Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

  Jemmy Wilson wrote dull pamphlets and made duller speeches, but still he showed some Scotch pertinacity in keeping alive the agitation in the metropolis. When we dissolved our organization, a lithographed circular was sent to all its subscribers recommending them to support the Economist. This was the foundation of Wilson’s fortune, which was in a sickly state previously … [it] became the stepping stone to Office … What so natural as that the paper should be the obsequious servant of the government, or the Economist’s pages should be employed in assailing the two men who laid the foundation of all this success, if they happen no longer to be in favour with the dispensers of patronage?130

  Bright ignored the Economist, and only partly listened to Cobden, agreeing a few months later to stand for a vacant seat in Birmingham – as news reached Britain in 1857 of a bloody uprising in India.131

  India and the Indian Mutiny

  In the climate of fear and vengeance that reports of the Indian Mutiny produced, criticisms of empire risked becoming still more unpopular, jeopardizing Bright’s chances of re-election, and Cobden urged him to moderate his tone, at least in public. In private, both condemned ‘the depraved, unhappy state of opinion’, Cobden wondering what point there was in taking to the stump: ‘I consider that we as a nation are little better than brigands, murderers, and poisoners in our dealings at this moment with half the population of the globe.’132 Once back in parliament, however, Bright grew bolder, informing his Birmingham constituents that the Empire ‘is a positive loss to the people’ and ‘neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’. The rationale for fighting Russia and China, ‘introducing cotton cloth with cannon balls’, were ‘vain, foolish and wretched excuses for war’. India, moreover, was a ‘country we do not know how to govern’, and Indians were justified in rebelling against British rule in the subcontinent, where the conquest of Oudh, ‘with which our Government had but recently entered into a solemn treaty’ was ‘a great immorality and a great crime, and we have reaped an almost instantaneous retribution in the most gigantic and sanguinary revolt which probably any nation ever made against its conquerors’.133

  Wilson found this last strophe on India so alarming that when he saw Bright in the Commons a few months later he obtained assurances from him that he had been ‘carried away much further than he intended’. Wilson relayed these assurances to Cornewall Lewis, who wanted to know if Bright would cooperate on electoral reform should the Tories be turned out and a new Liberal ministry formed – inevitably including Palmerston or Russell, the very men Bright was castigating for criminal misconduct in imperial and foreign affairs.134

  From 1857 the Economist was as fixated as the rest of the press on the horror stories pouring out of British India – where a mutiny of Indian soldiers, or sepoys, against their European officers in Meerut rapidly grew into a full-fledged rebellion against the British East India Company. By this time the quasi-private company, founded under Elizabeth I, ruled about two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent, in exchange for a £630,000 annuity to London on the revenue the land under its control generated. Three separate armies marched under its banners, one for each of the presidencies into which India was subdivided: Bengal, Bombay and Madras, totalling 232,000 Indians and 45,000 Europeans. The first of these was the largest and most homogeneous, recruited since the mid-seventeenth century from Hindu peasants in Bengal, Oudh, Bihar and Benares. These men mutinied in far greater numbers than anywhere else; a fact contemporaries attributed to an unwitting religious insult, infantry in Meerut – it was said – refusing to bite cartridges greased with cow and pig fat, offensive to Muslims and Hindus alike. In reality, their grievances were structural: both in the army – low pay, poor living conditions, an inability to rise through the ranks, in which the most senior Indian officer was obliged to obey the most junior European – and in the surrounding society, whose once formidable textile economy had collapsed under the onslaught of British manufactured cloth, while being subjected to an East India Company business model based on the predatory chase after new revenues and territories.135

