The Indian Mutiny was a civil war. Thousands of Indians fought alongside the British, including traditionally militant Pathans from the North-West Frontier, who defied calls to fight for Islam against the infidels. Dost Muhammad, the Afghan amir and no friend of Britain, made no hostile move. Others who had suffered at the hands of the British also refused to commit themselves; Judge George Edmondson, a fugitive in June 1857, found one prince willing to assist him even though the government ‘had reduced his army and taken away his guns’.27 Like many other benevolent neutrals, this magnate recognised that the Mutiny was primarily a soldiers’ rebellion, which had temporarily got out of hand because the government lacked the forces to contain it. It was localised, negative in its objectives, destructive in nature and therefore limited in appeal.
The Mutiny pushed India into the forefront of British political life and there was much heart-searching as to what had gone wrong and why. The immediate result was the dissolution of the East India Company in 1858. Henceforward, a secretary of state and ultimately parliament were responsible for the government of India, with local law and policy-making in the hands of a viceroy and provincial governor-generals, assisted by councils composed of bureaucrats and a handful of Indian princes. Admission to a reconstituted Indian civil service was through an examination and was, theoretically, open to educated Indians.
In the year of the Mutiny twelve Indian doctors had graduated from the newly-founded medical school at Agra, a fact which would have more long-term significance for India’s future than the battles in the Oude. These doctors would join a steadily growing élite of educated Indians who had undergone instruction in English in government schools, colleges and universities. By the mid-1880s it was estimated that there were 8,000 Indians with degrees and a further half a million who had graduated from secondary schools. All had been taught in English and had been exposed to British political ideas.
The experience of one Western-trained Indian, Romesh Chunder Dutt, is instructive, not only about the type of education available to Indians but its effect on their thinking about themselves and their country. Dutt was born in Calcutta in 1848, the son of a middle-ranking administrator, whose family had become westernised through several generations of service to the Company. Dutt attended school until he was sixteen, developing a fondness for English literature, in particular the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott. He proceeded to University College, Calcutta, then highly popular with the sons of priests, government clerks, merchants and zamindars, and set his sights on entry to the Indian civil service. To this end he travelled to London to cram for an exam geared for English entrants – Latin and Greek carried higher marks than Arabic and Sanskrit.28 He passed, well up the list, and entered the Middle Temple.
Dutt was fascinated by British life. He travelled widely while studying, once touring Scotland to view scenes familiar from his reading of Scott, and took an intense interest in British political life. He witnessed the 1868 general election, parliament in action, and had discussed Indian affairs with British Radicals and Liberals, including John Bright who had championed Indian causes in the Commons. Then and later, Indian students gravitated towards those British progressive circles which were anti-imperialist in sentiment.
When Dutt returned to take up his administrative duties in Bengal in 1871, he was keen to apply the liberal principles of self-help and enlightened self-interest which he had absorbed in Britain. Furthermore, he hoped that he could show the British that an educated Indian was equally adept as them in the arts of government, and that India could be changed from within by Indians as well as from above. What he had observed in Britain gave him a powerful sense of what could be achieved by the middle class and he had returned home convinced that its Indian equivalent deserved the same political power. Dutt’s intellectual development and the conclusions he reached were similar to those of many other educated Indians, who believed that what they had learned gave them equality with the British.
This was certainly not a view shared by the majority of the British in India. There were widespread protests in 1883 at a government proposal to extend the jurisdiction of Indian local magistrates to Europeans, and the Viceroy, Lord Ripon, was forced to withdraw the measure. Educated Indians felt affronted at what was an assertion of racial superiority. This slight led indirectly to the formation in 1885 of the Indian National Congress, an association of educated Indians from all professions, which met annually to discuss issues relating to their country. In its early days it was compared to an earnest public-school debating club, but its membership soon grew and by the end of the century it had become an influential forum for Indian opinion.
The emergence of what was essentially a highly respectable and respectful assembly of Indians imbued with British political ideas caused some alarm. Ripon’s successor, Lord Dufferin, a Liberal appointee, had no time for the ‘Bengali Babu’, whom he found ‘a most irritating and troublesome gentleman’. He also detected a ‘Celtic perverseness, vivacity and cunning’ among educated Indians, qualities which he believed they shared with contemporary Irish nationalists. Certainly there was much in common between the proto-Indian nationalists and their Irish counterparts: both lobbied sympathisers in Britain and knew how to manipulate public opinion through the press and public meetings. The Indians did not, however, go as far as the Irish in their demands, which were largely confined to the assimilation of more and more of their educated countrymen into the middle and higher ranks of the government.
Of course, this was rightly seen as the prelude to Indian self-government, which was why Curzon (viceroy from 1898 to 1905) steadfastly refused to consider greater Indian particpation in government. He rejected in forthright terms the request made by Dutt, Congress president in 1901, for the appointment of Indians to the viceregal council. The Marquess’s adamantine position on the advancement of Indians to senior posts, and his well-known view that the Congress was an unrepresentative and disruptive body, had the effect of beginning its metamorphosis into a focus for active political opposition to the raj.
