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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2017
Taking as its point of departure David Washbrook's essay ‘The Indian Economy and the British Empire’, this article takes a more detailed look at some episodes in the history of British India in the era of the Company Raj, with a view to placing them within a broader imperial framework, as advocated by Washbrook. The first part of the article examines, through an array of case studies, the actual contribution made by the Company to ‘global’ British expansion, concluding that it invested a lot of (Indian) blood and money in ventures from which it derived little benefit, as in the case of the expeditions to Manila (1762), Ceylon (1795), and Java (1811). It is shown that the Company's interests were ultimately sacrificed to the necessity of maintaining the European balance of power through consideration of the colonial interests of minor European powers such as Portugal or the Netherlands. While the Company saw its interests thus overlooked in the ‘global’ imperial arena, it could not find compensation in increased economic activity in India itself. Although the compulsions of ‘military-fiscalism’ largely explain such an outcome, we should not lose sight of the role of Indian agency in limiting the Company's options, as is shown by a rapid look at the history of both labour and capital markets, which the Company did not succeed in bending completely to its needs.
1 Washbrook, David A., ‘The Indian Economy and the British Empire’ in Peers, Douglas and Gooptu, Nandini (eds), India and the British Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 44–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Ibid., p. 54.
3 In particular, Travers, Robert, Ideology and Empire in 18th Century India: The British in Bengal, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2007 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Stern, Philip J., The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, New York, Oxford University Press, 2011 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Marshall, Peter John, The Making and Unmaking of Empire: Britain, India and America, c. 1750–1783, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 207–272 Google Scholar.
5 Holden Furber mentions that, in the early 1780s, ‘there were . . . rumours that the British in India might declare their independence’. Furber, Holden, Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville 1742–1811, Political Manager of Scotland, Statesman, Administrator of British India Oxford, London, Oxford University Press, Humphrey Milford, 1931, p. 48 Google Scholar.
6 53 Geo III c 155, quoted in Bowen, Huw V., ‘India, The Metropolitan Context’ in Marshall, Peter John (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. II, The Eighteenth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 547 Google Scholar.
7 Michael Duffy, ‘World-Wide War and British Expansion 1793–1815’, in ibid., p. 202.
8 Corbett, Julian Stafford, England in the Seven Years’ War, Vol. II: 1759–1763, London, Greenhill Books, 1992 (1st ed. 1907), p. 254 Google Scholar.
9 In their instructions to the commander of the troops, the Madras authorities wrote: ‘Should the place be taken, we hope a very considerable booty may be found in it.’ India Office Records (IOR), Asia Pacific and African Collections of the British Library (APAC), London, Madras Proceedings, Madras Military Consultations 1762, Consultation Fort Saint George of 31 July 1762, P 251/48.
10 Tracy, Nicholas, Manila Ransomed: The British Assault on Manila in the Seven Years War, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 1995 Google Scholar.
11 It appears, however, that the British-appointed governor, Dawson Drake, a Company man, ‘took all the furnishings from the Spanish governor's palace and chapel and packed them in crates, prior to sending them to India’. Mentioned in Documents Illustrating the British Conquest of Manila 1762–1763, edited for the Royal Historical Society by Nicholas P. Cushner, Camden Fourth Series, Vol. 8, London, Royal Historical Society, 1971, p. 7.
12 ‘Spanish protest to Robert Fell, British Commander, Manila, 18 July 1763’, APT (Archivum Provinciae Tarraconensis Societatis Iesu, San Cugat, Barcelona) XVIII, fo 13, reproduced in Documents Illustrating the British Conquest of Manila, document no. 104. The Spanish original mentions ‘el furor de los Cipayos’ (‘the fury of the Sepoys’) and adds: ‘violentan a las mujeres en las calles publicas’ (‘they rape women in the streets’).
13 Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War, p. 365.
14 Rye, Ajit Singh, ‘The Indian Community in the Philippines’ in Mani, A.K. and Sandhu, K.S. (eds), Indian Communities in South East Asia, Singapore, Institute of South East Asian Studies, 1993, pp. 708–774 Google Scholar.
15 Cornwallis to Court of Directors, 6 March 1789. IOR, East India Company Correspondence, Bengal Letters received 1 November 1788 to 12 March 1789, E/4/47.
16 Mentioned in Callahan, Raymond, ‘The Company's Army 1757–1798’ in Tuck, Patrick (ed.), The East India Company: 1600–1858, Vol. V, Warfare, Expansion and Resistance, London, New York, Routledge, 1998, p. 28 Google Scholar.
17 de Silva, Kingsley M., A History of Sri Lanka, Colombo, Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2005, pp. 275–286 Google Scholar.
18 Extract of Public Letter to Bengal, 22 April 1801. IOR, Board's Collections, File 2430, ‘New arrangements resulting from the transfer of the administration of Ceylon to the British Crown’, F/4/53.
