The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (23 page)

Where would it all end? A considerable body of opinion, stronger in London than in India, feared that the Company was becoming dangerously overstretched. In 1779, when it was locked in combat with Hyder Ali and his French sponsors, Major-General James Stuart, the resident in Tanjore (Thangayu), voiced the widely-held anxiety that the Company ‘already possesses more Territory and Influence than they well know how to make good use of’.
16
Twenty-five years later, the naturally cautious Arthur Wellesley was convinced that his brother had overstepped himself in his efforts to subdue the Mahrathas. He also believed that there were great risks in making treaties with native princes which left them with the façade of their former power, while real authority was exerted by the Company with the result that they lost respect and their puppet-master gained none.

Critics of expansionism were also uneasy about the swiftness with which senior Company officials resorted to war as an instrument of policy. A quick and unexpectedly arduous foray into Nepal in 1814–15 troubled the Duke of York, the commander-in-chief of the British Army, who wondered why ‘it was ever necessary’.
17
There was, of course, little that he or anyone else in London could do about it, for the men who made the decisions were thousands of miles away. If challenged, they fell back on a stock explanation which involved local prestige and the refusal of the Company’s strategists to tolerate a powerful or obstreperous independent state on their borders. The government and the directors were not always convinced; in 1816 there was some reluctance to allow the Nepal campaign’s hero, Major-General Sir David Ochterlony, a £1,000 annuity, which was understandable given the Company’s debts.
18

Behind the debates that had flared up in Britain whenever the men-on-the-spot in India adopted aggressive policies, lay a deep unease. Altogether the events of the fifty years after Plassey suggested that those who held power in India considered themselves beyond the restraint of either the Company or the British government. The growing Indian empire was becoming a state within a state. At the same time, it appeared that those responsible for India underwent a moral transformation, abandoning British habits of mind and codes of public behaviour and embracing those of the subcontinent.

Clive had recognised the temptations, to which he had earlier succumbed, when he returned to Bengal as governor-general in 1765 with a mandate to establish honest and fair government. ‘In a country where money is plenty, where fear is the principle of government, and when your arms are ever victorious,’ he observed, ‘I say it is no wonder that corruption should find its way to a spot so well prepared to receive it.’ For the next two years he did what he could to stamp out the worst abuses and the task was taken up by two of his successors, Warren Hastings (1772–85) and Lord Cornwallis (1785–92); but in a country where highly-paid posts proliferated, and the opportunities for graft were still plentiful, old attitudes died hard. In 1791, when a storming party at the siege of Cuddadur had been halted by fears of a mine, an officer rallied them with the cry, ‘If there is a mine, it is a mine of gold!’
19

Efforts to cleanse an administration which, among other things, tolerated torture as a means of extracting taxes, were regarded sceptically by many in Britain who felt that there was something disturbingly un-English about the Indian empire. Hitherto, imperial conquest and annexation had been confined to America and accompanied by emigration from Britain. Along with the emigrants had gone Christianity, British political values and systems of government which had been reproduced in the colonies. In India things had been different. In the space of sixty years the Company had acquired provinces that possessed their own machinery of government, which had evolved along autocratic lines and sophisticated, well-organised societies with their own deeply-rooted religions and customs.

There was no reason for the Company’s officials to upset the established order in India, a course of action which they lacked the means to undertake and which would have caused untold havoc. Instead, the Company behaved as an inheritor, accepting what it found, and making changes only when practical necessity demanded. This pragmatism involved compromises; religious practices repugnant to Christians were tolerated, and wherever possible Hindu and Muslim legal traditions were accommodated. The prevalent attitude was summed up by an incident in 1814 at Jaganath, when the acting magistrate encountered a widow about to commit sati, that is the Hindu custom of throwing herself on the funeral pyre of her husband. He tried to dissuade her, but ‘she said that she loved her husband, and was determined to burn with him’, so the magistrate departed and the ceremony went ahead.
20
Elsewhere, officers of the Company’s army would attend Hindu rituals with their men and allow Hindu priests to bless regimental colours.

There were limits to toleration which were invariably defined by the need to maintain public order. Small-scale campaigns were fought to suppress organised banditry, which was an integral part of the Indian social order, but which interfered with trade and represented a challenge to the Company’s authority. Drastic measures such as executions without trial were commonly adopted by officers, who claimed that they were a medicine which both doctor and patient understood. Arthur Wellesley, who never had any qualms about hanging bandits whenever he found them, later commented that the ‘liberal’ ideals which held sway in Britain were utterly unsuited to a country whose people were conditioned to authoritarian government and expected their rulers to act with a firm hand.

The nature of Indian society and the conditions which Company administrators faced ruled out any importation into India of the freedoms and political rights taken for granted in Britain. And yet, as liberal thinkers in Britain argued, despotic forms of government were corrupting, and the Company was growing into an institution so powerful that it might subvert the British state. Edmund Burke, the most persistent and trenchant critic of the Company and its officials’ behaviour, claimed in 1783 that ‘a corrupt, private interest’ had come into existence ‘in direct opposition to the necessity of the state’. This was hyperbole, but it highlighted contemporary misgivings about an institution which seemed outside the control of parliament. Brakes, not always effective, were placed on the Company by the 1772 and 1784 India Acts which imposed parliamentary control over the board of directors, the latter setting up a board of control chaired by the Secretary of State for India, who was also a cabinet member. Gradually a private interest came under public control.

