The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (38 page)

could buy him respectability, Clive found that he could not escape

the imperial origins of his wealth. Although he acquired a seat in

Parliament, a knighthood, and a lesser Irish title as Baron Clive of

Plassey in the Kingdom of Ireland, his ambitions fl oundered on a

controversy surrounding the Bengali
jagir
that remained his primary source of income. It was understandably awkward to explain

to members of Parliament that the Mughal feudal system made him

the EIC’s superior. Moreover, he became the personifi cation of imperial corruption as reports of the nabobs’ abuses reached London.

Frustrated and facing greater scrutiny of his personal fortune, Clive

accepted the directors’ plan to be rid of their upstart employee by

sending him back to India for a second term as the governor and

commander-in-chief of Bengal.

Arriving in Calcutta in 1764, Clive consolidated and reorganized

the Company’s conquests. He also addressed the reports of nabob corruption that had caused a stir in London by banning private trading

by Company employees and capping the gifts they could accept from

Indian rulers at one thousand rupees. Conveniently forgetting the

origins of his own fortune, he piously cited the need to improve the

Company’s reputation in India as a justifi cation for the crackdown on

nabobism: “the name of the English stink in the nostrils of a gentoo

or a mussalman.”19

Yet Clive still did not move explicitly to turn the EIC into a sovereign power. Seeking the returns of revenue collection without incurring the heavy costs of direct rule, he tried to co-opt the
nawab
s’

administrative machinery. Under what became known as the dual

194 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

system, roughly four hundred Europeans looked after the Company’s

interests and left the expensive and messy details of revenue collection, law and order, and day-to-day governance to Mughal bureaucrats and
zamindars
. A senior Bengali offi cial named Muhammad

Reza Khan supervised the operation. This was the standard imperial

template of indirect rule employed by earlier generations of empire

builders in the Andes, Iberia, and Britain, and it also explains why

Bengali
ryots
and weavers initially failed to realize the signifi cance

of Plassey.

Although he disavowed explicit imperial pretensions, Clive

remained enough of an opportunist to grasp the possibilities of the

Company’s victory over the Mughal emperor at Buxar. Faced with

the loss of Bengali tribute and needing allies to remain in power, in

1765 Shah Alam II made the Company responsible for revenue collection in most of eastern India. Securing this
diwani
for the EIC was

one of Clive’s greatest coups. In return for paying the emperor less

than two hundred thousand pounds per year, he promised the court

of directors an annual return of two to four million pounds. The British government’s share of this bounty was a guaranteed payment

of four hundred thousand pounds per year, which helped keep the

Crown solvent during the Seven Years’ War and American Revolution. The promise of full and unfettered access to the wealth of Bengal

also led to a run on the EIC’s stock. Pressure from speculators pushed

up dividends, and the court of directors sent detailed instructions to

Clive on how to spend the expected windfall.20

Ultimately, the people of Bengal bore the cost of Clive’s grand

promises. His ambitious revenue guarantees depended on the Company’s ability to bypass the hierarchal Bengali system of tribute collection to gain direct access to the wealth of local communities. This

was a feat that had eluded the Mughal
jagir
holders and
zamindars

for centuries. While Akbar’s
zabt
survey documented roughly half of

the tribute obligations in the wider empire, more than 90 percent of

Bengali villages remained unassessed at the turn of the eighteenth

century. The Company could not make good on Clive’s guarantees

if it did not know how much wealth each village produced or how

much the
zamindars
skimmed off before passing it on to their superiors. In 1769, therefore, Company offi cials tried in vain to conduct a

thorough survey of Bengali revenues. Handcuffed by their ignorance

of local circumstances, they had to base their revenue projections on

Company

India 195

estimates and speculation. Clive may have promised metropolitan

Britons that the
diwani
would yield two to four million pounds a

year in revenue, but in reality his men had no clear picture of Bengal’s productive capacity.

At a time when most Bengali tribute came from just twelve large

zamindaris
, Company offi cials looked for ways to rationalize and

streamline revenue collection. In the original Twenty-Four Parganas,

they fi rst tried collecting revenue directly, but when this failed to

bring suffi cient returns they auctioned off the task to private Bengali

“revenue farmers” on three-year terms. Many of the successful bidders were so brutal in their pursuit of profi t that
ryots
and laborers

fl ed to territories outside the EIC’s reach, thereby further depressing the Company’s returns. Similarly, the independent local brokers

responsible for channeling goods to the EIC’s Indian buyers blocked

the Company from taking full control of Bengal’s handicraft sector.

As a result, Company offi cials could not make good on Clive’s

assurances that Bengal would yield millions of pounds in profi t.

Struggling under the expense of becoming a territorial and military power and the annual payments to the metropolitan treasury, they had to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of their

subjects. For centuries common Bengalis had borne the weight

of imperial tribute, but the EIC’s escalating revenue assessments

were unprecedented in their rapacity. In 1769 and 1770, the Company’s demands tragically exacerbated one of the widespread famines that affl icted the region periodically. Born of fl ooding, crop

failures, and British commercial meddling, the catastrophe killed

roughly three million people. Adam Smith and other critics suggested that some Company offi cials shamelessly profi ted from the

famine by manipulating rice prices, but the EIC’s main culpability

in the loss of so many lives lay in its unceasing revenue demands

on collapsing rural economies.

