A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  That, at any rate, was the idea of ‘trusteeship’: the vision that was habitually recited to justify the immense military, tax and economic juggernaut that described the reality of the late Victorian empire. There is no doubt that those ideals were sincerely held; even as their realization was constantly thwarted and, in the end, indefinitely postponed. There is equally no doubt that it seldom occurred to the governors of the empire (although it certainly did to its adversaries) that their military and economic power had actually caused many, if not most, of the problems they claimed to be in India to correct. The conditions in which British ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ were introduced were, at the same time, the conditions that doomed them to failure. During Curzon’s own viceroyalty, 4 per cent of India’s revenues were spent on public works such as irrigation and nearly 35 per cent on the army and police. None of this means, however, that those ideals were, from the beginning, a fig-leaf for economic and military despotism. The liberal promise of shared betterment without bloodshed, of the evolution of self-government through educated citizenship (as pertinent, its champions believed, for the fate of Britain as for the colonies), remains, arguably, one of the nobler wrecks of western optimism. Its submerged ruins still lie deep in the modern consciousness, sending up ripples of pride or guilt to the surface of contemporary British life. At the very least, then, no account of British history, however provisional, can avoid diving into the depths to see through the murk what happened: just how the good ship ‘Victoria’ ran aground.

  The launch, at least, was ebullient. In 1834, Thomas Babington Macaulay, who had been born with the 19th century, was still a historian in the making. The dazzling essayist for the Edinburgh Review, social lion of fashionable Whig society in London, precocious parliamentary orator and MP for the newly enfranchised manufacturing borough of Leeds decided that, considering he had just £700 in the bank, he was in need of a decidedly bigger fortune. The place to get one, as any fool knew, was India. Not that he was himself going into business – although, of course, there were many perfectly splendid people in Leeds whose occupation that was. His purpose, rather, was to earn £10,000 a year by bringing Progress to benighted Asia.

  In 1833 parliament had finally liquidated the commercial side of the East India Company. What profits were to be made from indigo, sugar, cotton and the only steadily lucrative business of the time, narcotics (opium traded to China in return for tea), would henceforth be harvested by private traders. The ‘Company’ was now candidly what for many generations it had actually been, a tax-and-war machine, or, as it liked to think of itself, a government. As a member of the ‘Board of Control’ – the body answerable to parliament and co-governing India with the Company’s Court of Directors – it fell to Macaulay to justify the Whig government’s policy in the Commons. The prospect, despite Macaulay’s reputation as the ‘Burke of the age’, was not one that packed the benches. (‘Dinner bell’ Burke had himself often emptied them, of course.) On 10 July 1833, speaking to a chamber only a third full, Macaulay delivered his vision of British responsibility to India. It was a performance of stirring, Ciceronian eloquence in which, however, ignorance competed with arrogance. But it was, none the less, the manifesto of the liberal empire of good intentions. Even as Macaulay charted the beginning of the enterprise, he looked forward to its gloriously disinterested end:

  It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having been instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own. The sceptre may pass away from us. Unforeseen accidents may derange our most profound schemes of policy. Victory may be inconstant to our arms. But there are triumphs which are followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.

  The long march that England had undertaken from Magna Carta to the 1832 Reform Act (and that would go on until all Britain’s people were educated into citizenship) could, and would, God willing, be reproduced in Asia. The British Empire, like that of the Romans, might be in the road-building enterprise but no road would be finer, straighter – or longer – than the road to parliamentary nationhood. Moreover, the economic beauty of this empire would be the fit of its interlocking parts, just like the industrial machinery that Macaulay found so inspiring. Taking the ‘indolent’ and ‘superstitious’ Orient and giving it a good shaking-up through British law, education, light taxes and honest administration would supply the stability necessary for the religion of Progress to take hold. Under the protection of such government peace would break out and urban markets would flourish. No longer held to ransom by armed brigands and rapacious, corrupt tax collectors, the ‘cultivators’ would have some incentive to produce for those markets. And as their income kept pace with rising urban demand, their ability to introduce ‘improvements’ would make them still more productive. Up and up they would go, manuring their way to prosperity, just like their counterparts in Norfolk. Cash crops would yield surpluses that would be exported, not least to the mother country. In return Britain would send its textiles and its machinery, its plumply studded sofas and its damask drapes to India where they would find a ready market among all these thriving merchants and Turnip Singhs. With greater ‘ease’ (as the Victorians liked to put it) would come even more demand for cultural goods and services – colleges; newspapers; in the fullness of time, parliaments; even, dare one hope, True Religion. The entire project as Macaulay sketched it in his brightly reasoning imagination – taking ‘inert’ Asia (another favourite cliché) and injecting it with the dynamism of progress – flooded him with exhilaration. Bradford broadcloth, Sheffield cutlery and Bombay readers of the Edinburgh Review were just around the corner, he felt sure.