  The Economist was just as ruthless with Indians as with the Irish or Chinese. As Elgin ordered troops en route to China to double back to Calcutta, the paper looked forward to swift justice being meted out to the mutineers for their treachery in ‘undiscriminating destruction of hospitals and barracks, of helpless women and children’, which it contemptuously attributed to the ‘native character … half child, half savage, actuated by sudden and unreasoning impulses’ more than to any coherent motivation or design.136 It thought the worst was probably over by mid-July when the fall of Delhi to the rebels failed to ignite a general uprising. ‘Three-fourths of the Bengal army – the whole of the Madras and Bombay – and the entire non-military population from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, have stayed aloof … could there be stronger evidence that, in spite of numerous errors, British rule is regarded by the natives of India as a blessing rather than a curse?’137

  Even the ‘barbarous and treacherous massacre of the garrison at Cawnpore’, which, unlike the Times it declined to describe in detail, scarcely troubled its confidence in the future of empire.138 In fact, the mutiny was soon viewed as little less than a blessing in disguise. A month later, it offered ‘The Bright Side of the Picture’ in a tone of elated Benthamite optimism. The English character perhaps required such a shock to ‘startle and energize us’ – ‘a Crimean winter to convince us of the defects in our military administration, and a universal mutiny to open our eyes in India’. The sheer scale of the disaster gave British statesmen that rare thing, ‘carte blanche – an unencumbered field … we are free to act as on the first day of our Imperial existence’.139 This notion became the refrain of the Economist. ‘No event less horrible could have strengthened our hands so powerfully.’ If the sepoys had only committed garden-variety cruelties, ‘the Government would have been assailed at once by a strong party likening the revolt to that of the American colonies, and recommending the nation not to resist a patriotic movement … Eloquent voices would have been raised as Mr Bright’s was formerly, to warn the nation that a due retribution had come upon them for a selfish feeling of grasping ambition.’

  Yet now all these doubts and fears are absolutely stilled … Every Englishman knows that to abandon India, would be to commit a far worse sin against the millions of Hindoos than against our own nation … to the horrors of a military anarchy compared with which the reign of terror in the French revolution was a model of justice and mercy … In Europe too they see how helpless are the Indian races to restrain their own superstitions and their own passions – that no reverence for law, and civil order, and social obligations, adequate for the rudest form of self-government is yet written on their minds … Commerce with India would be at an end were English power withdrawn.140

  British forces regained the initiative at the turn of 1858, with the active help or acquiescence of princely states in upper and central India, and the diversion of regiments from Crimea, Persia and China. Imperial troops, reconquering or relieving besieged cities – in Delhi, Cawnpore, Lucknow and elsewhere – exacted terrible revenge on whole populations deemed guilty of aiding rebels. The Economist noted with approval ‘the stern vigour afforded by daily executions of mutineers of every rank’ – some were shot from the mouths of cannons – but wondered whether journalists and officers calling for the head of every sepoy in a mutinous regiment, even those who had committed no violence, had thought through the domestic reaction that might ensue: ‘it is at least worthy of consideration’, it submitted, ‘whether the deliberate execution of 35,000 men or more is a measure which the people and Government of England are prepared for’.141 When the East India Company itself failed to survive the uprising, London henceforward assuming direct control of the new British Raj, the Economist gave the change a warm welcome.

  Noblesse Oblige: Wilson in India

  One reason why the Economist embraced the new model of
government for India became clear a month after a state of peace was declared. ‘James Wilson’, the Times announced on 5 August 1859, had consented to become ‘Chancellor of the Indian Exchequer’, tasked with mopping up the cost of the mutiny. As in Crimea this had exceeded Economist estimates, with the death toll from the disproportionate British retaliation against Indian troops and civilians in the hundreds of thousands.142 The new appointee, the Times opined, ‘will carry with him habits of business and financial ability hitherto but too rarely exhibited on the banks of the Hooghly, and if he succeeds in making India solvent, and in proving that she can pay her own way, he will have rendered a public service which cannot be too highly appreciated.’143 Wilson went on a farewell tour. He appeared with Bowring at a banquet given by the mayor of Liverpool. The Cotton Supply Association met with him in Manchester. Bradford’s Chamber of Commerce asked him to induce the Indians to clip their sheep only once in nine months for finer fabrics. And after thirty-five years he returned to Hawick. Around ‘70 Scotch gentlemen’ were there to toast him, and amidst their cheers he summed up his work since leaving home. ‘We have at last solved that great problem in politics – that the real interests of society, well understood, were common to all alike.’ In India – whose interests were also ‘to an extent, identical’ with those of Britain – he promised to raise revenues and cut the cost of the army, which had more than doubled from £11,000,000 in 1855. ‘I say if you cannot govern the country and keep the internal peace for less than £21,000,000 you must abandon it altogether.’144

