The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  8K. N. Chitnis, The Nawabs of Savanur (New Delhi, 2000), 192.

  9Alam and Subrahmanyam, The Mughal State, 46–8.

  10Yusuf Ali Khan, Tarikh-i-Bangla Mahabat Jangi, trans. Abdus Subhan (Calcutta, 1982); Jadunath Sarkar, ‘Murshid Quli Khan’, Bengal Past and Present, xvi (1946); Abdul Karim, Murshid Quli Khan and His Times (Dacca, 1963), 163; A. Karim, ‘Murshid Quli Khan’s Relations with the English East India Company from 1700–1707’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, iv (1961), 264–88.

  11Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Trade and Politics in the Arcot Nizamat (1700–1732)’, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (2012), 339–80.

  12Despatches From England, 1730-1733. Records of Fort St George, Madras (1930), 4 Dec 1730, 31; Alam and Sabrahmanyam, ‘Trade and Politics’.

  13Gordon, The Marathas, 1600-1818, 110-112. Surendra Nath Sen, ‘The Early Career of Kanhoji Angre’, Early Career of Kanhoji Angre and Other Papers (Calcutta, 1941), 1–19.

  14Bombay Public Consultation, 5 & 9 May, June 17, 1718, 22 Oct, 1718, IOR, P/341/4; Addison logbook, IOR L/MAR/301A.

  15Surendra Nath Sen, ‘The Khanderi Expedition of Charles Boone’, Early Career of Kanhoji Angria and Other Papers, 12–19.

  16G. W. Forrest (ed.), Selections from the Bombay Diaries, 1722–1788, Bombay Secretariat, Home Series (Bombay, 1887), ii, 25; Fawcett and Foster, The English Factories in India, 1678–1684, 184.

  17G. W. Forrest, Selections from the Letters, Despatches and Other State Papers Preserved in the Bombay Secretariat, ii, 28.

  18Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia, 178.

  19Gyfford’s career can be traced in William Gyfford to Charles Boone, 20 August 1719, IOR G/40/21, 13–20, and other documents in the same file.

  20K. M. Panikkar, ‘Some Aspects of Nayar Life’, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, xlviii (1918), 255.

  21Menon, ‘Houses by the Sea’, 161–87.

  22For the history of Anjengo, see Leena More, The English East India Company and the Native Rulers of Kerala (Tellicherry, 2003).

  23Diary and Consultation Book, 1719–1723. Records of Fort St. George (Madras, 1910), June 1721, 91.

  24Diary and Consultation Book, 1719–1723, 4 May 1721, 73.

  25V. Nagam Aiya, The Travancore State Manual (Trivandrum, 1906), 325–7.

  26Mrs Gyfford to Bengal Council, 26 April 1722, IOR G/40/21, 196; Bengal Council to Thomas Matthews, 22 September 1722, IOR G/40/21 203; Ft St George Council to Anjengo, 199; Mrs Gyfford to Court of Directors, 6 Jan 1743, IOR E/1/32, 10.

  4. Passions at Plassey

  1Michael Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (London, 2010), 6–8; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Un Grand Dérangement: Dreaming an Indo-Persian Empire in South Asia, 1740–1800’, Journal of Early Modern History, iv (2000), 337–78.

  2Ananda Ranga Pillai, Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, ed. Henry Dodwell (Madras, 1922), i, 94; Ashin Das Gupta, ‘Trade and Politics in 18th Century India’ in D. S. Richards, ed., Islam and the Trade of Asia (Oxford 1970), 184-5.

  3Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Clive of India (London, 1975); An example of the importance of Plassey and Clive for modern Indian historiography is the textbook Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India (New Delhi, 2004).

  4Quoted in Munis D. Faruqui, ‘At Empire’s End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-Century India’, in Richard M. Eaton et al., Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History: Essays in Honour of John F. Richards (Cambridge, 2013), 22; John Malcolm, The Life of Robert, Lord Clive (London, 1836), i, 16.

  5For the political narrative see N. S. Ramaswami, Political History of Carnatic Under the Nawabs (New Delhi, 1984), 86–114.

  6Saunders to Court of Directors, 30 Sept, 1751 in Despatches to England, 1743–1751. Records of Fort St. George (Madras, 1933), 144.

  7Consultation in Diary and Consultation Book, 1751. Records of Fort St. George, 4 Nov 1751, 130.

  8Sarojini Regani, Nizam-British Relations, 1724–1857 (New Delhi, 1963), 121–44.

  9André Wink, ‘Maratha Revenue Farming’, Modern Asian Studies, xvii (1983), 591–628.

