The Indian Ocean (43 page)

So also in high policy matters. George Curzon, whose rotund late-Victorian pronouncements will embellish several themes in this chapter, began his history of Persia by writing, 'I endeavour to trace the steps by which Persia has passed, and is still passing, from barbarism to civilisation, as she exchanges the slow beat of the Oriental pendulum for the whirr and crash of Western wheels'.
4
Isabel Burton, wife of the famous explorer and self-publicist Richard, wrote in 1876 that a few Europeans had been killed in rioting in Jiddah in 1858. This was not good enough, and the European powers should have used the opportunity to strike out at oriental superstition. They

should have insisted upon Mecca being opened to the world, and upon all travellers being protected there as they are at Jerusalem and other 'Holy Cities.' It is high time that these obsolete obstructions to the march of civilisation should everywhere be swept away; the world will endure them no longer. Mecca is not only a great centre of religion and commerce; it is also the prime source of political intrigues, the very nest where plans of conquest and schemes of revenge upon the Infidel are hatched; and, as I have before said, the focus whence cholera is dispersed over the West. Shall a misplaced sentiment of tolerating intolerance allow her to work in the dark against humanity? Allah forbid it!
5

The broad sequence of the extension of British control sees at first the acquisition of a series of littoral bases, much like those acquired earlier by the Portuguese, and then the Dutch. Examples we have already noted are ports on the Indian coast, and Singapore, Aden and Cape Town. However, once the British economy made the transition from merchant capital to industrial capital, there was a need for control over the supply of raw materials for the new industries. Territorial acquisitions were the result. In terms of the schema we have been using (see page 114), the British now moved from controlling port cities, and then to having some influence over production, to the third stage of controlling territory and so the whole productive process.

The consequences of this extension of British control over large areas of land around the Indian Ocean have been much discussed. Our concern is with the maritime consequences of British dominance, but to set the scene we will provide a few suitable examples from India designed to show the broad impact on land. Arasaratnam's study of Coromandel in the later eighteenth century gets well the nexus between economic and political control. Cloth was the main product of coastal Coromandel, and the British were concerned to cut out competition from other purchasers, whether they be Indian or European. In the 1770s the English East India Company began to set up direct relations with the actual producers of cloth,
the weavers. Middle men were cut out, and so the Indian version of the 'putting out' system was undercut as the EIC got closer to controlling and subordinating the weavers.

There was vigorous opposition from both the weavers and other would-be purchasers. However, as the area ruled or controlled by the EIC expanded, more and more coercion, some of it physical, was applied. Hand in hand with these events in India, in Britain machine-made cloth was being produced with greater and greater efficiency. By the end of the story, in 1800, the EIC had done away with all European competitors. The position of the weavers was greatly reduced. So also with Indian financiers and merchants, who suffered from a confinement of the space in which they could operate, and ended up losing their autonomy, and becoming instead intermediaries between the producers and the EIC.

Further north, in Bengal, much the same thing happened once the EIC acquired the right to collect land revenue in this prosperous province in 1765. Now Bengal weavers had to fill the demands of the EIC before they could sell their cloth elsewhere, and the compulsory price the EIC paid was, in the words of an historian of this process, 'extraordinarily poor'. We see again in Bengal the nexus between political and economic control, for these cloth purchases were largely financed with the land revenue the EIC collected from Bengali peasants.
6
The opium trade is another example. In 1773 the EIC took monopoly rights over this and from 1797 no private cultivation was allowed: each peasant had to cultivate a specified area of land, deliver his entire produce to EIC at a fixed price, and was penalised if the area cultivated fell short of what the EIC wanted.
7

On the other coast, in Gujarat, the advance of the British was slowed for a time by opposition from the Marathas, but once this ended in 1818 the result for merchants and weavers here was similar to what had occurred earlier on the east coast and interior.
8
More generally, India as a colony was unable to protect its nascent industries. The contrast with the United States is revealing. Being independent, they were able to use government policy to get industries established to challenge the British. The American tariff on English woollen textiles was 35 per cent in 1828, and 50 per cent in 1832; and on some goods in 1842 it was 100 per cent
ad valorem
.
9
Colonial India had no such option.

Maritime matters are our main concern. Before going into detail, a brief overview of the main themes which we will deal with in this chapter will help to set the scene. In the broadest terms what we are seeing is the creation of a world economy, and a consequent huge growth in transnational trade in the second half of the nineteenth century. International trade grew seven times faster in this fifty years as compared with the first half of the century. In 1850 the world's merchant fleet had about 9 million tons of carrying capacity, by 1910 it had 34.5 million. In terms of volume per capita, international trade grew twenty-five times between 1850 and 1914.
10
People from around the Indian Ocean participated in this world economy, but were subject much more than before to its vagaries. As one example, around 1850 India supplied about 20 per cent of England's raw cotton imports, much less than the
United States. During the American Civil War India's exports boomed, and there was a speculative frenzy in Mumbai. The Civil War ended, the United States again exported cotton, and a series of major projects in Mumbai collapsed.
11

The context of European dominance in the Indian Ocean was very different from what applied in the Atlantic and Pacific. These two oceans were more or less created by Europeans. As we have noted so often, this was very much not the case in our ocean. Rather there was a very old and elaborate existing system which had to be undercut and replaced. This was achieved. As just one example, in 1913–14 of the tonnage of India's overseas trade 72 per cent was British, and 64 per cent of India's exports came to Britain.
12

Frank Broeze provided a very neat overview of the general impact of the west on the Indian Ocean:

the nature of the European intrusion [was] intensified by changes in maritime technology. Important aspects of this intensification were the use of larger iron vessels and steam power, the greatly increased volume of trade, the development of new forms of trade to meet the import and export requirements of industrialising Europe, and the unprecedented increase in the volume of passenger traffic both within the region and through it.
13

