BRITISH EXPANSION IN INDIA I N THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY:

A HISTORICAL REVISION

P. J. M A R S H A L L King’s College, London

THE CONQUEST of the Indian sub-continent in the hundred years from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century fits awkwardly into most histories of the British Empire as a whole.’ Older views which believed that the loss of the American Colonies had been followed by a long period of imperial disillusionment and the avoidance of fresh commitments may have been substantially modified in many respects, but it is still undeniable that a series of annexations of huge and often densely populated new provinces went against the grain of many assumptions widely held in the century of conquest. For about seventy-five of the hundred years, historians trying to reconcile theory and practice do at least have the advantage of being able to identify the persons on the British side who took the decisions that led to conquest. From about 1784 a clear chain of authority was established: in London the Board of Control was set up through which the ultimate re- sponsibility of ministers came to be asserted, while in India the Governor General was given overall control. After 1784 it is therefore possible for historians to argue more or less plausibly about coherent British policies being applied in India and to attempt to account for them. Before 1784 this is not possible. Authority was divided at home between the national govern- ment and the East India Company; control from Britain over Englishmen in Asia was very tenuous; and in India the British settlements were more or less independent of one another and their Governors’ powers were relatively weak. British ‘policy’ towards India before 1784 is thus likely to be an elusive concept.

Yet by 1784 Britain had won a substantial Indian empire in both ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ terms. Bengal was virtually a British province; Oudh was garrisoned by British troops and its ruler forced to submit to an increasing measure of British interference in his affairs; and the ruler of the Carnatic was subjected to similar interference, with his territory also garrisoned and large parts of his revenue mortgaged either to the East India Company or to private Englishmen. Further north the long strip of territory called the Northern Circars had been annexed outright. In western India territorial gains outside a string of coastal settlements had so far been slight, but a

A version of a paper delivered at the Anglo-American Conference of Historians, 1973. I am grateful to Mr. G. J. Bryant, Dr. Ashin Das Gupta and Professor Eric Stokes for valuable comments and suggestions.

28

P. J. MARSHALL 29 British army had crossed India from Oudh to Gujarat and the British were already attempting to manipulate the foreign policies of the Maratha states.

The historiography of the first phase of British expansion is still dominated, in Britain at least, by a distinguished group of British historians, notably H. H. Dodwell, S. C. Hill and P. E. Roberts, who did most of their work in the first three decades of the twentieth centuryY2 and by their equally dis- tinguished French contemporary. Alfred Martineau. All four wrote largely from a political point of view. They were of course fully aware that a great political revolution had been achieved by the servants of a trading company, but they were not much interested in the East India Company as a commercial body or in the private activities of individual Englishmen. Throughout their work there appears to be the very plausible assumption that the events which they chronicled with such a high degree of scholarship had been set off by two essentially political developments taking effect from the 1740s onwards : the drastic weakening of the Indian polity by the break-up of the Mughal empire and the extension of the Anglo-French wars of the eighteenth century to Asia. In recent years, however, historians have begun to study European trade in Asia more closely and in particular to focus attention on the earlier eighteenth century, before British political dominance began. Professor Glamann in writing on the Dutch has incidentally shown how the British East India Company had begun to outstrip the Dutch Company after 1700.4 Professor Furber has described British commercial success in the western Indian Ocean between the 1720s and the 1 7 5 0 ~ . ~ Dr. Bhattacharya has argued that by 1740 the economy of Bengal was becoming heavily dependent on the British.6

Such studies raise important questions about the relationship between the commercial expansion which they describe and the political expansion which was to take place later on. Was the first half of the eighteenth century from the British point of view a period of unadventurous calm to be broken by Nadir Shah and La Bourdonnais? Or was it a period in which pressures were building up which could only find an outlet in the subjugation of territory? Was India the victim of aggressive British mercantile capitalism, or were the British reacting to events entirely outside their control ?

This paper will try to show that there was indeed a connection between trade and political expansion, that there were economic reasons for seeking some degree of territorial aggrandizement even in the early eighteenth century, and that these reasons became more urgent during the actual period of conquest. But if to establish such a connection is to suggest at least a plausible motive for conquest, this still does not necessarily explain why

* All were contributors to the 4th volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire, British India 1497-1858 (Cambridge, 1929). See also Dodwell’s Dupleix and CIive (London, 1920) and Hill’s Bengal in 1756-1757, 3 vols. (London, 1905).

Dupleix er f’lnde francaise, 4 vols. (Paris, 1923-9). Dutch-Asiatic Trade 1620-1740 (Copenhagen and The Hague, 1958). Bombay Presidency in the Mid Eighteenth Century (New York, 1965).

.s The East India Company and the Economy of Bengal from 1704 to 1740 (London, 1954). p. 17. There is much valuable material on the British in Bengal in the early eighteenth century in S. Chaudhuri, ‘Trade and Commercial Organisation in Bengal . . . 1650-1720’ (London Ph.D. thesis, 1969).

30 BRITISH XXPANSION IN INDIA conquest took place. Eighteenthcentury India was not an inert victim ripe for conquest by any European state that chose to assert its irresistible power. Up to the 1740s at least, European military incursions into the subcontinent were still being repulsed as they had been since the sixteenth century. Con- quest would only become possible when the Europeans in India became very much stronger or when the Indian authority became significantly weaker. To explain the beginnings of British expansion in India, it is therefore necessary to ask not only why the British should have wished to take territory, but also to ask why they were able to do so. Earlier studies, with their emphasis on political factors, such as Anglo-French rivalry or Mughal decline, were essentially answering the second question. They were less concerned with the first one, that is with trying to account for the dynamism that led the British to use the new power which political events had given them to take territory. There is an important economic element in this dynamism.

