The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (41 page)

built a popular following in Britain by turning out newspapers, books,

and religious tracts that featured lurid depictions of “heathen” Indian

practices and titillating tales of abused women and Hindu eroticism.

The evangelical lobby used this public support to force the EIC

to abolish the ban on proselytization and end its formal patronage

of Indian religious institutions during the 1813 charter review. Yet

the missionaries were ultimately disappointed, for these concessions failed to produce the expected rush of conversions. Becoming

a Christian brought famine relief, education, and greater dignity for

the poor and lower castes, but it also entailed social ostracism and the

threat of physical violence. Moreover, the Company’s old guard, who

still believed that proselytization was disruptive, restricted religious

instruction in government-funded schools and barred Christian converts from the army and civil service. Even so, the ability of Protestant leaders to infl uence the charter review process meant that the era

of orientalist toleration was over.

In the 1820s, liberals and utilitarians sealed its demise by joining

the evangelicals in calling for greater efforts to reform India. Confi dent that all humans could be uplifted through good government,

Company

India 209

Christian morality, western education, and free trade, they were certain that benevolent British imperial rule would rescue Indians from

heathen superstition and oriental despotism. In joining the Protestant

religious lobby in proposing to save India from itself, these groups

introduced a new moralizing element into the legitimizing ideology

of western imperial rule. Later generations of conquerors used the

belief that empire could be turned to humanitarian ends to disguise

the inherent self-interest in their own imperial projects.

As central fi gures in the reformist lobby, James Mill and his more

famous philosopher son John Stuart Mill used their senior positions

in the EIC’s metropolitan bureaucracy to push for utilitarianism in

imperial administration. Although the Mills had little direct personal

knowledge of Indian society and culture, the senior Mill was the

author of a widely read and infl uential history of India. While James

Mill was a vehement critic of nabobism, he naively believed that it

was possible to use the authoritarianism of imperial rule as an instrument of moral uplift and social transformation. William CavendishBentinck, the governor-general of Bengal from 1828 to 1833, tried

enthusiastically to make this utilitarian agenda the basis of British

rule in India.

The utilitarians hoped to use India as a laboratory to perfect rational laws and social policies that could be transplanted back to Britain

to reform metropolitan political and social institutions tainted by conservatism and corruption. They joined the evangelicals in demanding

that Company offi cials intervene more directly in Indian society to

stamp out irrational and immoral practices. These alleged evil institutions included what they perceived to be infanticide, religiously sanctioned banditry (
thuggee
), and the ritual suicide of Hindu widows on

their husbands’ funeral pyres (
sati
).

The imperial reformers never intended to turn Indians into Britons, but they assumed that their superior civilization would have a

gradual transformative impact on Indian society. The agents of this

trickle-down “modernization” were to be a new class of westernized

Indians who would become willing allies of the British imperial project. To this end, the charter revisions of 1813 and 1833 required the

Company to set aside funds for western education. It fell to Thomas

Babington Macaulay, Cavendish-Bentinck’s legal advisor and the

president of the General Committee of Public Instruction, to put the

new system in practice. Writing in 1834, he famously declared: “We

210 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters

between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons,

Indian in colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in

intellect.”35 This state support took the form of subsidies to mission

schools on the provision that they did not try to convert Hindu and

Muslim students.

Macaulay and the utilitarians believed that their inherent superiority obligated them to conquer and rule India, but in practice the

Company still leaned heavily on local translators, diplomats, agents,

and bureaucrats to actually govern. Despite their grand philanthropic rhetoric, the reformers’ main goal was still to improve the

mechanisms of imperial extraction. The enormous costs of becoming

a political and military power pushed the Company to the brink of

bankruptcy until the metropolitan government stepped in with its

1.4-million-pound bailout. Parliament therefore insisted that the EIC

support itself.

Revenue collection remained the Company bureaucracy’s primary concern. Still attempting to make the
diwani
pay, Cornwallis ended the futile attempt to tap directly into the rural wealth of

Bengal. Instead he agreed with Burke that the
zamindars
were the

equivalent of English landed aristocrats whose legitimate rights had

been usurped by decades of meddling and mistreatment by nabobs

and tax-farming Indian speculators. Moreover,
zamindars
were the

only people in Bengal with the intimate knowledge of local production. Cornwallis therefore concluded the Permanent Settlement with

the
zamindars
in 1793, whereby they received proprietary rights

as landlords over their holdings in return for an obligation to make

fi xed revenue payments in perpetuity. They would also have the right

to claim any surplus above the set amount. In theory, this security

of tenure would solve the Company’s fi scal problems by giving the

zamindars
an incentive to increase production by investing in the

land. The
ryots
became their tenants, but Cornwallis assumed that

the
zamindars
would treat them fairly to improve yields.

Yet the fundamental problem with the Permanent Settlement was

that the
zamindars
were not hereditary landlords. They were tribute collectors who had no customary rights. Cornwallis arbitrarily

based the assessments on the estimated revenue returns of 1789

rather than on a systematic survey or census of Bengali wealth and

production. These fi gures represented a nearly 20 percent increase

Company

India 211

over Mughal tribute levels. As a result, many
zamindars
defaulted

and lost their holdings at auction. One-third of the land in Bengal

changed hands this way between 1793 and 1822, and only one of the

twelve great Bengal
zamindars
remained solvent at the turn of the

nineteenth century. Cornwallis clearly did not do the
zamindars
any

favors when he tried to make them the Company’s primary imperial

proxies in the Bengali countryside.

