This was just one example of how competition between European powers had effects on the other side of the world. Towns in India were handed to the French by the Dutch at the end of the 1690s as a result of the settlement of the Nine Years’ War in Europe; islands in the Caribbean changed hands between Britain and France as part of peace settlements two decades later after further intense fighting in Europe; while huge swathes of North America were swapped between the British and French when disputes over the Spanish throne were settled.
Marriages could also deliver vast territories, strategic bridgeheads or great cities – such as Bombay, handed over to England as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza when she married King Charles II in the 1660s. It was an act of generosity that, as the city’s Portuguese governor accurately predicted, spelt the end of Portugal’s power in India.33 Activities in bedchambers in Europe, hushed mutterings in palace corridors in its capital cities concerning potential brides or assumed slights by flighty rulers who were quick to have their egos piqued had implications and ramifications thousands of miles away.
On one level, such intrigues were of little concern to those in the east, who cared little if the Dutch, British, French or others held the upper hand. In fact if anything, the rivalries in Europe seemed merely to generate increasingly lavish benefits. Throughout the seventeenth century, rival delegations could be found heading to the Mughal Emperor, to the rulers of China and of Japan to curry favour and have new trading concessions granted or old ones reconfirmed. This elevated the importance of intermediaries – such as Muqarrab Khan, a port official in Gujarat, who oiled the wheels with the Emperor Jahangir in the early seventeenth century – who did well for themselves as a result.34 In Khan’s case, the goods he bought in 1610, made up of ‘Arabian horses’, slaves from Africa and other luxuries, took more than two months simply to clear customs.35
The British in Asia operated, as one historian has put it, on the principle that ‘everything and everyone had a price’.36 This provoked extravagant gift-giving – but also protest from some who condemned the covetousness of those who were courted. The Mughal Emperor Jahāngīr, for example, had a particular soft spot for being given ‘overgrown elephants’ – and perhaps dodos too – as gifts, and was said to have a heart ‘so insatiable, as that it never knows when it hath enough; being like a bottomless purse, that can never be fill’d, for the more it hath, the more it covets’.37
Dutch envoys brought coaches, suits of armour, jewels, fabrics and even spectacles to Beijing in the 1660s in a bid to win favour following the loss of their position in Taiwan shortly beforehand.38 An account of another extravagant Dutch delegation, this time to Lahore in 1711, shows the tremendous effort that went in to flattering and winning valuable contacts, as do glorious images made of their reception in Udaipur as the embassy made its way north. Laquerware from Japan, elephants from Ceylon and horses from Persia were taken as gifts, as were spices from the Dutch colonies, alongside European goods: cannon, telescopes, sextants and microscopes. Nothing was left to chance, even though on this occasion circumstances contrived to leave the envoy’s request to renew trade concessions unresolved.39
It took a long time for the fuller implications of the shifting sands in Europe to work their way through to the east. To all intents and purposes, the more merchants arriving to trade and the bigger the ships they came in the better: this meant more gifts, more rewards and greater volumes of trade. As it was, Mughal emperors such as Akbar, Shah Jahān and Awrangzīb (ruled 1658–1707) were partial to having themselves weighed on their birthdays, with gems, precious metals and other treasures being repeatedly loaded on to the scales until they were balanced – hardly the best incentive to maintain a trim waistline.40
Then there were the bribes payable to middlemen who demanded money to ‘escort’ travellers and merchants to their destination, much to the frustration of some who felt that the principle, as well as the amount, was annoying. English merchants who had their goods impounded at Rajmahal in 1654 felt there was no option other than to bribe the governor and his officials – just as the Dutch always had to do.41 Complaints about lack of fairness could reach the Mughal emperors, who sometimes punished those who had lined their pockets too well: apparently, one judge accused of not being impartial was made to stand in front of the ruler and be bitten by a cobra; on another occasion, gatekeepers were whipped after a musician complained that he would have to hand over a portion of a stipend awarded to him by the Emperor on his way out of the palace.42
Funds coming in to India continued to fuel the artistic, architectural and cultural blossoming that had accompanied the enormous injections of capital since the early sixteenth century. Increasing sums percolated into Central Asia, partly as a result of tribute paid by rulers like Awrangzīb to secure peaceful relations to the north, but also as a result of horse-buying on a massive scale from breeders whose herds grazed on the steppes. As many as 100,000 horses were being bought in the markets of northern India each year – and at sky-high mark-ups if some sources are to be believed.43 Even greater numbers of livestock were also sold to merchants from India, as well as from Persia, China and increasingly Russia, leading to further wealth flowing into the region. Cities such as Khokand (in modern Uzbekistan) flourished, with accounts talking rapturously of the quality of the rhubarb, tea, porcelain and silk that could be bought at cheap prices and in considerable quantities.44
Despite the rise of European trade, the networks crossing the spine of Asia were still very much alive and kicking. This is shown by the records of the VOC that note that tens of thousands of camel-loads of textiles were being sent each year from India to Persia via the old routes through Central Asia. English, French, Indian and Russian sources likewise provide information about continued overland trade and give some idea of its scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: travellers in Central Asia talk consistently about large volumes of goods being sold in markets, about enormous numbers of horses being reared and brought to places like Kabul, an ‘excellent trading centre’ where caravans converged from all over Asia to buy and sell a wide range of textiles, aromatic roots, refined sugars and other luxuries.45 Increasingly important in this continental trade were the minorities who helped lubricate commercial exchange, thanks to shared customs, family ties and the ability to create credit networks that worked over long distances. In the past, the Sogdians had played this role. Now it was Jews and above all Armenians who did so.46
Under the surface, powerful currents were swirling unseen. European attitudes to Asia were hardening, shifting from seeing the east as a wonderland filled with exotic plants and treasures to a place where the locals were as limp and useless as in the New World. Robert Orme’s attitudes were typical of the eighteenth century. The first official historian of the East India Company, Orme penned an essay whose title ‘On the effeminacy of the inhabitants of Indostan’ reveals much about how contemporary thinking had toughened. A bullish sense of entitlement was rising fast.47 Attitudes towards Asia were changing from excitement about profits to be made to thoughts of brute exploitation.
