The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (40 page)

he committed suicide at the age of forty-nine. It is not clear whether

he was driven by poor health or his loss of status, but his suicide was

in keeping with the ignominious demise that befell Tariq ibn Ziyad,

Francisco Pizarro, and other earlier imperial conquerors.

Warren Hastings suffered similar persecution upon his return to

Britain. Seeking to use the ex-governor as a lever to rein in the EIC

and attack entrenched corruption in Britain, Edmund Burke brought

impeachment proceedings against the nabob in the House of Commons. The trial ran intermittently from 1788 to 1795. Burke caste

Hastings as an upstart oriental despot who preyed on legitimate

Indian noblemen for his own selfi sh gain. “There is not a single

prince, state, or potentate, great or small, in India, with whom they

[the nabobs] have come into contact, whom they have not sold. . . .

There is not a single treaty they have ever made, which they have

not broken. . . . There is not a single prince or state, who ever put

any trust in the company, who is not utterly ruined.”30 More specifi cally, Burke charged Hastings with persecuting the mother and

grandmother of the
nawab
of Awadh, arranging the execution of

a Bengali merchant who had charged him with taking bribes, and

padding contracts to sell Company opium and provision its army.

Although he genuinely respected the nobility of Mughal aristocrats, Burke’s primary aim was to ensure that the nabobs’ Indian tyranny did not set a precedent for metropolitan Britain. Nicholas Dirks

204 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

has also convincingly argued that Burke sought to protect the British Empire’s reputation by pinning its worst abuses on the nabobs.31

Burke was partially successful on this score, but Hastings won acquittal by drawing out the trial and presenting himself as a patriot who

had saved India for Britain in the aftermath of the disastrous American Revolution and the loss of most of its New World territories.

Nationalism and patriotism thus became useful camoufl age for the

greed and self-interest of empire building.

Nevertheless, the popular backlash against nabobery that culminated in Burke’s impeachment proceedings played a central role in

forcing the metropolitan government to assert more direct control

over the East India Company. In effect, it had become a state unto

itself, with its own revenues, army, and foreign policy. Just as the

Umayyad caliphs took Iberia away from Tariq and the Spanish Crown

reined in the conquistadors, the metropolitan authorities fi nally

accepted that they had to take over the nabobs’ private empire.

The attack on Clive in the House of Commons was part of a larger

parliamentary inquiry into the Company’s policies and accounts that

began the process of bringing it under public control. The fi rst step

was the Regulating Act of 1773, which limited the ability of wealthy

shareholders to dominate the court of directors and brought the Company’s Indian administration under more direct metropolitan supervision. The act placed the Madras and Bombay presidencies under a

governor-general in Bengal who in turn answered to a new four-man

supervisory council. But this tentative move to check the Company’s

reckless expansionism was largely ineffective. As the fi rst governorgeneral of Bengal, Hastings circumvented the council by playing the

members off against each other.

Burke and the anti-Company faction in Parliament therefore proposed to bring the East India Company under more direct governmental supervision. Their draft law passed the Commons but died

in the House of Lords on charges that it was a veiled attack on the

private property of the EIC shareholders. More cautious politicians

instead settled for a slower reformist approach to make the Company

more fi scally responsible and better able to manage its own defense

during an era of global war with France. The treasury secretary, John

Robinson, also noted that it was preferable to keep the EIC directly

accountable for the nabobs’ misdeeds: “I think that the errors which

must be committed in the management of such acquisitions, at so

Company

India 205

great a distance from the seat of government, had better fall upon

the Directors of the Company than fall directly upon the ministers

of the King.”32

These sentiments led to the India Act of 1784, which fi nally

stripped the East India Company of its political authority. While the

court of directors retained control of the EIC’s commercial operations,

the act placed its political service under a new parliamentary Board

of Control whose president became a de facto cabinet member. The

Company’s charter and monopoly came up for parliamentary review

every two decades, thereby giving the metropolitan government

more direct infl uence over its fi scal and administrative policies.

The India Act came into full force in 1786 when Lord Charles

Cornwallis replaced Hastings as the governor-general. Arriving

in the aftermath of his defeat at Yorktown, Cornwallis recovered from

the ignominy of surrendering to the American rebels by expanding

the EIC’s Indian empire. This violated the intent of the parliamentary

reforms, but the necessity of defending the Company’s interests against

Indian rivals and Napoleonic France inevitably led to further confl ict

and warfare. The Maratha Confederacy and the Mysore Sultanate used

French aid to build well-equipped and well-trained armies. By this time

most Indian rulers were fully aware of the Company’s imperial agenda

and belatedly tried to form a united front. In 1780, the Maratha minister of Poona wrote to the sultan of Mysore: “Divide and grab is their

main principle. . . . They are bent upon subjugating [us] one by one, by

enlisting the sympathy of one to put down the others. They know best

how to destroy Indian cohesion.”33

Yet the decaying Mughal Empire, the expansionist Muslim Mysore

Sultanate, and the fractious Hindu Maratha Confederacy had competing agendas and could not create the political and social cohesion

that was necessary to resist empire building. Moreover, they alienated their own subjects by imposing excessive revenue demands to

fund their cripplingly expensive European-style armies. Cornwallis

and his successor Richard Wellesley exploited the resulting unrest by

picking off the squabbling Indian princes one by one. Britain’s global

struggle with France provided an excuse to annex half of Awadh and

take the Mughal court and its aging emperor under its formal protection. The French revolutionary bogey gave Wellesley the excuse to

fi nally vanquish Mysore on the grounds that Tippu Sultan had taken

the title
citoyen
(citizen), planted a republican liberty tree in his

206 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

capital, and was conspiring with the French governor of Mauritius.

