by Jon Wilson
Kanhoji thought the Company’s insolence merited a violent rebuke, but he released Katherine quickly and with very little ransom demanded because a far more important visitor was on his way. For the past six years the Maratha regime had been fighting a civil war. Every force of significance in Maratha lands had been divided between two leaders who differed in the attitude they took to the Mughal empire. Tarabai, the widow of one of Shivaji’s sons, had rebuilt the Maratha state after it was crushed by Mughal armies in the 1690s and 1700s, and was opposed to any submission to the empire. Her rival and nephew, Shahu, was the child of another of Shivaji’s sons and favoured cooperation with the Mughal regime. Shahu had been captured by the Emperor Alamgir as a child, and grew up in luxurious imprisonment at the Mughal court. When Alamgir died in 1707, leading Mughal courtiers released Shahu with a force of fifty men, giving him rights to land revenue throughout western, central and southern India which Maratha leaders had long demanded. With the empire wracked by conflict over the succession to the 88-year-old emperor, Mughal officials thought that a friendly Maratha leader, better able to tax local lords and gather an army than their own officers, would be a useful ally.3
Over the next few years, Shahu defeated his aunt and established the basis for a stable Maratha regime that would endure for the next half-century as the undivided centre of political power in western India. Shahu’s administration was based on a new kind of politics. Instead of building alliances with old, potentially fickle Maratha warlords, Shahu’s regime centralized the control of resources. It depended particularly on a new class of administrators, mainly Brahmins, who combined their ability to lead troops in battle with skills in management and accountancy and a closer connection to commerce and banking.
The most important bureaucrat in Shahu’s regime was Balaji Vishwanath, a member of the low-ranking coastal Chitpavan Brahmin community who started his career as a clerk in the salt works of Sidi Kasim at Janjira but became chief administrator of the city of Pune around 1700. Balaji decided to back Shahu early in the Maratha civil war. Along with the accounting aptitude learnt in the world of coastal commerce, Balaji brought negotiating skills, the capacity to lead men in battle and a network of Brahmin bureaucrats and bankers able to provide the administrative framework for Shahu’s regime. He rose to be chief organizer of Shahu’s armies in 1711, and was appointed chief administrator of Shahu’s regime with the Persian title of Peshwa, or leader in 1713.4
Rumours that Balaji was marching an army down from Pune to the coast prompted Kanhoji Angre to free Katherine Chown. At the time Kanhoji was at war with the Portuguese and constantly battling a fleet led by Sidi Kasim. With the prospect of a war with Balaji’s well-organized army, Kanhoji Angre had no desire to fight the East India Company as well. Thus he appealed to the Company for friendship, and the Company was surprised by the favourable terms he offered. Kanhoji returned the property he had seized earlier, promised never again to ‘meddle with any English ships’ and granted English merchants free use of his ports. Lieutenant Mackintosh, the English officer sent with 30,000 rupees in ransom to collect Katherine, described how she had ‘most courageously withstood all Angre’s base usage, and endured his insults beyond expectation’. There is, however, no evidence that she was treated badly at all.5
In fact, the rumours that Kanhoji had heard were wrong. Balaji Viswanath was coming to woo him rather that to fight, marching with the aim of enlisting Kanhoji as an ally within Shahu’s expanding Mughal-sponsored Maratha regime. The two men met at Lonavala, the resting place halfway between Pune and Bombay where the road up from the sea meets the Deccan plain. Balaji’s idea was to appeal to Kanhoji’s Maratha patriotism and their common maritime homeland. Both men were loyal to the Maratha regime; they were also both from the same strip of coast between the sea and the Western Ghats, and shared a common dialect and sense of superiority over their landlocked compatriots. The plan worked. Kanhoji switched sides in the Maratha civil war, was given control of all the sea forts under Maratha control and allied his naval and financial clout with Shahu’s land-based forces. It was as the leader of the Maratha state’s seaborne forces that this ‘pirate’, once so desperate for the East India Company’s friendship, became early eighteenth-century British India’s greatest foe.
