Читать книгу Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 - Maya Jasanoff, Maya Jasanoff - Страница 8

The British presence in India actually had its formal beginning one hundred fifty years before the age of Clive, Plassey, and the Seven Years War. It dated back to the last day of the sixteenth century, when Queen Elizabeth I, by then a frail old woman with thick face paint and frizzed curls, granted a royal charter to the “Company of Merchants of London, Trading to the East Indies.” It was among the final acts of her reign, and one of the most significant. The charter granted the East India Company, as it was known, the right to operate a monopoly of English trade with India and the spice islands of the East. In form, the East India Company was a joint-stock company, made up of investors who bought shares in trading ventures. There were many such companies, pursuing Britain’s commerce with every corner of the globe: the Levant Company, the Muscovy Company, the Royal African Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the South Sea Company—whose “bubble” burst in 1720, bringing the fortunes of thousands down with it. France and the Netherlands also conducted overseas trade through monopolistic companies of this kind. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was founded in 1602; the French East India Company, which had been established by Colbert in 1664, was revamped and consolidated as the Compagnie des Indes, both East and West, by the brilliant Scottish financier John Law in 1719.

These were companies; their goal was profit. But securing profits in distant, unfamiliar, and potentially hostile domains required more than business acumen and willing investors. It called for diplomats and strong defenses. Winning a charter back home to trade was only the first step. Actually carrying on that trade meant winning partners and permissions overseas. In the Mughal and Ottoman empires, Europeans needed the consent of local authorities and merchants to establish trading outposts, or “factories.” And since all the European companies were competing with one another for the same markets, their representatives constantly jockeyed for position with local rulers, plying them with gifts, promises, favors, and bribes. This was the experience of Britain’s first ambassador to India, Sir Thomas Roe, who traveled to the court of the emperor Jehangir in 1615. When Roe raised the subject of trade and tax concessions for Britain with the emperor,

He asked me what Presents we would bring him. I answered…that many Curiosities were to bee found in our Countrey of rare price and estimation…He asked what kind of curiosities those were I mentioned, whether I meant Jewels and rich stones. I answered, No: that we did not thinke them fit Presents to send backe, which were brought first from these parts, whereof he was chiefe Lord…but that we sought to finde such things for his Majestie, as were rare here, and unseene, as excellent artifices in painting, carving, cutting, enamelling, figures in Brasse, Copper, or Stone, rich embroyderies, stuffes of Gold and Silver. He said it was very well: but that hee desired an English horse.

Unprepared for the emperor’s wishes, Roe instead found himself outmaneuvered by the Portuguese, who gave Jehangir “Jewels, Ballests and Pearles with much disgrace to our English commoditie.”⁷ In 1618, however—a full three years after he first sought an audience—Roe’s persistence was rewarded by an agreement with the emperor “for our reception and continuation in his domynyons.”⁸

For the next century and more, the East India Company evolved into one of the most profitable, stable, and progressive corporate bodies in Britain. It was still very much a business: its charter, unlike those of the companies settling North America, did not invite it to establish colonies, nor, before the 1740s, had it begun to build a substantial army of Indian sepoys.⁹ By 1750, the East India Company’s factories stretched from Basra on the Persian Gulf to Bencoolen in Sumatra. The Company establishment in India centered on three coastal settlements, later the “presidency” towns, or regional capitals, of British India. On the west, or Malabar, coast was Bombay, which England received from Portugal in 1661 as part of the dowry of Charles II’s bride, Catherine of Braganza. By that time, Madras on the east, or Coromandel, coast was a flourishing settlement of about forty thousand, with a fort and (from 1680) the first Anglican church in India, poised on a rise above the crashing breakers of the bay. Calcutta, later the most important of the three towns, was also the newest, founded in 1690 by the Company factor Job Charnock at a swampy site eighty miles up the Hooghly from the Bay of Bengal. Charnock had chosen the spot, it was said, “for the sake of a large shaddy tree,” a choice that confounded most, for “he could not have chosen a more unhealthful Place on all the River.”¹⁰ Mosquitoes buzzed insistently, miasmatic vapors thickened in the air, and the nullahs, slow, fetid canals, lay across the settlement like breeding grounds for disease. So many of those who went to eighteenth-century Calcutta died there that “it is become a saying that they live like Englishmen and die like rotten sheep.”¹¹

