Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (10 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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And the Indians themselves? The answer is that they allowed themselves to be divided – and, ultimately, ruled. Even before the Seven Years War, the British and French were meddling in Indian politics, trying to determine the successors to the Subahdar of the Deccan and the Nawab of the Carnatic. Robert Clive, that most mercurial of East India Company men, first came to the fore when he sought to raise the siege of Trichinopoly, where the British candidate for the Deccan, Mahomed Ali, was trapped; then seized Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic, and held it against the besieging forces of Mahomed Ali’s rival Chanda Sahib.
When the Seven Years War broke out, the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, attacked the British settlement of Calcutta, imprisoning between sixty and 150
7
British prisoners in what became known as the ‘Black Hole’ in Fort William. Siraj had French backing. But his rivals, the Jaget Seth banking family, subsidized the British counter-attack. And Clive was able to persuade the supporters of a rival Nawab, Mir Jafar, to defect from Siraj’s side on 22 June 1757, at the Battle of Plassey. Having won the battle and secured the Governorship of Bengal, Clive then deposed Mir Jafar, appointing his son-in-law Mir Kasim; when the latter proved insufficiently malleable, he in turn was expelled and Mir Jafar restored. Once again Indian feuds were being exploited for European ends. It was entirely characteristic of the age that more than two-thirds of Clive’s 2,900 troops at Plassey were Indians. In the words of the Indian historian, Gholam Hossein Khan, author of the
Seir Mutaqherin, or Review of Modern Times
(1789):
It is in consequence of such and the like divisions [between Indian rulers] that most of the strongholds, nay, almost the whole of Hindostan, have come into the possession of the English ... Two princes contend for the same country, one of them applies to the English, and informs them of the way and method of becoming masters of it. By his insinuations and by their assistance, he draws to himself some of the leading men of the country who being his friends, are already fast attached to his person; and meanwhile the English have concluded to their own mind some treaty and agreement with him, they for some time abide by those terms, until they have a good insight into the government and customs of the country, as well as thorough acquaintance with the several parties in it; and then they discipline an army, and getting themselves supported by one party, they soon overcome the other, and little by little introduce themselves into the country, and make a conquest of it ... The English who seem quite passive, as if suffering themselves to be led, are in fact giving motion to the machine.
 
There was, he concluded, ‘nothing strange in those merchants having found the means of becoming masters of this country’; they had simply ‘availed themselves of the imbecility of some Hindostany Sovereigns, equally proud and ignorant’.
By the time of Clive’s victory over his remaining Indian foes at Buxar in 1764, he had reached a radical conclusion about the East India Company’s future. Doing business on Indian sufferance was no longer enough. As he himself put it in a letter to the company’s directors in London:
I can assert with some degree of confidence that this rich and flourishing kingdom may be totally subdued by so small a force as two thousand Europeans ... [The Indians are] indolent, luxurious, ignorant and cowardly beyond all conception ... [They] attempt everything by treachery rather than force ... What is it, then, can enable us to secure our present acquisitions or improve upon them but such a force as leaves nothing to the power of treachery or ingratitude?
 
Under the Treaty of Allahabad, the Mughal Emperor granted the East India Company the civil administration – known as the
diwani
– of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. It was a licence not to print money but the next best thing: to raise it in taxation. The
diwani
gave the company the right to tax over 20 million people. Assuming that at least a third of their produce could be appropriated this way, that implied a revenue of between £2 million and £3 million a year. It was now in what seemed like the biggest business of all in India: the business of government. As the company’s Bengal Council put it in a letter to the directors in 1769: ‘Your trade from hence may be considered more as a channel for conveying your revenues to Britain’.
Once pirates, then traders, the British were now the rulers of millions of people overseas – and not just in India. Thanks to a combination of naval and financial muscle they had become the winners in the European race for empire. What had begun as a business proposition had now become a matter of government.
The question the British now had to ask themselves was: How should the government of India be carried out? The impulse of a man like Clive was simply to plunder – and plunder he did, though he later insisted that he had been ‘astonished at his own moderation’. A man so violent in his disposition that in the absence of foes he thought at once of self-destruction, Clive was the forerunner of Kipling’s dissolute empire-builders in his story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’:
We will ... go away to some other place where a man isn’t crowded and can come into his own ... in any place where they fight, a man who knows how to drill men can always be a King. We shall go to those parts and say to any King we find – ‘D’you want to vanquish your foes?’ and we will show him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything else. Then we will subvert that King and seize his Throne and establish a Dy-nasty [
sic
].
 
But if British rule in Bengal was to be more than a continuation of the smash and grab tactics of the buccaneers, a more subtle approach was needed. The appointment of Warren Hastings as the first Governor-General by the 1773 Regulating Act seemed to inaugurate such an approach.
A clever little man, as much a brain as Clive was a brute, Hastings was a former King’s Scholar at Westminster and joined the East India Company as a writer at the age of seventeen. He was soon fluent in Persian and Hindi; and the more he studied Indian culture, the more respectful he became. The study of Persian, he wrote in 1769, ‘cannot fail to open our minds, and to inspire us with that benevolence which our religion inculcates, for the whole race of mankind’. As he remarked in his preface to the translation he commissioned of the
Bhagavadgītā
:
Every instance which brings [the Indians’] real character home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained by their writings; and these will survive, when the British dominion of India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.
 