Within a few decades, the only remaining independent Indian rulers

were the
nawabs
and
rajas
who remained in power by submitting to

Company residents, who took control of their military, political, and

diplomatic affairs.

The conquest of India was an impressive imperial achievement,

but Wellesley’s unauthorized wars infl ated the Company’s already

burgeoning debt and provoked another anti-nabob backlash in Britain. His imperial adventures emboldened liberals and manufacturing

interests who charged that its mercantilistic monopoly damaged the

metropolitan economy by choking off trade. The court of directors’

defense that the EIC needed its commercial privileges to offset the

enormous expense of administering and defending its empire carried

less weight at the dawn of the era of free trade and laissez faire capitalism. The Company therefore lost control over most Indian trade

when its charter came up for review in 1813.

Only the monopoly on trade with China survived, and opium

became the EIC’s most important export. This dependency on a narcotic drug for the bulk of their commercial profi ts forced Company

offi cials to take extraordinary steps to retain access to Chinese markets. Ignoring the Chinese government’s ban on opium imports, they

encouraged private traders to smuggle it into the country. These

merchants in turn purchased tea for British markets, thereby removing the taint of drug dealing. By midcentury, opium sales accounted

for 12 percent of the Company’s total revenue, which made the EIC

resemble a modern drug cartel.

The British government fought two wars under the banner of

free trade to force China to open its markets to Indian opium, but

the EIC gave up the last of its commercial functions during the next

charter review in 1833. With its stock withdrawn from circulation it

essentially became a department of state, albeit one whose control of

revenue collection still allowed it to pay a dividend of 10.5 percent on

its bonds. Moreover, as a semiprivate proxy for British rule in India,

it still spared metropolitan taxpayers the full cost of maintaining an

enormous Asian empire. The Company therefore still served the useful function of hiding the true economic and moral costs of empire.

This was particularly true in the case of the Company army. Its

expansion from 82,000 to 214,000 mostly Indian soldiers between

1794 and 1857 turned Britain into a major imperial land power. With

Company

India 207

a professional European offi cer corps and a full range of artillery, cavalry, and support units, it conquered the rest of South Asia by the midnineteenth century. It also defrayed the costs of further conquests in

the Middle East, China, Africa, and the Crimea. The burden of paying for these imperial adventures fell primarily, albeit indirectly, on

Indian farmers, craftsmen, and laborers. These same Indians enlisted

as
sepoys
not because they were loyal British subjects but because

service in the Company army offered far greater pay, benefi ts, and

prestige than comparable unskilled civilian positions.

The civil arm of the East India Company underwent a similar

transformation when Cornwallis followed the India Act’s mandate

to create separate administrative, judicial, and commercial services.

The immediate impact of this restructuring was that it was harder

for Company offi cials to seek personal fortunes through private

trade,
jagirs
, or buying revenue contracts through Indian proxies.

Cornwallis moved to stamp out nabobery by creating a more formal

political service that recruited the sons of wealthy landed and professional British families with improved pay and perquisites. Civil

service academies in Calcutta and London produced a new cohort of

better-trained young bureaucrats who looked on Company service as

a career rather than a shortcut to easy riches.

These reforms eliminated some of the worst aspects of nabobery,

but the greater metropolitan control that came with the revised charter gradually imposed a new kind of subjecthood on all South Asians.

Failing to recognize that it was empire and not Indians that had corrupted so many young Britons, Cornwallis laid the foundations of a

more stratifi ed and bounded imperial state by removing Indian men

from the higher ranks of Company service and discouraging Company employees from having intimate contact with local women.

This was in sharp contrast to men such as Clive and Hastings, who

enthusiastically embraced India’s diverse cultures even as they were

busily fi lling their pockets with its riches.

The nabobs’ relatively sympathetic orientalism gradually gave

way to intolerance and chauvinism as evangelical Protestants assumed

a more prominent role in the Company. Hastings had characterized

the empire of the nabobs as a Hindu and Muslim state governed by

enlightened Christians, but he refused to promote Christianity for

fear of provoking social and political unrest. This pragmatic tolerance was harder to defend after evangelicals became more politically

208 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

infl uential in Britain and rose to leadership positions in the Company.

At fi rst, the Anglicans and Dissenters were more focused on reforming the British lower classes than in producing Indian converts, which

stands in sharp contrast to the conquistadors’ use of Catholicism to

justify their conquests. Most of the nabobs were practicing Protestants, but they allowed the evangelicals to open schools and travel

freely only so long as they did not stir up Indian anger by proselytizing. Those who refused to abide by the rules faced deportation.

This changed in the nineteenth century when the missionaries

and their metropolitan supporters challenged the Company’s use of

Indian religious law and custom in imperial administration. Arguing

that the security of British rule in India depended on mass conversions, they attacked Hindu and Muslim religious institutions as barbarous and sinful. Charles Grant, a Company director and reformed

nabob, joined forces with the celebrated abolitionist William Wilberforce, who equated Hindu and Muslim infl uence in India with slavery. Wilberforce minced no words in dismissing these non-Christian

faiths with a confi dent declaration: “Our religion is sublime, pure and

benefi cent. Theirs is mean, licentious, and cruel.”34 Making no apologies for their unalloyed bigotry, the evangelicals and abolitionists