After Tamerlane (40 page)

The defeat or containment of colonial invasion highlighted what was needed if an Afro-Asian state was to resist a European takeover. The real key was to maintain, more or less intact, the state's own network of communications, allowing the movement of people, goods, ideas and information. Only the most primitive and impoverished of societies did not need or had not developed such a system. Almost everywhere, it was essential if rulers, elites and their towns were to be supplied with food and revenues, if more than the most localized government was to be maintained, if the economy was to rise above subsistence level. All the most important, wealthy and powerful of Afro-Asian states (as well as many that were not) depended on elaborate networks to collect and distribute taxes, foodstuffs, luxury goods and essentials like salt. The prestige of the ruler
and the extent of his rule were often a matter less of territory than of control over the paths of trade, tax and (sometimes) pilgrimage. The circulation of goods and money supported a class of wealthy traders whose self-interested loyalty helped prop the political regime. What was vital was that this network should preserve its hinterland, a ‘security zone' where it did not have to face external competition or risk dislocation.

The states that fended off the Europeans after 1840 were those that were able to maintain a security zone – a hinterland large enough to support the superstructure of political rule. Of course, most states had other resources with which to strengthen their solidarity against European outsiders and deny them the collaborators on whom they almost invariably depended. Perhaps the most important was religion. Scholar-gentry loyal to the Confucian monarchy rallied Vietnamese resistance to the French on the Mekong in the 1860s.
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Popular Buddhism helped the Burmese Empire fight off British control. In northern Sumatra, the Acheh struggle against the Dutch fell to leaders who preached a pan-Islamic jihad against the Christian invaders. Charismatic forms of Islamic belief sustained resistance to French advance in the Muslim lands of North and West Africa. Coptic Christianity gave the Ethiopian Empire a solidity against outside attack that belied its ramshackle administrative structure. In harsh environments, where almost any form of external contact posed a dangerous threat to social cohesion, the incentives to collaborate might be even weaker. Such places were, by their very nature, usually marginal to European interests, except where they fell across the road to a richer sphere.
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If a security zone and a network were the twin essentials of survival, they were also (potentially) two hostages to fortune. If the Europeans could disrupt the network, they could unravel the state and unpick the loyalty of its most powerful elements. If they could deploy their arsenal of steam-powered mobility, industrialized consumer goods and cheaper credit to break the links that bound the local economy together, the effect would be like an electrical short circuit. In the native state, ruthless action would be needed to repair the damage. But the ‘cure' might be so drastic that it destabilized the polity and changed the nature of the resistance itself. We can see this process at work in the ‘middle years' between 1830 and 1880. As the scope of
European settlement, commerce and religion grew wider, the points of friction with Afro-Asian states were bound to multiply. In many cases, as we have seen, the interventions that followed were indecisive. But often, whether by accident or design, the Europeans were able to dislocate the polity they had targeted by indirect means. This was most obvious in a case like that of the maritime states of the Malayan world, whose seaborne trade (the prime source of wealth and revenue) was swept away by Western competitors. The consequence was not a walkover for European imperialism. When the power of rulers crumbled, those they had kept in check grew stronger. If the ruler's network frayed, local men or the social predators that he had kept at bay quickly moved in. Religious cults – like the Buddhist messiahs in Burma – smuggling, piracy or slave-raiding (as in East Africa) might become the basis for a new social order. It might be more decentralized than the old regime. It was often more xenophobic and more violent. It confronted Europeans with a different kind of resistance. It confirmed their suspicion that much of Afro-Asia was dangerous and barbaric. But in the end it was usually too fragmented and unstable to withstand the ever-tightening grip of the Europeans on the routes, links and connections that bound region to region and place to place, or to frustrate the local coalitions that command over movement allowed the Europeans to build. In the end, a purely localized resistance could be overcome in detail or left to rot on the margins of a colony.

