A History of Britain, Volume 2 (75 page)

In 1800, Wellesley set the capstone on the arch of his triumphalism by opening the new College of Fort William. It was, he often boasted, the achievement he was proudest of: the nursery of a new generation of proconsuls educated in the laws, languages and religion of the races and nations to whose government they were now irreversibly committed. Along with
munshis
(teacher-secretaries), many of the young men initially patronized by Warren Hastings now took up posts at the college. After Wellesley had gone the college would be sacrificed to the needs of fiscal retrenchment and replaced by Haileybury College in England, but not before it had inculcated its official version of how what had begun as a commercial company, trading from modest posts on the sufferance of the Mughals, had ended up holding sway over a subcontinent. The chaotic and stumbling route to dominion, strewn with acts of self-deception and self-enrichment, was remade as a broad historical highway at the end of which was Wellesley's classical house of government. Instead of being part of India's problems (perhaps the main problem), Britain was the solution. It was meant to be. ‘The position in which we are now placed', Wellesley declared in 1804, ‘is suited to the character of the British nation, to the principles of our laws, to the spirit of our constitution, to the liberal and comprehensive policy which becomes the dignity of a great and powerful empire.' Britain would be the new Rome in a subcontinent that the Romans had never reached.

Was it really only seventy years since the inspirational inscription had been set in Stowe's Temple of Gothic Liberty, thanking the gods for not making the free British Romans? Was it only three generations since the founders of a maritime empire had insisted that theirs would be a dominion uniquely blessed by liberty, unencumbered by the pompous trappings of conquest? It was supposed to have been a minimalist empire: no big, expensive standing armies; no regiments of tax collectors; an enterprise built on mutual interest, not on military coercion. Hampden and Milton would bless it for minding its own business.

It had not worked out that way. There was business all right, along with the edicts and the elephants, but it was not exactly what the founders had had in mind when they had imagined a flow of raw materials coming into the metropolis and a flow of manufactures going out to the empire. India had never wanted what Britain produced, and it still didn't. Raw cotton was now being shipped from Bombay to England, but in the volumes and at the prices dictated by the likes of Henry Wellesley. Yet those
who turned it into manufactured cloths in the spinning and weaving sheds of the industrial north needed something from Asia to reconcile them to their grinding labour and inadequate wages, and that something was hot and sweet: sugared tea. So East India Company ships sailed back from Canton loaded with black Bohea, and its profits would go some way to paying for 150,000 sepoys (for the fabled bounty from Indian land revenues seemed more than ever a mirage). But the profitability of the business depended on the Chinese being induced to take something other than silver in exchange.

And that something was Indian; that something was a narcotic. Despite a draconian ban on opium, the Ch'ing empire was incapable of preventing smuggling, and the number of chests of Bengal opium that found their way to China rose from hundreds to many thousands a year. The first famous victim of the opium habit had been Robert Clive. It had eaten into him so badly that it had overpowered even his other mainline addiction – for the rushing high of imperial supremacy. Most of those who came later to British India would resist the first craving. But as for the opiate of global mastery, nineteenth- and even twentieth-century Britain would remain helplessly hooked.