Hastings sponsored translations of the Islamic texts
Fatāwā al-’Ālamgiri
and the
Hidayā
, as well as founding the Calcutta Madrassa, an Islamic law school. ‘Muslim law’, he told Lord Mansfield, ‘is as comprehensive, and as well defined, as that of most states in Europe’. He was no less assiduous in encouraging the study of India’s geography and botany.
Under Hastings’s auspices, a new, hybrid society began to develop in Bengal. Not only did British scholars translate Indian laws and literature; company employees also married Indian women and adopted Indian customs. This extraordinary time of cultural fusion appeals to our modern sensibilities, suggesting as it does that the Empire was not born with the ‘original sin’ of racism. But is that its true significance? A crucial aspect of the Hastings era which is easily overlooked is that most of the East India Company men who ‘went native’ wholly or partially were themselves drawn from one of Britain’s ethnic minorities. They were Scots.
In the 1750s little more than a tenth of the population of the British Isles lived in Scotland. Yet the East India Company was at the very least half-Scottish. Of 249 writers appointed by the Directors to serve in Bengal in the last decade of Hastings’s administration, 119 were Scots. Of 116 candidates for the officer corps of the company’s Bengal army recruited in 1782, fifty-six were Scots.
8
Of 371 men admitted to work as ‘free merchants’ by the directors, 211 were Scots. Of 254 assistant surgeon recruits to the company, 132 were Scots. Hastings himself referred to his closest advisers as his ‘Scotch guardians’: men like Alexander Elliot of Minto, John Sumner of Peterhead and George Bogle of Bothwell. Of thirty-five individuals entrusted by Hastings with important missions during his time as Governor-General, at least twenty-two were Scotsmen. Back in London, Hastings also relied on Scots shareholders to support his conduct in the company’s Court of Proprietors, notably the Johnstones of Westerhall. In March 1787 Henry Dundas, the Scottish Solicitor-General, jokingly told his nominee for the governorship of Madras, Sir Archibald Campbell, that ‘all India will be soon in [our] hands, and ... the county of Argyll will be depopulated by the emigration of Campbells to be provided for at Madras’. (Even Hastings’s first wife was a Scot: Mary née Elliot of Cambuslang, widow of a Captain Buchanan who had perished in the Black Hole.)
Much of the explanation for this disproportion lay in the greater readiness of Scotsmen to try their luck abroad. That luck had been in short supply in the 1690s when the Company of Scotland had tried to establish a colony at Darien on the east coast of Panama, a location so unhealthy that the venture stood little chance of success, though Spanish and English hostility hastened its collapse. Happily, the Union of Parliaments of 1707 was also a union of economies – and a union of imperial ambitions. Now Scotland’s surplus entrepreneurs and engineers, medics and musketeers could deploy their skills and energies ever further afield in the service of English capital and under the protection of England’s navy.
The Scots may also have been more ready than the Britons of the south to be assimilated into indigenous societies. George Bogle, sent by Hastings to explore Bhutan and Tibet, had two daughters by a Tibetan wife and wrote admiringly of the distinctive Tibetan style of polygamy (in which one woman could take multiple husbands). John Maxwell, a minister’s son from New Machar near Aberdeen who became editor of the
India Gazette
, was no less intrigued by the (to his eyes) luxurious and effeminate ways of Indian life: he had at least three children by Indian women. William Fraser, one of five brothers from Inverness who came to India in the early 1800s, played a crucial part in subjugating the Ghurkas; he collected both Mughal manuscripts and Indian wives. According to one account, he had six or seven of the latter and numberless children, who were ‘Hindus and Muslims according to the religion and caste of their mamas’. Among the products of such unions was Fraser’s friend and comrade-in-arms James Skinner, the son of a Scotsman from Montrose and a Rajput princess, and the founder of the cavalry regiment Skinner’s Horse. Skinner had at least seven wives and was credited with siring eighty children: ‘Black or white will not make much difference before His presence’, he once remarked. Though he dressed his men in scarlet turbans, silver-edged girdles and bright yellow tunics and wrote his memoirs in Persian, Skinner was a devout Christian who erected one of the most splendid churches in Delhi, St James’s, in gratitude for surviving an especially bloody battle.
Not everyone was so multicultural, of course. Indeed, in his history of modern India, Gholam Hossain Khan complained about the very opposite tendency:
The gates of communication and intercourse are shut up betwixt the men of this land and those strangers, who are become their masters; and these latter constantly express an aversion to the society of Indians, and a disdain against conversing with them ... Not one of the English Gentlemen shews any inclination or any relish for the company of the Gentlemen of this country ... Such is the aversion which the English openly shew for the company of the natives, and such the disdain which they betray for them, that no love, and no coalition (two articles, which, by the bye, are the principle of all union and attachment, and the source of all regulation and settlement) can take root between the conquerors and the conquered.
 
Nor should we let the many appealing aspects of eighteenth-century Indo-Celtic fusion blind us to the fact that the East India Company existed not for the sake of scholarship or miscegenation but to make money. Hastings and his contemporaries became very rich men. They did so despite the fact that the key market for their core product, Indian textiles, was being restricted by various protectionist measures designed to stimulate British manufactures. And no matter how devoted they might be to Indian culture, their aim was always to transfer their profits back home to Britain. The notorious ‘drain’ of capital from India to Britain had begun.

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