by Jon Wilson
Four years after William Hedges’ audience with Shaista Khan the English sent an invasion fleet. Nineteen vessels, with 200 cannon and 600 soldiers sailed from Portsmouth. A second fleet followed in 1688. The force sailed with the intention of asserting England’s power over the entire Bay of Bengal. It was instructed to attack the King of Siam (modern-day Thailand) because another group of interlopers was threatening to undermine the East India Company’s commerce there as well. Its first port of call was Dhaka. A massive armada by contemporary standards, the combined Indian invasion fleet was the largest to sail to Asia before the 1790s. Robert Clive, the man whom most historians consider to have conquered Bengal seventy years later, did not have such a large body of British ships and troops under his command.4
This, the first of three wars between the East India Company and the Mughal empire, began the long cycle of violence that ended with the British conquest of South Asia. As with later conquests, its purpose was not to capture large areas of territory. The history of empire was a history of action in the heat of the moment, not of coherent plans and ideas. The British dominance of India grew from the cumulative response of passionate and often angry men to the situation they had put themselves in in India. What marked British actions in India from 1686 onwards was their effort to create invulnerable pockets of British power, followed by the reluctance of the Company’s administrators and soldiers to negotiate. That reluctance allowed violence to grow over the next two and half centuries; without negotiation it was hard for the British to end wars. The result, by the 1850s, was that British armies had spread through every part of the Indian subcontinent. But as time went on other instruments were used to assert unchallengeable power, too: written rules, new technologies like railways, steamships or dams, bricks and mortar. All had the same purpose: to make Britain’s power in India invulnerable to challenge from the multitudinous Indian forces the British needed to deal with to do their work. Of course, each of these initiatives failed on its own terms. But the British regime was built from its response to a succession of crises, from its catastrophic defeat in the Anglo-Mughal war of 1686–90, until it was finally forced out.
Why did this violent dynamic start? How did such a strangely bellicose institution as the East India Company emerge? To answer these questions, we need to explain how William Hedges reached Dhaka and what happened when he did. But before that, we must start with the origins of the East India Company, and tell the peculiar story of the way traders from London banded together to make money in Asia. The possibility of violence and conquest was present in the history of this particular organization from the very beginning.
Dealing with spirits
Like India at the same time, early modern England was a society of little societies. The East India Company was founded in a world that had many companies and corporations. The economy of seventeenth-century England was dominated by highly social traders who grouped together to maintain order, protect honour and nurture the habits of interaction that kept commerce going. After Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, town and city corporations replaced churches at the centre of urban life. Different branches of enterprise were ruled by craft guilds, which allowed independent craftsmen to nurture the ‘mysteries’ of their trade. Even after Henry’s Tudor revolution, the central state had limited control. An array of small corporate bodies was scattered throughout England’s towns and cities. It was these organizations, not the central state, which performed most of the functions of government, keeping the peace, aiding the poor, regulating the economy and supporting commerce. Essential to this system was the free conviviality each association nurtured. As historian Philip J. Stern notes, ‘by its very nature, to “traffic” was not only to truck and barter but to engage in intercourse and exchange’. English society was a commonwealth made up of ‘little platoons’, as Edmund Burke later called them. These were institutions where men (and a handful of women) met to talk and argue, often drunkenly, bound together by common rituals. As a 1695 dictionary put it, the word ‘society’ denoted ‘company, conversation, civil intercourse, fellowship’. England’s companies were not corporations in the way we understand that word today, but social bodies dedicated to nurturing the conviviality necessary to sustain a commercial society.5
Yet there was something different about the East India Company from the start. The Company began life in exactly the kind of convivial conversations that ruled every other area of English commercial life in the seventeenth century. But discussion quickly turned to political power and violence. In the 1590s, merchants from the City of London talked especially about trading spices and cloth with Asia. Nutmeg, pepper, mace, cinnamon and cloves were popular, profitable products, but it was difficult and expensive to ship them from Asia. Black pepper is indigenous to India’s south-western coast, Kerala and southern Karnataka. Other spices came from the Molucca Islands in South East Asia. Calico, or plain unbleached cotton fabric made on India’s south-west coast, made the same journey. These goods had come through the Mediterranean to Venice, or around Africa to Lisbon, but in the late seventeenth century these routes were blocked. Venice’s connections to Asia had been by war with the Ottoman empire in the 1570s. Portugal’s route was halted by war between Spain and the Protestant powers of the north. In response, Amsterdam and London, two cities that were political allies but fierce commercial rivals, sent their own ships around the Cape of Good Hope. The Dutch fleet returned intact and quadrupled the money paid out to investors. All three ships from London were lost. The response to this crisis was the creation of a new Company with unique powers.6
Throughout 1599 and 1600, a group of London merchants petitioned Queen Elizabeth to let them create a company that could exclude rivals from trade with Asia, and then use force to defend English interests there if need be. Other trading companies existed, but they were associated with private merchants who subscribed together to share in the infrastructure needed to trade in Russia or Turkey, for example. But this new company would be more than an agglomeration of traders. From the start it was a political body with a single stock of money to hire ships, pay soldiers, build factories (as seventeenth-century merchants called their warehouses) and also to buy goods on its own account. It could even sign its own treaties with local rulers.