  In February 1834, two weeks before embarking on the four-month voyage to India, his chests packed with the kind of things he judged really indispensable in the tropics – 300 oranges and the complete works of Homer, Horace, Gibbon and Voltaire – Macaulay treated the electors of Leeds to some parting words. Half valediction, half benediction, they offered both a blessing from the Church of Irrevocable Progress and a headmasterly reassurance that this was All for the Best. Be of good cheer, was the general drift; you are not losing your MP but gaining the world:

  May your manufactures flourish; may your trade be extended; may your riches increase. May the works of your skill and the signs of your prosperity meet me in the furthest regions of the East and give me fresh cause to be proud of the intelligence, the industry and the spirit of my constituency.

  Macaulay’s conviction that he could Make a Difference was the authentic ‘spirit of the age’ (a term that had just become popularized, not least by William Hazlitt). Arguably, Britain had never had a generation more determined to do what Viscount Palmerston (the great drum-beater of Britain’s global power) called ‘world bettering’. But ‘Clever Tom’ Macaulay had grown up with that impulse in the Clapham household of his evangelical parents, Zachary and Selina Macaulay, who had been ardent campaigners for the abolition of slavery. Between constant prayers and obligatory accounting for their time, he and his brothers and sisters had been inculcated with a driving need for self-justification. However jaunty a materialist Macaulay was to become (to the acute disappointment of his perfervid father), he never quite lost that early anxiety.

  For Zachary it might have been worse. Tom might have become a Benthamite, for whom a human being was l
ittle more than a walking sense-receptor. Macaulay never did become a utilitarian, although in India he discovered that the utilitarians’ schemes of improvement generally ended up being improved by a strong dose of reality. But even when he had attacked the utilitarian philosopher James Mill for reducing men to machines, Macaulay was certainly aware of the attraction of the ‘political economists’ and ‘philosophical radicals’ for all those who saw nothing wrong about trying to optimize pleasure and minimize pain. As far as Jeremy Bentham himself was concerned it would have been all very fine if, left to its own devices, the mass of humanity could find its own way to this golden mean. But self-evidently it needed help. And that help had to come from government; from exceptionally knowledgeable, disinterested men prepared to ascertain, scientifically, the causes of whatever particular social evil they were committed to correct. They should be zealous enough to investigate every aspect of the problem; draft their report and thrust it under the noses of whichever power could do something about it; generally make pests of themselves until the remedy became law; and then ensure that it was properly carried out through cadres of professional inspectors. The vision – even if never completely enacted – was a true turning point in British history, signalling the inadequacy of an older, more socially sentimental idea of aristocratic and ecclesiastical benevolence to deal with the modern industrial-imperial world of the 19th century. The squire, the justice of the peace and the parson would be replaced by the professional civil servant, the government’s blue-book statistician and the health inspector.

  This is not to say that the ‘philosophical radicals’ wanted to burden society permanently with overbearing and expensive government. Their notion was, rather, to invest in enough initial investigatory zeal and intelligence to have society correct itself. There would be short-term pain, fiscal and social, in return for long-term, cost-efficient gain. But where the most conspicuous exercises in Benthamite social improvement were concerned – the New Poor Law of 1834 in particular – the pain seemed a lot more visible than the gain. Paradoxically, it took money to make the workhouses so horribly penal that even the desperate would not want to surrender themselves to them.

  And in times of extreme economic distress like the 1840s in Britain, even the most ‘brutilitarian’ regime was preferable to starvation. The ebb and flow of the numbers in the workhouses, their critics rightly pointed out, was no index of true social misery; only of those moving in and out of the institutional walls. Very often, moreover, the reforms attracted the maximum of odium with the minimum of relief for the burdens of public administration. Even when, under the auspices of the arch-Benthamite in government, Edwin Chadwick, the utilitarian reformers did something as demonstrably benevolent as attempting to lower mortality rates in the towns and cities of Britain through cleaner water and piped sewage, their work ran into the ingrained suspicion, not to say hatred, of state busy-bodying that ran through all classes of the population.

  That is why the colonies – swarming with chaos, sickness and violence – promised a more fruitful field for Benthamite idealism. In India, there was no tradition of bloody-minded liberty to get in the way of strong but necessary doses of Improvement. On the contrary, so the reformers believed, the crumbling of the Mughal Empire over the 18th and 19th centuries had left a subject population desperate to feel the strong hand of authority. ‘Happiness before freedom’ or ‘firm but impartial despotism’ was the working rubric of this generation. Utilitarianism had certainly had an impact on the teaching at Haileybury, the East India Company college established in Britain to educate the new generation of Indian civil administrators (of whom there were still only around 900 in the 1830s). But the people with whom Macaulay, as the fourth legal member of India’s Governor-General William Bentinck’s council, had to become acquainted were certainly not just tropical transplants of Jeremy Bentham.