A collision between westernised Indians and the government had been predicted at the onset of the government’s educational reforms in the 1830s. Although in many ways a despotism, British India had never been a totalitarian state in which the government proscribed books, newspapers and foreign travel and banned political debate. If Indians were allowed free access to British political and philosophical writers, it was inevitable that they would apply what they read to their own country, and ask why they were excluded from those political rights which were their rulers’ birthright. It was a tricky question which Curzon and those of like mind could only answer with reference to the peculiar conditions of India. Divisions of religion, wealth, caste and clan were so profound and a source of so much fission that only a disinterested and fairminded British government could command the loyalty of all Indians, protect them and secure internal order. Reference was frequently made to the state of India before British rule when life had been precarious and anarchy was endemic. Above all was the fear that democracy and moves towards self-determination would, in the words of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, a rigorous and plain-dealing administrator who served in India from 1885 to 1919, release ‘the demon of discord’ so that the country would be convulsed by ‘all the latent feuds and hatreds’ hitherto reined in by men of his stamp.29
On another and all-too-common level, Indian aspirations towards self-determination were countered on racial grounds. These were candidly expressed by Sir George Younghusband, who served with the Indian army intermittently between 1878 and 1918:
It is never wise to stand studied impertinence, or even the semblance of it, from any Oriental. Politeness, and courtesy, by all means, and even camaraderie, as long as these are reciprocated, and all is fair, and square, and above board. But the moment there is a sign of revolt, mutiny, or treachery, of which the symptoms not unusually are a swollen head, and a tendency to incivility, it is wise to hit the Oriental straight between the eye
s, and to keep on hitting him thus, till he appreciates exactly what he is, and who is who.30
Younghusband spent some time putting this doctrine into practice on the northern frontiers of India in the endless small wars of punishment and pacification. Their common purpose was summed up by one of Younghusband’s colleagues after a bout with the Chins of the Assam frontier when he had taught them ‘that the only thing that mattered was the Great White Queen across the waters’.31 Resistance was toughest and most persistent among the tribes along the North-West Frontier, a remote, mountainous region where British control was always precarious.
There was a special romance about the North-West Frontier campaigns largely because they were contests in which the British usually managed to overcome brave, resourceful and daring warriors on their home ground. Of course technology mattered and probably tipped the balance, but there were plenty of close shaves, since the tribesmen were adept at ambushes. Two campaigns were needed in 1888 and 1890 against the recidivists of the Hazara district, who defiantly refused to pay fines for raiding and sniped at patrols. On the first occasion 14,000 men were sent against them, and on the second, 8,000, of whom at least a quarter were British, a custom established after the Mutiny.
This was a highly specialised form of warfare in which every use was made of up-to-date technology. The two Hazara forces used the field telegraph for communication between commanders and columns, and were armed with Gatling machine-guns, breech-loading rifles with a range of up to 1,000 yards, and small, collapsible mountain guns (the ‘screw guns’ of Kipling’s poem) which were carried by mules. Despite the weight of firepower, charging tribesmen armed with swords and knives sometimes careered into British lines and caused havoc. This occurred during a skirmish during the 1890 Hazara campaign, when, according to the official report, a British officer ‘engaged in combat with two fanatics, one of whom he killed, but was wounded by a second, a big powerful man, who almost overpowered him’.32 In 1895, seasoned frontier fighters were perturbed by the allegations that the new .303 rifle bullet lacked the stopping power of the old .457. Secret forensic tests were therefore carried out on the corpses of Pathan mullahs, who had been executed by firing squads using the two types of ammunition, to discover their relative merits.33
Grisly details like this were deliberately kept from the public in Britain, who were also kept in the dark about the full extent of the systematic burning of villages, crops and granaries, and the slaughter of livestock which marked every frontier operation. Instead, newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts like Winston Churchill’s popular Malakand Field Force (1897) presented the wars as tales of derring-do and adventure. When justification was offered it was in familiar terms of quite literally pushing back the frontiers of civilisation. The North-West Frontier wars (there were nearly twenty between 1863 and 1901) were a glamorous and headline-catching feature of a grander, often more mundane business, the government and regeneration of India.
5
They Little Know Our Strength: The Far East and the Pacific
Claydon House in Buckinghamshire contains a Chinese room embellished in a style which brings together Chinese and rococo motifs. It was created in the 1760s when men of discrimination looked on China with awe and wonderment. It was an ancient, orderly civilisation whose artefacts, particularly porcelain, were prized by collectors and imitated by craftsmen like those employed at Claydon. China tea, imported by the East India Company, was well on the way to becoming a daily palliative for all classes. Within eighty years attitudes to China had changed radically. A popular encyclopaedia published in 1842 said little on Chinese civilisation, but instead described China as ‘an unbounded mart’ with a population clamouring for British goods. These were denied them by their rulers, who refused to recognise the benefits of free trade and had gone as far as to exclude British commerce.1
Opium rather than manufactured goods was what the Chinese people demanded. The felicitous combination of the British taste for tea and the Chinese for opium had been exploited by the East India Company which, since 1773, had enjoyed a monopoly over the drug’s production. The rise of the opium trade coincided with a period of Chinese decline. By 1800 China had become a static, introverted society governed by an intensely conservative and ossified bureaucracy. The Ching dynasty of emperors were Manchus, outsiders who found it hard to rally their Chinese subjects at moments of crisis. But rulers and ruled were united by a common mistrust of all foreigners, whom they designated ‘barbarians’ and treated with condescension. This had been amply demonstrated in 1793 and 1816 when two British missions, headed by Lords Macartney and Amherst, had travelled to Peking in an attempt to establish formal diplomatic relations between Britain and China. Both embassies were politely cold-shouldered, and departed in no doubt that they had been regarded as representatives of some distant, tributary state.
