The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (22 page)

Plassey proved, crudely but effectively, that the Company was a force to be reckoned with in India. For the next fifty years, the rulers of Mysore, Hyderabad, the Mahratha states and the Punjab scrambled to acquire the new military technology and the specialists, usually Europeans, who would train their soldiers to use it. Other Indian princes chose to preserve their independence by seeking an accommodation with the Company through unequal treaties, in which they agreed to surrender revenues and some of their authority in return for the Company’s protection in the form of a permanent garrison.

The pattern of expansion by coercion and treaty was first seen after Plassey when Clive played kingmaker and installed Mir Jafir as nawab of Bengal, Orissa and Bihar. All the customary land taxes of these provinces passed to the Company and Mir Jafir was left responsible for justice and policing, functions that were taken over by the Company in 1772. All Frenchmen were expelled from Bengal, and soon some of its taxes were flowing into the Carnatic to subsidise the war effort against France. After some awkward moments, including an amphibious assault on Madras, the war in the Carnatic went in the Company’s favour. Pondicherry fell in 1761 and its fortifications were levelled. French pretensions in southern India were in shreds, even though Pondicherry was returned to them in 1763 under the terms of the Treaty of Paris.

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Bengal gave the Company the wherewithal to sustain its new position as a major military power within India. The circumstances of its acquisition gave impetus to further wars of conquest and pacification as civilians and soldiers discovered that the profits of war far exceeded those of trade. Looking back on twenty years of intermittent campaigns, Edmund Burke told the Commons in 1785 that, ‘The great fortunes made in India at the beginnings of the conquest, naturally excited emulation in all parts, and through the whole succession of the Company’s servants.’

This was true. Those who played the game of high politics and war in India found themselves tantalisingly close to huge sources of wealth which could be easily tapped. It was, Clive correctly stated, ‘the known and usual custom of Eastern Princes’ to make generous gifts to those who helped them. Mir Jafir followed tradition and between 1757 and 1766 gave Clive a total of £234,000 and, during the same period, extended his largesse to other officials in Calcutta, who individually received sums of between £5,000 and £117,000. The goodwill and influence of powerful men were purchasable commodities in Indian political life, as they were in eighteenth-century Britain, and the Company’s agents saw no reason why they should not benefit from the accepted practices of a country where they were now power-brokers. Corruption was also endemic in the day-to-day administration of India, and officials who were placed in charge of the tax-collection in Bengal and elsewhere soon ‘went native’, channelling revenues into their own pockets.

These were all the fruits of conquest. War also generated profits, most of which found their way into the hands of soldiers, which was why so many of them always favoured aggressive policies. Clive made £40,000 between 1744 and 1753 during which time he held relatively junior posts, while the more scrupulous Arthur Wellesley (younger brother of the Marquess and later Field-Marshal, the Duke of Wellington), who held more senior commands between 1798 and 1805, returned home £43,000 better off.
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Junior officers were always itching for action, especially if it offered chances of promotion, campaign allowances and, most welcome of all, loot and prize money. In September 1797, young officers in Madras were plunged into despair when they heard that an expedition against Manila had been cancelled. One wrote to his parents, ‘Judge of the gloom, the disappointment, and vexation which overspread the faces which a few moments before had exhibited the highest symptoms of hope, and ardour for distinction.’
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No doubt there were some fire-eaters genuinely dismayed that they had missed a chance to show their prowess in the field, but there were many, perhaps the majority, who had been dreaming of plunder. The official, and therefore suspect, total of loot taken from Nagpur in 1758 was £25,000. The actual value of the booty was probably far greater, since much of what had been stolen would never find its way on to the Company’s reckoning sheets. This was understandable since the procedures for prize-money allocation were slow and heavily weighted in favour of senior officers. Participants in the 1817–19 Mahratha War had to wait eight years for the pay-out of the £2 million owed them, so it was inevitable that many soldiers grabbed what they could and never declared it.

