guide to the Records of the Ganjam District, pp.1, 93–107.

  70. IJ, pp.42–3, 45–6.

  71. It was a standard complaint among late-eighteenth-century incomers to the subcontinent that ‘the Hindoos will not explain their tenets’: see S. Chaudhuri (ed.), Proceedings of the Asiatic Society (Calcutta, 1980), pp.64–5; IJ, pp.46–7.

  72. As a result, Elizabeth Marsh was also apparently ignorant of the persistent European superstition that pilgrims sometimes threw themselves under the wheels of Jagannath’s chariot.

  73. I am grateful to Susan Bay
ly for information on Puri. For an expert discussion of the cult, see H. Kulke and B. Schnepel, Jagannath Revisited (New Delhi, 2001).

  74. There is an evocative and well-illustrated account of Puri festivals available online: see http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/british-view-india.htm.

  75. IJ, pp.47–9, 56.

  76. IJ, pp.50–2.

  77. IJ, pp.54, 56–7; cf. C.A. Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, 1986).

  78. IJ, pp.27, 57–8.

  79. IJ, pp.60–1.

  80. IJ, pp.24–5, 58–60, 64.

  81. Though some British loyalists argued that royal and patriotic celebrations were sparse and badly neglected in East India Company enclaves in the subcontinent at this time: see H.E. Busteed, Echoes from Old Calcutta (1972 repr.), p.101.

  82. For JC’s ‘bond debt’ to Johanna Ross, negotiated before summer 1776, see IOL, L/AG/34/27/1, item 71.

  83. I am grateful to Professor Om Prakash for confirming this likely identification (private communication); IJ, pp.1, 64–5.

  84. IJ, pp.12, 15, 18–19, 28, 51.

  85. B.S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ, 1996), p.9.

  86. IJ, p.19.

  CHAPTER 6: World War and Family Revolutions

  1. On the global scale and repercussions of this conflict, see for instance C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (2004), pp.86–96; D. Armitage, ‘The Declaration of Independence and International Law’, William and Mary Quarterly 59 (2002), pp.39–64; and Maya Jasanoff’s forthcoming study of the worldwide loyalist diaspora after 1783.

  2. M. Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (2002), p.347: and see passim for the mineral’s human and commercial significance over time and distance.

  3. P.J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976), pp.114–40; B. Barui, The Salt Industry of Bengal, 1757–1800 (Calcutta, 1985).

  4. JC’s work as a salt agent – and the politics of salt in Bhulua – can be traced in his correspondence with Dhaka’s Provincial Council: IOL, G/15/8–17, passim.

  5. IOL, G/15/9, fol. 241.

  6. IOL, P/49/61, fol. 321.

  7. For one Company military officer’s working list of Persian terms ‘used in the collection of the revenue of Bengal’, see BL, King’s MS 197.

  8. T.R. Travers, “ ‘The Real Value of the Lands”: The Nawabs, the British and the Land Tax in Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004), p.551; Edmund Burke’s characterization of Company officials in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, V, ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford, 1981), p.430.

  9. IOL, G/15/9, fol. 320; G/15/10, fols 646–50; G/15/12, fols 416–17.

  10. Lives of the Lindsays; or, A Memoir of the Houses of Crawford and Balcarres, by Lord Lindsay (2nd edn, 3 vols, 1858), III, p.164; Marshall, East Indian Fortunes, p.140.

  11. Kurlansky, Salt, pp.335–6.

  12. IOL, G/15/9, fols 456, 610–11, 634–5.

  13. IOL, G/15/12, fols 277–8.

  14. M. Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 2000), p.33; for this ‘global crisis’, see Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, pp.86–120.

  15. Infra, pp.66–9.

  16. Travers, ‘ “The Real Value of the Lands” ‘, passim.

  17. P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), pp.330–1.

  18. IOL, G/15/12, fols 277–8; G/15/9, fol. 315; G/15/10, fol. 57.

  19. IOL, G/15/9, fol. 197.

  20. C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (Cambridge, 1983), pp.144, 236.

  21. H. Furber, John Company at Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p.159.

  22. Register of private trade outwards, 1772–5: IOL, H/21, fols 90 and 91; and IOL, P/49/62, fol. 754.

  23. IOL, P/49/63, fols 643–51.

  24. IOL, G/15/12, fols 243, 257; and see the correspondence on this matter in IOL, P/49/63.

  25. IOL, H/224, fol. 81.

  26. IOL, P/49/63, fols 647–59, passim.

  27. IOL, P/49/63, fols 652–6.

  28. This paragraph and the next draw heavily on a working paper by Dr Bishnupriya Gupta: ‘Competition and Control in the Market for Textiles: The Indian Weavers and the East India Company’. I am grateful to Dr Gupta for allowing me to refer to it.

  29. For one aspect of the Company’s acute commercial difficulties at this time, see H. Bowen, ‘Tea, Tribute and the East India Company’, in S. Taylor, R. Connors and C. Jones (eds), Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson (Woodbridge, 1998), pp.158–76.

  30. Gupta, ‘Competition and Control’.

  31. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (2 vols, Oxford, 1976), II, pp. 636–41, 731–58.