  During his valedictions Wilson gave effusive thanks to Palmerston, who had interceded on his behalf many times since 1848. Confessing that he had initially declined the offer of a position as secretary at the Board of Control, a parliamentary body that supervised the East India Company, he reported that ‘the noble Lord begged that I reconsider’ telling him that ‘a man who enters public life must not confine himself to those few questions of which he considers himself master’. In 1856, Queen Victoria had blocked Wilson from a governorship in Australia, considering it bad form for a commoner to run a place bearing her name. But in 1859 Palmerston, now prime minister, made him vice-president of the Board of Trade, before offering him such an exalted post in India – sweetened with promises of a title and cabinet place within five years.145 Yet it was his time on the India Board, Wilson reflected, without which ‘I could not have assumed the duty which has now devolved upon me’.

  In that earlier stint in the Commons Wilson had indeed pushed for the kind of economic development the East India Company had been slow or unwilling to pursue. Railway construction was his main concern, sharing the view of Bright and other Manchester men that this would open the vast interior to British industrial goods and ease extraction of raw materials like flax, wool, indigo, sugar and above all cotton, where Britain was too reliant on the American South. His daughter Emilie remembered her father ‘planning these Indian lines of railway on the dining-room table – lines over which eleven years later he himself was destined to travel’.146 He pressed administrators to open the port of Karachi, hoping to tempt ‘native dealers from Kabul’, and personally carried wool and cotton samples to factories in Leeds. But to these goals Wilson added another, a direct extension of his concerns as editor and proprietor of the Economist, and now Chancellor of India: security of investment.147

  ‘Wilson believed that he originally suggested’, Bagehot – his successor at the Economist – would record, ‘the peculiar form of state guarantee upon the faith of which so many millions of English capital have been sent to develop the industry of India.’148 Peculiar because, as Wilson realized even before his arrival there, and with no less an authority than Mill to back him up, for liberal outcomes a compromise with liberal principles might be needed – at least when it came to what were commonly considered backward races.149 Bagehot, who was even more alive to this problem, praised Wilson for his pragmatism: ‘the necessity on the one hand, in an Asiatic country where the state is the sole motive power, of the Government’s doing something – and the danger on the other of interfering with private enterprise, by its doing, or attempting to do, too much’.150 Wilson took leave of Britain telling his audiences, ‘I am one of those who believe that what is right in one part of the world cannot be wrong in another’, for ‘human nature is human nature the world over’.151 In practice, however, he behaved as though India required very different measures to springboard capitalist development.

  Wilson arrived in Calcutta in November 1859 with his wife and three eldest daughters, before setting out to meet the new viceroy of India, Lord Canning, on a tour of the Upper Provinces. He soon got to work, seeking to apply in under one year policies that had taken decades to enact in England. His first budget – with its dual task of raising revenue and keeping order – included policies Wilson had once opposed. He proposed a paper currency, for example, modelled on Peel’s Act of 1844. Income tax would also be assessed, starting at 200 rupees, even as millions of pounds in spending were slashed. ‘I am putting the screw on very strongly’, he admitted.152 He sought to do so with tact. Recycling his strategy from Influences of the Corn Laws, he tried to show Hindus that being taxed was as one with their own ancient laws, codified in the Manu-Samhita.153 In the army he aimed to reduce the ratio of native Indians by shifting some to ‘a great police system of semi-military organization’, which, he claimed, would be ‘cheaper by half a million’, and safer for Europeans.154 Finally, he set up an English system of public accounts, with estimates, annual budgets, and a national audit.