This outlook was captured perfectly in the ‘nabob’, the term given to East India Company officials who did absurdly well for themselves in Asia. They behaved like hoodlums and loan sharks, lending money locally at exorbitant rates of interest, using Company resources for their own benefit and creaming outrageous profits off transactions for themselves. It was the Wild East – a prelude to similar scenes in the west of North America a century later. Go to India, the memoirist William Hickey’s father told him, and ‘cut off half a dozen rich fellow’s heads . . . and so return a nabob’. Serving the EIC in India was a one-way ticket to fortune.48
The path was not without hardship or danger, for conditions in the subcontinent were not easy, and disease could put a swift end to ambitions. As far as the evidence allows us to ascertain, although mortality levels dropped thanks to improvements in sanitation and hygiene, as well as in medicine and healthcare, the nu
mbers of those sent home or deemed unfit for service rose steadily.49 Experiences could be traumatic, as the merchant sailor Thomas Bowrey and his friends found out when they paid sixpence for a pint of ‘Bangha’, an infusion of cannabis, in India in the late seventeenth century: one ‘sat himself down upon the floor and wept bitterly all afternoon’; another, ‘terrified with fear . . . put his head in a great jar and continued in that posture for four hours or more’; ‘four or five lay upon the carpets highly complimenting each other in high terms’, while another ‘was quarrelsome and fought with one of the wooden pillars of the porch until he had little skin upon the knuckles of the fingers’.50 It took time to get used to other parts of the world.
On the other hand, rewards were astounding – so much so that it became commonplace for playwrights, the press and politicians to mock the newly rich. There were howls of contempt about the boom in tutors being hired to teach gentlemanly pursuits like fencing and dancing, about the nervousness in choosing the right tailor, about knowing the right things to talk about at dinner.51
Hypocrisy was everywhere. It was grotesque, William Pitt the Elder told fellow MPs in the late eighteenth century, that ‘the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruption, as no private hereditary fortune could resist’.52 There was no need, he felt, to note that his own grandfather had brought back one of the world’s great gemstones, the Pitt diamond, from his spell in India and used the wealth he had accumulated during his spell as governor of Madras to buy a country estate – and the parliamentary seat that came with it.53 Others were also outspoken. It was awful, a furious Edmund Burke told an inquiry in the House of Commons not long afterwards, that ‘nabobs’ were destroying society – by throwing their wealth around, becoming MPs and marrying the daughters of the gentry.54 Getting angry about such matters had little effect, however: after all, who would not want an ambitious and rich young buck for a son-in-law, or a generous spouse for a husband?
The key to unlocking these great fortunes lay in the transition of the East India Company from a mercantile operation ferrying goods from one continent to another into an occupying power. The shift into both drug-dealing and racketeering was seamless. Opium was grown in increasing volumes on plantations in India to fund purchases of silk, porcelain and above all tea from China. Imports of the latter soared, with official figures that chart a rise from 142,000 pounds of tea bought in 1711 to 15 million pounds eighty years later – figures which conceal further shipments that must have been smuggled to avoid tax. In a neat mirror image, rising addiction to luxury goods in the west was effectively being traded for – and soon matched by – rising addiction to drugs in China.55
Making money in other dubious ways was no less lucrative. Although protection had been offered to local rulers in India in the eighteenth century on an increasingly regular and large scale, the decisive moment came in 1757 when an expedition led by Robert Clive was sent to Calcutta to intervene following an attack on the city by the Nawab of Bengal. Clive was soon being offered enormous sums to provide support for rival local candidates wanting to assume power. In no time, he found he was granted control of the diwani – the tax take of the region – and was able to help himself to the revenues of one of the most populated and economically vibrant parts of Asia, home to a textile industry that was responsible for more than half of all Britain’s imports from the east. Almost overnight, he became one of the richest men in the world.56
A House of Commons Select Committee that was set up in 1773 to look at the aftermath of the conquest of Bengal revealed the staggering sums taken from the Bengali purse. Over £2 million – tens of billions in today’s terms – had been distributed as ‘presents’, almost all of it finding its way into the pockets of EIC employees locally.57 The outrage was compounded by disgraceful and shocking scenes in Bengal itself. By 1770, the price of grain had been driven higher and higher, with catastrophic results as famine kicked in. The death toll was estimated in the millions; even the governor-general declared that a third of the population had died. Europeans had thought only of enriching themselves as the local population starved to death.58
The situation was entirely avoidable. The suffering of the many had been sacrificed for personal gain. To howls of derision, Clive simply answered – like the chief executive of a distressed bank – that his priorities had been to protect the interests of shareholders, not those of the local population; he deserved no criticism, surely, for doing his job.59 Things were to get worse. The loss of manpower in Bengal devastated local productivity. As revenues collapsed, costs suddenly rose sharply causing panic that the golden goose had laid its last egg. This prompted a run on the shares of the EIC and pushed the Company to the brink of bankruptcy.60 Far from its directors being superhuman administrators and wealth-creators, it turned out that the practices and culture of the Company had brought the intercontinental financial system to its knees.