However, this ‘endgame' only gradually became obvious. Across much of Afro-Asia, that meant after 1880 or even after 1900. In the meantime, in all those places where the Europeans had not yet assembled the means to break up local networks and substitute their own, the prospects for empire looked poor. Some form of Muslim imperium was much more likely than European
rule
in much of West Africa, thought the philosophical traveller Winwood Reade. ‘Should the Turks be driven out of Europe,' he wrote, ‘they would probably become the Emperors of Africa, which in the interests of civilization would be a fortunate occurrence.'
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The French naval officer who explored the Mekong river wrote bitterly of the ‘profound indifference' of French opinion to the vision of empire he had revealed.
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Fighting endless ‘native wars' against elusive enemies without the
means for a rapid victory or local support for permanent rule held little appeal for European governments. They might license piecemeal advances from established bridgeheads and try their hand at a knockout blow. But across much of Afro-Asia they were resigned to the survival of the great indigenous states, and forced to tolerate the resistance of the small.

The great exception was India, perhaps the most remarkable case of imperialism in modern history. By 1820 the British had made themselves the dominant power on the subcontinent. By 1856, on the eve of the Mutiny, they had conquered Sind and the Punjab and annexed Awadh. They seemed bent on taking direct control of every part of India, including those states whose princes acknowledged their paramountcy. Yet the conquest of India was neither swift nor uncontroversial. It was pursued at heavy cost in an age of depression caused in part by the weight of taxation on new colonial subjects. It was disliked in London, where the risk that the East India Company (still the embodiment of British power in India) would go bankrupt under the strain awoke fears of a parliamentary crisis on the scale of the 1780s. The tensions it provoked in Indian society eventually burst forth in the Great Mutiny of 1857. To many British radicals, India was a despotic encumbrance that corrupted British politics and seemed certain to drag Britain into an endless round of Asian wars.

Yet, despite all objections, the momentum of expansion had rarely faltered. London grumbled, but dared not disavow its hyperactive proconsuls. When the Mutiny was suppressed, and the Company discredited, the British government assumed the role of overlord of India. This willing attitude was all the more striking because the strategic burden of defending India against rivals from north and west had already become a major obsession in British diplomacy. Matters were made worse by the military reorganization that was needed in the aftermath of the Mutiny. In the interests of ‘never again', up to
70,000
British troops were to be permanently stationed in India: one British soldier for every two Indian. This was between a third and a half of the British army – perhaps three times the pre-Mutiny garrison, and a colossal strain on the military defence of the rest of the empire. So two questions need answering. Why was India conquered earlier and more completely than almost any other part of Afro-Asia? And
why were the British willing and able to assume the large risks and heavy costs of its rule?

To answer the first is to return to the circumstances in which India underwent a double revolution and British power was first established on the lower Ganges. In that double revolution, the Mughals, the nominal rulers of North and Central India, were disabled by an inland invasion led first by the Iranian Napoleon, Nadir Shah, and then by his Afghan legatee, Ahmad Shah Durrani. Almost simultaneously, the maritime regions – most of all the dynamic textile economy of Bengal – had become more dependent on their foreign trade and more at odds with the foreign traders. When the East India Company pushed aside the Bengal nawab Suraj ud-Daula with the help of local allies and installed a puppet ruler, it found soon enough that the old imperial rule from Delhi had all but collapsed. By the early 1800s the Company had forced its way up the Ganges, occupied Delhi, and turned the Mughals themselves into a puppet dynasty. The Company's servants, as its officials were styled, had much to gain personally from the extension of its power, since its control over trade created a stream of fees and its growing bureaucracy a flood of jobs. The Company state crushed any ruler that threatened its interests. It soon became commonplace to attribute its triumph to the assertion of British will over the chaos and lethargy of native India. In fact the key to British power could be found not in India's backwardness and indolence, but in its openness and accessibility, and in the sophistication of its financial and commercial life.