Of probably greater importance than the extension of parliamentary control over the Indian empire was a fundamental change in attitude of that generation of young Company servants who were taking up their posts at the turn of the century. They arrived having been exposed to evangelicalism, a creed which was making considerable headway among the British middle and upper classes during the 1780s and 1790s. Evangelicalism was a form of Protestantism which emphasised personal spiritual regeneration through the acceptance of Providence, and useful service to mankind, undertaken in accordance with Christian humanitarian principles. Cornwallis seems to have been one of the first to have been swayed by evangelical ideals for, on his appointment as governor-general, he listed his priorities as: ‘Try to be of some use; serve your country and your friends [and] take the means which God is willing to place in your hands.’
21

Personal moral uprightness was essential if the evangelical was to perform his duties to the rest of the world. John Malcolm, whose Indian career began in the early 1780s, believed that British power there rested on the gallantry of British troops and the high moral standards of its administrators, in particular their truthfulness and integrity. ‘When they condescend to meet the smooth-tongued Mohammedan, or the crafty Hindoo, with the weapons of flattery, dissimulation, and cunning,’ he remarked, ‘they will to a certainty be vanquished.’
22
In other words, if the British continued to adopt what were taken to be the values of the people they governed, they would be undone. Arthur Wellesley concurred, telling Malcolm in 1804, ‘I would rather sacrifice Gwalior or every frontier in India ten times over, in order to preserve our credit for scrupulous good faith.’
23

Arthur Wellesley spoke with the voice of the British aristocracy, a class that considered the right to rule others as its birthright, and which enjoyed a monopoly of political power at home. The India Act extended this monopoly to India, where high offices were soon occupied by men such as Cornwallis, the Marquess Wellesley, and in the next century, Lord Hastings and the Earl of Minto. They applied, in varying degrees, the traditional principles of aristocratic government to the people of India, mingling firmness with benevolent paternalism, and endeavoured to keep a high standard of personal probity.

They and the home government accepted that Britain’s Indian empire was a national asset although its acquisition had never followed any predetermined plan. By 1800, British domination of India was an accepted political fact of life despite parliamentary misgivings about the activities of grandee governor-generals who were just as pugnacious as their predecessors when it came to securing frontiers and enforcing Britain’s will on recalcitrant native rulers.

The momentum to acquire more and more power could not be allowed to slacken. India had become a base from which Britain could dominate southern Asia and the Indian Ocean and promote its commercial interests which were beginning to reach out towards China. The Indian army gave Britain the power with which to protect these interests, and enforce its will throughout a region which extended from the Red Sea to the Malay Peninsula. The potential of the Indian army was first revealed during the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France when a combination of Indian manpower and local naval supremacy enabled the British to wage war in Egypt and conquer Mauritius and Java. After 1807, when it was clear that the French were supreme in Europe, British strategists began to lay plans for the conquest of Spanish America which involved conveying Indian troops across the Pacific to Mexico and Chile.

These schemes were laid in the knowledge that British-trained Indian units were more than up to the task; during the siege of Cuddadur in 1783 Madras sepoys overcame French troops who had previously repelled a European assault party, and, at Bharatpur in 1805, Indians had advanced into action when the British 76th Regiment had flinched.
24
Nonetheless, those who ruled India had no illusions about the real source of their power, the legend of British invincibility. ‘Every European soldier’, wrote Cornwallis, ‘should be carried in a
dooly
to the scene of action, when, like a panther or a blood hound, he might be let slip against the enemy.’
25
A wave of unrest among native troops during 1809 was an uncomfortable reminder that stability throughout the subcontinent ultimately rested on British troops alone.
26
This fact would never be forgotten, even by those who dreamed of bringing European enlightenment to the people of India.

7

The Desert of Waters: The Pacific and Australasia

The Pacific Ocean appeared as a huge void on eighteenth-century world maps. In the past two hundred years a handful of sailors had crossed its waters and returned with tantalising but fragmentary reports of islands and one, possibly two continents far to the south. Questions about the region had to remain unanswered. Sailing to and then traversing the Pacific was an extremely perilous enterprise; sailors cooped up for long periods and living on a stodgy diet contracted scurvy, and inexact methods of reckoning longitude sometimes forced captains to sail blindly. In 1741 Anson’s officers miscalculated their fleet’s position by 300 miles when rounding Cape Horn.

The technical impediments to Pacific reconnaissance were removed by 1765 with the publication of the
Nautical Almanac
and the almost simultaneous invention of an accurate maritime chronometer which together made it possible to measure longitude precisely. Regular rations of lime and lemon juice, laced with rum, reduced but did not eliminate scurvy epidemics. And yet, while these innovations made systematic exploration of the Pacific easier, the voyages undertaken by Captain James Cook and others from the late 1760s onwards remained tests of nervous stamina and physical endurance. Sailors jumped ship before each of Cook’s three expeditions, and in 1790 a sixth of the crew of the
Discovery
deserted rather than face an 18,000-mile voyage to the north-west coast of America.
1
What lay ahead of them was described by Captain Sir Henry Byam Martin in a melancholy note added to his ship’s log in July 1846. ‘The Pacific is the desert of waters – we seem to have sailed out of the inhabited world, and the
Grampus
to have become the Frankenstein of the Ocean.’
2

Isolation, the tensions generated by unchanging companions, the monotony of shipboard routine in an unfamiliar, sometimes frightening seascape were the common lot of the officers and men who first sailed the Pacific. What they experienced was shared with the public whose curiosity about an unknown ocean, its islands and their exotic inhabitants ensured that first-hand accounts of the early voyages became best-sellers. One avid reader of this travel literature, Coleridge, considered writing a poem on the 1787–88 cruise of the
Bounty
which had ended in the famous mutiny and the remarkable trans-Pacific voyage of its commander, William Bligh, and the loyal crewmen. What particularly fascinated Coleridge and many others was contemplation of how those who undertook these epic voyages, and encountered new and completely different societies, might be inwardly transformed by their experiences. The poem was never composed, but Coleridge later drew upon Cook’s vivid descriptions of the Antarctic seas for his ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.