Viewed from London, the direction of British affairs in India throughout the eighteenth century showed little dynamism of any kind. Neither the British Government nor the Court of Directors of the East India Company believed in using force in India for commercial ends. The Company had few of the incentives for seeking political control in India which are usually attributed to exponents of economic imperialism, Its sale of British manu- factured goods was comparatively modest; it wished to keep any long-term investment in India to a minimum; and before 1784 it was not much con- cerned with introducing new technologies into India or with developing new products for the European market. The main part of its business in India was to purchase textiles made in a traditional way by Indian artisans. Subject to some fluctuations, adequate supplies of Indian textiles seemed to be reasonably assured, while any attempt to conquer the areas of production appeared to be wholly impractical. Indeed the Company believed that it had much to lose and little to gain by military adventures. By the early eighteenth century the British Company was overtaking the Dutch as the largest supplier of Europe with Asian commodities. Success had come through what the Company liked to regard as peaceful trading. Large armed forces were, therefore, superfluous and could only be maintained by spending funds which would otberwise be used to purchase cargoes of Indian goods. In any out- break of war and disorder the fragile networks of Indian trade through which the Company received its textiles were always the first casualty. Innumerable examples can be found of the Directors in London urging non-intervention and peace on their servants in India, the most piquant perhaps being the orders to pursue ‘pacifick measures’ as ‘the best means of promoting the commercial interests of the Company and avoiding the heavy expences’ of war, which were sent when the Directors heard that the Nawab of Bengal had taken Calcutta in 1756.’

A pacific Company was not, at least in this period, prodded into belliger- ence by ministers of the crown. Virtually all shades of political opinion seem to have shared the Directors’ assumptions about the need to avoid war. ‘I The Fort WiNiam-Zndia House Correspondence (New Delhi, 1949-), ii ,40.

P. J. MARSHALL 31 When royal ships and troops were dispatched to India during the Anglo- French wars, they were not sent to further the imperial designs of ministers like Pitt but in response to requests from the Company and they appear to have been used largely for purposes determined by the Company.* One of the most frequently quoted reasons for growing ministerial intervention in the Company’s affairs was the need to prevent servants in India from involving the Company in unwanted wars. When the House of Commons resolved in 1782 that ‘to pursue schemes of conquest and extent of dominion, are measures repugnant to the wish, the honour, and the policy of this nation’, they were stating a principle that was universally a~cepted .~

It is, however, in developments in India rather than in decisions taken at home that the economic elements in British expansion become apparent. Had the Company been able to live up to its intentions of avoiding political involvement and the use of force, and had it been able to exclude others who might have been less scrupulous, the case for regarding political and commercial expansion as separate phenomena would be a strong one. But neither condition was in fact fulfilled. There was a wide gap between the official instructions of the Court of Directors and the actual trading practices of the Company, while the Company’s monopoly operated in such a way that it left much scope for private initiative.

Eighteenth-century Indian trade was not carried on in an Adam Smith world of free exchange, whatever opinion in Britain might think. Europeans in India believed that they could only trade successfully if they could coerce the artisans and cultivators to whom they were obliged to advance money for goods to be delivered several months later, could seize the persons and property of defaulting merchants, could frustrate monopolies operated for their own benefit by rulers or Mughal aristocrats, and could beat down demands for what they regarded as excessive customs duties. Agreements were sought, either from the Emperor or from local governors, about customs rates or legal immunities. These agreements were not, however, definitive settlements so much as milestones in a continuing process of bargaining, the Company trying to obtain an enlarged interpretation while the Indian power tried to impose a restricted one. Current practice thus came to matter much more than the formal terms of agreements. The degree to which practice favoured the Company varied in different parts of India in the early eighteenth century : Bombay and Madras were virtually British colonies ; at the Mughal port of Surat the British paid customs at a nominal rate; in Bengal, Calcutta was almost entirely outside the Nawab’s authority, the British having virtual exemption from customs and exercised judicial powers over merchants and weavers throughout the province.1° The Company had even become the outright ruler of small pockets of territory outside its trading towns in which

* H. W. Richmond, The Navy in fhe War of 1739-48,3 vols. (London, 1920), iii, 178-225. J. S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years War, 2 vols. (London, 1907), i, chap. 14; ii, chap. 4.

Journals of the House of Commons, xxxviii, 1032. lo H. Vansittart to Directors, 7 October 1767, I[ndia] O[ffice] R[ecords], Home Miscellan-

eous, 196, p. 344; 7th Report of Secret Committee, 1773, Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, 15 vols. (London, 1803-6), iv, 325.

32 BRITISH EXPANSION IN INDIA

it hoped to settle weavers and to collect taxation. Villages round Calcutta had been ceded to the Company in the Mughal furmun of 1717, although the Nawabs had refused to allow them to be occupied,” and attempts to buy new land were still being made in 1755.12 At Madras the Company had obtained extra villages in 1693, 1708 and 1742,13 and a new foothold further down the coast at Devikottai in 1749.

