The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (34 page)

turning point on par with Pizarro’s stroke at Cajamarca. Mir Jafar

did indeed become
nawab
after his men executed Siraj-ud-Daula,

but he was Clive’s creature. As the EIC’s governor in Bengal, Clive

consolidated his hold on the province by expanding its
zamindari

rights into Calcutta’s hinterlands, fending off invasions by neighboring Indian powers (including the Mughal emperor himself), and

appointing and deposing
nawabs
as the Company’s interests dictated. In effect, the Plassey conspiracy transformed the EIC into a

princely Indian power.

Clive was thus a private speculative empire builder in the tradition

of Tariq ibn Ziyad and Francisco Pizarro. But he was no crude conquistador. He was a clerk, soldier, and diplomat, but above all he was a new

kind of bureaucratic conqueror. Clive’s greed and personal ambition

clearly matched Pizarro’s, but Mughal India’s advanced institutions

of administration, commerce, and revenue collection made plunder

unnecessary. After Plassey, he amassed a fortune of nearly a quarter

million pounds by taking control of the Bengali treasury and extorting “presents” from local notables.4

The Company’s directors in London never planned to acquire

an empire, but they were powerless to prevent their opportunistic

employees from parasitizing Asian imperial systems. These clerical

empire builders did not need the decisive military advantage that the

Pizarrists held over the Inkas; they won their victories with “foreign”

Indian troops from other parts of the subcontinent. Once in control

of Bengal, Clive also left the economic and political structure of the

province intact because the Mughal institutions of imperial extraction were already so effective. He therefore had the luxury of playing

down the consequences of Plassey by making a show of respecting

Mughal sovereignty while siphoning off the province’s wealth.

Clive’s deference to Mughal and Bengali authority led many commoners to assume that Plassey was one of the relatively minor power

shifts that occurred periodically in Bengal rather than a catastrophic

stroke by imperially minded foreigners. In the short term, they were

174 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

correct. Clive did not have the inclination, authority, or resources to

annex the province. Instead, he lobbied his superiors for permission

to supplant the
nawabs
as the primary revenue collectors in Bengal. Writing to the Company chairman in London, he declared: “It

is scarcely a hyperbole to say that the whole Mogul Empire is in

our hands. . . . We must indeed become the Nabobs ourselves in fact,

if not in name, perhaps without disguise.”5 This policy had serious

consequences for common Bengalis, for the EIC’s shift from trade to

collecting tribute drew the British ever more deeply into village life

and production. Within fi fteen years of Plassey, the Company’s Committee of Circuit openly stated: “Revenue is beyond all question the

fi rst object of Government, that on which all the rest depends, and to

which everything should be made subsidiary.”6

From the EIC’s standpoint, Clive’s capture of the
nawab
-ish state

and steady assumption of political authority in Bengal proved to be a

trap. The enormous wealth of the province was enticing, but the costs

of maintaining a government and standing army nearly bankrupted

the Company. Clive’s successors therefore had to squeeze the Bengali

peasantry to remain solvent. By the 1770s, they were making revenue

demands that earlier generations of
zamindars
, who had to negotiate

tribute levels with local producers, never could have attempted.

Village
ryots
and weavers initially may have been indifferent to

Siraj-ud-Daula’s demise, but they suffered most under the Company’s insatiable appetite for tribute and taxes. Jamiruddin Dafadar, a

poet from western Bengal, wrote an epic poem recounting how their

desperation led to open revolt. In it, a Muslim cleric urged local leaders to resist the British: “
Lakhs
[hundreds of thousands] of people

are dying in famine, try to save their lives! The Company’s agents

and
picks
[armed henchmen] torture tillers and
ryots
for exorbitant

revenue; and people are deserting villages.” Similarly, another contemporary poem condemned the brutal methods of one of the EIC’s

Indian agents in Rangpur: “His only aim was to demand more and

more; under severe torture a wail of agony arose.”7 Although the

people of Bengal had been imperial subjects for centuries, Plassey set

in motion a new bureaucratic process of rule and extraction that consigned them to a more systematically exploitive and invasive form of

subjecthood.

Clive’s victory in Bengal came more than a century after Pizarro

and his men overthrew the Inkan Empire. Both enterprises were part

Company

India 175

of early modern Europe’s global expansion, but there were considerable differences in how the relatively isolated New World societies of

the Western Hemisphere and the far more integrated and complex

polities of Asia responded to this threat. The Spanish conquistadors

were plundering adventurers who had little interest in trade. They

sought to become landed gentlemen, and their commercial activities

consisted primarily of exporting the products of their
encomiendas
to

Europe. Clive, on the other hand, was a salaried employee of a chartered company that focused initially on trade rather than conquest.

The EIC’s Dutch, French, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, and Portuguese

rivals had similar agendas in Asia. But the slow pace of early modern

travel and communication meant that the directors of these companies had minimal control over their employees once they were on the

other side of the world. When it took half a year for a message from

London to reach Bengal, self-interested opportunists such as Clive

could easily turn to imperial ends the armies and navies that chartered companies had raised against European rivals.

The result was a new kind of private Asian imperial state that was

very different from the early modern empires of the Western Hemisphere. Where Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French territories in

the Americas quickly took on a colonial dimension by attracting signifi cant numbers of European settlers, corporate conquerors in Asia

built their empires by grafting themselves onto preexisting indigenous systems of imperial rule. The conquistadors did this to a lesser

extent in Peru and Mexico, but Inkan and Aztec administrative and

economic systems were less compatible with western institutions.

