Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (55 page)

It would, perhaps, be going too far to suggest that Clive, having master-minded a revolution in Bengal by subverting the authority of the Nawab, was now bent on a revolution in London and the subversion of the Honourable Company. Now, as later, he would probably have
preferred to control the Company rather than remove it. But just as he was the first President openly to criticize its direction, so he was the first to go on record as questioning its existence. In January 1759, with many corrections and rephrasings, he drafted a long and unsolicited letter on Indian affairs and sent it secretly to William Pitt (the Elder), then the dominant figure in the war-time administration, the man who had dubbed his generalship ‘heaven-born’, and of course the grandson of ‘Governor Pitt’.

In this highly revealing letter Clive contended that a glorious future awaited the British in India. If only the Company would ‘exert themselves’ and ‘keep up such a force as will enable them to embrace the first opportunity of further aggrandizing themselves’, they might take ‘the sovereignty of Bengal upon themselves’ (i.e. replace the Nawab). He was confident that the Moghul emperor would accord him imperial recognition since he, Clive, had himself been offered the
diwani,
the second most senior position in the province. This would have given him control of the province’s revenue collection and an easy position from which to claim the sovereignty; but he had felt obliged to refuse ‘for the present’, mainly because the Company would not authorize the troops ‘to support properly so considerable an employ’.

But so large a sovereignty may possibly be an object too extensive for a mercantile company; and it is to be feared that they [i.e. the directors] are not of themselves able, without the nation’s assistance, to maintain so wide a dominion. I have therefore presumed, sir, to represent this matter to you [Pitt], and to submit to your consideration, whether the execution of a design that may hereafter be still carried to greater lengths [‘perhaps of giving a king to Hindostan,’ as he explained to his father], be worthy of the government’s taking it in hand.

From Bengal alone he anticipated an annual income of ‘upwards of two millions sterling’ and he was certain that that, plus the possession of ‘the paradise amongst nations’, was worthy of ‘public attention’. The whole business could be managed without draining the mother country ‘as has been too much the case with our possessions in America’. ‘A small force from home will be sufficient…’

No response to this letter had reached Clive when, partly for health reasons, partly for career reasons, he sailed for home in early 1760. Pitt obviously had other things on his mind – like the Seven Years War. But,
as will emerge, ‘Clive’s letter was the germ of the Parliamentary measures which led step by step to the transfer of the substance of authority from the Company to the Crown’ (Sir George Forrest).

As a result of Plassey and the emergence of the Company as a major political power in India its priorities were bound to change. If supremacy in Bengal meant that revenue replaced commercial profits as its financial support then administration must replace trade as the profession of its employees. A proliferation of boards, councils and committees began to participate in the direction of its affairs in both London and India. Its Bengal establishment grew prodigiously and increasingly its outward-bound ships carried more in the way of troops and stores, passengers and European luxuries than they did of broadcloth. Ledgers became tax rolls, warehouses arsenals. Men who had once been proud to call themselves ‘servants of the Company’ now preferred to be seen as ‘serving in the Company’ – as if it were no different from serving in the Navy or the Treasury. The Company was perceived as a branch of government; and, ere long, it became a branch of government. Only lawyers called it ‘The United Company of Merchants of England trading to The East Indies’. To others it was the ‘East India Company’ or, more significantly, just ‘The India Company’.

Naturally this transformation could not be achieved without strains and contradictions. The anomaly – some said scandal – of a private enterprise presuming to govern vast territories, wage wars, collect taxes, and grossly enrich its employees/public servants pitched the affairs of the Company into the public and parliamentary domains. So long as its establishment had comprised just a fleet of ships, a few ports, a London office, and a sheaf of trading concessions, only those with a financial interest in its affairs bothered to interfere. But an empire was something else. It needed regulation and, in time, regulation meant nationalization. By the
politician the Company’s commercial monopoly and its overseas trading concessions came to be regarded merely as assets waiting to be stripped. But its territories, its subject peoples, its diplomatic commitments and its military establishment – these properly fell within the purview of the state. On them, therefore, the attentions of government and politicians focused. And since the Company’s patrimony would be not just nationalized but ‘imperialized’, on these same features generation after generation of British historians would also focus in a brave attempt to elucidate the origins of the ‘British Raj’.