Thus if the Company had not used armed force on a large scale or in any systematic way to advance its trade in the early eighteenth century, it would still be misleading to describe its trade as peaceful or to assume that it had stood aloof from Indian politics. The Company sought political concessions in order to carry on its trade. Even in normal times its relations with Indian rulers involved conflict. That these conflicts did not end more often in out- right warfare in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century owed more to the lack of force at the disposal of the Company’s servants in India than to the peaceful intentions of their employers at home, Attempts could be made to coerce a ruler by blockading his ports, but the Company’s ultimate sanction was the obviously two-edged one of withdrawing its trade altogether. With the growth of British naval and military power in India in the second half of the eighteenth century much more effective means of coercion were to be put into the hands of the Company’s servants and the degree to which commercial and political expansion were linked was to be made much ~1earer.I~

Not only was the Company’s trade likely to lead to claims to exercise political powers and to conflicts with Indian rulers, but the Company’s monopoly worked in such a way that there was a vigorous private sector to British trade in India which made similar claims with similar possibilities of conflict. The survival of the monopoly meant that Indian rulers, unlike African ones in the nineteenth century, were not subjected to the attentions of concession seekers or trading concerns based in Britain. The Company would not permit any direct trade between Britain and Asia. But it was much more liberal to Englishmen who were actually in Asia. From the late seven- teenth century it had ceased to make any real effort to control the private trade in Asia of its servants. At the same time it had come to recognize that it could not effectively prevent Englishmen not in its service from making their way to India and setting up as traders, and so had licensed certain individuals to settle in India as so-called Free Merchants. By the middle of the eighteenth century a sizeable volume of private business was being conducted in India by Company servants acting on their own behalf or by Free Mer- chants, with the acquiescence and even the blessing of the Company, which increasingly left the search for new items of trade and new areas of operation to private enterprise.

In the early eighteenth century most of the British private traders concen-

l 1 Bhattacharya, East India Company and Bengal, pp. 30-1.

l3 H. D. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 3 voh. (London, 1913). ii, 289-92. l4 Although it deals with a later period, Pamela Nightingale, Trade and Empire in Western

India 1784-1806 (Cambridge, 1970) has an interesting discussion of this link, e.g. pp. 23940.

Fort William-India House Corr., i, 851-8.

P. J. MARSHALL 33 trated on ship-owning and trading by sea from the Indian ports. By the 1720s the British community at Calcutta owned some thirty or forty ships, usually Asian-built and Asian-crewed, specializing in carrying freight for Asian merchants along the traditional routes between the Bay of Bengal and western India, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.15 The records of arrivals of ships kept by the Dutch at Cochin on the Malabar Coast show a doubling of English ‘country’ tonnage between 1724 and 1742.16 Perhaps the most striking indication of the vitality of private British trade in India in the early eighteenth century is the growth of Calcutta. One observer thought perhaps improbably that it already had a population of 300,000 people by 1731,” and its population was thought even more improbably to have quadrupled between 1730 and 1750 by another.18 When the city was sacked by Siraj-ud- daula in 1756, fifty lakhs of rupees, or about €540,000, was demanded in compensation for the losses of its European inhabitants alone. Englishmen were also actively trading on their own behalf in certain centres well away from their coastal settlements, especially in Bengal where they claimed the full immunities and privileges exercised by the Company. The value of private trade at Patna in 1725 was thought to be over E65,000,19 while estimates of private purchases of cloth at Dacca for various years between 1736 and 1747 put them at over €20,000 in three years out of five.2o Not only was the volume of private trade growing very rapidly, but the private traders were much more adventurous than the Company and therefore perhaps even more liable to come into conflict with Indian rulers. Private ships went to ports not usually visited by the Company’s ships and private merchants dealt in commodities, like sugar, opium, betel nut or salt, of little interest to the Company. Private trading in what were called ‘inland’ commodities provoked a serious confrontation with the Nawab of Bengal as early as 1731.21 In 1734 English ships blockaded Surat, largely to enforce private claims.22

As the trade of both the Company and of private individuals grew in the first half of the eighteenth century, Indian rulers came under increasing pressure to yield political concessions. To argue that such pressure eventually led to conquest would, therefore, seem by no means implausible at first sight. Had Company servants and private traders in India been able to match their desire for political authority with the means to extort it, a very strong case could no doubt be made for assuming that territorial empire grew out of economic need. The question of means seems, however, to be the decisive flaw in any narrowly economic interpretation of the beginnings of British

l5 The names of ships paying the Company’s ‘tonnage’ duties at Calcutta are regularly

Furber, Bombay Presidency, p. 44. This estimate appears in an anonymous account of Bengal sent to the Ostend Company

Examination of J. Z. Holwell. 31 December 1751. IOR. Correspondence Memoranda.

listed in the Public Consultations (IOR, Range 1) from 1714.

(Antwerpsch Archievenblad, v. 48).

D/103. l9 Abstract Bengal to Directors, 9 January 1725, IOR, E/4/2, pp. 438-9. 2o A. Karim, Dacca, the Mughal Capital (Dacca, 1964), pp. 87-8. 21 Bhattacharya, East India Company and Bengal, pp. 48-60. 22 A. Das Gupta ‘Trade and Politics in eighteenthcentury India’, ed. D. S. Richards,

Islam and the Trade of Asia (Oxford, 1970), p. 193.

34 BRITISH EXPANSION IN INDIA

conquest in India. Those who might have wished to improve the Company’s or their own trading position in India by the use of force could not command the necessary force.