Economical states
The rebirth of the Maratha regime under Shahu, Kanhoji and Balaji was part of a broader set of changes which took place in India during the early eighteenth century, years which saw the reconfiguration of Mughal power. The network of alliances and Persian-speaking officials which had allowed the Mughal empire to exercise authority throughout India began to fragment. Effective government authority now moved to new regional states that claimed to govern in the name of the emperor, but administered on their own: Arcot and Hyderabad in the south and south-east, Bengal and Awadh to the east, the Marathas in the west. Each of these were autonomous regimes created by former members of the Mughal nobility. Each thrived by creating a more centralized form of administration in its own domain, based on a strong relationship with merchants and a close connection with the countryside. To the English, each seemed to offer new challenges to the East India Company’s capacity to profit from India, ensuring the relationship was fractious, difficult and occasionally violent. They were certainly powerful enough to ensure the Company did not expand beyond its scattered outposts.
It was the death of the Emperor Alamgir at the age of eighty-eight in 1707 that triggered change in India. Rival camps had had decades to build their power. Bahadur Shah, Alamgir’s son, won the first succession battle and created a stable but short-lived regime. He himself was an old man by the time his father died, and only lasted five years. After 1713, infighting broke out, Delhi’s authority weakened and Mughal officers began to leave the capital to build more stable forms of power in the provinces.
The new political order emerged as, following chaos in Delhi, the imperial centre failed to control the flow of cash. Alamgir had spent the last years of the seventeenth century ‘seized with a passion for capturing forts’ in the Deccan plateau. The Deccan wars were a testing ground for many of the Mughal leaders who rose to prominence in the early eighteenth century. But with soil that was so difficult to cultivate, the Deccan didn’t bring land into the empire that could pay its way. The costs of these conquests made investment in the central power of the Mughals a bad deal. Money therefore began to flow to more productive, profitable places and it did not come back. Political power moved, too, out from the old Mughal capitals on India’s northern plain to new regional centres: to Aurangzeb’s old Deccan capital at Aurangabad and then to Hyderabad; to Lahore and Pune; to the newly built regional capital cities of Arcot in the south, Jaipur in Rajasthan, Lucknow in Awadh and Murshidabad in Bengal, as well as to the European companies’ fortified port towns. The first forty years of the eighteenth century saw the flourishing of urban life in these dispersed court cities, with the growth of new styles of architecture and new forms of literature and music while the old Mughal capitals on India’s northern plain declined.6
Alongside the growth of new cities, the early eighteenth century saw the rise of a new kind of imperial officer. This was the age of the administrator, of men such as the aforementioned Maratha Peshwa Balaji Vishwanath. Armies began more to be paid from each state’s treasury rather than being mobilized by nobles, so leaders needed to combine accounting skills with the capacity to command men under arms. The Mughals had always relied on banking families to lend them money, but the relationship between capital and government became far closer in these new provincial regimes. Like the old Mughal empire, the new regimes combined military force and negotiation to assert their authority. But they imposed Mughal ideas of balancing power more systematically on the countryside. With more money and a more compact territory to rule, the new states sent their officers into the hinterland to negotiate with small landholders in a way their predecessors could not. Leaders who tried to build alternative centres of authority, whether ‘rebe
l’ zamindars or European companies, were more easily subdued.7
One of the smallest examples of this new kind of state was Savanur, the regime that provided the fortune made by Katherine Chown’s first husband, John Harvey. Harvey made money from transporting cotton fibre and cloth grown and woven in the Deccan down from the market town at Hubli to Karwar, then on to Bombay and eventually Europe. Hubli’s success as a commercial centre came about because of the investment of the Savanur nawabs, a political lineage founded by Afghan warriors who had moved to the region in the seventeenth century, and consolidated their regime in the confused conditions of the early eighteenth century. In the 1720s, their ruler Nawab Abdul Majid Khan built a new town at Hubli, named Majidpur after himself, to handle expanding trade. Savanur was successful because its rulers were able to switch from war to trade in the flourishing economic conditions of the eighteenth century, and to establish a productive relationship with European merchants.8
