The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (44 page)

Metropolitan politicians consequently agreed that the Company

had to go. In 1858, Parliament passed an India Bill that fi nally abolished the EIC and transferred all of its holdings to the Crown. The

court of directors met for the last time in September of that same

year, and the Company’s stock stopped paying dividends fi ve years

later. In its place the British government created a new administrative

imperial entity known as the Raj (from the Hindi word for “government”) to assert direct control over India. In London, the secretary of

state for India, assisted by the India Offi ce, appointed and supervised

a viceroy who presided over a unifi ed Indian bureaucracy. The India

224 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Bill dispensed with the archaic Bengal, Bombay, and Madras presidencies and the Company’s outdated civil administration. The new Indian

Civil Service (ICS) was theoretically a meritocracy open to educated

Indians, but the practice of holding the competitive entrance exams

in London ensured that only a handful of subject peoples entered its

senior ranks in the nineteenth century.

Like the EIC, the Raj remained an imperial state in its own right.

Its reconstituted armed forces were still separate from the regular

British army, and the viceroys still had considerable autonomy in setting its foreign policy. The reformers used Bahadur Shah’s cooperation with the mutineers as an excuse to fi nally abolish the Mughal

Empire, and in his place Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli made

Victoria queen-empress of India in 1876. As her fi rst viceroy, Lord

Canning sought to win popular local support for the new imperial

regime by giving carefully chosen Indians seats on the viceregal and

provincial advisory councils. Assuming that the mutiny had demonstrated the ineffectiveness of western-educated Indians as allies and

intermediaries, Canning hoped to turn Indian nobles and aristocrats

into a primary prop of British rule. He ended the practice of annexing

the kingdoms of childless rulers and invented a grandiose array of

titles, coats of arms, and chivalric orders to reward princes who swore

allegiance to the Raj. Finally, he angered revenge-minded Britons and

earned himself the nickname of “Clemency Canning” by pardoning

former mutineers and rebels who were not directly implicated in the

killing of Europeans.

These reforms actually did very little to alter the realities of imperial governance and exploitation in India. The Raj was still concerned

primarily with generating and extracting wealth, and British offi cials

still believed that they could remake Indian society to increase their

returns by raising agricultural production. Formal taxation replaced

tribute collection, and investment instruments became important

new revenue sources as South Asia became more tightly integrated

into global capital markets. Ultimately, though, the wealth of India

still lay in the countryside, which forced the British to continue to

search for ways to make imperial extraction pay without provoking

further rebellions through their economic and social meddling.

The Raj also remained equally committed to defending the

boundaries of imperial subjecthood despite its loudly and piously

proclaimed commitment to opening government and commerce to

Company

India 225

qualifi ed Indians. Most British offi cials and their families lived within

the segregated confi nes of opulent hill stations and fortifi ed urban

enclaves. Ever conscious that the mutiny had exposed their vulnerability as a privileged imperial elite, they became even more obsessed

with protecting their personal safety under the guise of upholding

law and order. A larger garrison of regular British forces provided

a counterbalance to the reorganized Indian army, and the expanded

railway network ensured that troops could deal quickly with potential threats. As a late nineteenth-century state, the Raj had the means

to keep closer track of the Indian majority through a more modern

police force, better censuses, and public health legislation that provided a legal cover for keeping Europeans segregated from the Indian

majority. Angry Indians still occasionally attacked and murdered

British offi cials, but these measures ensured that there would be no

more uprisings on the scale of the 1857 mutiny.

As the threat of overt violent resistance receded, the westerneducated Indian professionals and civil servants, whom the British continued to dismiss at best as an isolated elite and at worst as

semi-European baboos, emerged as the most serious threat to the

Raj. Frustrated by the smothering racism that still permeated imperial society, they refused to become permanent imperial subjects. In

fact, their command of British law and culture was more dangerous

to the Raj than any mutinous
sepoy
because they had means and

opportunity to call attention to how the inherent exploitation and

hypocrisy of imperial rule confl icted with the ideals of a western

liberal democracy.

To this end, Indian lawyers and members of the civil service turned

the Indian National Congress (INC), which a retired British bureaucrat founded in the 1880s as a supervised outlet for Indian political

aspirations, into a powerful anti-imperial movement. Shifting from

their initial goal of ending discrimination in the civil service, the INC

leadership demanded political representation, judicial reform, and the

abolition of the exploitive economic policies that they believed were

draining India’s wealth to Britain. These educated elites remained

divided by region, caste, and religion, but they were far more successful in organizing popular resistance to the Raj than the British had

ever imagined possible.

Belatedly recognizing the scope of the threat, imperial offi cials

tried to appease them with a series of constitutional reforms that

226 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

slowly expanded Indian participation in advisory councils that evolved

gradually into provincial legislatures in the early twentieth century.

But these stopgap measures were doomed because Mohandas Gandhi,

a London-educated lawyer, and other INC leaders fi nally convinced

the Indian majority to withdraw the tacit consent that had allowed

foreigners to rule South Asia for almost two centuries. Recognizing

that they were losing their grip on India following the First World

War, desperate British offi cials subverted their own reformist agenda

by resorting to coercive and illiberal extralegal measures to deal with

dissent. When these tactics sparked even larger widespread popular

opposition, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer took matters into his

own hands by ordering his men to open fi re on a peaceful protest

in the Punjabi city of Amritsar. Pizarro would have approved, but

the murder of almost four hundred unarmed demonstrators turned

even more Indians against the Raj. In convincing enough Indians to

think collectively, if not nationally, rather than locally or communally, Gandhi and his allies created suffi cient social unity to render

British India ungovernable through their noncooperation campaigns.