Three broad periods can be distinguished. The first is the era of the sailing ship, from 1750 to 1850, where locals still had a role, albeit a decreasing one and only in intra-oceanic trade; they had no role in connecting the Indian Ocean with other parts of the globe. In the next, from 1850 to 1945, the era of the steam and then the motorship, locals were slowly replaced and denied meaningful participation. A very marked hierarchy appeared, and the locals were left with only niche, small-scale, areas of operation. Many were reduced to menial employment on European ships. The period from 1945, to be covered in the next chapter, sees the arrival of the specialised bulk carrier and container ship. In this period people from around the ocean come back to dominance. However, as ports developed to service these new ships, mechanisation and especially containerisation reduced dramatically the opportunities for unskilled labour.
14

We have written many times of connections across and beyond the ocean. These now intensified. We will follow the distinction made by Horden and Purcell in their study of the Mediterranean, and distinguish between connections
in
the ocean and connections
of
the ocean. It will be remembered that they found 'a distinction between history
in
the Mediterranean – contingently so, not Mediterranean-wide, perhaps better seen as part of the larger history of either Christendom or Islam – and history
of
the Mediterranean – for the understanding of which a firm sense of place and a search for Mediterranean-wide comparisons are both vital.'
15

What then of wider connections, going beyond the ocean, a history
in
the ocean? Indian railway sleepers were sometimes built using Baltic fir, which was creosoted in Britain, then shipped to India. From the 1830s cargoes of ice came to Mumbai
from north America. On either side of 1800 whales and seals were hunted in the southern stretches of our ocean by European and American ships, and the products taken far outside the ocean. Seal furs were mostly sold in Guangzhou. Cowry shells from the Seychelles were used to buy slaves in West Africa, and even after the end of the slave trade they were used to about the mid nineteenth century as currency in the Bay of Bengal, and far afield in Timbuktu, Benin, and up and down the Niger river. In 1925 there was a large strike by seamen in Britain after ship owners, led by the reactionary Lord Inchape of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company (P&O), cut their wages. The strike was vigorously supported by unionists in Australia, who provided strike pay for their English colleagues. Once the strike was over Lord Inchape decided to teach the unionists in Fremantle a lesson: for a while his ships boycotted western Australia and sailed direct to Melbourne.
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The history
of
the ocean, that is connections within it, are many and variegated: again a few examples will set the scene. Opium was cultivated in Bihar, in eastern India. Its role in the China trade in the nineteenth century is well known, but an earlier extensive trade to Java has been less studied. The VOC monopolised this trade. In the 1670s they made less than 5,000 Spanish dollars from its sale, but in the 1720s they made 83,000 and nearly 2,000,000 in 1800.
17
Another drug, tobacco, continued to be traded around and in the ocean, with the Philippines becoming a major production area during the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century Kuwait imported all its water, and other necessities also travelled long distances across the ocean. As land was taken over for cash crops in Mauritius and Zanzibar, food had to be imported. Indian indentured labour in the former required imported rice, dhal and ghee from India, as did the free Indian population in the latter. Mozambique Island, just as in the past, imported food from along the Swahili coast, and even from India. Aden was taken by the British in 1839 and became an important hub in the imperial system. Livestock came from the Somali coast, grains from India, rice from Kolkata, and dates from the Gulf. Even leeches were traded far and wide. These were necessary for blood letting or phlebotomy, a very common medical specific in some European areas, especially France in the nineteenth century, and also in the Indian ayurvedic system. The main producer was the small French remnant in Pondicherry, and there was an extensive trade from there to Mauritius: their availability was widely advertised by pharmacies in Port Louis. One had them available by the thousand. In 1845 Fanny Parks was on her way back to England on the
Essex
. The ship's doctor had brought on board 10,000 leeches from Kolkata, as he knew there was a shortage at the Cape, and he could sell them for no less than half a crown a piece. He carried them in large earthen pots full of soft mud: alas, the pots broke in a storm and the sea water killed them all. Later in the century Indian labour was taken to the Caribbean, and on the transport ships 100 leeches had to be carried for each 100 labourers.
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We have examples here of new British possessions opening up new or more intensive connections across the ocean. This applies particularly to connections with the new colonies in Australia, something often ignored by Australian historians who concentrate on ties with the 'mother country'. The first colony, New
South Wales, quickly developed extensive ties with India. The first ship from India arrived in Sydney in 1793 with a cargo of stores, livestock and provisions. Four others came in 1794–95 with food. Between 1808 and 1825 no less than ninety India ships came to New South Wales. In 1829 a colony was founded on the western Australian coast, at Perth, and in its first year a ship was sent to Java for food supplies. From the 1840s there were close connections between Mauritius, where the sugar industry was flourishing, and the nascent industry in eastern Australia.

Two particular products provided exports from the Australian colonies to India. India has never been a particularly good place to breed horses. In the nineteenth century in western Australia a new town was set up to breed horses for the Indian market. Its appropriate name was Australind. This project failed, but the eastern colonies for long provided the bulk of the horses used by the Indian army. This trade began in the 1830s and continued for nearly a century. From the late nineteenth century the Indian army depended almost entirely on the again appropriately named 'Walers', though not all of them came from New South Wales. The trade was at its height in the second decade of the twentieth century, thanks to the demands of World War I. In this decade 59,000 were sent from Queensland, 21,000 from Victoria, 19,000 from New South Wales, and 12,000 from South Australia.
19
Western Australia also provided an alternative to Baltic fir for use as railway sleepers: in the later nineteenth century there was a significant export of karri and jarrah timber.