Given Chinese insularity and apprehension of all things alien, it was inevitable that a clash would occur with Britain, which believed it had a right to conduct unrestricted trade throughout the world. The first collision occurred in the spring of 1839 at Canton, the main port open to foreign commerce. The Chinese imperial government, disturbed by the harmful social and economic consequences of opium addiction, decided to curtail the trade and instructed Commissioner Lin Tse-hsü to cut it off at its source, Canton. His measures provoked an angry response from Captain Charles Elliot, the Superintendent of Trade, and when news of them reached London, the government came under pressure from companies with Chinese interests. Lin’s behaviour was represented as another example of Chinese obstructiveness and a direct challenge to the principles of free trade. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, therefore authorised the despatch of a seaborne expeditionary force to the mouth of the Canton River.
Today the First Opium War (1839–42) is commonly portrayed as a shameful act of aggression contrived to promote a trade which was immoral, and to which the Chinese government had rightly taken exception. Contemporaries regarded the war and its successors as highly praiseworthy enterprises undertaken as a final resort. The fault lay with the Chinese who had formerly connived at the trade at the same time as treating Britain and its merchants in a high-handed manner. The war was therefore seen as a showdown in which Britain, its patience exhausted, revealed its muscle in the hope that, thereafter, a chastened Chinese government would prove more amenable to perfectly reasonable demands.
The war was a severe shock to the Chinese who knew nothing of the technology of their adversaries. In every engagement the Chinese were, in the words of an eyewitness, ‘unable to contend against the fearful weapons of their determined foe’. He had been astonished when, during the early fighting, a Congreve war rocket struck a junk which then caught fire and exploded, killing all its crew.2 When the British landed at Amoy in September 1841 they suffered no losses, but their musket volleys killed at least a hundred Chinese who were armed with matchlocks and bladed weapons.3
At the start of the war operations were confined to the Canton River. Hong Kong island was seized and annexed as a future naval base and commercial centre. There followed a sustained demonstration of firepower on the Yangtze River, devised to show the imperial government the hopelessness of further resistance. During June and July 1842 Woosung, Shanghai and Chinkiang were shelled and taken by landing forces. It was a tough campaign, fought in the hot season, and there were heavy British losses from sunstroke, malaria, dysentery and cholera. Of the thirty-four men killed during the capture of Chinkiang, sixteen died from heat exhaustion.4
The Yangtze campaign paid off politically. A stunned Chinese government signed the Treaty of Nanking which confirmed British possession of Hong Kong and opened Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Shanghai and Ningpo to British commerce. The apparatus of unofficial empire was soon in place: consulates were established; British subjects were allowed exemption from Chinese jurisdiction; a naval base with coaling facilities was set up at Shanghai; and British men-o’-war were permitted to patrol Chinese rivers and coastal wa
ters. France and the United States quickly followed Britain’s example and were granted similar privileges.
The Opium War had far-reaching consequences for the history of the Far East. China’s technical backwardness and vulnerability had been exposed and Britain had made itself the major commercial and military power in the region. In 1853, when the American Admiral Perry visited Japan to persuade its rulers to open their country to Western trade, he warned them if they did not, then the British would appear and treat Japan as they had China. The Japanese wisely conceded, and within a few years had made commercial agreements with the Western powers, including Britain.
Having dragged China into the informal empire, Britain turned its attention to making it safe for trade by the suppression of riverine and coastal piracy. This was exciting and rewarding work; in 1849 one squadron of warships earned £42,000 in head-money which was calculated at £20 for each dead or captured pirate and £5 for each of those who escaped. Actions were brief and brisk and their flavour is captured in an official report of an engagement between the steamer HMS Hermes and five junks near Hong Kong in March 1853. Proceeding under sail, the Hermes lured the pirates towards her until, realising their mistake, they scattered and three got away. The remaining two:
Finding they could not escape, closed and lashed themselves together, prepared to fight, and sent men aloft to throw stink pots [primitive hand-grenades which emitted a noisome smoke] as we ranged up alongside them, firing musketry; as we closed they put their helms hard over and got under our bows, and commenced throwing stink pots most furiously, when we backed off and opened fire on them … offering to cease if they would yield, but they would not. Finally, having driven them below with Grape, Canister and Musketry, Lieutenant Burton boarded and got possession.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 29