This extraordinary interest in the aftermath of Plassey, though important for the history of India and for the history of the British Empire, again distorts the history of the Company. It was only in India, and indeed until the 1780s only in Bengal and adjacent areas of Hyderabad, that the Company found itself administering extensive territories and treading on the toes of the home government. Elsewhere trade remained as much a priority as ever and, in one sector, even more so. It is ironical that while Westminster was busy clipping the Company’s wings, on the other side of the world a new generation of commercial endeavours was hatching. And while in Calcutta feathers flew in the squalid cock-fighting, further to the east the Company was again sailing seas and coming home to roost in the lands where Lancaster and the Middletons, Floris and Saris had first opened its account.

What may be regarded as the Company’s commercial swan song was inspired by three considerations new to Company thinking; none either originated in Bengal, owed anything to Clive, or was particularly relevant to the rhetoric of Westminster. They were, first, the naval and strategic priorities dictated by a succession of wars with all the Company’s major competitors in the East – France, Spain and eventually Holland. Second the Company’s growing dependence on, and concern for, its trade with China. And finally a major shift in the thrust of private or ‘country’ trade.

All these elements surface during the course of the Seven Years War. Commonly represented as affecting the Company only in so far as it saw the culmination of that Anglo-French struggle for supremacy in the Carnatic, the Seven Years War was ‘the first world war’ and in fact had repercussions for the Company way beyond India. Eventually it would create some interesting possibilities in the Philippines; initially it prompted an unhappy experience in Burma.

Coinciding precisely with Clive’s triumphal progress in Bengal, and
yet utterly devoid of either glory or consequence, the Burmese or ‘Negrais Affair’ is readily consigned to oblivion. As with other things Burmese, the facts are obscure and the locations unfamiliar. Quite reasonably one could dismiss the whole business as just another example of that disastrous British obsession with off-shore properties – Pulo Run, Pulo Condore, and now the island of Negrais. Alternatively – and this was the view taken by Alexander Dalrymple, a man of whom more will be heard – Negrais was the first uncertain step towards the re-establishment of the Company’s trade in south-east Asia. It should be bracketed not with Pulo Run but with Singapore, not with Pulo Condore but with Hong Kong.

From the Company’s settlements at Masulipatnam, Madras and Calcutta, English private traders had been calling at the ports of southern Burma ever since the mid-seventeenth century. Syriam, their usual destination, was the main outlet for the Mon kingdom of Pegu which also controlled the wide Irrawaddy delta. Here rubies and lac (a resinous red dye) were sometimes available although the main attraction was Burmese teak, the finest shipbuilding material in the East. For repairing Indiamen the timber was freighted to Bombay and Calcutta while the smaller vessels operated by country traders were usually repaired and indeed built in Syriam itself. By the 1730s the volume of this business had justified the appointment of an English ‘Resident’ who although not a Company servant handled both Company and private business. His few European companions included a representative of the French
Compagnie des Indes
whose ships’ timbers were also repaired with Burmese teak. But there seems to have been no great hostility between the two and when in 1743 Syriam was twice sacked as a result of renewed fighting between the Mons and the up-country Burmans, both men withdrew to their parent establishments at Madras and Pondicherry.

With southern Burma in turmoil and with the European trading companies locked into their own war over Jenkins’s ear and the Austrian Succession, no further attempts were made to reopen a Burmese establishment until 1750. In that year Mon representatives appeared in Pondicherry with a proposal which Dupleix, having just handed Chanda Sahib on to the throne of the Carnatic, was happy to consider. The Mons wanted military assistance against their Burman rivals. There was the possibility of opening another grand field for French ambition. More to the point, Dupleix welcomed the proposal as a means of securing a safe haven on the opposite side of the Bay of Bengal.

