The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  ‘[S]ince the days of the Norman Conquest,’ John Crawfurd, a champion of Calcutta’s merchants argued in 1828, ‘language more presumptuous and revolting has never been addressed, by Englishmen in authority, to men of their own country.’ He attacked the Company’s ‘corporation spirit, combined with the habitual contemplation and exercise of despotic power’. These arguments used mainstream language and were published in mainstream periodicals. Crawfurd’s castigation of the Company was printed in the Edinburgh Review, the journal of self-styled philosophical Whigs interested in furthering a progressive, propertied social order based on a union between the commercial middle classes and Britain’s historically dominant aristocracy. In the political climate of the 1810s and 1820s there was nothing particularly radical about attacking the East India Company’s absolutist form of corporate power.23

  Vent for manufactures

  The onset of economic crisis changed the mood and made these Whig arguments untenable. After the years of austerity that followed the Napoleonic Wars, the mid-1820s saw a quick boom and rapid crash in both Britain and British Asia, causing the demise of ideas of Anglo-Indian commercial and political partnership, and consolidation of more absolutist ideas about imperial power.

  The boom of the early 1820s was driven by the rapid construction of new cotton factories in the north of England, and the idea that easy money could be made from silver in newly developed mines in the independent Latin American republics. In India, money was cheap and the cost of labour relatively low, so speculation in indigo, coffee and cotton expanded. To fuel growth the government decided to reduce import duties rather than increase its surplus. Free-trading ideology was increasingly taking hold, fuelling a growing challenge to the Company’s absolutism.24

  The crash of 1825 was perhaps the world’s firstly truly global financial crisis. The bubble in London burst in September of that year, just as the East India Company was facing increased costs because of the unexpected escalation of its war with Burma. To resolve their own financial difficulties, manufacturers from Britain flooded India with goods made in the mills of Manchester and ships from the dockyards of the north-east of England. The amount of cotton yarn imported to India expanded forty times in four years, to 4.6 million pounds. The import of British-made vessels annihilated the Bombay ship-building industry. Faced with this onslaught of cheap commodities from Europe, it was hard for traders to export from India. The Company and private European merchants could only make money by exporting silk and opium, the latter shipped in large quantities to China. Without an outlet for their commodities, British private merchants and Company officers tried to ship more and more of their money back to London. As their capital was withdrawn, a succession of banks, investment houses and indigo companies collapsed quickly in 1830. The price of raw materials in India sank, dramatically cutting the income of farmers. In the region around Madras peasants’ income from selling rice fell by half between 1825 and 1831. Some regions fell victim to famine; many parts of India did not recover until the 1840s.25

  Concern about the fractured character of British authority was heightened by these economic and financial crises. The capacity of British merchants to make money and the British Government of India’s capacity to pay its costs seemed to have been endangered. In the five years before 1828, the Company’s trading profits had been eaten up and the Company ran a deficit of £2.9 million each year. For Lord Ellenborough, President of the Board of Control in the Duke of Wellington’s short-lived Tory government, the Company’s dreadful finances were caused by ‘disrespect and disobedience’ to orders from London: ‘nothing but a continuation of strict rule could bring India to subordination’. The deficit had, the Tories argued, been caused by ‘great delays in the communication with India’. It took two and half years for instructions to be sent and receive a response. Ellenborough was optimistic that technology would allow greater control. Speaking to the British cabinet in November 1829 he suggested that a link by steamship would allow orders to be sent and replied to in sixty days.

  The overlapping crises of the late 1820s disabled the Whig opposition to the authoritarian approach proposed by Wellington’s Tory government. Whig parliamentarians as well as ‘progressive’ journals such as the Edinburgh Review began to argue that India could only be ruled by an authoritarian regime that was anathema to English constitutional principles. One-time critics of the East India Company made peace with its ‘corporation spirit’ and supported the exercise of ‘despotic power’. Others challenged the Company’s right still to rule, suggesting the British state take over directly. The call, in particular, came from the beleaguered sites of British industry: Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, once centres of radical arguments about reform in the subcontinent.

  The shift is clear from looking at the changing arguments of those who wanted reform in the early 1820s. At Hull in 1822, the radical economist and entomologist William Spence condemned the Company’s monopoly by arguing that its abolition would expand trade in both directions. At similar meetings in 1829 and 1830, Spence described India not as trading partner but as one-way ‘vent for our manufactures’, a place to offload the ‘superabundant capital’ of Britain. By late 1829, when he published a tract in favour of the free movement of people and goods between Britain and India, John Crawfurd had abandoned his critique of the exercise of ‘despotic power’ in India. He admitted that Britain ‘holds our Indian empire by the power of the sword’. The British should, Crawfurd said, emulate the practice of authoritarian states like Russia and Spain in encouraging the investment of money and migration of people to conquered countries. The priority was no longer the involvement of private traders and Indian elites in government, but the creation of a form of rule able to smash open new markets.

