by Jon Wilson
Mir Ashraf eventually got his property back from Pearkes, but only after a personal appeal to Robert Clive. Ashraf saw that Plassey brought about the speedy collapse of the institutions that had allowed trade to prosper in cities like Patna. Now the prosperity of individual merchants depended on a fragile chain of personal connections rather than a stable structure of power. Because of this, Mir Ashraf tried to create relationships with as many potential allies as he could, even if they were on opposite sides. By the beginning of 1759, he was helping the Shah Zada, son of the Mughal emperor Alamgir II, whose forces were then threatening to invade Bengal. He became a secret but ‘firm friend’ of the French. In 1763, he tried, unsuccessfully, to acquire land revenue rights from the Company, as land seemed a more secure basis on which to make a living than commerce in such troubles times. None of these tactics worked in the end. A decade after Plassey, Mir Ashraf’s company had been taken over by an Indian merchant employed directly by the British. Eventually it was assimilated into the East India Company itself. Paul Pearkes didn’t get his way, but the Company encroached on the commerce of an independent Indian trader.
Throughout the whole of the Bengal presidency, from Patna to Dhaka, the years after Plassey were a chaotic time of mistrust and crisis. Indian businesses collapsed as marauding British traders and their Indian allies undermined the viability of Indian enterprise. The number of European merchants outside Calcutta quickly expanded. By May 1762, there were at least thirty-three British traders scattered through Bengal on ‘private business’, most working in partnership with East India Company officials buying and selling a range of commodities. These traders claimed immunity from taxes and believed they were not subject to the power of the Nawab. As in Patna in 1757, or when a party of soldiers ‘killed one of the principal people’ of Sylhet ‘on account of a private dispute’, they created disorder by enlisting the Company’s violent capabilities in personal battles.40
In the long term it was revenue not trade that dominated British politics in Bengal. In eastern India this demand for revenue began as an insistence on land to compensate for the losses in Calcutta, but ended up as an aim in its own right. The treaty signed with Mir Jafar promised more than twelve million rupees (£158 million in 2016 prices) in supposed recompense. Gifts of more than ten million rupees were promised to British civil and military officers ‘for their services’. Clive alone received two million. Military men, including John Corneille, were given five million rupees in total. The Company was promised land, too, 24 sub-districts to the south of Calcutta, still called 24 Parganas and Clive was given an estate that paid a further 300,000 rupees a year.
Despite these ‘gifts’ the Company was no more confident with its new allies than the now murdered Siraj-ad-Daula had been. With characteristic impatience it pressed Mir Jafar to pay money that had been promised, often by violent means. In the days after Plassey Clive deliberately kept his troops outside Murshidabad to prevent them from plundering Bengal’s capital, but officers sent to investigate the condition of the town complained about the ‘shuffling and tricking’ of Mir Jafar’s new ministers, saying there was far less money in the treasury than they expected. Clive decided to march into Murshidabad with a ‘guard’ of 500 men to secure the Company’s share of Bengal’s cash. Over the next twenty-four hours at least two-thirds of its treasury was emptied and shipped to Calcutta.