  32. It is possible that JC was pushed in the direction of Lakshmipur, as distinct simply from jumping. There were complaints from private merchants in the Dhaka region in mid-1776 that, because of its economic difficulties, the East India Company was seeking to monopolize the cloth trade there. Its agents were reputedly stamping every length of fabric woven in the vicinity with the Company mark, for instance: see IOL, E/1/60, fols 421–2.

  33. IOL, P/49/68, fol. 388.

  34. Dhaka’s Provincial Council was informed of JC’s replacement on 3 December 1776: IOL, G/15/14, fol. 642; G/15/15, fols 106–7, 154.

  35. Philip Francis to John Bourke, 21 November 1777: IOL, MSS Eur F5, fol. 266.

  36. IOL, G/15/20, fol. 69.

  37. IOL, P/154/57, fol. 77.

  38. Though the range of married women’s economic enterprise in early modern Britain, as elsewhere in the world, was far greater than the letter of the law or prescriptive literature suggested.

  39. M. Hunt, ‘Women and the Fiscal-Imperial State in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, in K.Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History (Cambridge, 2004), pp.29–47.

  40. e.g. John Marsh to Baron Grantham, 5 March 1776, Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Record Service, L30/14/243/5.

  41. FB (unfol.).

  42. NA, PROB 11/803.

  43. NA, PROB 11/1095.

  44. EM may have resorted to her navy connections once again and obtained a berth on one of the ships that Admiral Sir Edward Hughes (an old contact from her Asiatic progress) brought into Portsmouth from Calcutta in May 1778: the Egmont, the Europa or the Stafford.

  45. NA, PROB 11/1053.

  46. See the report on Chatham’s victualling yard in 1773: NA, ADM 7/660, fol. 55.

  47. e.g. NA, T77/5/5, fol. 104.

  48. FB (unfol.); NA, WO 17/211.

  49. John Marsh’s account of his wartime service in his memoir, NMM, BGR/35; and see his regular intelligence reports in NA, CO 91/21–25, and BL Add. MSS 24168–24173. The role that consuls in port cities played in the information systems and cultural networking of states and empires, as well as in commerce, requires concentrated study.

  50. See for instance “ ‘That Historical Family”: The Bakunin Archive and the Intimate Theater of History in Imperial Russia, 1780–1925’, Russian Review 63 (2004), pp.574–93.

  51. CB, I, fol. 53; FB (unfol.).

  52. Fifth Report of the … Several Public Officers Therein Mentioned. Commissioners of the Navy (1793), p.5; D. Syrett, Shipping and the American War 1775–83: A Study of British Transport (1970), pp.24–35.

  53. N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (2004), p.615.

  54. GM’s memoir of his mission to Hamburg; FB, entries 18 February–4 June 1776.

  55. Ibid.; Syrett, Shipping and the American War, pp.80–1.

  56. FB, fol. 147.

  57. FB, entries for 2 May 1778 and 15 March 1790.

  58. I am grateful to Andrew Graciano for information about Benjamin Wilson.

  59. For
the York, see FB (unfol.) and the captain’s log: NA, ADM 51/4402. I am grateful to Professor Roger Knight for his help in regard to identifying this ship. EM’s transporting of ‘wrought plate’ is at IOL, B/94, fol. 538.

  60. For these transcontinental sojourners, see M.H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (2003), pp.10, 57–61.

  61. IOL, B/94, fol. 409.

  62. T.A.J. Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Basra (New York, 2001); IOL, L/MAR/C/891, fol. 158.

  63. H.V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge, 2006), 238–9; S. Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000), pp.63–4.

  64. HMC: Report on the Palk Manuscripts (1922), p.307; D.B. Mitra, The Cotton Weavers of Bengal, 1757–1833 (Calcutta, 1978), pp.18–20; Marshall, East Indian Fortunes, p.56.

  65. FB (unfol.).

  66. For JC’s association with Cator and Ross, see IOL, L/AG/34/27/1, item 71; and L/AG/34/29/1, fol. 11.

  67. IOL, G/15/20, fol. 275; though see G/15/21, fol. 161.

  68. FB (unfol.).

  69. IOL, E/4/624, fols 13 and 359.

  70. IOL, G/15/21, fols 315 and 374; P.J. Marshall, ‘Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron’, in A. Whiteman et al. (eds), Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants (Oxford, 1973).

  71. IOL, L/AG/34/29/1, fol. 11; FB (unfol.).

  72. See the inventory of the sale: IOL, L/AG/34/27/2.

  73. IOL, L/AG/34/27/1, fol. 70.

  74. Ibid. There is no mention of JC’s grave in the extant cemetery files for Dhaka in the archives of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia: IOL, MSS Eur F370.

  75. FB, fol. 28 et seq.

  76. Ibid.

  77. Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, trans. C. Stewart (Delhi, 1972 repr.), p.67; T.W. Copeland et al. (eds), Correspondence of Edmund Burke (10 vols, Cambridge, 1958–78), VI, p.11.

  78. Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, 21–28 April 1781, 16–23 March 1782; H.E. Busteed, Echoes from Old Calcutta (1972 repr.), p.210.