Their progress toward independence in 1947 was halting and tragically bloody, but the Raj’s relatively short life span in comparison to

earlier empires demonstrated that the realities of empire had changed

radically in the twentieth century.

Lasting from the victory at Plassey in 1757 to the violent partition of the Raj in 1947, Britain’s South Asian empire appeared to be

an imperial achievement on par with Umayyad Al-Andalus and the

Spanish Andes in its coherency and durability. Yet there were actually three successive but very different British empires in India: the

empire of the nabobs, the reformed Company empire, and the Raj.

In retrospect, Britain’s greatest imperial achievement in India was

extending the shelf life of an archaic proxy empire from the early

modern era into an age of nationalism and transnational global capitalist integration.

The original Company empire began as a commercial enterprise

that had operated in South Asia for over a century before metastasizing into an empire. The nabobs built their Indian empire without

the authorization of either the court of directors or the metropolitan British government. This set them apart from the conquistadors,

whose New World empire building at least had the formal sanction

of the Spanish Crown. Clive certainly matched Pizarro in his greed

Company

India 227

and ambition, but Mughal administrative and economic institutions

proved suffi ciently co-optable and adaptable to spare Company offi cials from having to adopt the conquistador commander’s brutal tactics. Clive and his fellow Company servants did not have to concern

themselves with fi nding ways to extract wealth from their subjects.

The Mughal imperial institutions largely did it for them.

Therefore Plassey was not a nabobist Cajamarca. Instead it was

a relatively minor battle that allowed Clive to supplant the
nawabs

as the imperial overlords of Bengal. This also explains why common

Bengalis did not initially recognize that they had acquired a new and

more ambitiously rapacious imperial master. It is fruitless to try to

determine if there was more rural unrest under Mughal,
nawab
, or

Company rule, but it is clear that
ryots
and craftsmen learned that

their subjecthood had changed for the worse when the Company’s

rising tribute demands led to famine and destitution in the decades

after Plassey.

In the short term, however, Clive’s
jagir
was representative of the

orientalist trappings that allowed the nabobs to pose as Indian rulers

and conceal the full extent of their empire building from their superiors in London. Working through indigenous institutions of imperial

governance, tribute, and commerce allowed them to form mutually

benefi cial alliances with key local Bengalis. These
banians, zamindars
,

and
sepoys
did not betray a larger Indian nation in helping to build

the Company empire; no such entity existed in eighteenth-century

South Asia. The peoples of the British Isles were only just beginning

to think of themselves as a nation during this period, but their stronger collective identity gave them an enormous advantage in India

were identities were still primarily local, occupational, communal, or

confessional. Moreover, the emergence of popular British patriotism

allowed Clive and Hastings to escape censure for their excesses by

wrapping themselves in the garb of national service.

The most successful nabobs became fabulously wealthy by transferring the real costs of empire to the metropole. Clive may have

hoped that the Bengali
diwani
would generate millions of pounds of

revenue each year, but it was little more than a cover for tribute collecting and stock speculation. The administrative and military costs of

becoming an imperial power nearly bankrupted the Company, while

Clive and his fellow nabobs made their fortunes. Bengali farmers and

craftsmen of course bore the real cost of nabobism in the form of

228 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

rising tribute obligations and famine, but British landed aristocrats

and taxpayers also came to consider themselves its victims. From a

metropolitan standpoint, the nabobs’ greatest sins were forcing the

treasury to rescue the Company from insolvency and disrupting the

gentlemanly social order with their ill-gotten wealth.

The British authorities accordingly realized that empire was too

lucrative and destabilizing to be left in the hands of private entrepreneurs. From one perspective, Parliament’s move to assert more

direct control over a territory that it had never originally intended

to acquire was an inevitable sequence in the standard narrative of

imperial history. Just as the Umayyad caliphs recalled Tariq ibn Ziyad

and Musa ibn Nusayr from Iberia and the Spanish Crown sent Don

Francisco de Toledo to mop up the Pizarrist mess in the Andes, the

1784 India Act put an end to nabobism by stripping the East India

Company of most of its mercantile functions. Although its stock and

court of directors made it still look like a commercial enterprise, the

EIC essentially became a more closely regulated imperial state that

allowed the metropolitan government to control India without incurring the heavy moral and economic cost of imperial governance and

extraction.

The Romans, Umayyads, and Spaniards would have been well satisfi ed with such arrangements, but the proxy Company empire also

introduced a new complication into the mechanism of imperial rule.

Under pressure from the metropolitan reformist lobby, Company

offi cials actually had to make at least a show of putting their selfserving humanitarian legitimizing ideologies of empire into practice.

Although they may have been bigots by contemporary standards,

British liberals, utilitarians, and evangelicals actually believed they

could remake Indian society to the mutual benefi t and profi t of themselves and their subjects. Their public depiction of empire as moral

and benevolent helped win support for the imperial enterprise in