On the last day of the first year of the seventeenth century, ‘The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ was created as ‘one body corporate and politick’, when the Queen issued its first charter. The first governor was Thomas Smythe, whose trading interests included America and Russia as well as India, a man who signalled his global interests by building a tomb for himself patterned with globes. The Queen gave the London Company a monopoly on trade with all parts of Asia not in the possession of ‘a Christian prince’. Its royal charter meant that when it acted it did so with the command of the English state.7
The Company’s fleet left Woolwich with five ships and 500 men in 1601, heading for the spice islands of Indonesia. By the 1630s, the Company was importing over a million pounds’ worth of pepper, and had spread to Java, India and the Middle East, even briefly operating a base in Japan. Dutch dominance of South East Asia made London’s breakthrough into the spice trade difficult, so the Company shifted to other markets, moving from Indonesia to India, starting to increase its purchase of textiles rather than spice. Madras, on the south-east coast of India, was founded as the East India Company’s first self-contained settlement in India in 1639. Bombay became a Company possession in 1668. English operations began seriously in Bengal in the late 1660s, accelerating after 1676 when a warehouse was built at Hughli, then the second port in Mughal-ruled Bengal after the city of Chittagong.
From the beginning, the Company was controversial. From its foundation, England’s political class debated whether this institution was compatible with the laws and traditions of a people proud of their liberty. Critics argued that the East India Company wielded an abstract, inhuman and unaccountable kind of pow
er, acting like a tyrant rather than a trader. A particular moment of conflict occurred in 1683, the year after William Hedges arrived in Bengal. A private trader called Thomas Sandys sent a vessel to southern India, bought a shipload of cloth there and arrived back in the English Channel in January 1682. When his ship sailed up the Thames, East India Company officers seized it and tried to levy a fine. Instead of paying up, Sandys filed a suit in court, contesting the Company’s right to interfere. Called ‘the Great Case of Monopolies’, the dispute became one of the late seventeenth century’s most celebrated trials.