  Bentham’s principles, after all, presupposed universal laws governing human behaviour. But the British governors of India who had come of age in the first two decades of the 19th century had gained an early understanding that the difference between success and failure lay precisely in the degree to which general principles had to be adapted to local peculiarities. The young men who were borne aloft on their palkhee gharee litters, sweating in the dusty heat, their heads filled with Marcus Aurelius, the Indian Rig Veda and the arithmetic of millet yields, were Britain’s first true imperial soldier–scholars, equally at home with the sabre and the theodolite. Many had been young protégés of the exuberant, unapologetically expansionist Marquis of Wellesley. Some of them had graduated from, others had taught at, Wellesley’s college of Fort William in Calcutta, which had been established as the barracks of the empire of knowledge, created to reinforce the rule of the sword. Governor-General Richard Wellesley – in so many ways a more complicated figure than his much more famous younger brother, the Duke of Wellington – had not just been a gung-ho generalissimo. To govern the huge territories his armies had gained during the wars against the Indian allies of the French, he believed, would need men broadly and deeply versed in the topography, history, languages and culture of India. And his college was supposed to provide – through Brahmin teachers known as munshis – their initial instruction in Sanskrit, Hindustani, Persian (still the language of the Indian courts), Arabic and some of the vernacular tongues.

  What got created – for a brief, dazzling generation during the first quarter of the 19th century – was a non-English British Indian government; perhaps the best the British ever made in Asia. Virtually all of its stars were Scots, Irish or Welsh. The most phenomenally knowledgeable and culturally tolerant of them were Scots like Sir Thomas Munro, Sir John Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone, and a little later James Thomason in the northwest provinces. All took to India the lessons of the Scottish enlightenment, especially the budding sociology of Adam Ferguson and John Millar, in which wise public action had to be grounded on deep local understanding. It was, in fact, just because so many of them felt that English government had so misunderstood and so mistreated their own country that as Britons they were determined not to repeat the mistake in Asia. Many of them became authorities on the minutiae of the history, law and agrarian economics of the territories under their rule. To act effectively meant knowing in depth the states and societies with which one was dealing. So Malcolm wrote extensively on the Sikhs, and published The History of Persia (1815). Elphinstone, who had fought with the Maratha princes, produced an encyclopedic Report on the Territories Conquered from the Paishwa (1821). And those writings were often strikingly free of the stereotypes about ‘anarchy’ that coloured the work of the later Victorians. Elphinstone’s History of India (1841) was at pains to portray Mughal rule as a golden age of peaceful relations between Muslims and Hindus.

  Local knowledge changed the Scottish soldier-scholars. But it also forced them to face the contradictions of their position. On the one hand, the East India Company had promised that its bloody, disruptive campaigns were the precondition of establishing enough stability for a resurgent India (or at least Bengal, Bombay and Madras) to prosper. But somehow each campaign seemed to generate another. Pushing northwest into the Punjab to pre-empt the expansionism of the new enemy, Imperial Russia, brought them into collision with one of the few truly cohesive states of the region, the Sikh power of Ranjit Singh. Instead of creating a stable frontier the British engineered an unstable one, which in turn guaranteed even more military activity. It never stopped. It was always back to front. The nomadic horse troops of Rajasthan and the Deccan were declared ‘bandits’ – as indeed many of them were. But they had been turned into criminal predators by the relentless destruction by the British of their state patrons, the Marathas. Every intervention postponed, rather than hastened, the desperately wished-for moment of ‘settlement’. In the meantime there were soldiers to be paid – almost a quarter of a million of them by the 1830s, making the East India Company army (overwhelmingly made up of Indian soldiers, the sepoys) by far the biggest m
ilitary force in Asia and one of the biggest in the world. That, in turn, meant that taxes had to be levied. The further hardship caused by those taxes generated more distress, hardship and anger.

  Although local knowledge clouded the sunny optimism of the liberal vision of tutelage, it could at least do something about mitigating hardship. Thomas Munro had discovered that the zemindar – the middlemen with whom the government in Bengal had insisted the peasants make their assessment and pay their taxes were, far from being a tradition, more or less unknown in southeast India. James Thomason would believe the same was true for the Punjab. Those useful middlemen had simply interjected themselves with a blank cheque for extortion. Instead a ryotwari system, with every peasant settling directly with the officers of the government, was introduced, even though it presupposed a more or less complete land survey of every single holding, including data on the fertility of the soil and weather conditions experienced in the tax year. It was a monumental task (and only conceivable with the help of the same native agents who were the target of the paternalists’ criticism). But to do anything else, Munro, Thomason and the knowledge-harvesters argued, would be to betray their ‘trusteeship’.