In Bengal a similar process took place but on a much larger scale. The governor who held the greatest authority in Bengal was Murshid Quli Khan. Born a Brahmin in the Deccan, he converted to Islam and spent the early years of his life serving a Mughal officer in Persia. Murshid Quli Khan’s administrative skills were spotted by Alamgir and he was appointed diwan, officer in charge of revenue, over territory conquered in the Deccan. He then moved to take over revenue collection in Bengal before becoming sole ruler of the province by 1717. The Bengal regime’s power depended on commercial connections. Murshid Quli Khan shifted his government from Shaista Khan’s capital of Dhaka to the new city of Murshidabad, five miles south of the silk-producing centre of Kasimbazar. He consolidated his authority by intervening more directly in the countryside than had his predecessors. His regime built alliances with autonomous local landholders who supported the regime, but sent his own officials into the countryside to inspect, scrutinize and sometimes collect revenue directly when the relationship broke down. Sometimes that involved dispossessing local lords with the use of violence. The Nawab and his local allies built markets, roads, bridges and police stations to augment trade, and Murshid Quli Khan monitored the weekly price of grain, expanding the flow of information to the capital. The result was that revenue from land increased by 40 per cent in the twenty years after 1722.9
The new regime provided stability and support for commerce, allowing the East India Company’s trade to grow. As Mughal chronicler Salimullah noted, Murshid Quli Khan was ‘sensible that the prosperity of Bengal depended on its advantageous commerce [so] showed great indulgence to merchants of every description’, including Europeans. Tension grew nonetheless. When the English tried to fortify their factories in order to defend themselves against a more powerful regime, Bengal’s nawabs saw this act as the sign of a nation of supposedly peaceful traders that was prone to violence. In 1717, the Nawab’s officers at Hughli pulled down a half-built British building. When they sought an explanation, the Company received a document condemning the Company’s recurrent violence in Bengal, starting with Job Charnock for having ‘plundered the whole city and then burnt it’. Peace was only restored after the complaints of Indian merchants saw the Company dragged to the negotiating table once again.10
In predominantly Tamil south-east India, the region close to the Company’s port of Madras, Nawab Sa’adatullah Khan created a similar regime. Like Murshid Quli Khan, Sa’adatullah was another efficient administrator whose organizational talents were spotted and nurtured by Alamgir. Nicknamed kifayat (economical) Khan by the emperor, he used his control of finances to outmanoeuvre the regional governor, the fierce, dog-loving Afghan warrior Da’ud Khan Panni, to become Nawab himself. Under Sa’adatullah’s rule, Arcot grew into a city of perhaps 100,000 people, with a vigorous textile industry and sophisticated literary culture. Sa’adatullah imposed his authority over the territory of the region more emphatically than his predecessors had done, subduing rival power centres with overwhelming force rather than enlisting them as allies.11
As in Bengal, the East India Company’s response to the growing power of a neighbouring Indian state was to fortify. The fortifications of Madras were repaired and extended in the 1720s, and a new barracks and building for storing gunpowder built. Fort St David, the British outpost 120 miles south of Madras, was strengthened in 1725. The Court of Directors worried about the cost of new defences, but anxious Company servants in the subcontinent insisted that bigger forts were needed to protect them against malevolent Indian powers. In 1724 London tried to reduce spending in Madras by a third, thus bringing it in line with the figure paid in 1707, but officers in Madras simply refused to follow orders. The paymaster was particularly worried about cuts to the military and the gun room: ‘the Gunner declares now he has barely any room to dry his powder,’ he wrote. Eventually, the Company in London gave in. ‘[A]s at this distance we cannot see what has been done,’ the Court of Directors admitted in 1730, ‘we must rely on your integrity,’ they wrote to Madras.