19 Ibid.
20 North to Wellesley, 6 October 1801, enclosed in Extract of Bengal Commercial Consultation, 20 December 1801. IOR, Board's Collections, File 2430.
21 Ibid.
22 The net revenue of the pearl fisheries in 1803 was only £13,546, one of the lowest in the decade 1799–1809: Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘Noble Harvest from the Sea: Managing the Pearl Fishery of Mannar, 1500–1925’ in Stein, Burton and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (eds), Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996 Google Scholar, Table 6, p. 159. It is clear that such a small amount was insufficient to ensure a balanced budget.
23 Walsh, Thomas, Journal of the Late Campaign in Egypt. . ., London, T. Cordell and W. Davies, 1803, p. 190 Google Scholar.
24 Crowhurst, Patrick, The French War on Trade: Privateering 1793–1815, Aldershot, Brookfield, Vermont, Scholar Press, 1989 Google Scholar.
25 Thorn, William, Memoir of the Conquest of Java. . . ., London, T. Egerton, 1815 Google Scholar.
26 Funds had to be supplied from Bengal to Java. IOR, Board's Collections, File 10361, F/4/421. Governor-general Lord Moira complained in 1814 that, ‘Instead of the surplus revenue which . . . was asserted to be forthcoming from that possession, it could not be maintained without the Treasury, as well as the troops of Bengal.’ Quoted in Harrigan, Tim, Raffles and the British Invasion of Java, Singapore, Memon Books, 2012, p. 279 Google Scholar.
27 Tarling, Nicholas, Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Malay World 1780–1824, St Lucia, Cambridge University Press, University of Queensland Press, 1962, p. 71 Google Scholar: ‘Toward the end of the European war . . . there was the prospect of a strong and friendly regime in the northern Netherlands to which Britain might feel it safe to restore her overseas conquests and so consolidate friendship.’
28 The expression ‘un pistolet braqué sur le cœur de l'Angleterre’ is generally attributed to Napoleon, as reported by his memorialist Las Cases. A search through the latter's work, however, yields only a less forceful expression. Las Cases reports, in the diary for 2 November 1816: ‘He (the emperor) remarked that he had done much for Antwerp but that this was little in comparison with what he had proposed to do. He intended to have rendered it a fatal point of attack to the enemy by sea.’ Journal of the Private Life and Conversation of the Emperor Napoleon at Saint Helena by the Count De Las Cases, Vol. IV, Part the Seventh, London, Henry Colburn & Co., 1823, p. 47.
29 Tarling, Anglo-Dutch Rivalry, p. 72: ‘The Dutch state . . . would also, it was arranged early in 1814, be extended by the acquisition of some Belgic provinces, and a new Barrier would be constructed as a defence against French aggression. There would, therefore, be no obstacle to the restitution of Dutch possessions. . .’
30 Carey, Peter, ‘The Sepoy conspiracy of 1815 in Java’, Bijdragen tot de Taal, Land-er Volkerkunde, vol. 133, 1977, pp. 294–322 Google Scholar.
31 Yang, Anand A., ‘Indian convict workers in Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Journal of World History, vol. 14, June 2003, pp. 179–208 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Temperley, Harold, The Foreign Policy of Canning 1822–1827, London, Frank Cass, 1966 (1st ed. 1925)Google Scholar, in particular pp. 365–389 on Canning and Portugal.
33 Farooqi, Amar, Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the Politics of Opium, New Delhi, New Age International, 1998 Google Scholar.
34 In 1830 the Court of Directors of the East India Company suggested in a letter to the governor-general that he start negotiations for the purchase of Damao. Mentioned in Pinto, Celsa, Trade and Finance in Portuguese India: A Study of the Portuguese Country Trade 1770–1840, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 151 Google Scholar. Nothing came of it, however, and in 1837 a much watered-down proposal by a Company official to financially compensate the Portuguese government so as to induce it to put an end to the smuggling was rejected by the Directors on the pretext that it would ‘require the preliminary measure of an international treaty’. IOR, East India Company Correspondence, Letter of Court of Directors to Bengal Government, 2 June 1837, Bengal Separate Revenue Department Dispatch no. 3 of 1837, India and Bengal Dispatches, 2 June–28 July 1837, E/4/751.
35 Yapp, Malcolm, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan, 1798–1850, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1980, p. 581 Google Scholar.
36 Ibid., p. 582.
37 Cobden, Richard, How Wars are Got Up in India: The Origin of the Burma War, London, W. and F.G. Cash, 1853 Google Scholar.
38 Of the 40,000 men of the expeditionary force in the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–26, 15,000 died, mostly from disease. Stockwell, A.J., ‘British Expansion and Rule in South-East Asia’ in Porter, Andrew (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. III, The Nineteenth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 376 Google Scholar. See also Peers, Douglas M., ‘War and public finance in early 19th century British India: the First Burma War’, International History Review, vol. 11, November 1989, pp. 628–647 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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40 As argued in Sutherland, Lucy S., The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1952, p. 414 Google Scholar.