Undermined by the force used by his British sponsors Mir Jafar did not last long as Nawab. The cash he needed to pay his army was quickly depleted. The post-Plassey frenzy of private British commerce led every trader, big and small, to claim he was doing business on behalf of the East India Company and to take advantage of the Company’s tax-free trade privileges, so that tax revenues collapsed. Local lords used the weakness of the regime to assert their autonomy, and refused to pay revenue. As Robert Clive’s successor as governor put it, ‘the general disaffection of the people [meant] the revenues of most parts of the province were withheld by the Zemindars [sic]’. Commercial confidence in this recently prosperous province plummeted. The government’s authority evaporated. The Nawab’s own army was unpaid and starving, ‘their horses are mere skeletons, and the riders little better’, as Warren Hastings, the Company’s resident at Murshidabad noted. Eventually, hungry troops mutinied and barricaded Nawab Mir Jafar in his palace. Bengal’s nobles began to organize themselves around alternative candidates to rule Bengal. Robert Clive was Mir Jafar’s last British supporter. Mistrustful of yet still loyal to the man he had personally escorted onto the throne, Clive left India in February 1760, again apparently for the last time, tired and ill but with a fortune and a grand story to tell back home about his great deeds. Mir Jafar survived less than a year.41
The big issue during the next few months was the fate of Chittagong. Chittagong was Bengal’s only seaport, a tough town to attack, the place the British had imagined would become the centre of their trading empire in the Bay of Bengal since the late seventeenth century. The lure of this great port had led the British to fight, and lose, a war with the Mughal empire in the 1680s. After the Battle of Plassey, the British demanded the new Nawab hand over the port and its district but Mir Jafar resisted. The city’s governor even blocked the East India Company’s attempt to open a factory there. Company officers suggested force was necessary. As one argued, Chittagong ‘will require a season when we can command instead of requesting’. In a controversial move opposed by Robert Clive’s allies, the new British governor in Bengal supported Mir Jafar’s replacement by his son-in-law, Mir Qasin, when he promised to hand them the city along with the revenues of the districts of Burdwan and Midnapur. With no support from the Company’s new governor and prominent nobles and bankers, Mir Jafar abdicated and fled to Calcutta. In October 1760, the new Nawab, Mir Kasim, arrived to find the city and throne of Murshidabad empty for the second time in three years.42
In these troubled times the physical occupation of an empty palace did not bring with it the right to rule. The Company could only collect revenue from Chittagong once four companies of Company troops were sent to force the local governor to submit. In other districts local leaders fled to the hills, leaving no one for the British to collect revenue from, and no records of who was supposed to pay them anyway. The new Nawab thought he could only build his own authority if he checked the East India Company’s power; Mir Kasim tried to put into practice the classic Mughal policy of balancing interests. To counter the British East India Company he backed the Dutch East India Company, and gave tax-free trade to all merchants. But with no revenue to pay troops needed to check the Company and maintain order, small instances of violence escalated throughout Bengal. The English factory in Dhaka complained of the ‘general insolence of the natives, with interruptions put upon the trade in general’, and prepared for battle. Local conflicts coalesced into full-scale war. The Company again marched to Murshidabad to evict a Nawab, but this time it was one they had themselves installed. Mir Kasim moved his army and capital west to the town of Monghyr in Bihar, and joined up with Shah Alam II, the newly crowned Mughal emperor on the borders of Bengal, capturing and killing East India Company officers as he did so.43
Pangs of hunger
‘It is all very well’, the poet Mir asked of the Mughal emperor in these days
to be generous and charitable
The question is whether the king can afford this?
When he himself is living, hand to mouth
And pangs of hunger have reduced him to a skeleton.44
These were years of crisis in the Mughal capital. Alamgir II had been emperor since 1754 but was killed by invading Afghans in 1759. Delhi was the scene of conflict between Afghans and the Marathas, each of whom was backed by rival groups of Mughal nobles. Maratha generals considered sending the Mughals into permanent exile and placing a Hindu, Maratha emperor on the throne. Instead, they decided to support Mughal authority, making Alamgir II’s son emperor as Shah Alam II. He was duly crowned in December 1759. The Marathas then suffe
red a massive defeat when they took on the Afghans in 1761 at Panipat. Shah Alam II was supposed to be ‘protector of the world’, a sovereign who lit up the universe ‘like the sun’. But he fled Delhi’s chaos looking for support from whoever had the troops and money to bring order back to the Mughal capital.