  10Khan, Tarikh-I-Bangla Mahabat Jangi, 42–7.

  11P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead. Eastern India, 1740-1828 (Cambridge, 1987), 70–72; Gangarama, The Maharashta Purana: An Eighteenth-Century Bengali Historical Text (Honolulu, HA, 1965).

  12Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead. 72.

  13Orme to Clive, 25 Aug 1752, IOR Mss Orme/19, 1–2.

  14William Tooke, Narrative of the Capture of Calcutta, 10 Apr–10 Nov 1756 in Samuel Charles Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757: (Calcutta, 1905), i, 268; Brijen Kishore Gupta, Sirajuddaullah and the East India Company, 1756–1757: (Leiden, 1962), 50.

  15Khan, Tarikh-i-Bangla Mahabat Jangi, 118–1199.

  16Nawab to Coja Wajid, 28 May 1756 in Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, i, 3.

  17Jadunath Sarkar and Karim Ali (eds.), ‘Muzzafarnamah’, Bengal Nawabs (Calcutta, 1952), 63; Gupta, Sirajuddaullah and the East India Company, 1756–1757, 52.

  18Lenman, ‘Clive, the ‘black jagir’ and British Politics’, Historical Journal 26, 4 (1983), 801-829.

  19Letters from Clive to William Mabbot [January 1756], & 6 Oct 1756, CR1/1, 6 & 16, Clive Papers, National Library of Wales.

  20Clive to William Mabbot, 6 Oct 1756 in Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, i, 228.

  21Council at Fulta to Court of Directors, 17 Sept 1756 in Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, i, 214.

  22Clive to his Father, 9 Oct 1756, Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, i, 227.

  23Hill, i, 242, 248, 227; Pigot to Nawab, 14 Oct 1756 in Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, i, 241.

  24John Corneille, Journal of My Service in India (London, 1966), 66.

  25Corneille, Journal of My Service in India, 23, 88, 126.

  26Ibid., 109.

  27Watson to Nawab, 4 Feb 1757 in Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, ii, 273. G. J. Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784 (Woodbridge, 2013), 131.

  28Corneille, Journal of My Service in India, 115.

  29Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, ii, 240; ii, 163; ii, 203, 76; Khan, The Transition in Bengal, 1756–75, 5.

  30Manik Chandra to Clive, 23 Dec 1756 & Clive to Manik Chandra, 25 Dec 1756, IOR H/193, nos.4–5.

  31Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics, and Society in Early Modern India : Bihar, 1733–1820 (Leiden, 1996), 102–6.

  32Corneille, Journal of My Service in India, 113.

  33Journal of Captain Eyre Coote in Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, i, 54; Clive’s Narrative in Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, ii, 420–3.

  34A. Mervyn Davies, Clive of Plassey. A Biography (London, 1939), 215–216; Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India (London, 1974), 137.

  35Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, i, cxcix–cci; Journal of Captain Eyre Coote Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757, iv, 55.

  36Percival Spear, Master of Bengal. Clive and His India (London, 1975), 91; compare with John Keegan, The Face of Battle. A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (Harmondsworth, 1983) and Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton, NJ, 2009).

  37Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784, 153; Malcolm, The Life of Robert, Lord Clive, 271.

  38Letter from Clive to Luke Scrafton, January 1757, IOR H/808, 65.

  39Brenda J. Buchanan, Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A Technological History (2006), 68–87; John William James Stephenson, Treatise on the Manufacture of Saltpetre (1835), 88–96.

  40Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics, and Society in Early Modern India, 168–76.

  41Khan, The Transition in Bengal, 1756–75, 28; Henry Vansittart, A Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal, from the Year 1760, to the Year 1764 (1766), 35.

  42Khan, The Transition in Bengal, 1756–75, 32–5.

  43Ibid., 32–45.

  44Ishrat Haque, Glimpses of Mughal Society and Culture: A Study Ba
sed on Urdu Literature, in the 2nd Half of the 18th Century (1992), 58.

  45Jos J. L. Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire: c. 1710–1780 (1995), 57; Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784, 161; Mountstuart Elphinstone, The Rise of British Power in India (London, 1887), 400–417.

  46Khan, Seir Mutaquerin, iii, 9.

  47Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784, 179.

  48Trends calculated from John F. Richards, ‘The Finances of the East India Company in India, c.1766–1859’, LSE Economic History Working Papers, (2011); Khan, Seir Mutaquerin, iii, 9.

  49Chart source: Richards, ‘The Finances of the East India Company’.

  50Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India. The British in Bengal (Cambridge, 2007), 75.