  The export of capital and goods formed an important part of the argument Thomas Macaulay made for transforming the nature of British rule in India. Son of the missionary and anti-slavery activist Zachary Macaulay, Thomas Macaulay combined a particular interest in empire with a growing role as a Whig historian and philosopher. After being elected to Parliament in 1832, Macaulay became spokesman on India for the new Whig government in the House of Commons. It was he who gave the centrepiece speech in defence of the government’s Charter Act in 1833. The speech was an eloquent case of the need for India to be governed by British despotism. Absolute power was needed to maintain order and ensure the ‘diffusion of European civilization amongst the vast population of the East’. But despotism had to create consumers of British goods, Macaulay said. There was no point in establishing imperial rule if Indians were ‘performing their salams [sic] to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures’. At a moment of economic crisis, Macaulay was most interested in diffusing European habits of consumption.26

  In 1828, Macaulay had written a coruscating defence of the principle of political balance against the dry rationalism of Mill’s ‘Essay in Government’.27 When he rose to defend a new charter for the East India Company in July 1833, he adopted all of James Mill’s proposals for the Government of India: opening India to free trade; retaining the East India Company as an institution of rule; forming a single legislative council to bring all of British India’s disparate territories into a single unit of command; creating a code of law which applied equally to all subjects of British power. To the cold authoritarianism of James Mill’s utilitarianism Macaulay added one liberal flourish. He insisted on adding a ‘noble clause’ to the new charter which promised that all public appointments were open to Indians as well as Europeans. With the anxious, mistrustful attitude British officers had towards Indians in positions of public office, it was a meaningless gesture, which had no effect for a generation.28

  Macaulay and Mill differed in their language and attitude not their intentions. Both wished to centralize power, to place all subjects under a single authority, to remove the power Indians had over their own government and reduce discretion by codifying l
aw. But they cast the changes they proposed in a dramatically different light.

  Mill wrote with an air of desperation as if catastrophe beckoned about the need to create order from chaos and corruption. His language was saturated with the anxiety of his age: this was a time of rapid industrial change, political unrest and seeming continual imperial crisis.

  Macaulay’s success came from his ability to hold this anxiety back. He took Mill’s arguments and shoehorned them into an optimistic narrative about enlightenment and the progress of civilization. His greatest literary achievement was The History of England, published from 1840 onwards. Long before then his political attitude was ruled by the logic of the storyteller, the romantic historian, skilful at placing the fragmented actions of fallible beings into a heroic story about great men creating progressive social change. Macaulay’s genius was to persuade contemporaries that a panicked response to economic and political crisis was a deliberate act of improvement; that an authoritarian effort to shore up the East India Company’s creaking structures of power was a moment of liberal, enlightened reform. As historian Robert Sullivan put it ‘above all, Macaulay sold the British empire’.29

  Beneath Macaulay’s poetry, the future of the East India Company was determined in a series of prosaic and sordid negotiations. The East India Company’s proprietors gave up their commercial privileges for a fixed income and a vague idea of their power. The Company had lost its monopoly over British trade with India in 1813. But its institutional strength allowed it to compete effectively with private traders until the depression of the 1820s. The economic crash meant the Company could be easily convinced to give up its commercial privileges. It was Sir John Malcolm, just returned after his three-year stint in Bombay, who did the persuading. According to the deal Malcolm negotiated, Company stockholders exchanged their income from India’s beleaguered export trade for an annuity paid at 10½ per cent per annum guaranteed by the British state. As straightforward as they were, the negotiations seem to have killed Malcolm. The influenza epidemic gripped his stressed body in the spring of 1833. He collapsed while giving a speech to the East India Company and died in May, at the age of sixty-four.30

  The Charter Act did not, though, kill the East India Company or its way of working. It ended the Company as a financial interest separate from the British state. But the loss of its commercial functions was a victory for the East India Company’s way of doing business. In 1833 the Company merged with the British state, and won the battle over how India should be ruled. Representative government and a balance of power were not admitted as a valid way to govern the ‘anomalous’ circumstances of India. Instead the East India Company was able to stand forth with an unashamedly absolutist form of government, an ‘enlightened and paternal despotism’, as Macaulay put it. The Charter Act of 1833 marked the transformation of the idioms of power which had ruled the Company since the 1690s into a new idea of imperial authority. Rather than being conceived as a collection of different political authorities India began to be seen as a single terrain on which the consistent and unaccountable exercise of British power began to be imagined.31

  Legislating for a conquered race

  In the 1830s there were a proliferation of British projects which had the aim of making this idea of imperial power a reality. Most of them were unsuccessful. Some were never implemented. Others were only put into practice after long delays. But their growth tells us something important about the changing character of British rule. From the 1830s Britain’s leading officers in India developed projects at a great distance from the point at which they would be put into practice. These schemes took many forms: making new laws, surveying land, building canals, roads and eventually railways. What they had in common was their abstract character, particularly their effort to circumvent the need for a relationship with or knowledge about local political circumstances. They created an idea of imperial domination that was very real in the minds of its authors, but always seemed out of kilter with what was happening in reality. In the process India became a land of unprecedented possibility and disappointment, of social and technological fantasy as well as recurrent crisis.