The case ended up at the Court of the King’s Bench in Westminster Hall, and lasted two years. A huge, now empty space, the oldest part of the building where the two houses of parliament dwell, in the 1680s Westminster Hall was the centre of England’s legal life, full of lawyers and litigants, spectators and witnesses, including a few willing to provide fake evidence for a fee. It was here that Guy Fawkes, Charles I and Warren Hastings were tried. The scene in 1683 was busy but ramshackle. The hall’s three royal courts were not in separate rooms but sat behind different boarded enclosures, with spectators in one court able to hear what was happening in the next. The ‘Great Case of Monopolies’ brought in a good-sized audience, as one of England’s most powerful institutions was being challenged, and some of the country’s greatest political figures argued for or against.8
Thomas Sandys was defended by Henry Pollexfen. Pollexfen was a prominent Whig politician, a man whose legal career had been built on defending the right of citizens to freely gather together in corporations to collectively manage their own affairs. He had no problem with a corporation trading with Asia. He objected to a company that could command its employees to make money on behalf of anonymous stockholders in London, and then exclude everyone else from Indian commerce when it did so. Trust and sociability were central to his argument. For commerce to be possible, there had to be a reciprocal relationship between trading parties, and each to have a personality and a soul. Pollexfen’s point was that you could only trust real, living people. ‘I do not speak against Companies, nor regulating, nor managing trade,’ he said. Regulation could be done ‘virtuously and commendably’. But it should protect individual merchants who continued to ‘trade upon their own particular stock and estates’. ‘A Man should know with whom he dealt, who were his Debtors, and how to come to them.’ From this Whig point of view, commerce was only good for society if it was rooted in the free and public conduct of individuals who had the power to govern their own lives. The Company’s anonymous, bureaucratic structure corroded the social relations that allowed trade to flourish and be mutually beneficial. Commerce with a company that traded on its own account was ‘a kind of dealing with Spirits’. Faced with such ‘an Invisible Body’, buying and selling goods from the Company was like trading with a ghost.9
Sharply at odds with the mainstreams of domestic commercial life, the East India Company’s governors needed a theory to explain why they had created such a strange institution to trade with Asia. They did so by appealing to religion, and arguing that Asia was different. In 1682, this argument was made by Heneage Finch, the lawyer employed to defend the Company in the Sandys trial. Finch was a High-Church Tory, a believer in the absolute, divinely ordained power of the state to impose its authority on people’s lives. Finch’s tactic was to concede much of Pollexfen’s argument. Thomas Sandys’ lawyers were right, he said, up to a point. Since the days of Edward I, English merchants had had the freedom to trade as they pleased, but, Finch suggested, that right was based on the trust and friendship that came from contact with people who shared the same religion. Free trade existed because Europeans had created a civil society based on their common Christianity, he said. Non-Christians did not share the same civil laws and moral codes, so had to be treated as enemies. In India, the English were in a continual state of war, so trade in Asia needed to be specially regulated by the state, and protected by a corporation with despotic powers. Finch noted that the medieval law that Pollexfen used to defend free trade only gave Englishmen the freedom to trade with other Christians. Edward I had also expelled the Jews. If Jews were enemies, India’s Hindus and Muslims were so even more.10
Thomas Sandys’ supporters considered this chain of reasoning ridiculous, one calling it ‘absurd, monkish, fantastical and fanatical’. The free merchants’ point was that peace was possible with infidels. It was perfectly safe for private traders like Thomas Sandys and Thomas Pitt to trade in India. Asian governors like Shaista Khan were good business partners, as long as merchants were willing to negotiate and then submit themselves to Mughal authority.11
With its control of the vast bulk of trade with Asia, the Company managed to persuade large sections of London’s elite that their claims were valid. Most importantly, England’s new King, James II, became a strong supporter of the Company’s rights. James’ short-lived tenure on the thrones of England and Scotland was based on the divine right of kings, so the Company’s use of arguments that strengthened monarchical authority helped sway their case. A gift of £10,000 a year from the Company’s profits was persuasive as well. The connection was so close that the East India Company came to be seen as more than an organization of merchants with government sponsorship, but the agent of English royal power in Asia. The document which despatched English soldiers to fight the Mughal empire was signed by King James II.12