  51‘Account of the Late Famine in India’, Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review, xli (1771), 402–5; William Wilson Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal (London, 1868), 19–20.

  52Rajat Datta, Society, Economy, and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760–1800 (New Delhi, 2000), 238–50.

  53‘Account of the Late Famine in India’, 403; J.R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in 18th Century Bengal (Cambridge, 1993), 194.

  54‘Grosely’s Tour to London’, The Monthly Review, Or, Literary Journal, xlvii (1772), 173; David Coke, Vauxhall Gardens: A History (New Haven, ConnCT; London, 2011).

  55William Maskelyne to Mrs Clive, Mss Eur, G37/24, 68.

  56H.V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–1773 (Cambridge, 1991), 13.

  57Alan Ramsay, An Essay on the Right of Conquest, (Florencem 1783), 9; David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Digge (Oxford, 1896), 600.

  5. New Systems

  1Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke, 2008); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004).

  2Jon E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke, 2008), 19–44; Numbers calculated from East India Register (London, 1773) and East India Kalendar (London, 1800).

  3Henry Morris, A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Godavery District (London, 1878), 20–21, 70–71, 258–60.

  4Mallikarjuna Rao, ‘Native Revolts in the West Godavari District, 1785–1805’ (Andhra University PhD, 2000), 42–50; Jon E. Wilson, ‘“A Thousand Countries To Go To”: Peasants and Rulers in Late Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, Past & Present, clxxxix (2005), 81–109; Jon Wilson, ‘How Modernity Arrived to Godavari’, Modern Asian Studies, ii (2016).

  5Branfill to Madras Board of Revenue, 17 Oct 1799, IOR F/4/170, 443.

  6Branfill to Captain John English, 30 Mar 1800; Branfill to Col. Vigors, 31 Mar 1800; Branfill to Board of Revenue, April 1800, Andhara Pradesh Sate archives, Godvari District Records, vol. 856, 109–112 & 130.

  7Kindersley to Board of Revenue, 13 May 1824, Andhara Pradesh Sate Archives, Godvari District Records, vol. 4638, 103–110.

  8Bentinck to Court of Directors, 28 August 1804, IOR E/4/894, 381–3.

  9Madras Despatch, 27 June 1804, IOR E/4/892, 571.

  10John Stuart Mill, Speech on East India Company Revenue Accounts, Hansard, House of Commons, 12 August 1867, §1384.

  11Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–1773, 184–6.

  12Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India.

  13Fanny Burney, Diaries and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett (1796), iii, 411; P. J. Marshall, ‘The Personal Fortune of Warren Hastings’, The Economic History Review, xvii (1964), 293.

  14Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, 1991), vi, 381–3; Richard Bourke, ‘Liberty, Authority, and Trust in Burke’s Idea of Empire’, Journal of the History of Ideas, lxi (2000).

  15Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, NJ, 2015), 16–25, 339.

  16Wilson, The Domination of Strangers, 53.

  17Wilson, The Domination of Strangers, 58–76; D. H. A. Kolff, Grass in Their Mouths: The Upper Doab of India Under the Company’s Magna Charta, 1793–1830 (Leiden, 2010), 20.

  18John Francis Davis, Vizier Ali Khan: Or, The Massacre of Benares, (London, 1871), 12.

  19Thomas Williamson, The East India Vade-Mecum; Or, Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military, or Naval Service of the Hon. East India Company (1810); M. S. Islam, ‘Life in the Mufassal Towns of Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, in Kenneth Ballhatchet and John Harrison (eds.), The City in South Asia: Pre-Modern and Modern (London, 1980); Tania Sengupta, ‘Living in the Periphery: Provinciality and Domestic Space in Colonial Bengal’, The Journal of Architecture, xviii (2013) 905-943.

  20Mountstuart Elphinstone to Anne Elphinstone, 20 Nov 1796, IOR Mss Eur F88/59/21.

  21Anand A. Yang, The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920 (New Delhi, 1989), 94–5.

  22Julia Maitland, Letters from Madras: During the Years 1836–1839 (London, 1846), 61–3; Joy Wang, ‘Maitland, Julia Charlotte (1808–1864)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) www.oxforddnb.com/index/101048645/Julia-Maitland, accessed 23 April 2016.

  23Maitland, Letters from Madras, 46–7.

  24‘Abstract of Regulations of the Bengal Government’, Parliamentary Papers 1831–2 (735–IV), iv, Appendix, 638–817.

  25H. T. Colebrooke, A Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions, with a Commentary (Calcutta, 1798).