Royal monopolies were of little value when the local population produced relatively few marketable and exportable goods and did not

use convertible currencies. It was therefore more effi cient and practical for the imperial powers to transform their New World conquests

into settlement colonies where transplanted Europeans took on the

responsibility for development and exploitation.

In the east, the chartered company empires never attracted signifi cant numbers of migrants from Europe and could not be considered

colonies in the Roman sense of the word. Europeans found the more

humid and tropical Asian climates less congenial, but, more important, early modern Asian peoples and states were far better equipped

to stand up to westerners. They were less vulnerable to infectious

Old World diseases and had well-developed militaries that could meet

176 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

the small chartered companies’ private armies on equal technological

terms. In short, there were no opportunities in Central and East Asia

for would-be conquistadors to replicate Pizarro’s Andean feat.

Men such as Clive had the freedom to dabble in speculative imperial projects because metropolitan European governments had few

eastern ambitions. The English initially had little interest in an overseas empire. Empire, as conceived by Henry VIII, meant autonomy

from the papacy and sovereignty over the British Isles. As in postReconquista Spain, it was not until the English, Scots, Welsh, and, to

a much lesser extent, Irish began to envision themselves as separate

and distinctive people that the “British” turned their attention overseas. The combination of the crowns of England and Scotland with

the principality of Wales produced the United Kingdom in 1707. And

although a vague sense of the British Isles as a coherent geographic

entity dated back to Roman times, it was James I’s active promotion of

“Britain” as a unifying identity that encouraged his relatively diverse

subjects to shift their allegiance to the Crown. Additionally, the nearly

constant wars with France between 1756 and 1815, increased literacy,

and the development of the Anglican Church further nurtured this

broader British identity.

While it took time for common Britons to embrace the strong

sense of unity and shared destiny embedded in popular nationalism,

the development of a coherent sense of Britishness was an enormously powerful imperial tool at a time when most peoples of the

early modern era still identifi ed themselves primarily on the basis of

locality, occupation, and religion. National sentiment paid economic

and military dividends in organizing people from all walks of life to

fi ght and fund the French wars and defend the overseas empire. The

Bengal
ryots
may have been indifferent to Siraj-ud-Daula’s demise

at Plassey, but it did not take long for the British public to celebrate

Clive’s achievement as a great collective victory. Indeed, the British

Empire and the wealth it generated became an inducement for the

peoples of the British Isles to become “British.” This is why a great

many Scots played a signifi cant role in the East India Company in the

late eighteenth century.

At fi rst, this sense of cultural superiority did not extend to Asia.

Lacking the enormous advantage that they had over New World peoples, western merchant soldiers could not legitimize empire building

by portraying Asians as inherently weak or backward. Instead, when

Company

India 177

Clive and his allies built their Indian empire, they depicted rulers

such as Siraj-ud-Daula as greedy and inept despots who forced them

to intervene in Indian politics and society to defend legitimate commercial interests. Once in power, they found it much harder than the

Pizarrists to denigrate South Asians as inferior subjects. In contrast to

the American settlement colonies, company empire builders remained

a small privileged minority who had to adopt local languages and customs to rule effectively and profi tably.

Nevertheless, British imperial thinkers became increasingly confi dent that, as a free people, they had a duty to develop the world that

God had given them. Divine obligation commanded them to exercise

this liberty around the globe. In the decades following Plassey, the

British in Bengal decided that their unique blend of liberty and commerce would rescue common Indians from the anarchy and oppression of the Mughal Empire and its successor states. Imperially minded

Britons assured themselves that while they had not asked for the task

of saving India, they would not shirk from it when fate and circumstance laid it at their door.

Drawing on Enlightenment ideals, evangelical Protestantism, liberalism, utilitarianism, the advances of the early industrial revolution,

free trade, and English justice and good government, the imperial and

reformist lobbies promised to remake India along western lines, rescue its women from sexual subjugation, and develop its resources for

the greater good. Bartolomé de Las Casas and succeeding generations

of Spanish imperial reformers made similar declarations, but by the

nineteenth century this paternalism represented a more hypocritical

kind of legitimizing imperial ideology. Answering to elected governments for their actions, empire builders tried to disguise their greed

through professions of philanthropy. Clive and other Company offi cials became fabulously wealthy in India, the subcontinent became

an important market for British manufacturers, and the metropolitan

treasury depended on Company payments, but the British public was

largely certain that they ruled India for its own good.

These liberalizing imperial ideologies protected Indians from the

kinds of abuse that Andeans and other New World peoples suffered

during the most brutal extractive phases of Spanish imperial rule.

Still, the new British brand of imperial paternalism could not disguise the reality that subjecthood in Company India entailed selfserving exploitation at the hands of alien despots. British imperial

178 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

rulers were therefore just as concerned with defi ning and defending the boundaries between citizen and subject as their Roman,

Umayyad, and Spanish forerunners. Effi cient and profi table extraction still depended on defi ning and dehumanizing conquered peoples. Opportunities for the early modern equivalent of romanization

declined accordingly.

The East India Company had the freedom to develop these selfserving imperial institutions because the British Empire of the early

modern era was so decentralized and incoherent. While Britons were