* * *
After desperate consultation, the government in London concluded that the EIC was too big to fail and agreed a bail-out. To fund this, however, cash had to be raised. Eyes turned to the colonies in North America, where taxes were substantially lower than in Britain itself. When Lord North’s government passed the Tea Act in 1773, it thought it had found an elegant solution to pay for the EIC rescue, while also bringing at least part of the tax regime of the American colonies closer into line with Britain’s. It provoked fury among settlers across the Atlantic.
Leaflets and pamphlets were widely distributed in Pennsylvania that described the East India Company as an institution ‘well versed in Tyranny, Plunder, Oppression, and Bloodshed’. It was a symbol of all that was wrong with Britain itself, where the highest levels of society were in thrall to the greedy, self-serving interest groups enriching themselves at the expense of the common people.61 Ships carrying tea were turned back as a united front among colonists refused to bow before the demands of a government that did not allow them representation in the political process. When three vessels put in to Boston harbour, there was a tense stand-off between the locals and the authorities. On the night of 16 December, a small group of men dressed as ‘Indians’ boarded the boats and tipped the tea into the harbour; they would rather it went to the bottom of the sea than be forced to pay taxes to London.62
Seen from an American perspective, the chain of events that led to the Declaration of Independence of the United States had a very American context. But from a wider vantage point the causes can be traced back to the tentacles of British power extending ever further in search of new opportunities, and from the efficacy of the Silk Road that had caused disequilibrium by pumping back too much too quickly. London was trying to balance competing demands on opposite sides of the world, and attempting to use revenues generated by taxes in one location to fund expenditure in another, leading to disillusionment, dissatisfaction – and revolt. The pursuit of profits had been relentless, which in turn had spurred a growing sense of self-confidence and arrogance. The East India Company, Clive told inquisitors on the eve of its collapse, was an imperial power in all but name. It ruled over countries that were ‘rich, populous, fruitful’, and was ‘in possession . . . of twenty millions of subjects’.63 As those in the American colonies recognised, there was ultimately little difference between being a subject in one territory controlled from Britain rather than another. If Bengalis could starve to death, why not those living in the colonies, whose rights seemed no better or greater? It was time to go it alone.
The American War of Independence provoked much soul-searching in Britain as to how it should treat the regions where it had built up trading positions that were not just commercially lucrative but had real political clout too. The effective conquest of Bengal marked a signal moment in so far as it changed Britain from being a country that supported colonies of its own émigrés to becoming a domain that ruled other peoples. It was a steep learning curve to make sense of what this meant and how to balance the desires of
the centre of the empire with the needs of its extremities. Britain found itself administering peoples who had laws and customs of their own, and having to work out what to borrow from new communities, what to lend – and how to build a platform that was workable and sustainable. An empire was being born.
Its genesis marked the end of a chapter. The passing of most of India into British hands ensured that the overland trade routes were starved of oxygen, as buying and spending power, assets and attention were decisively diverted to Europe. The decline in the importance of cavalry in the face of yet more improvements in military technology and tactics, particularly relating to firepower and heavy artillery, also played a role in depressing the volumes passing along the roads that had criss-crossed Asia for millennia. Central Asia, like southern Europe before it, began to fade.
The loss of thirteen colonies in North America was a humiliating setback for Britain and underlined how important it was to keep British possessions secure. And in that sense, the appointment of Lord Cornwallis as governor-general of India was an eye-opener: it was Cornwallis who had played a prominent role in the debacle across the Atlantic and who had surrendered Yorktown to George Washington. Perhaps the idea was that painful lessons had been learnt, and those who had learnt them were best placed to make sure that the same thing did not happen again elsewhere. Britain might have lost the United States, but it would never lose India.
15
The Road to Crisis
The disaster in America was a great shock for Britain, a setback which suggested that the empire could be vulnerable. The British had managed to build up a dominant position – directly, as well as through the East India Company – that brought prosperity, influence and power. It fiercely protected its stepping stones – the oases that linked together to connect back to London – and was jealously vigilant against any attempts to dislodge or weaken its grip on the channels of communication from the Sea of Java to the Caribbean, from Canada to the Indian Ocean.
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Page 35