The Nawabi government saw the conduct of the East India Company as rebellious and arrogant. The growth of Madras’s fortification, together with occasional English violence against Nawabi officials, fuelled Sa’adatullah Khan’s desire to undermine the strength of the East India Company. Yet Sa’adatullah recognized that with 500 troops to protect a ‘fortress defended by the sea’, Madras was impregnable. Instead of attempting to subdue the Company with the use of force, he developed a different strategy. He planned to build a succession of port cities along the Tamil coast, enticing merchants trading with the British or French, as well as independent ‘interloping’ Europeans. The first new port, named Sa’adat Pattan, was inaugurated in 1719. But Sa’adatullah’s plan failed; five years after the buildings were finished the new city’s palace and fort were in a state of ruin, and fifty of the eighty new shops empty. Along with the nearby French town of Pondicherry, Madras had become too important in the region’s trading networks to be undermined by an alternative commercial strategy. Sa’adatullah tried again, in 1728 inviting an Ethiopian from western India called Sidi Jauhar Khan to build a sea fortress, enticing merchants with the offer of exemption from customs for five years. This second port did not last either. In south-east India during the first half of the eighteenth century, European companies dominated the sea while compact and powerful states dominated the interior.12
A passion for conquering forts
The East India Company’s relationship with its neighbours at Arcot and Bengal was dominated by fractious, fortified peace during the first half of the eighteenth century, with only sporadic outbursts of fighting. Things were different on India’s western coast. There, the relationship between British and Indians was frequently ruptured. These tensions led to half a century of war with Maratha sea forces led by Kanhoji Angre, and smaller conflicts with independent rulers along the coast of western India further south. Historians today suggest that the ‘first Anglo-Maratha War’ began in 1775, but when Clement Downing published his Compendious History of the Indian Wars in 1739, it was conflict with the Maratha sea captain Kanhoji Angre that he was writing about. These forgotten wars sapped the Company’s resources, costing the treasury in Bombay 80,000 rupees a year (£1.3 million in 2016 prices) during their height, in addition to ships and soldiers being sent from Britain. Such wars did not go well for the British: the Company failed to inflict a single defeat on the Marathas on land or sea.
Throughout the conflict, the East India Company battled a Maratha state which built a compact regional regime tied into the reconfigured structures of Mughal power. After convincing Kanhoji Angre to back Shahu in the Maratha civil war, Balaji Vishwanath’s next success at the negotiating table was to persuade the Mughal emperor to put his relationship with the Marathas on a permanent footing. In May 1719, Balaji at last negotiated a stable relationship between the two powers. The Marathas would pay 100,000 rupees into the Mughal treasury and provide troops for the dominant faction at court in Delhi; in exchange, the Marathas would have absolute control
over their heartland, and then have the right to collect 35 per cent of land revenue in a vast swathe of territory in the south of India beyond. The deal gave Shahu’s regime unchallengeable legitimacy in the eyes of Marathi nobles and merchants, and allowed his government to centralize power within the administrative offices which Balaji Vishwanath established at Pune.
Shahu’s regime consolidated power in the same way as other Mughal successor states in Bengal, Arcot and elsewhere, tightening control of land rights, deepening its relationship with regional trading networks and using military force more readily against rival centres of power. The difference was that the Marathas tried to assert dominion over the sea as well as the land; they, like the Portuguese before them, claimed to be lords of the sea. It was this claim that entangled Kanhoji’s maritime forces closely with the affairs of the East India Company.
The Marathas used techniques learnt from the Portuguese to assert power over the ocean, filling the vacuum left by the decline of the Estado da India. By 1710, Kanhoji’s sea force asserted its sovereignty from Goa to Surat by insisting every ship bought one of their passes in order to be allowed to sail and trade. The Maratha capacity to make this claim real was far greater than the Portuguese Estado da India’s had been even at its peak. But, still, the reality was that a single force was unable to dominate India’s western coast. The Marathas were willing to concede the export trade to foreigners, letting ships managed and owned by Europeans sail freely if they acknowledged their authority, insisting only Indian vessels pay customs duties. There was, in other words, plenty of scope for an accommodation with the East India Company. But English paranoia made peace difficult to sustain.13
Five years of peace followed Katherine Chown’s capture and quick return, but fighting between the English and Kanhoji Angre broke out again in 1718. The cause this time was the Maratha admiral’s capture of four ships. Kanhoji claimed they belonged to Indian merchants who were using the Company’s flag to shield themselves from Maratha power, and had not paid customs. One, which the Company said belonged to a British merchant from Calcutta, had been sold to an Indian trading with Muscat. Another was the property of Trimbakji Maghi, a Marathi merchant travelling with goods belonging to traders from the Mughal port of Surat. Kanhoji claimed that Trimbakji was from Alibag on the Maratha mainland, so did not fall under the protection of the Company. The Company claimed he was a resident of Bombay and so was under their jurisdiction.