The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (37 page)

of the eighteenth century and disrupted the commercial networks

that were central to the Mughal economy.

These dire conditions spurred Aurangzeb’s decision to abandon

the accommodationist policies of his predecessors. Short of money to

pay his troops and desperate to shore up his legitimacy, the emperor

alienated his Hindu subjects by retreating to the relative security

of Islamic orthodoxy. His wasteful and intolerant policies sent the

empire into a downward spiral that enabled the EIC to gain its political foothold in India. His death in 1707 touched off a three-decadelong power struggle among his heirs that allowed a variety of power

brokers to play the role of kingmaker in enthroning and deposing a

succession of increasingly pathetic Mughal princelings. Alamgir II,

the reigning emperor when Clive won his victory at Plassey, was a

puppet of his chief minister, who ordered his assassination to keep

him from falling into the hands of rivals. Alamgir’s son Shah Alam II

survived in power until his death in 1806 by attaching himself to

the
nawab
of Awadh, the Marathas, invading Afghan Rohillas (who

blinded him), and fi nally the EIC.

The Mughal Empire was a hollow shell by the mid-eighteenth

century, but it did not meet the fate of its Inkan counterpart by falling

to a direct western invasion. Instead, the East India Company became

an Indian power by winning the scramble to fi ll the vacuum left by

the Mughal Empire’s collapse. The EIC’s primary rivals were Mughal

functionaries and governors who founded autonomous states in Bengal, Awadh, and Hyderabad on the Deccan Plateau. Additionally, new

powers like the Marathas, Afghan Rohillas, and Sikhs also carved out

Company

India 189

states as the empire lost control of its hinterlands. In southern India,

which was never under direct Mughal rule, a military adventurer in

Mysore named Hyder Ali made himself a dangerous threat to the

Company by allying with the French. Yet this political disorder did

not do too much damage to the integrated commercial economy of

South Asia. Indeed, credit was widely available, and a network of

bankers funded many of the regional powers.

Bengal in particular was one of the most prosperous regions in

South Asia in the decades before Plassey. Enriched by imports of

American silver and the export of textiles and raw silk, sugar, pepper, opium, and other cash crops, the province had became one of

the most valuable territories in the Mughal Empire at the turn of

the eighteenth century. Most important, its highly commercialized

cash-based economy allowed
zamindars
to collect tribute in rupees.

The Mughals thus had a strong incentive to retain the province.

Responding to a 1698 revolt by the local
zamindars
, Aurangzeb

installed one of his grandsons as
nazim
(governor) and sent an exslave named Kartalab Khan to be the
diwan
(fi scal offi cer). Assisted by

a contingent of expatriate Hindu clerks, this able bureaucrat updated

the revenue rolls, removed embezzling
jagir
holders, and tortured

defaulting
zamindars
into fulfi lling their tribute obligations. In short

order his ruthless tactics produced more than ten million rupees for

the imperial treasury, which led the grateful Aurangzeb to ennoble

him as Murshid Quli Khan. In time, the collapse of Mughal authority made this former slave the semi-independent
nawab
of Bengal,

but he never stopped making tribute payments to the Mughal treasury in Delhi.

Murshid Quli Khan’s stern but effi cient rule spared Bengal much

of the turmoil of the early eighteenth century, but his death in 1727

opened the way for a succession struggle among his would-be heirs.

His son-in-law initially emerged victorious, but in 1740 a lesser offi cial named Alivardi Khan seized the
nawab
ship with the backing of

the Hindu bureaucracy, the powerful Jagat Seth banking family, and

a personal guard of northern Indian Pathans. Alivardi Khan almost

lost the province to a Maratha invasion, but he left Bengal relatively

secure when died in 1756. His grandson Siraj-ud-Daula was Clive’s

opponent at Plassey.

It is entirely understandable that Bengali
nawabs
were not prepared to deal with the unexpectedly assertive East India Company.

190 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

The EIC’s board of directors certainly was not interested the politics of the province, but at a time when it took six months to send

orders from London, the Bengal Presidency made the decision to

purchase
zamindari
rights in Calcutta’s hinterlands entirely on its

own. Becoming Mughal vassals by moving from trade into revenue

collection was highly profi table, but it embroiled Company employees in the competition to succeed the Mughals in the province. The

resulting private empire was thus the individual handiwork of ambitious Company employees, the most successful of whom eighteenthcentury Britons nicknamed nabobs. As an English corruption of the

Mughal title
nawab
, the term meant an extravagantly wealthy and

powerful person who made his fortune by exploiting Indians. Far

from being an honorifi c, it was a satirical expression of derision for

grasping imperial entrepreneurs who were corrupted by greed and

shameless orientalism.

Clive was the nabob personifi ed. The son of a Shropshire squire

and attorney of limited means, he arrived in India as an eighteenyear-old clerk with the unapologetic intention of acquiring a fortune. By the turn of the eighteenth century, it had become clear to

ambitious social climbers that the chaos that gripped Mughal India

offered opportunities to acquire wealth and status that were simply

unavailable in Britain. But it also took fame and publicity to propel

a junior clerk of common origins into the oligarchic ranks of landed

gentlemen who dominated metropolitan politics and society. Clive’s

opportunity came in 1747 after he transferred to the military arm

of the Company and distinguished himself by turning back a French

attack on an important Indian ally of the Madras Presidency. The

grateful
nawab
of Arcot awarded him the title Sabut Jang Bahadur,

“fi rm in war,” which made him a Mughal nobleman with a
zat
rank

signifying the command of ten thousand soldiers and horsemen.13

More signifi cant, his exploits made him a minor celebrity in Britain

and won him the leadership of the relief force that recaptured Calcutta from the
nawab
of Bengal.