In the first half of the eighteenth century Indian powers were still capable of containing the pretensions of the European trading companies on land. The Dutch and the Portuguese had both suffered serious reverses in India, and the British with their garrisons of five hundred or so men at their principal settlements did not believe that they would fare any better.23 Major political changes may have seemed commercially desirable to Englishmen in India, but they could not be brought about without a fundamental shift in the relative strength of the East India Company and the Indian powers with which it had dealings. Such a shift could presumably have come about for one of two reasons: either through a serious weakening of Indian states or through a major strengthening of the British. Put in more concrete terms, the balance of power between Indians and Europeans could have been transformed either by the disintegration of the Mughal empire or by the dispatch of forces to India to fight one another by the British and the French on a scale never before contemplated by Europeans. Both developments in fact occurred, and thus Mughal decline and Anglo-French rivalry must clearly retain much of the importance traditionally allotted to them, at least in explaining why the acquisition of a European empire in India became possible.

Recent research has, however, prompted some reconsideration of the relative importance of Indian political weakness and European military power in the early stages of British conquest. In the long run Mughal collapse greatly facilitated foreign conquest of India, but it seems that the initial breaching of India’s defences in the period from about 1750 to 1784 owed more to a sudden access of power by the British than to any sudden weakening of the Indian states. The fall of the Mughal empire has received stimulating re-examination by historians in South Asia. The older explanations of personal incapacity, religious fanaticism and foreign invasion have been supplemented by the diagnosis of fundamental social and economic weak- nesses. In particular, it has been suggested that jagirs, that is grants of land to noblemen who were required to render service to the state, had been issued in such numbers that their value had declined sharply. To try to maintain their incomes, Mughal aristocrats were forming themselves into factions to compete for office and were collecting taxation from their jagirs at a rate which impoverished the countryside and provoked rebellion.24 With the establishment of a virtually independent kingdom in the Deccan in 1724, the empire began to fall apart, so that by the middle of the century the British were no longer confronted by a more or less centralized polity capable of bringing massive force against foreign incursions. On the other hand, the

23 The Bombay servants believed that they would need 3,000 European soldiers to drive the Marathas out of Salsette in 1737 (W. S. Desai, Bombay and the Marathas (New Delhi, 1970), p. 101).

24 S. Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 2nd edn. (New Delhi, 1972); I. Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (Bombay, 1963), pp. 319 ff.; N. A. Siddiqi, Land Revenue and Administration under the Mughuh (Bombay, 1970), pp. 135-6.

P. J. MARSHALL 35 states which were establishing their autonomy in the ruins of the empire still presented a formidable threshold for any European trading company to cross. If they too were being undermined by what has been called ‘the agrarian crisis of Mughal India’, this had not yet significantly weakened them in two out of the three areas where the British traded.

On the west coast Indian authority remained powerful throughout the century. To the south the European pepper settlements were hemmed in by the kingdom of Travencore which worsted the Dutch in 174Iz5 and then by the Mysore of Haidar Ali, the Indian power which the British came to fear more than any other. Further north the Marathas were expanding to overrun Gujarat and eject the Portuguese from many of their settlements. By the eighteenth century Maratha power had developed obvious weaknesses : intense rivalry between the chiefs and an inadequate financial system heavily dependent on the collection of chaufh, or a forced contribution from con- quered territory.z6 Against the huge armies of Wellesley, the Marathas no doubt had little chance. But they could more than hold their own against the forces of Bombay in the eighteenth century and could offer effective resistance to the much larger Bengal army of the Hastings era.

Arguments that Bengal on the eve of Plassey was a state on the point of collapse remain unproven. The Maratha invasions had been brought to an end, jagirs had largely been abolished, and it has been suggested that a ‘new balance of power’ had emerged, between the Nawabs, the larger zamindars and the great bankers, capable of dealing with ‘the immediate problem of internal ~tability’.~’ The newly-ascended Nawab, Siraj-ud-daula, faced a dangerous conspiracy against him in 1756. But his two predecessors, both conventionally described as strong and successful rulers, had been the beneficiaries of similar conspiracies.

The disintegration of the Mughal empire left India highly vulnerable to the kind of forces which the British could deploy at the very end of the eighteenth century, but fifty years earlier, in most of the areas in which the Company operated, effective authority was still intact. The exception, where political instability did affect the Europeans directly, was on the Coromandel Coast in the south-east, an area incidentally never under prolonged Mughal control. On the Coromandel Coast the Nawabs of the Carnatic were trying to carve out a new state, but were being opposed by smaller rulers who refused to be incorporated and were themselves obliged to resist Maratha invasions and the intervention of the Nizams of the Deccan who claimed suzerainty over them. Disputed successions, both for the Carnatic and for the Deccan, added to the confusion.

The area of political disintegration affecting Europeans in the eight- eenth century may have been comparatively limited, but it was here that

25 A Das Gupta, Mulubar in Asiun Trude 1740-1800 (Cambridge, 1963, chap. 2. 26 These weaknesses are clearly shown in S. N. Sen, The Milifury System ofthe Muruthus,

2nd edn. (Calcutta, 1958). 27 P. B. Calkins, ‘The formation of a regionally oriented rul@g group in Bengal’, Journal

of Asiun Studies, xxix (1969-70), 799-806. There is much mteresting matenal on pre Plassey Bengal in S. Akhtar. ‘The Role of Zumindars in Bengal 1707 to 1772’ (London Ph.D thesis, 1973).