Offi cials in Madras and Bombay adopted a different strategy in

trying to collect revenue directly from peasant producers, but they

were no more knowledgeable about local conditions or successful

than their counterparts in Bengal. Rather, they simply did not share

Cornwallis’s inclination to look for aristocratic allies in systematizing

tribute collection. Moreover, the more peasant-centered approaches

in the Madras and Bombay presidencies were not markedly more

effi cient in extracting rural wealth, and they ultimately forced many

ryots
into debt by demanding tribute payments in currency.

The Bengali
ryots
did not fare much better under the Permanent

Settlement. Instead of becoming clients of progressive gentleman

zamindar
farmers, the defaults arising from unreasonable revenue

obligations once again left them in the hands of speculators. Some

of these buyers were local, but others were Calcutta merchants who

had few reservations about using the coercive powers of the Permanent Settlement to meet their obligations. Tenants who fell behind on

their tribute payments risked the confi scation of their entire harvest

or outright eviction. This was at a time when private land titles were

becoming more valuable as produce prices rose and the population

of Bengal grew in the aftermath of the famines. These seismic social

shifts had been under way since the beginning of the eighteenth century, but the Permanent Settlement made them more traumatic by

accelerating the demise of the old
zamindar
class and the marginalization of peasant producers.

The Company’s renewed effort to balance its books also placed

entirely new kinds of burdens on Bengali farmers. Heavy borrowing

in the 1790s infl ated the EIC’s debt from eighteen million pounds

to thirty-two million between 1802 and 1807, which Company offi cials hoped to resolve by expanding cash crop exports. When the

zamindars
failed to live up to expectations, the Company resorted to

draconian production quotas and enticing cash advances to push Bengali peasants into growing indigo (for dye) and poppies (for opium).

212 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Defaulters became obligated to grow crops for European commercial fi rms until they or their descendants cleared their debts, which

amounted to virtual debt slavery.

The failure of the Permanent Settlement and the loss of its commercial monopoly after the 1813 charter review turned the Company

into a new kind of imperial power. Stripped of its mercantilist protection and privileges and subject to governmental supervision, the EIC’s

Indian empire now served the interests of metropolitan manufacturers and investors. British commercial fi rms displaced the Indian bankers who had brokered the nabobs’ private trading ventures, funded

the Company’s wars, and fi nanced craft production. Bengali weavers

similarly suffered as the European market for Indian fabrics gradually disappeared due to rising metropolitan import duties and competition from textile factories that turned out inferior but cheaper

products. After 1813, the EIC could not stop British mill owners from

fl ooding India with these machine-woven goods. Manchester manufacturing interests used their political infl uence, which was at its apex

at midcentury, to ensure that the Company did not adopt any of the

protectionist policies that were becoming more widespread in Europe

and the United States. Bengal’s venerable weaving sector therefore

fell into decline as South Asia shifted from one of the world’s largest

exporters of high-quality textiles to a raw material supplier and captive imperial market.

Although imperial apologists celebrate this transformation as a

triumph of modernity and free trade, the hypocrisy of empire kept

the Indian economy stunted and backward. The Company lost its

monopoly, but it retained mercantilistic control over salt and opium

production. Moreover, it still drew most of its revenue from tribute

collection based on custom rather than formal taxes and tariffs on

commercial agriculture. Each year, Company employees also transferred approximately six million pounds to Britain in the form of

bullion, administrative salaries, pensions, stock dividends, and fees. In

addition to these “home charges,” the EIC continued to export opium

to an increasingly addicted Chinese market.

From the Indian perspective, their imperial rulers ironically became

more bigoted and chauvinistic as they became more respectable. Ever

mindful of their precarious position as a privileged minority, British

empire builders recognized that their security depended in large part

on their ability to demand Indian deference and obedience. Where

Company

India 213

the nabobs had mixed freely with aristocratic Indians, their successors became obsessed with upholding their collective prestige. To this

end the Company administration struggled to ensure that Indians

encountered only sober, propertied, and respectable Britons.

Indeed, the life of a privileged imperial elite in India had its

rewards. Cheap Indian labor allowed middle-class Britons to live like

propertied metropolitan gentlemen, and phalanxes of Indian clerks,

cooks, washmen, maids, gardeners, grooms, and litter bearers looked

after their needs and whims. These privileges of empire trickled down

to lower-class Europeans whether the East India Company liked it or

not. Despite the best efforts of senior Company offi cials, common

Britons had the power to exploit any Indian because, as members of

the civilized imperial minority, they were exempt from prosecution

in all but the highest presidency courts. Inevitably, a popular image

of India as a country where “the black man works that the white man

may be at ease” developed in Britain. As a result, the western population in India grew from approximately three thousand Europeans

to eighty thousand between 1814 and 1871. This imperial elite was

a tiny percentage of the overall South Asian population, but their

numbers almost certainly would have been higher had not offi cials

been so vigilant in suppressing immigration to ensure that an infl ux