Although Plassey was a minor battle in military terms, Clive’s victory brought him the fortune and celebrity that had drawn him to

India. With Mir Jafar fi rmly in his pocket, and assured of the support

of the main Bengali merchant and banking families, he beat back a

military challenge from the increasingly impotent Dutch East India

Company and forced his pet
nawab
to grant the EIC
zamindari
rights

Company

India 191

over twenty-four more subdistricts (
parganas
) in eastern Bengal. Two

years later, he took the enormously audacious step of secretly convincing Mir Jafar and the Mughal emperor to grant him a
jagir
over

this territory, which effectively made him the Company’s superior in

Bengal under the terms of Mughal feudalism. Although the tribute

from the Twenty-Four Parganas was substantial, the EIC was entitled

to keep only 10 percent of it before turning the rest over to Clive as the

recognized
jagir
holder. On average, the
jagir
netted the rising nabob a

staggering annual income of twenty-seven thousand pounds.14

Clive’s peers used similar tactics in the Madras and Bombay presidencies. In southern India, the Company became the dominant force

in Madras after vanquishing the French East India Company and

its local allies during the Seven Years’ War. With the French threat

waning and profi ts from conventional trade on the decline, Company employees sought fortunes in tribute collecting, loan-sharking,

mercenary service to local powers, and soliciting bribes from Indian

princes. Loans from Indian bankers gave them additional means to

fi nance private trading schemes and military adventures.

In Bengal, the nabobs wrung approximately two million pounds

out of the province by looting its treasury and extorting gifts from

provincial elites. In 1760, Clive arrived in Britain as a conquering hero

with thirty thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds, Company bills of

exchange totaling fi fty thousand pounds, and, interestingly, two hundred and thirty thousand pounds’ worth of bills issued by the rival

Dutch East India Company.15 Apparently his imperial enthusiasm did

not prevent him from traffi cking with the EIC’s archrival.

Clive’s departure left Mir Jafar and his fellow Bengali conspirators

in the hands of Henry Vansittart and a cabal of senior Company offi cials who wasted little time in following Clive’s example in exploiting

their privileged position. Although
zamindari
rights in the TwentyFour Parganas entailed only the authority to gather tribute, the EIC’s

dependence on revenue collection forced it to intervene more aggressively in the political and commercial life of Bengal. This gave Company employees more opportunities to seek personal fortunes, but

it did not mean that they intended to carve out an empire in eastern

India. They merely joined the other Mughal vassals and clients who

sought to profi t from the empire’s collapse.

In this sense they were not very different from Mir Jafar and his Bengali backers. However, the inept old Mughal soldier was a poor custodian

192 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

of the Company’s interests and nearly bankrupted the province making

good on his fi nancial promises to the nabobs. The EIC therefore replaced

him with his father-in-law, Mir Kasim, on the condition that the new

nawab
bestow an additional tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of

“presents” on Vansittart and other senior Company offi cials.

Once in power, Mir Kasim moved his power base beyond the

Company’s reach to western Bengal. Recognizing the shifting military balance in the post-Plassey era, he tried to free himself from

British oversight by upgrading his army and executing fi fty-six

Company employees. In the ensuing war, he formed an alliance with

the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II and the
nawab
of the neighboring

kingdom of Awadh. The defeat of their combined forces at Buxar by

Company troops in 1764 fi rmly established the EIC as the supreme

political and military power in eastern India, which allowed Vansittart to reinstate Mir Jafar as
nawab
.

With its beachhead in Bengal secure, the East India Company

forced the
nawab
of Awadh to become a client by admitting a Company supervisor into his court. This “resident” took control of his

diplomatic and military affairs, which brought the kingdom squarely

into the EIC’s sphere of infl uence. Additionally, the
nawab
had to pay

for the support of a Bengal army garrison. Over time, the Company’s

informal relationships with these sorts of Indian princes developed

into the residency system, which gave it control of nominally independent rulers without adding the expense of imperial conquest and

direct administration to its balance sheet.

In Bengal, however, the
nawabs
lost what remained of their

authority and became simple fi gureheads after Mir Jafar died in 1765.

The Company disbanded their armies, placed them on an allowance,

and chose their heirs. Like the Inka nobility, the Bengali ruling classes

suffered the disorienting loss of status that befalls vanquished imperial elites. In dismantling the
nawabs
’ military and court, the Company dried up an important source of patronage, thereby threatening

tens of thousands of aristocratic cavalrymen with impoverishment.

Although Plassey did not produce a shock on par with Pizarro’s stroke

at Cajamarca, Mughal intellectuals used the Arabic and Persian term

inqilab
, a sudden “inversion of the existing order,” to describe how

the fall of Bengal had turned their world upside down.16

Company offi cials played down their imperial intentions by pretending to rule as Mughal vassals, but their reliance on relatively

Company

India 193

common Indian intermediaries disrupted the established social order.

Becoming a successful nabob required local allies serving as interpreters, trading partners, and fi nanciers. Far from being mere pawns, these

banians
grew wealthy on the EIC’s empire building.17 Most were new

men whose infl uence and status humiliated the older Mughal nobility. Ghulam Hussain Khan, the son of an aristocratic court family

who served both Mir Jafar and the EIC, was disgusted by the
banians
’

ability to exploit the greed and ignorance of the nabobs. Writing in

1781, he complained that the young “beardless” upstarts who attached

themselves to Company offi cials “have no view but that of their own

benefi t, and think of only pleasing their English masters.”18

The nabobs owed their fortunes to these upstarts. Yet just as Hernando Pizarro discovered that no amount of looted Inka treasure