36 BRITISH EXPANSION IN INDIA

Anglo-French rivalry, unrestrained by any strong Indian power, developed to the point that European forces were introduced into India on an entirely new scale. The British quickly built up armies capable not only of defeating the French but of coercing Indian rulers hitherto immune from European military pressure.

Before the outbreak of the war with the French in south India in 1744, the Company had kept garrisons of some five hundred European or half-caste soldiers at its settlements. By the end of the war armies had been created with European regiments, several thousand sepoys and detachments of King’s troops, while there was to be a squadron of the Royal Navy stationed more or less permanently in the Indian Ocean. By 1759 the Madras army consisted of two battalions of Europeans, six battalions of sepoys and two artillery companies, supported by a regiment of British regulars.28 There were 1,200 Europeans and 8,500 sepoys in Bengal two years later.29 The ship of the line, the mobile field piece and the drilling of infantry to achieve the maximum effect from muskets had all been introduced into European warfare in the seventeenth century. The cost of these innovations had put them beyond the means of the European trading companies in Asia until the mid-eighteenth century, when the British state and the British Company showed themselves willing to pay the price for what they hoped would be a brief campaign to frustrate French aggression. The immediate impact of these new forces in India was spectacular, partly due to the great increase in firepower which they produced and partly to the greater confidence with which Europeans began to pit their troops against numerically much larger Indian forces. By 1751 the English at Madras believed that ‘the weakness of the Moors is now known, and it is certain any European nation, resolved to war on them, with a tolerable force, may overrun their whole country’.30 Greater realism was to come when the British faced the armies of Mysore and the Marathas, who were quick to add European military technology and tactics to their formid- able cavalry. But for a few years the British military ascendancy in certain parts of India was very marked.

Rivalry with France produced this military ascendancy, but rivalry with France will only partially explain how this ascendancy was used to transform the British position in India by 1784. The outright annexation of territory was not generally regarded by the British as a necessary defence against the French. In south India, where most of the fighting took place and where the British had most reason to fear a French resurgence, the Company were able to ensure that Muhammad Ali, the Nawab of the Carnatic, remained closely tied to them and they were willing to use force against any other chieftain who showed signs of sympathy for France, such as the Raja of Tanjore or Yusaf Khan of Madurai. But the area actually occupied by the Company remained very small. Opportunities for acquiring more territory were in fact refused. Both in 1760and in 1784 the Britishrelinquished controlof large parts

lU W. J. Wilson, History of the Madras Army, 4 vols. (Madras, 1882-8), i, 138-52. l9 Return of land forces, November 1761, IOR, L/MIL/10/130. 30 Fort St. David to Directors, 6 August 1751, IOR, Home Miscellaneous, 93, p. 15.

P. J. MARSHALL 37 of Muhammad Ali’s territory which they had administered as an emergency measure during a war.

Rivalry with France seems to have played a comparatively minor part in the conquest of Bengal. Desire to eliminate the French settlement at Chandernagore certainly made it more difficult for Clive to reach a lasting settlement with Siraj-ud-daula early in 1757, and fear that the Nawab might go over to the French was one of Clive’s motives for joining the plot against him which ended at Plassey. But after 1757 the French do not seem to have entered into British calculations about Bengal to any significant degree.31 From 1759, however, when the son of the Mughal emperor invaded Bihar, the collapse of the empire began to exercise a direct influence on British expansion from Calcutta. The threat posed to Bengal by the political confusion of northern India certainly contributed to drawing British intervention further and further up the Ganges valley and into Oudh. In western India the only episode before 1784 in which fear of the French appears to have prompted a forward policy by the British was the St. Lubin mission to the Maratha Peshwa in 1777-8. Hastings tried to counter French influence by increasing pressure on the Marathas, which helped to provoke the Anglo-Maratha war

Traditional explanations of the beginnings of British territorial expansion in India which concentrate on Indian political instability and fear of the French have the merit of explaining why the British equipped themselves with the means of conquering territory and why they sought to intervene in Indian politics. But there is still a wide gap between military ascendancy and diplomatic influence on the one hand and outright control of territory or even the creation of virtual satellite states, as in Oudh or the Carnatic, on the other. The one was certainly not intended to lead to the other. Before 1784 there is no real sign that opinion in Britain, either in the Company or in the government, was ceasing to regard Britain’s role in India as primarily a commercial one to be maintained with the minimum of force or territorial commitment. Nor, although the contrary was widely believed by contem- poraries, is it easy to see any coherent drive for empire by men actually in India. Separated from the home authorities by at least six months’ sailing time, the Company’s Governors and military commanders obviously had much scope for individual initiative and the development of ‘sub-imperial- isms’. But there is little to suggest that these opportunities were used to fulfil any very grandiose ambitions. Clive repeatedly professed to believe that the British should ‘act upon the true principles of moderation’ which are ‘the true interest of a trading company’,33 and that they should ‘take no open part with these Hindostan princes’.34 Hastings had shadowy hopes of ex- tending ‘the influence of the British nation to every part of India not too

31 The British continued to be alarmed at the French presence at Chandernagore, which led to a serious crisis in 1769, see B. Kennedy, ‘Anglo-French Rivalry in India and the Eastern Seas 1763-93’ (Australian National University Ph.D. thesis, 1969).