  The most important project was the attempt to create a new set of laws for India. British observers universally observed that law in India was chaotic and arbitrary and thought certainty and uniformity (‘where it was possible’) were vital for securing British power. In his 1833 speech to Parliament, Macaulay repeated common complaints about major areas of law left uncertain. He had, he said, asked a senior civil servant what a judge would do if an enslaved dancing girl ran away from her master. ‘Some judges’, he said, ‘send the girl back. Others set her at liberty. The whole is a mere matter of chance.’ Macaulay imagined that Britain’s absolute power would make the compilation of a new code of law an easy task. A ‘quiet knot of veteran jurists’ could quickly do what a ‘large popular assembly’, with its factions, debates and need to be publicly accountable could not, he thought.32

  The ‘quiet knot’ deputed to write India’s new law was led by Macaulay himself. In 1834 he resigned his parliamentary seat telling his constituents in Leeds that he was sailing to ‘legislat[e] for a conquered race, to whom the blessings of our constitution cannot as yet be safely extended’. Macaulay had been offered the position of chief lawmaker of the new Indian Legislative Council. The salary was large enough to ensure he would be financially secure for the rest of his life. But Macaulay’s elation at securing a decent livelihood was combined with an elevated sense of imperial purpose. There was, he wrote, ‘no nobler field than that which our Indian empire presents to a statesman’ than legislation.33

  During his three years in India, Macaulay cut himself off from Indian life, ensuring nothing would challenge this sense of authoritarian purpose. ‘We are strangers here,’ he insisted, and he wanted to keep it that way. He saw the world outside the high-walled palace in which he lived as corrupt and chaotic, a place of threat, turmoil and danger. When his residence was being renovated he was forced to spend a short stretch in a smaller dwelling, and there complained about being ‘deafened by the clang of native musical instruments and poisoned with the steams of native cookery’. In theory, Macaulay was willing to concede to ‘the feelings of the natives of India’ in his work, but had no way of communicating to gauge what they were. The laws he wrote during his isolated sojourn were works of detached rationalist abstraction. His Code of Criminal Law was a body of jurisprudence written for everyone and no one, which had no relationship to previous Indian laws or any other form of government at all. As the Law Commission insisted, ‘no existing system has furnished us even with a ground-work’.34

  In Parliament Macaulay promised that India’s newly centralized, absolute government would sweep away the confused mass of British–Indian jurisprudence with a series of rational codes. Most important was the reduction of the religiously-rooted Hindu and Muslim law which British judges used to govern inheritance disputes into a systematic, written form. Suspicious as ever of their Indian interlocutors, all but a few British judges saw the traditions of legal practice which governed property before their arrival incomprehensible. Despite occasional flourishes of radical language from Macaulay, the British government was too worried to engage in any serious reform. Efforts to alter existing practices were rare and only occurred once officials convinced themselves that change would be popular, or conformed to authentic Indian customs and laws. The iconic and solitary instance of British social engineering in Lord William Bentinck’s period as Governor-General was the decision to ban sati, or the practice of Hindu women being burnt alongside their dead husbands. Here legislation was only passed after a decade of trying to regulate the practice failed. Bentinck only outlawed sati once he was convinced that it was not an authentic Hindu rite.

  Macaulay and his three fellow law commissioners finished their Code of Penal Law in 1837 but it sat unread and unenacted for twenty-four years. The intention to codify Hindu and Muslim law was seen as too difficult even to
start. As chaotic as the existing system seemed, judges and officials throughout British India were worried that change would create opposition. Instead, judicial officers sponsored the printing of yet more unofficial codes and guides: Theobald’s Acts of the Legislative Council, Morley’s Analytical Digest of Cases, Beaufort’s Digest of Criminal Law, Harrison’s Code of Bombay Regulation, for example. In the 1830s and 1840s, the law was not reshaped by the explicit authority of the central state. This was an era of manuals and guidebooks, as officials and judges moulded the practice of law for themselves by printing books which reduced legal complexity to simple rules without the official sanction of the Governor-General.

  The perseverance of the boiling kettle

  Macaulay’s legal reforms were intended to pull distant places together and bring scattered centres of British authority within a single orbit of command. Their purpose was to subjugate the actions of British officers under a single set of rules, and so make the empire whole and united. Their success relied on the existence of physical means of communication that could disperse orders and rules from the centre of authority to its satellites. Along with legal reform the 1830s was a time in which projects to improve transportation proliferated. Roads and steamboats came first. After the years of Lord Bentinck’s savage expenditure cuts, investment in public works increased after 1837. But even on the most liberal calculation, until the mid-1840s public works took a fractional 2 per cent of British India’s £20–£25 million total expenditure.35 Most of this money was spent on roads which connected district capitals, or extended a few miles out from the Collector’s office to ease the transport of cash from landholders to the Company’s treasuries. Still, by the end of the 1830s, the empire’s road network was fragile and left the British in a constant state of danger. Even on the Grand Trunk Road that connected Calcutta to Delhi and beyond raids were frequent. Vehicles carrying British goods needed to keep together in the Government Bullock Train, a heavily armed convoy of animals and carts, to have a good chance of getting through to their destination.36