For the first twelve years of his reign Shah Alam II was an emperor in exile, a man trying to build authority at the very moment when the Mughal empire was suffering its greatest eighteenth-century crisis. During these years the victories of British armies in Bengal seemed to demonstrate that the East India Company was a possible ally for the new emperor. In a series of letters to Clive and his successors, Shah Alam II offered the East India Company the position of imperial tax collector in Bengal, the famous office of diwani, in return for the use of the British army. The ‘Delhi project’, as historian G. J. Bryant calls it, appealed to British soldiers’ ideal of heroic violence, forming the main subject of gossip ‘from generals down to subalterns’ for a few months. As one captain asked, ‘Does anyone talk of a trip to Dely? Or are we to be D—d to a garrison life? No! that I cannot imagine while you have a king to put on the throne.’ Company officers were enamoured with the idea of fighting to restore a legitimate monarch whom they could then manipulate. But the East India Company’s concern for maintaining its own security and profitability trumped any romantic desire for martial glory. A Delhi trip would be expensive, and might involve a confrontation with the force Britons feared the most, the Marathas.45
Rather than the British, Shah Alam II was supported by the ruler of Bengal’s western neighbour, the Nawab of Awadh, and the East India Company’s latest enemy, the exiled Mir Kasim. The emperor, the recently ousted Nawab of Bengal and the ruler of Awadh threatened to march on Calcutta and oust the East India Company. The Company marched to meet them. The consequence was the Battle of Buxar, one of only three moments in the history of the British empire in India when Company soldiers directly fought troops commanded by the Mughal emperor. Unlike the first Anglo-Mughal war, this was a tough and even contest. At a massive cost in dead and injured (a quarter of the 7,000 troops who fought on the British side were killed or seriously wounded) the Company emerged victorious.
The defeated Shah Alam II once again offered the East India Company the office of diwan, revenue collector, in Bengal. This move was an attempt to put in play the classic Mughal tactic of assimilating an enemy into the polity as a privileged subject once again. It was the same tactic used in 1691, when the Mughals allowed the East India Company to settle in Calcutta after they were so humiliatingly defeated in the first Anglo-Mughal war. Realpolitik dictated that Shah Alam II had to concede far more than the right to build a small fort in a far-flung swamp; but even in defeat the emperor needed to retain his prestige. He could not present the grant of the office of diwan as a bargain made after a battle. It needed to be seen as the gift of an emperor made with full authority. It was not, for example, mentioned in the Treaty of Allahabad between the Company, Mir Kasim and the Nawab of Awadh but ‘sealed and approved’ in the presence of the emperor.
The British already had as much practical control over the revenues of Bengal as they wanted. But accepting the diwani gave their practical power legitimacy, and proved to critics in Britain and India that they were not interested in challenging more powerful forces in the Indian subcontinent. On his journey back to Asia for a third time, this time as Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Bengal, Robert Clive feared that if ‘ideas of conquest were to be the rule of our conduct, I foresee that we should of necessity be led from acquisition to acquisition until we had the whole Empire against us’. That, of course, is exactly what happened in the end, as the passion for conquest outweighed the rational limits of British power. But in 1765 the diwani was acquired to prove to audiences in both Britain and India that the East India Company was interested only in trade and money not political power.
The diwani was seen as a reluctant necessity for both sides. There was little ceremony when it was granted, the emperor sealing the treaty seated on top of a bedframe in Clive’s tent. ‘Thus’, one Indian observer wrote, ‘a business of such magnitude . . . was done in less time than would have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass’.46
Shah Alam II was to be given 2,600,000 rupees (£325,000) a year in tribute from the East India Company’s expanded revenues. Clive hedged the Company’s bets, and promised to pay his old allies the Marathas money from the Bengal revenues as well. These payments still theoretically left the Company 12,300,000 rupees (£1,355,000) each year from Bengal’s revenue.47 The diwani caused a quick bubble in the East India Company’s stock price, but no new bonanza to British taxpayers. But it did not alter the Company’s finances, as the costs of collecting cash increased as quickly as the Company’s capacity to collect revenue. Its surpluses only, briefly, expanded in the early 1770s because the size of its military was scaled back, but the onset of new wars in the late 1770s more than soaked up the revenues gained from the diwani, pushing the Company into deficit. By 1780, this once profitable commercial organization was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.48
East India Company, revenue and expenditure in India, 1762-1781.49
The meeting at Allahabad officially turned the Company into revenue collectors in Bengal and rulers of the northern sarkars in coastal Andhra. The Company also signed a treaty of mutual defence with the defeated Nawab of Awadh, allowing its great neighbour to the west to rely on British troops in exchange for cash and the right of British merchants to trade without paying taxes. Soon after Buxar, a British garrison was constructed in the city of Allahabad as a last line of defence for Bengal. In 1765, the British aim was still to protect the fortified enclaves from which they tried to control commerce and collect cash. Company politics were rooted in the sentiments of mistrust and impatience that had grown, in the eighty years since their defeat in the Anglo-Mughal war of 1686–90, within the paranoid, walled worlds of their forts and factories. But they had begun to imagine that those enclaves stretched throughout much of south India and extended from Calcutta halfway along the Ganges towards Delhi.