32 S. P. Sen, The French in India 1763-1816 (Calcutta, 1958), pp. 180-94; Y. N. Deodhar, Nam Phadnis and the External Affairs of the Maratha Empire (Bombay, 1962), pp. 58-73.

33 To J. Walsh, 14 October 1764, India otfice Library, MS. Eur. D. 546/5, f. 100. 34 J. Malcolm, Life of Robert, Lord Clive, 3 vols. (London, 1836), iii, 251-2.

of 1779-82.32

38 BRITISH EXPANSION IN INDIA

remote from their possessions’,3s but in more concrete terms he disapproved of bringing territory under the direct control of the Company, was not responsible for acts of conquest and annexation, and at the end of his career was struggling, as he saw it, to secure the autonomy of the Wazir of Oudh and the Nawab of the Carnatic from the mounting tide of British interference.

The progression from military ascendancy to domination of territory was neither an inevitable one nor one that was consciously willed either in London or in Calcutta. It seems rather to have been brought about by the willingness of the British to use the new forces at their disposal in the pursuit of what were in their eyes strictly limited objectives which would not seriously compromise the independence of Indian rulers. But although it may have been no part of British plans to destroy the fabric of the Indian states from which they were extracting concessions, repeated demands backed by force had precisely this effect. By 1784 Oudh and the Carnatic had been seriously undermined and Bengal had collapsed altogether.

Some of the demands which the British were able to enforce on Indian rulers in the second half of the eighteenth century were new ones which arose from the need to counter supposed French designs or to maintain the new armies. Others were demands for commercial concessions for which the Company’s agents or private traders had often pressed in the past but which could now be taken by force. The most spectacular victory for the Company’s trade was won in Bengal. Revolutionary as their outcome may have been, the events that were to end in Plassey seem to have begun in 1756 in a way that had frequently occurred in the past. The Company enjoyed great privileges in Bengal but they had been subjected to periodic levies backed by threats of force from the Nawabs. In 1752 the Nawab Alivardi Khan had come down from his capital with an armed force to ‘bully all the settlements out of a large sum of money’.36 In 1756 his successor Siraj-ud-daula came again. Money was not forthcoming and, much to the surprise of the English, when his bluff was called, the Nawab attacked and took Calcutta. In the past the Company would have been restored to their settlements, no doubt after paying an indemnity and accepting certain limitations on their immunities. But now the Company had an army in south India which was sent to Bengal to recover Calcutta and to settle ‘the Company’s estate in these parts . . . in a better and more lasting condition than ever’, as Clive put it.37 After much manaeuvering and negotiating Clive decided that the Company would not be secure in Bengal so long as Siraj-ud-daula remained on the throne. He there- fore lent his army to a plot to depose the Nawab. Once the British had won their victory at Plassey, whatever Clive may have intended, successive Nawabs were exposed to a series of demands which destroyed their authority within ten years.38 As the Nawabs’ power collapsed, the value of the Company’s Bengal purchases grew from an average of fi350,OOO a year in the early

35 G. R. Gleig, Memoirs of the Rt. Hon Warren Hustings, 3 vols. (London, 1841), ii, 136. 36 Hill, Bengal in 1756-7, i, p. xxxiii.

Ibkf. i, 232-3. For an illuminating recent account of the collapse of the Bengal Nawabi, see A. M.

Khan, The Trmition in Bengd (Cambridge, 1969).

P. J. MARSHALL 39 1760s to approach €1 million by 1770, and to exceed it in the years 1777-9.j9

The new forces were also used to win commercial advantages for the Company in western India. For fifty years the Company’s own navy, the Bombay Marine, had been waging war against the Angrias, a dynasty of Maratha chieftains who made a living by levying tolls from ships and by piracy. In 1756 an expeditionary force of the Royal Navy accompanied by a detachment of the Royal Artillery destroyed the Angrias’ fleet and captured their fortress at Gheria after a single bombardment. At Surat, once one of the great ports of the world, but now much in decline, the Company had been complaining of maladministration and extortion for generations. With the Royal Naval squadron on the west coast, the Bombay servants felt free to send an expedition to take over the harbour administration of Surat and install a British garrison in 1759.40

Private trading interests were also on occasions able to bring the new forces into play against Indian states. In the second half of the eighteenth century private British interests in India continued to grow and ramify, even though the Company’s monopoly remained intact. The English fleets of ‘country’ trading ships increased rapidly, with Bombay’s beginning to rival Calcutta’s. Between 1760 and 1770 most of Bengal’s output of salt, opium and betel nut passed under the control of British private traders. In 1763, when British assets were plundered throughout Bengal outside Calcutta, the total compensation demanded by private individuals was about €600,000, an indication of the extent to which the British were now involved in Bengal’s internal trade. Profits from office were added to profits from trade. Senior servants were able to win huge and much publicized presents for favouring claimants in succession disputes in Bengal. Soldiers collected prize money or ‘donations’ from Indian rulers for successful campaigns. Because the Com- pany’s monopoly restricted the migration of capital from Britain, private trading had in the past generally been financed by loans from Indians; but fortunes made from the conquest and administration of territory now turned the British into lenders as well as borrowers. Some of these funds went to develop the Company’s new provinces. European-owned indigo plantations, sugar factories and silk filatures were already being set up in Bengal by 1784.4f Much private European capital also went into loans to Indian rulers at rates of interest high even by Indian standards. The Nawab of the Carnatic, whose English creditors claimed over €3 million by 1784, was the largest

but the English creditors of the Wazir of Oudh also had claims worth €300,000 by 1778.43

Many of these diverse private interests depended for their success on the

39 3rd Report, Secret Committee. 1773, Reports, iv, 61; 9th Report, Select Committee,

*O ‘Reasons for the President and Council at Bombay undertaking the expedition’, IOR,

P. J. Marshall, ‘Private British investment in eighteenth-century Bengal‘, Bengal Past

O2 The definitive account of theNaways debts i s J. D. Gurney, ‘The Debts of the Nawab

43 Listed m the British Museum, Add. MS. 29199, f. 244.

1783, Reports, vi, 1734.