  26Rammohan Roy, ‘Questions and Answers on the Judicial System of India’, Parliamentary Papers, 1831 (320A), 726.

  27Hossein Khan Tabatabai, The Seir Mutaquerin, or Review of Modern Times, III, 200.

  28Sudder Dewanny Adawlut, 19 Sept 1793, no.5, IOR P/154.

  29Chittabrata Palit, Tensions in Bengal Rural Society: Landlord, Planters, and Colonial Rule, 1830–1860 (1975).

  30James Wordsworth, ‘Police Report, District of Rangpur’, (1799); J.D. Paterson to Police Committee, 30 Aug 1799, NAB, Faridpur District Records, vol. 62, 8.

  31Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The British in Benares: A Nineteenth Century Colonial Society’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, iv (1962).

  32R. K. Gupta, The Economic Life of a Bengal District, Birbhum, 1770–1857 (Burdwan, 1984).

  33Petition of Alexander Paniotty, 4 April 1800, National Archives of Bangladesh, Dhaka District Records, vol.135, 268–80

  34Rammohan Roy, ‘Questions’, Parliamentary Papers, 1831 (320A), 718.

  35Ratnalekha Ray, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society, c.1760–1850 (New Delhi, 1979); Eric Stokes, ‘The First Century of British Colonial Rule in India: Social Revolution or Social Stagnation?’, Past and Present, viii (1973).

  36McLane, Land and Local Kingship in 18th Century Bengal.

  37Iqbal, The Bengal Delta; C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983).

  38Petition of Raja of Diviseema, 10 Jan 1812, Andhra Pradesh State Archives, Godavari District Records, vol. 873, 15–18.

  39Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Deindustrialisation in Nineteenth-Century South India’ in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden, 2009), 426. Henry Montgomery, ‘Report on Rajahmundry District,’ 18 Mar 1844, IOR P/230/49, 2090-2192; Henry Morris, A Descriptive Account of the Godaveri District (London, 1878), 279-292.

  40Amales Tripathi, Trade and Finance in the Bengal Presidency, 1793–1833, (Calcutta, 1979), 211.

  41Calculated from tables in Montgomery, ‘Report on Rajahmundry District’, 2099–2100.

  42B. B. Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley, CA, 1976), 56; H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge, 2006), 278.


  43Wilson, The Domination of Strangers, 104–33.

  44Yang, The Limited Raj.

  45Bourke, Empire and Revolution, 672–3.

  46Dutta, The North-East and the Mughals, 1661–1714; Ray, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society, c.1760–1850.

  47E. G. Glazier, A Report on the District of Rungpore (Calcutta, 1873), 1–48.

  48National Archives of Bangladesh, Rangpur District Records, vol. 290, 65, vol. 298, 30.

  49Palit, Tensions in Bengal Rural Society, 38; Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India; Ray, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society, c.1760–1850.

  50William Digby to Board of Revenue, National Archives of Bangladesh, Rangpur District Records, vol. 306B, 271.

  51Shomik Dasgupta, ‘Ethics, Accountability and Distance: The Political Thought Rommohun Roy (King’s College London, PhD thesis, 2016).

  52C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2011).

  53Kling, Partner in Empire, 78.

  54Lyn Zastoupil, Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain (Basingstoke, 2010), 121–150.

  55S. D. Collet, Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy (Calcutta, 1913), 2d, 178–81.

  56‘Revenue and Judicial System of India’, Parliamentary Papers, 1831 (320A), 716–41.

  57Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India, 74.

  58Rammohun Roy (Raja), The Essential Writings of Raja Rammohan Ray (1999), 268–71; Bruce Carlisle Robertson, ‘The English Writings of Raja Rammohan Roy’, in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, A History of Indian Literature in English (2003), 29–31.

  6. Theatres of Anarchy

  1For the background of Manjeshwar temple, see P. Gururaja Bhatt, Studies in Tuluva History and Culture: From the Pre-Historic Times Upto [sic] the Modern (Kallianpur, 1975), 134.

  2Thomas Munro to Richard Wellesley, Dec 1799, BL Add Mss 13,679, 2–5.

  3Thomas Munro to William Petrie, 16 June 1800, IOR P/254/59, 6306–14; John G. Ravenshaw to G. Garrow, 27 Aug 1801, IOR P/254/77, 448–9.

  4Wellesley to Dundas, 28 July 1798, in Edward Ingram (ed.), Two Views of British India: The Private Correspondence of Mr. Dundas and Lord Wellesley, 1798–1801 (1970), 55; B. Surendra Rao, Bunts in History and Culture (Udupi, 2010), 176.