Acquisitiveness at the top was transmitted downwards. An unknown private of the 11th Dragoons recalled the wave of excitement which animated British and Indian other ranks in 1825 after they heard the news that they were about to besiege Bharatpur. When the city fell in January 1826, he watched seven cartloads of gold and silver auctioned, and a soldier offer two gold moidores (about £3.50p) for a bottle of spirits, which would normally have been sold for a tenth of that amount. He also noticed soldiers carrying off gold necklaces, jewellery and camel-hair shawls, while others dug up the floors of houses in search of cash buried by their owners, a common precaution against looters and tax-collectors.
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This kind of behaviour had attended every war in India during the past eighty years and was beyond the control of officers. When Lieutenant Robert Blakiston apprehended some British plunderers after the capture of Gawilghur in 1803, he was threatened with a bayonet and called a ‘meddling rascal’ for having dared to prevent them from exercising what they regarded as a natural right.
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Over and above the often considerable windfalls which came their way on campaign, officers could expect to earn enough from their pay and maintenance subventions either to provide a nest egg for retirement or to provide an annuity for their families at home. John Malcolm, in many ways a model of administrative probity, who entered the Company’s service in 1781, had accumulated £13,000 twenty-three years later and was still able to send home £400 annually to support his parents and sisters. He calculated that when he retired in 1806 his pension and savings would yield him £1,500 a year, enough to place him firmly in the ranks of the gentry.
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In the 1790s the poet Samuel Coleridge’s family was sustained by his elder brother, a junior officer in the Company’s army. Colin Mackenzie, an engineer attached to the Madras army in 1790, was willing to risk contracting local diseases working in the interior as a surveyor of forests (he knew nothing of botany) in order to qualify for higher rates of pay, some of which he sent back to his family on the Isle of Lewis.
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By the end of the century, placing a son in the Company’s army had become a valuable source of additional income to many middle-class families in Britain. Lacking the means to buy a commission in the regular army and provide a private income to supplement the low pay of junior officers, they had the satisfaction of seeing their offspring established in a gentlemanly occupation. Perhaps for this reason, officers of the king’s army looked down their noses at their Indian counterparts.

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Late eighteenth-century India was a bustling society, peopled by men on the make whose judgements in Company matters were always swayed by self-interest. The free-for-all which followed Plassey encouraged others to promote thrusting, acquisitive policies from which they had everything to gain. Moreover, as the Company annexed land and infiltrated the princely states, the demand grew for administrators, collectors of revenue, surveyors and residents. All these posts were well-paid and many were filled by ambitious young army officers. The dynamic of expansion generated bellicosity; Robert Blakiston thought there was something in the air of India which made British soldiers more ‘blood thirsty and ferocious’ than usual. Even some of the Company’s directors, who were uneasy about the process of conquest and war, found themselves intoxicated with the new spirit. One, interviewing the twelve-year-old John Malcolm in 1781, asked, ‘Why, my little man, what would
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do if you were to meet Hyder Ali?’ ‘Do, Sir, I would out with my sword and cut off his head,’ was his answer and it qualified Malcolm for a commission in the Company’s army.
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Hyder Ali Khan, Sultan of Mysore, was the most persistent of the Company’s enemies after Plassey. He had invaded the Carnatic in the 1760s, and in harness with the French made war on the Company and its allies in southern India in the late 1770s and 1780s. His son, Tipu (the Tiger) Sultan, continued the duel and was only narrowly beaten by Lord Cornwallis of Yorktown fame in 1793. Tipu, like the other independent princes of southern and central India, knew that survival depended on beating the Company at its own game, warfare in the European manner. During 1791 his agents in Paris were procuring arms from dealers in the Netherlands and, according to Admiralty intelligence sources, had purchased 50 cannon, 80 gun carriages, 100,000 cannon balls, 10,000 muskets and 20,000 ‘best tempered sabres’.
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The nizam of Hyderabad had acquired a 14,000-strong corps, armed with muskets and instructed in European methods by French mercenaries, and the princes of the Mahratha Confederacy possessed an estimated 30,000 troops, drilled and organised by freelance European officers.