The resulting degradation and depopulation of key agricultural

areas further undercut the EIC’s revenues and brought it to the brink

of bankruptcy. In London, news of the famine burst the speculative

bubble that Clive had carefully nurtured with his wild overestimates

of the
diwani
’s value, but not before he made more than fi fty thousand pounds speculating in Company stock. Metropolitan taxpayers also suffered in the crash, for it took a loan from the treasury of

1.4 million pounds to keep the Company solvent.21

196 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Obviously things had to change, and it fell to Warren Hastings,

Clive’s successor as governor, to sort out the complexities of the

diwani
and imperial administration. But Hastings was just as much

of a nabob as Clive. Both men arrived in India as clerks and won

fame after transferring to the Company army. Where Clive was the

hero of wars with the French in Arcot, Hastings made his reputation

defending Bombay from a Maratha invasion. Governing Bengal from

1772 to 1885, he brought Clive’s dual system to an end by replacing Mughal administrators and judges with Company employees. He

also sought more direct control over the
zamindars
and other local

authorities.

In effect, Hastings’s reforms acknowledged that the EIC had

acquired an empire, and he sought to establish the Company’s legitimacy as an Indian power by codifying and systematizing indigenous

administrative and legal institutions. Assuming that Bengal had fallen

into decline under “foreign” Mughal despotism, Hastings and his

lieutenants sought to revive its “authentic” high Hindu culture. They

hired Brahmin scholars to commit “ancient” legal codes to paper, kept

court records in local dialects, and became dedicated students of Sanskrit and Hindu literature and history. The reformers also became

the patrons of Hindu shrines, festivals, and graves as they became

increasingly enmeshed in running Bengal.

Hastings’s orientalist program also recognized the value of Mughal

bureaucratic institutions. The EIC adopted Persian, the Mughals’

court language, as the lingua franca of day-to-day governance and

reserved English for internal Company correspondence. Company

courts adapted Mughal statutes to try criminal cases and used British

interpretations of Hindu and Muslim law for civil matters. The new

generation of young Company employee/administrators labored

to learn Persian, which meant that Mughal clerks and translators

remained infl uential. Recognizing the vital role that these intermediaries played in imperial administration, Hasting founded the Calcutta

Madrassa to train Muslim elites for the civil service. Similarly, the

Company continued to play its role as a dutiful Mughal vassal by

sending tribute to the increasingly impotent imperial court in Delhi

and minted coins bearing the emperors’ portraits until well into the

nineteenth century.

Despite these efforts, Company bureaucrats struggled to make

sense of the enormous diversity of South Asia. Although there were

Company

India 197

broad political, religious, and cultural continuities that were common

reference points at this time, most people identifi ed themselves primarily on the basis of locality, lineage, family, occupation, and religion. Company offi cials, however, believed that Indians were most

fundamentally defi ned by “caste.” The actual term was in fact a European import. Based on the Latin
castus
, it had the same etymological

origins as the term
castas
, which the Spanish used to describe the

hybrid social categories that emerged in their New World empire.

The Portuguese introduced the term to South Asia, and the Dutch

and British then used it to delineate a range of Indian identities associated with Hindu religious texts and everyday life.22

Briefl y, the notion of caste came to describe a uniquely South

Asian form of ranked identity. It was based on the four
varnas
of

Brahmin priests, Kshatriya warriors, Vaishya merchants, and Shudra

cultivators outlined in Hindu scripture, as well as thousands of much

more localized occupational categories (
jatis
) that were theoretically

determined by birth. These nested identities gave Indians ways to

assert authority, mobilize resources, and unite for mutual defense.

Nomadic and foraging peoples were largely outside the bounds of

caste, but settled Indians who converted to Islam still lived within

its realities because in diverse and multiethnic village societies caste

helped create order and stability.

British imperial observers believed that Indian caste, religious,

and tribal identities were fi xed by religion, tradition, and birth, but

in fact these norms were relatively fl exible and malleable, particularly in rural communities where different groups lived side by side;

they were far too fl uid to serve as effective instruments of imperial

exploitation. Company offi cials needed to make better sense of Indian

identity and foster sharper social boundaries to rule effectively. They

therefore recruited Indian scholars and religious experts, who shared

their interest in making local identities less fl uid, to develop caste into

a more rigid and coherent social category where communities, rather

than individuals, had rights.

Nationalists and imperial critics accuse British offi cials of imposing caste on India as part of a larger strategy of divide and rule. In

practice, no empire, least of all the East India Company, was ever even

remotely powerful enough to impose new identities on an unwilling

people. Instead, the EIC’s empire created a new reality by introducing better communications, standardizing laws, expanding the market

198 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

economy, and reducing the isolation of rural communities. This

inspired Indians to reimagine personal and caste identities and codify

formerly diverse and fl exible religious customs and practices. Indian

community leaders and legal and religious experts often cooperated

with the Company’s efforts to create clearly defi ned caste identities

because it enhanced their own authority and social prestige.

Company offi cials never fully grasped the complexities of Bengali society, which explains why Hastings lacked the intimate

knowledge of the
zamindaris
that he needed to make imperial rule

in Bengal pay. In 1772 he took another stab at making the
diwani

live up to Clive’s promises by fi xing revenue assessments for a fi veyear period and by auctioning off tribute collection rights. He also

tried to avoid the abuses of the 1760s by supervising the new revenue farmers more closely. A Committee of Circuit oversaw the new

system, and young British offi cials (known as collectors) assisted by

“native offi cers” gathered the EIC’s allotted tribute from the winning bidders.