Home Miscellaneous, 95, pp. 277-8.

and Present, F v i (1967), 52-67.

of h o t , 1763-76‘ (Oxford D.Phd thesis, 1968).

40 BRITISH EXPANSION IN INDIA

growth of British power. Present-seekers and soldiers thrived on political intervention and war. British control could break down restrictions on trade and provide security for loans and investments (although it might also bring Company monopolies over valuable commodities and limitation on the interest rates that could be charged to Indian rulers). There were obvious ways in which private interests could shape policy to their needs. The Governors and senior army officers who took decisions in India usually had elaborate private concerns of their own to further. At home the agents of Indian interests could qualify as voters for the Court of Directors or even, as in the case of the Carnatic creditors, seek to bargain with their votes in the House of Commons.

The extent to which private interests, formidable as they were, called the tune for the Company can, however, be exaggerated. The Company’s point of view could prevail and private traders could be rebuffed. The great prizes of Bengal’s inland trade, salt and opium, were, for instance, taken away from them and made Company monopolies. Nevertheless, there are instances where extensions of British power clearly seem to have been produced by private interests. In Bengal the Company’s hopes after Plassey that an independent Nawab might survive as an ally of the British foundered, among other reasons, because of the ruthlessness of the private traders. Immediately after Plassey they moved into the trades, such as salt and betel nut, which had previously been monopolized under grants from the Nawabs, or into the frontier districts where the Nawab’s officials had created trading monopolies for themselves. Throughout Bengal British traders defied the Nawab’s customs administration and his courts. The abuses of the private traders provided at least the pretext on which Mir Kasim took up arms against the Company in 1763 and fought a war which was to leave the Nawabi defeated and totally discredited. In the south the decision to use the Company’s troops to capture Tanjore for the Nawab of the Carnatic in 1773 had a very strong element of private interest to it : the Governor and Council had been promised presents, the army prize money, and the Nawab’s creditors new territory on which their loans could be secured.44

Their new military power not only enabled the British to break down obstacles to the Company’s trade and to that of private individuals, but the new armies in themselves became a reason for making fresh demands on Indian rulers. These demands began the gradual process by which the whole ruison d’ktre of the Company shifted from trade to tax collection. Since the seventeenth century the Company had been trying to finance some part of its trade by collecting revenue in Indian territory. The area under its control had, however, remained very small until the outbreak of the French wars, when the Madras servants made an agreement with a claimant to the throne of the Carnatic, which was to be the first of many such agreements made with Indian rulers in the years to come. The Company bound itself to provide troops, while the would-be Nawab allocated revenue to pay for them.45 As

to England 1746-51 (Madras, 1932), pp. 189-91.

Gurney, ‘The Nawab of Arcot’s debts’, pp. 161-209. 45 Fort St. David to Directors, 24 October 1750, Records ofFort St. George: Despatches

P. J. MARSHALL 41 the Company’s armies grew both in the south and in Bengal, more and more agreements of this kind were signed. Only by putting a major part of its forces on to an Indian payroll could the Company hope to remain solvent. But, however unintentionally, by this device the Company was also likely to find itself drawn into the direct administration of territory. The normal method by which an Indian ruler paid for British troops was by making them a charge on the revenue of specific districts. If the Indian administration proved itself incapable of making regular and prompt payments, there was a very strong temptation for the British to take over the administration themselves.

The needs of the army created a pattern of encroachment on Indian states that was to be repeated again and again. In the Carnatic the Nawab was able to limit his formal cession of territory to the area known as the Company’s jagir. But the major part of his revenue was taken over both in the Seven Years War and in the American Revolutionary War, and relative immunity from interference in normal times was purchased at a high price. In order to maintain cash payments to the Company and thus to avoid cession of territory, the Nawab plunged deeply into debt to private Englishmen and had to mortgage much of his revenue to them. In Bengal, where the army had grown to 4,000 Europeans and 26,000 sepoys by 177046 and where military spending had amounted to f 8 million in ten years compared with only f5,300,000 spent on trade,47 the Nawabs were faced with spiralling demands from the Company. Large districts were annexed in 1760, specifically to pay for the army; by 1764 a further subsidy was required;48 and in 1765 the whole revenue of Bengal was taken over. By the 1770s Oudh had been turned into an outwork of Bengal’s defences: the Wazir was paying for two brigades and assigning part of his revenue to the Company. In all three cases, to ensure the maximum revenue for its own troops, the Company insisted that the ruler greatly reduce his own forces (disbanding them altogether in Bengal) and entrust the defence of his territory to the British. If they assumed responsi- bility for the defence of an Indian state, the Company inevitably began to regulate its foreign policy as well. The road from becoming the ally of an independent ruler, to exercising a military protectorate over him, to displacing him altogether was an easy one. At each stage the needs of the army forced the Company on.