The late eighteenth-century arms race presented a challenge to the Company, which was accepted with relish by the Marquess Wellesley when he took up the governor-generalship in 1798. Britain had been at war with Revolutionary France since 1793, and the Company’s intelligence officers made much of the fact that French mercenaries in India were all left-wing Jacobin Republicans, and that Tipu, who obligingly called himself ‘Citizen Tipu’, was begging for French assistance. Invoking the bogey of French Revolutionary subversion made sense in 1798, the year of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, which was seen in London and Calcutta as a prelude to an overland attack on India. Wellesley, a passionate opponent of the French Revolution, did not wait on events; he struck. Hyderabad was neutralised and neutered by coercive diplomacy, and in 1799 the Company’s army overran and conquered Mysore.

Tipu died fighting in his capital, Seringapatam, and the nocturnal scene in which Company officers discovered his body became a favourite with British genre painters. His famous mechanical tiger was brought to London in 1808 and displayed as a trophy in the Oriental Repository, a museum attached to the East India Company’s headquarters in Leadenhall Street. This contraption immediately aroused enormous curiosity and made a deep and lasting impression on all who came to see it. They stared at a brightly painted, life-sized tiger mauling a uniformed Company officer and heard one emit roars and the other shrieks which subsided as he succumbed; sounds created by a crank-operated barrel organ within the beast.
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This was the ‘Man-Tiger-Organ’ that entertained the Indian emperor in John Keats’s fairytale, ‘The Cap and Bells’, an exotic toy which, in the original, seemed a fitting plaything for an oriental despot. In fact Tipu had been nothing of the kind, but this did not stop the wars between him and the Company from being publicly presented as a contest between fickle tyranny and civilising order. The point was graphically made by contemporary prints and paintings of Tipu’s sons surrendering themselves to the trustworthy and benevolent Company officers. Indians saw things differently; Muslims venerated Tipu as a martyr for Islam, whose name was being used thirty years later to encourage resistance against the British.
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After the conquest of Mysore, it was the turn of the Mahratha states. The initiative came from Wellesley who, by a mixture of force and diplomacy, secured the impoverished and weak Mahratha overlord, the Peshwa, as a Company ally. The result was the Mahratha War of 1803 against the armies of Sindia Daulat Rao of Gwalior and Raghugi Bhonsle of Nagpur. After a whirlwind campaign, their armies were defeated by Arthur Wellesley at the battles of Assaye and Argaon, while in the north, General Sir Gerard Lake occupied Aligarh, Delhi and Agra. With two of the leading Mahratha princes on their knees, the Marquess snatched at the chance to eliminate the third and declared war on Jaswant Rao Holkar in 1805. The second phase of the war went badly; a Company column was roughly handled near Agra and Lake found Bharatpur too tough a nut to crack. The Marquess Wellesley had overreached himself and in 1806 he was recalled to London.

The Marquess had come unstuck because of over-confidence and temerity. He had not gone to India to enrich himself, but to prove his worth as a dynamic and visionary administrator (he founded a college for Company civil servants at Madras), and hoped that his achievements would qualify him for high office in Britain. He was the first of a breed of highhanded, patrician proconsuls who relished the exercise of absolute power; when he visited Cawnpore in 1802, he rode on a magnificently bedecked elephant and ‘in the true style of Eastern pomp, distributed his [the Company’s] rupees with a liberal hand’ just like an Indian potentate.
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A man of such temperament had nothing but disdain for balance sheets and the Company’s directors who were, he wrote confidentially in 1799, ‘held in universal contempt and ridicule in every branch of the service in India’.

The businessmen in London had profound misgivings about the Marquess Wellesley and those men of similar stamp who, over the past forty years, had engineered a revolution in the Company’s affairs. This apprehension was well founded since the policies of these wilful and sometimes venal servants had thrown the Company’s accounts into chaos, and given it responsibilities it did not want and for which it was unfitted. In 1744 the Company had loaned the government £1 million; twenty-eight years and various wars later, it was in the red and seeking to borrow £1.4 million from the Treasury. By 1815 the Company’s debt was £40 million and just over three-quarters of its annual budget was consumed by the expenses of its army, which was now 150,000 strong. There had been brief signs of financial resurgence in the mid-1760s as the land taxes from Bengal began to pour in, but these quickly vanished and the Company lurched from crisis to crisis. In order to stay afloat, it had fallen back on the dubious expedient of raising capital by regular share issues, and had created what in effect was a private version of the national debt.