41 The most emphatic statement is, of course, Peers, Douglas M., Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India 1819–1835, London, Tauris, 1995 Google Scholar.
42 Anthony Webster, The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics, 1790–1860, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2009 Google Scholar.
43 Kolff, Dirk H.A., Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 176–181 Google Scholar.
44 Wilson, William John, History of the Madras Army , Vol. 1, Madras, Government Press, 1882, pp. 8 Google Scholar, 19, 72–74.
45 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, pp. 178–179, notes that ‘the East India Company soon stopped the recruitment of the old “buccsary” matchlockmen under their own jemadars’. . . and that ‘soon there was no trace left in Bengal of the independent jobber-commander’.
46 Thus Governor-General Lord Cornwallis wrote in a letter to the Duke of York on 10 November 1786: ‘The Sepoys are fine men and would not in size disgrace the Prussian ranks; I have heard undeniable proofs of their courage and patience in bearing hunger and fatigue, but, from the little I have hitherto seen of them, I have no favourable idea of their discipline.’ Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, Vol. I, London, John Murray, 1859, pp. 235–236.
47 Because food cooked on board ship was considered, partly for religious reasons by both Hindu and Muslim sepoys, unfit for human consumption, the troops had to be fed with food cooked in ghee (clarified butter) before embarkation, which could be carried in haversacks, but, because of lack of proper refrigeration, deteriorated quickly, causing epidemics of dysentery.
48 Major Temple to Major-General Van Straubenzie, Commander China Expeditionary Force, 13 October 1859, enclosed in Van Straubenzie to Birch, Secretary in the Military Department of the Government of India, Canton, 15 October 1859. IOR, Military Collections, Collection 438, ‘China Expeditionary Force 1859–60’, L/MIL/5/439.
49 Hoover, James William, Men Without Hats: Dialogue, Discipline and Discontent in the Madras Army, 1806–1807, New Delhi, Manohar, 2007 Google Scholar.
50 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, p. 190.
51 The classical formulation of the theory is George Fletcher MacMunn, The Martial Races of India, London, Sampson Low, 1933. For a critique, see Streets, Heather, Martial Races: the Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004 Google Scholar.
52 Lucassen, Jan, ‘The Brickmakers’ Strike on the Ganges Canal in 1848–49’ in Behal, Rana P. and Linden, Marcel Van der (eds), Coolies, Capital and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 47–83 Google Scholar.
53 Joshi, Chitra, ‘Public Works and the Question of Unfree Labour’ in Stanziani, Alessandro (ed.), Labour, Coercion and Economic Growth in Eurasia, 17th–19th Centuries, Leiden, Boston, Brill, 2013, pp. 273–287 Google Scholar.
54 Thomy Hugon, of the Bengal service, who described himself as ‘a native of Mauritius who has lived twenty years in India as a planter and a public servant’, in a report on the subject of Indian emigration to Mauritius of 29 July 1839, having claimed that wages in Mauritius were treble what they were in Bengal, stressed the benefits emigration would bring to India: it would be relieved of some of its poor, the circulation of ideas would lead to ‘moral improvement’, and Mauritius would provide a market for Indian grain exports as its Indian population increased. IOR, Board's Collections, ‘Papers regarding employment of Indian indentured labourers overseas’, Vol. 15, File 77655, F/4/1847.
55 They were particularly critical of the recruitment procedures, which they found characterized by ‘gross misrepresentation and deceit practised . . . by native crimps . . . employed by European and Anglo-Indian . . . shippers’, and denied that wages in Mauritius were higher than in India. Report of the Committee Appointed by the Supreme Government of India to enquire into the abuses alleged to exist in exporting from Bengal Hill Coolies and Indian Labourers of various classes to other countries, together with an appendix containing the oral and written evidence taken by the Committee and official documents laid before them, Calcutta, G.H. Huttman, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1839, pp. 222–223.
56 The expression was used by the colonial secretary, Lord John Russell himself, who, under pressure to authorize Indian labour emigration to Guiana, wrote on 15 February 1840 that he would be unwilling to adopt any measure to favour the transfer of labourers from British India to Guiana, as he was not ‘prepared to encounter the responsibility of a measure which may lead to a dreadful loss of life on the one hand, or, on the other, to a new system of slavery’. Quoted in Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Oversea 1830–1920, London, Hansib, 1993 (1st ed. 1974), p. vi Google Scholar.
57 Ibid., pp. 236–366.
58 Behal, Rana P. and Mohapatra, Prabhu P., ‘“Tea and Money Versus Human Life”: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations 1840–1900’ in Daniel, E. Valentine, Bernstein, Henry and Brass, Tom (eds), Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia, London, Frank Cass, 1992, pp. 124–143 Google Scholar.
59 Nil Darpan, or, The Indigo Planting Mirror, a Drama (by Dinabhandu Mitra). Translated from the Bengali by a Native, Calcutta, C.H. Manuel, 1861.
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