India's openness helped the British in several ways. It was part of the reason for the double revolution. Unlike China, no Great Wall had barred the approach from Central Asia to the plains of Hindustan. Nor were foreign merchants confined to keyhole ports like Canton. It was far easier for Europeans to gather knowledge about India than about China. It was far less difficult for European merchants to deal with their Indian counterparts. India's commercial economy – the hub of the world's textile trade in the eighteenth century – was far more outward-looking than China's, and its bankers and merchants were far freer from their rulers' control. In maritime India the British met trading states, not a hostile bureaucracy answerable to a distant emperor. When their interests were threatened, they found it easy to
combine with the disaffected subjects of maritime rulers. Their limited reserves of organized force leveraged a large investment by local men for whom the Company's trade was too valuable to lose.

But that by itself would hardly explain the relative ease with which the British marched into the subcontinental interior. Here they could exploit three other benefits of India's early modern ‘modernity'. Firstly, much of India was already connected by a credit system that shifted balances across the subcontinent. In their multiple wars the British could combine their profits from trade with the financial services of Indian bankers to survive the setbacks of military failure and outlast their enemies.
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Secondly, starting with Bengal – the most prosperous region – they could draw on the income of a long-established system of land taxation – the ‘land revenue'. They could pay the swollen ranks of their armies, and then annex fresh revenues to fund new wars. Here was a self-propelling colonialism that could hardly function in the less-developed regions of Afro-Asia, and not at all in non-monetized economies without revenue systems. Thirdly, partly because lowland India had already developed occupational castes and mercenary armies (the contrast is with clan-based loyalties and feudal levies), it was easy for the Company to recruit (just as it was possible to pay for) a professional army of sepoys loyal to its foreign paymaster. By 1835 the Bengal army had some sixty-four regiments of ‘native infantry', and the Company's Indian armies were much larger than the whole British army, at home and abroad.
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With this standing army as a battering ram, the Company could knock down all but the most determined opponents.

Thus India provided its European invader with the resources that could be turned to the task of conquest.
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Astonishingly early, therefore, the Company created its own ‘security zone' and made itself an Indian or ‘country' power, competing on Indian terms with Indian rivals. It could use the fluidity of Indian society to its own advantage. Western India had long been open to foreign merchant elites, especially the Parsis, who originated in Iran and came to dominate the western port city of Bombay. They were natural partners of the Company ‘firm'. In Bengal a new Hindu elite, the
bhadralok
(‘respectable people'), quickly sprang up to replace the Muslim old guard and supply the educated collaborators on whom the Company
raj
depended. With allies like these, the Company could assemble the local networks it needed to squeeze – and eventually suffocate – the trade and revenue of any Indian rival. The effect was to shift the balance of cost and risk away from Britain, the ultimate beneficiary of Indian empire, and towards the hybrid ‘Anglo-Indian' polity that first emerged in the Bengal ‘bridgehead'. It was Anglo-India, not Britain, that financed the wars of conquest. When London sent troops to help out, the Company paid for their hire – one reason why their use was begrudged less at Westminster than the smaller forces sent to impoverished colonies in New Zealand or South Africa.

The size and wealth of the Company state had another consequence. From early on it was an eldorado of opportunity for those in Britain (and especially Scotland) who could win a nomination to its commercial and civil service or the officer corps of its armies. By the 1830s, these men and their families were a formidable vested interest, with much to gain from the Company's rise. Their writings and memoirs formed the basis of an Anglo-Indian myth in which India's centrality to British power became the ruling motif. Most remarkably of all, the dramatic spectacle of India's conquest, once excoriated by Edmund Burke, was now justified by utilitarians and liberals as the grand example of rational reform. The debris of ignorance and superstition was being swept away by civilized modernity. India was a project, not an abuse. Indeed, two of the most powerful writers of mid-Victorian Britain were eager to beat the Indian drum. Both had taken the Company's shilling. The historian T. B. Macaulay had been Law Member in the Company's Indian government. His essays on Clive (1840) and Warren Hastings (1841) depicted them as progressive empire-builders in the tradition of Rome. John Stuart Mill, the prophet of liberal individualism, was an official in the Company's London headquarters. In his
Representative Government
(1861), British rule was fiercely defended as the only path to social progress.