  It is no coincidence that these moves all tended to increase the confidence of overseas investors. Wilson was such an investor, and that was his intention. As if to underscore the byways between empire and finance, Wilson arrived in India even as his Chartered Bank was opening branches in Calcutta, Bombay, Shanghai and Hong Kong, buoyed by the opium pouring into China, as well as those more benign-sounding commodities, which in contrast it actually named in its prospectus, circulating between China, Java, Ceylon, India, Manila, Australia and the rest of the region.155

  His reforms did more than incorporate India into the formal structure of empire: they made it into that structure’s financial cornerstone. Without the Indian Army, and the Indian revenues that paid for it, Britain could not have projected its power in Africa and the Middle East, let alone Central, South and East Asia. Nor could the international system of multilateral settlements and payments that emerged after 1858 have looked nearly as favourable to the City.156 A stabilized British Raj pulled in capital from London: £286 million, or 18 per cent of the total invested in the empire from 1865 to 1914. The presence of so much foreign capital, in turn, made it crucial to maintain stability, and therewith investor confidence. India was expected above all to ‘keep faith’ with its creditors. Between 1858 and 1898 remittances averaged nearly half of exports, with 20 per cent alone going to debt service and Home Charges, an ingenious system by which Britain debited India for the cost of exploiting it. Meanwhile, the trade surplus India ran with much of the rest of the world allowed it to settle its trade deficit with Britain; and for Britain, in turn, to settle around two-fifths of its own trade deficit, mainly with Europe and North America.157

  If his special mission concerned finance, Wilson was far from indifferent to the trappings of empire this brought with it. He was excited by the challenge of India, and his own power to act there, in contrast to London. He described the ‘increased capacity of the mind when removed to a new scene of action … I cannot tell you with what ease one determines the largest and gravest question here compared with in England’, exulting that ‘the Indian Exchequer is a huge machine. The English Treasury is nothing to it for complexity, diversity and remoteness of the points of action.’158 Taking to his new imperial role with gusto, he relished the subtleties of frontier diplomacy as much as he enjoyed the dusty chaos of the financial files before him:

  It is a most unwieldy Empire to be governed on the principle of forcing ci
vilisation at every point of it. One day it is the frontier of Scinde and a quarrel with our native chiefs which our Resident must check: another, it is an intrigue between Heraut and Cabul, with a report of Russian forces in the background: the next, there is a raid upon our Punjab frontiers to be chastised: then come some accounts of coolness, or misunderstanding, or unreasonable demands from our ally in Nepaul: then follow some inroads from the savage tribes which inhabit the mountains to the rear of Assam and up the Burrampootra: then we have reported brawls in Burmah and Pegu, and disputes among the hill tribes whose relations to the British and the Burmah Governments are ill defined: then we have Central India, with our loyal chiefs Cindiah and Holkar, independent princes with most turbulent populations, which could not be kept in order a day without the presence of British troops and of the Governor-General’s Agent.159

  On his departure for India, Wilson relinquished nominal control of the Economist first to Greg, and then to Bagehot’s best friend, Graham Hutton, who stayed on as editor during his absence in Calcutta. In reality, the paper served the ambitions of its founder and owner till the end. When controversy arose over his first budget, Hutton and Bagehot leapt to defend it, attacking Charles Trevelyan, now Governor of Madras, who publicly objected to its steep spending cuts, tax rises and large procurements for the army.160 Wilson was outraged at this attempt to undermine his authority, but he scolded his surrogates, accusing them in one of his last letters of hurting his chances by going overboard in the dispute.