The cost of its armies provided the Company with its biggest incentive to extract grants of revenue leading ultimately in most cases to control of territory. But Indian revenue could be put to other purposes apart from military spending, especially in Bengal where revenue was most abundantly available and most easily realized. Bengal’s revenue was used to pay for greatly increased exports of its own textiles, for the purchase of tea at Canton and for the defence of Bombay and Madras, as well as for its own ever expanding army. The need to ensure collection of more and more revenue

46 9th Report, Secret Committee, 1773, Reports, iv, 5%. 47 3rd Report, Secret Committee, 1773, Reports, iv, 61. 48 Fort William-India House Corr., iv, 260.

H--c

42 BRITISH EXPANSION IN INDIA

led to steadily increasing British involvement in the administration of Bengal. In time the Company was to devote all its efforts to administrative functions, most of them connected with revenue collection, and to abandon a trade which became increasingly unprofitable to it. But this lay in the future. Up to 1784 and well beyond, the Company took its trade very seriously and its exports to Britain continued to grow. The desire for grants of revenue had, however, introduced another very potent form of British pressure on Indian states.

Many of the problems which face historians of European expansion before industrialization, are similar to those so frequently debated for the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. This paper has tried to show that attempts to divide motives for expansion, however crude such divisions may be, into ‘economic’ or ‘political‘ categories have as much relevance for the beginnings of British rule in India as they have for the Scramble for Africa. But historians of any period before the nineteenth century have additional problems. They cannot take the fact of European supremacy for granted or assume that, if they can establish the motive for expansion, this motive can automatically be translated into action. It is not enough to ask why Europeans might wish to control territory; it is also necessary to ask whether they were able to do so.

In any examination of the early history of British India it seems helpful to try to separate the two questions. The development of state organization and military technology by the beginning of the eighteenth century had given the major European powers clear advantages over any Asian rival, as the fate of the Ottoman Empire in Europe was to show. But until the middle of the century, problems of cost and distance had prevented any European state from realizing these advantages in maritime Asia, and had restricted European political control to islands or coastal enclaves. From the 1740s, however, the British state and the British Company were both able and willing to spend the very large sums needed to maintain substantial European armies and navies in Asia. Even if these forces were primarily directed against the French, they presented Indian states with a challenge of an entirely new order. Indian political weakness certainly contributed to the conditions which made the founding of a foreign empire possible in the eighteenth century. But in the short run at least, the sudden increase in European power seems to be the more convincing explanation of why inroads began to be made into the by no means insignificant Indian states which had succeeded in establishing them- selves in the ruins of the Mughal empire.

The question of why British territorial expansion in eighteenth-century India became possible can hardly be answered except in terms of Anglo- French rivalry and Mughal decline. Without the threat posed by the French, the British troops and ships which played so important a role would never have been dispatched to India, nor would the authorities at home have sanctioned the expense of maintaining the new armies in India. Spending on such a scale would not have been tolerated merely to win concessions for British trade. In the eyes of many Englishmen with practical experience at Canton, a very strong case existed for compelling the Chinese to grant greater

P. J. MARSHALL 43 trading privileges to Europeans, but in the absence of any pressing political incentive, force was not made available until 1839.

It was the intention both of the government and of the Company at home that the uses to which the new forces were to be put should be limited to defeating the French and guarding against renewed French attacks, purposes which, it was hoped, would not involve any extensions of the Company’s settlements. But close control from home was virtually impossible; decisions about how the troops should be used were taken in India. Although the Company’s servants may not have devised systematic schemes for using their military ascendancy to establish a territorial empire, they were willing to use it to extract concessions from Indian rulers whose cumulative effect was to weaken and eventually to destroy those states that came within the British orbit. Some of the concessions were political in character, such as the grants of revenue to maintain armies, powers to interfere in revenue administration to ensure the payment of subsidies, or a veto on a ruler’s foreign policy; others were overtly commercial: rights for the Company or private traders to evade customs, to exclude competitors, to enforce repayment of debts, to try their own commercial cases, or to control weavers, poppy cultivators or saltpetre boilers. Such concessions were the fruits of political power and were a strong motive for seeking it.

No simple explanation of the early phases of British expansion is likely to be convincing, since two separate problems are involved. If political considera- tions had been absent, the British would not have equipped themselves with the means which made territorial expansion possible. But any account of how these means were used which ignores economic considerations is an inadequate one, even if the impulses behind British conquest before 1784 do not fit any simple stereotype of economic imperialism. India was certainly not subjected to a deliberate attack planned by mercantilist-minded ministers at home. Nor was Britain’s interest in India yet that of an industrialized society seeking markets for its exports or profitable outlets for investment. British attitudes were in fact a strange mixture of the new and the old. Government and Company at home viewed India in a way that was to be characteristic of British policy in many parts of the world in the nineteenth century: they wished to maintain an ‘open door’ and free competition in which British commercial expertise would prevail. But Englishmen in India pursued objectives not very different from those of the Portuguese when they had first rounded the Cape of Good Hope. They were trying to enlarge their share in the centuries-old trade between India and Europe and to win a stake in the traditional seaborne trade of the Indian Ocean and in the internal trade of Indian states such as Bengal. Europeans had always been tempted to use force in the pursuit of such objectives; the successful defence of Britain’s open door policy against an apparent French threat to it gave Englishmen in India the force they needed.