The East India Company’s use of these absolutist arguments was, from one point of view, very surprising. Before James II came to the throne in 1685, the Company had been associated with a low-church, Whiggish kind of politics sceptical of claims about the sanctity of sovereign power. Josiah Child, a former beer supplier to the navy at Portsmouth, was the Company’s leading director in these years. Child had been part of a network of dissenting traders whom James tried to exclude from government contracts before he became king. Child, certainly, was ideologically supple in the interests of profit. Men with ancestral wealth criticized the speed with which he accumulated a fortune, the diarist John Evelyn lambasting the splendour of his country estate in Epping Forest as the kind of place where the ‘suddenly monied for the most part seat themselves’. Yet behind the twists and turns in their alliances and arguments, the men who led the East India Company were consistently committed to the development of an organization which offered the prospect of absolute and stable control from England over commerce with Asia. Throughout Child’s writings one finds a steady concern about ensuring that prices were stable, interest rates were low and the constant stream of commodities from the subcontinent routine. Most important was the exclusion of rival private traders, whom Child thought might be in league with hostile powers to obstruct the regularity of Company trade. Child’s ideal form of government was one which imposed the mechanical regularities of maritime commerce, with their seasons, their licences, passes and shipping timetables, upon the political life of the land. Under James II, it seemed that absolute monarchy offered the most suitable form of authority to support the Company’s claim to control English capitalism in Asia.13
Interlopers
William Hedges left for Bengal only a few weeks before Child instigated proceedings against the ‘interloper’ Thomas Sandys. Born in Co. Cork in Ireland to a family of merchants, he started his career trading with the Ottoman empire. Like other Company traders, he had interests in different places, with a stake in the Royal African Company’s slave trade as well as Turkey, the Levant and India. In his mid-thirties, he was the Levant Company’s treasurer in Constantinople. In his forties, in the late 1670s, Hedges was living in one of the streets behind London’s Guildhall, part of a community of merchants with Dutch and dissenting Protestant connections. Hedges’ first wife Susannah was sister-in-law of Jeremy Sambrooke, the leader of a radical dissenting faction in the East India Company. It was through this network that Hedges quickly worked his way up the East India Company’s hierarchy. His knowledge of Asia, albeit a different part of the continent, led to his appointment as
the Company’s chief in Bengal in September 1681.14
Hedges’ task was particularly to suppress the trade of interlopers. He was sent to Bengal to replace Mathew Vincent, the previous chief of the Company’s operations in ‘the Bay’, whose many crimes included trading with private merchants. Hedges’ ship, the Defence, was shipping a small detachment of soldiers to imprison Vincent and seize other interlopers if need be. But from the beginning of his voyage, Hedges came across private merchants trading in defiance of the Company about whom he could do nothing. In January 1682, while waiting off the coast of Kent for his final instructions, he saw Thomas Sandys’ Expectation shortly before it was seized by Company officers. Once he was on his way, Hedges spotted Thomas Pitt a few hundred miles off the coast of Brazil. They saluted each other and went their separate ways. When he landed at Baleswar on the coast in Orissa in July 1682, Hedges found that Pitt had been there for two weeks, had bought a house and was quickly buying up goods. Pitt was telling everyone the old East India Company had collapsed and ‘a new Company erected’, and marched through town with red-coated soldiers, music and flags to prove his point. Hedges protested, but to no avail.15
Hedges then sailed on to Hughli, where he took up his position as chief of the Company’s presence in Bengal. Thirty miles upriver on one of the Ganges’ tributaries from the spot of swampy ground where the city of Kolkata now lies, Hughli was one of India’s busiest ports, in Bengal second only to the port of Chittagong on the province’s eastern coast. It was a Mughal city of perhaps 100,000 people, home to thousands of merchants from across India, the Middle East and East Asia, as well as factories belonging to all the European trading powers. With its five English officers, the East India Company’s factory was the centre of a network of English outposts scattered throughout the rivers of eastern India, the place where goods from a variety of suppliers were stockpiled before being shipped to London. Saltpetre and rough cotton came from Patna, in Bihar. Silk came from Malda and Kasimbazar. Finely woven muslin came from Dhaka. All these commodities were put on to rowing boats and sent downriver to Hughli. Until the 1690s, the uncharted shoals and mud-banks of Bengal’s delta meant ships’ captains dared not sail into the Ganges’ estuaries. Goods were stored and repacked at Hughli to be shipped and loaded again onto ocean-going vessels at Baleswar, 200 miles south. At each of these places, the Company’s profits depended on a capacity to engage with Indian merchants and manufacturers, and then to develop a productive relationship with Indian political power. Such commercial relationships could be tense and difficult, and it was precisely these that Thomas Pitt, as well as the Dutch, Danish and French East India Companies, was trying to undermine.