The absence of harbours on the Coromandel Coast has already been stressed. With the arrival of those squadrons under Barnett (then Peyton), La Bourdonnais, and Boscawen and with the consequent inauguration of the Bay of Bengal as a theatre for naval warfare, this deficiency became critical. Every monsoon the fleets must desert their station or risk the sort of losses suffered by La Bourdonnais after the capture of Madras. Similarly every time ships needed refitting they must leave the coastal settlements to the tender mercies of the enemy and make for Dutch Trinconomalee (Sri Lanka), Mauritius or Bombay.

Under the impression that they might have found a solution, Boscawen and Lawrence had just wrenched the port of Devikottai from the Raja of Tanjore. But Devikottai proved as useless for ships of deep draught as every other inlet on The Coast. Word, therefore, that Dupleix had sent a French envoy to Pegu to negotiate for a Burmese harbour threw Madras into consternation. President Saunders wrote immediately to London and, without waiting for an answer, prepared to forestall the competition by occupying the island of Negrais.

At the south-western extremity of Burmese territory and therefore the nearest point to Madras, Negrais had been recommended by one of the numerous Englishmen engaged in private trade between The Coast and Burma. Curiously neither he nor Saunders seems to have been aware that the Company actually had a claim on the place. Sixty years previously it was to Negrais that Captain Weltden had repaired after he and Samuel White had been attacked at Mergui. Weltden had allegedly hoisted the English flag on the island and had left an inscription, beaten in tin, recording his claim. It was a pity that this memorial was not rediscovered. The memory of the Mergui massacre might have alerted the Negrais settlers to the possibility of a repeat performance.

Negrais had been chosen by Saunders on the grounds that it had potential for ‘a capacious harbour for shipping being well secured against all sorts of winds’. What he did not realize, but what the thirty-odd pioneers quickly discovered, was that it was not secured against all sorts of tides. After a few weeks of being flooded out every time a high sea and a spring tide coincided, the disgruntled and fever-ridden settlers sailed away to the mainland and the comparative comfort of Syriam.

In the meantime the Court of Directors in London had received Saunders’s letter and approved his anxiety about a French naval base in the Bay. In 1752 they wrote endorsing the Negrais settlement and in 1753, on learning that Dupleix’s envoy was in high favour at Pegu,
Saunders made a second attempt to establish a settlement. This time it was on a much larger scale. Four ships were to convey the new pioneers across the Bay and two covenanted servants, one from the St Helena Council, the other from Benkulen, were to take command. The appointments were made by the directors in London who no doubt recalled the disastrous jealousies aroused when such matters were left to Madras. But it is indicative of the unpopularity of the enterprise that the Benkulen man opted out, preferring even Sumatra’s pestilential climate to waterlogged Negrais. Shipwrights and labourers had to be impressed into service; the guard of thirty-odd Europeans and seventy peons mutinied soon after arrival.

To the problems of fever and flood was added that of famine. It was hoped that the settlers would soon be either self-sufficient or able to obtain rice from the mainland. But the Burmese refused any trade and, though the island abounded in game, it was also a paradise for tigers. The settlers lived off turtles; the tigers lived off settlers. Hunt, the man from St Helena, died of dysentery, the work of fortification ground to a standstill, and the Mon authorities steadfastly refused to countenance the new settlement.

Nevertheless the disconsolate settlers, now commanded by Henry Brooke, a writer from Madras, stayed put. By 1754 the Mon-Burman war was going badly for the Mons. Disappointed in their French allies, there seemed to be a real prospect of the Mons granting, in return for military aid, not only Negrais but also the adjacent mainland port of Bassein plus extensive privileges in Syriam. The British contingent in Syriam played along with their Mon hosts; but to Saunders in Madras and to Brooke at Negrais it was now evident that they were backing a loser. When Burman troops occupied Bassein and much of the intervening Delta, Brooke therefore switched allegiance. Missions were exchanged between Negrais and Alungpaya, the Burman sovereign, who was then encamped beside the mighty Shwe Dagôn pagoda at a place which he renamed Yangon (Rangoon). The Company moved its Syriam establishment to the new capital and by 1756 both Company and private ships were calling there for repairs.