Come here to die
In a strange way the grant of the diwani saved the Mughal empire. It made it the East India Company’s interest to uphold the prestige of the authority which gave the British such power in Bengal. As historian Robert Travers notes, the diwani also ‘drew elite Britons into the courtly world of late Mughal governance’, creating a brief moment when a collaborative form of Anglo-Indian polity seemed possible. Company officers sought Mughal titles and attended lavish dinners hosted by officers of Bengal’s Nawab, just as in Arcot. In neither place was there any immediate desire to dispense with Indian institutions. The next few years saw British efforts to find and govern with Mughal India’s ‘ancient constitution’.50
But if Plassey, Buxar and the grant of the diwani did not bring the demise of the Mughal empire in Bengal, they did practically kill off Mughal techniques of statecraft. The polite tone of conversations which took place in the houses of Indian nobles did not last long once the British got down to talking business. Nor did it extend far beyond the Company’s fortified citadels. The exercise of British power in India in the years after Plassey was marked by a refusal to engage in the kind of negotiation that had been so vital to the creation of Mughal authority and prosperity in practice. Perpetually impatient and prickly, the Company’s officers usually saw any challenge as ‘insolence’, or as a humiliation that needed to be avenged, rather than an act which required conciliation. The constitutional niceties of Anglo-Mughal conversation did not alter the British assumption that their primary purpose in India, to make money, relied on their Company’s capacity for violence. It was that deep-rooted instinct which corroded the possibility of any enduring form of partnership.
To collect cash from the new territories in Bengal acquired with the diwani, Robert Clive ordered ten companies of troops to march into the countryside and enforce payment. In his two last years as Gov
ernor of Bengal, 1766–7, Clive tried to focus the Company’s servants’ attention more emphatically on the goal of collecting revenue, banning officers from engaging in private trade and allowing them a commission on the Company’s private trade instead of private profits. This met with much resistance, and Company servants continued to make fortunes from personal commerce for another twenty years. But the impatient focus on the collection of revenue at all costs undermined the capacity of political authorities in Bengal to respond to economic crises. The consequences were catastrophic.
The rains were light in 1768 and did not come at all in the summer of 1769. It was only in late November 1769 that the British started to take notice. ‘[T]he oldest inhabitants never remembered to have known anything like it,’ Clive’s successor Henry Verelst wrote. But even then, the ‘calamity’ which mattered most to the Company was the depletion of the Company’s revenue supplies. By February 1770, 70 per cent of the largest of Bengal’s three annual rice crops, usually harvested in December and January, had been lost. The Company’s council in Calcutta optimistically remarked that ‘we have not yet found any failure in the revenue’. But the price of rice had increased five times in some places and millions were starving. Historians debate how many people died in total, but a good estimate is that somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent of the province’s population of perhaps twenty million perished in the famine of 1769–70.
The few Britons who wrote about it described the famine as a moment when the fragile power of human society to organize its subsistence was conquered by the malign forces of Indian nature. In these years, scavenging carnivores were everywhere in British minds. One observer described ‘thousands falling daily in the streets and fields whose bodies, mangled by dogs, jackals, and vultures in that hot season (what at best the air is very infectious) made us dread the consequences of the plague’. John Shore, a later Governor-General, wrote in bad verse how ‘in wild confusion dead and dying lie / hark to the jackal’s yell and vulture’s cry’. Company servants thought people had reverted to a state of natural barbarity, with descriptions by June 1770 of the living feeding on the bodies of the dead.51