Against disease little could be done, but against armed opponents, there were more concrete forms of protection. Right from the start, the search for profit in the East was laced with violence. European traders defended themselves and their factories with gates, guards, and guns. In part, inspired by prudence as well as paranoia, they did it to protect themselves from the locals. In Egypt, for instance, incidental attacks on Europeans were so common—or at least so feared—that Europeans were advised (if not required) to wear Eastern dress. Throughout the cities of the Levant, Europeans (like Jews, Greeks, and Eastern Christians) lived in gated districts, known as Frankish quarters, at least partly for their own security. Reading the records of early French and British traders in Egypt, one turns up a steady stream of complaints about harrassment and avanias—“outrages”—incidents in which Ottoman officials levied extortionate duties or demanded bribes. In 1767, Ottoman authorities even seized the chief French dragoman (interpreter) on the Alexandria waterfront and imprisoned him on the charge that he was a renegade subject of the Sultan. After nearly a year of merciless captivity, chained up in the bowels of an Ottoman slave galley, the doomed dragoman died, “broken by suffering and worry,” in the slave prison of Constantinople.¹²

But the chief goal of European defenses was to protect themselves from one another. Nowadays, “trade wars” are costly but generally bloodless. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were not. Violent altercations, particularly with the Portuguese and the Dutch, pepper the early history of the East India Company.¹³ An especially vivid incident of intra-European rivalry overseas occurred in Java in 1623, when the East India Company factory at Amboina was attacked by Dutch VOC soldiers and ten Englishmen were tortured and killed. Promptly dubbed a “massacre,” and the subject of intense public outrage in Britain, the Amboina episode had the effect of turning English traders away from the spice islands—where Dutch power was now paramount—and concentrating them on the Indian subcontinent. By the mid-eighteenth century, Portugal and the Netherlands no longer posed a major military threat to the British in India. But a new and far more dangerous rival appeared on the subcontinent instead: France.

Alliances and conflicts between European powers cast a long shadow over the global expansion of European trade. In the late nineteenth century, at the height of the scramble for Africa, the German chancellor Bismarck memorably remarked that his map of Africa lay in Europe. A hundred years earlier, his maps of Asia and the Middle East would have been there instead. Wars in Europe triggered conflicts between factions of Europeans abroad, and overseas incidents between groups of Europeans could touch off conflicts on the Continent. At the same time, Europeans were enlisted and manipulated by local rulers. On the coasts of West Africa, for example, European slave traders involved themselves in struggles between regional powers, not least because African prisoners of war constituted a major source of slaves.¹⁴ In North America, the famous tale of Captain John Smith’s “rescue” from execution by the “Indian princess” Pocahontas was in fact probably a ritual ceremony staged by her father, the powerful chief of the Powhatan Indians, to co-opt the strange white newcomers as subordinate tributaries.¹⁵

The result was a complex map of loyalties, on which national, ethnic, and even religious groupings overlapped in curious ways. Who was friend and who was foe, and how could anyone tell the difference? Even the national labels of “French” or “British” were flexible categories at best, particularly when it came to accommodating Catholics and Protestants (respectively) of other nationalities. The East India Company army, like the British Crown army, relied heavily on continental European volunteers—at times drawing as much as half its strength from non-British nationals. The French East India Company was also a hybrid creation, chaired by a Scot and manned (like the French army) by a range of Europeans, including Scottish Jacobites and Irish Catholic “wild geese” who had flown across the Channel in search of opportunities denied them in Protestant Britain. The boundaries between ally and opponent were not, and could not be, defined exclusively in ethnic or racial terms. After all, as The Death of General Wolfe suggested, the native North American was a truer friend to Britain than the Frenchman.

Perhaps nowhere in the mid-eighteenth century did European and indigenous rivalries cross with greater consequence than in India. Much had changed since the days of Sir Thomas Roe, when the Mughal emperor commanded three-quarters of the subcontinent, bound together by a brilliant, effective system of revenue collection and military organization. Now the Mughal Empire was racked by invasions and civil war. In 1739 the Persian warlord Nadir Shah sacked Delhi, carrying the emperor’s celebrated Peacock Throne away with him as a trophy. The emperor was also steadily losing control over his vassals. Where once he had had the power to appoint and remove regional governors—and to prevent them from amassing too much power for themselves—now many provinces were governed by essentially independent rulers, who turned their offices into hereditary positions and no longer regularly delivered their tax revenues to the emperor. In the 1720s, for example, the Persian Shiite military commander Safdar Jang took control of the province of Awadh and made it effectively a hereditary kingdom for his family. In Bengal, in the east, Nawab Alivardi Khan ruled as a virtually independent sovereign from 1740 to 1756. In the south, wars of succession in Hyderabad and Arcot split the old establishment and sucked neighboring rulers into the fray. From the west, the Marathas pushed into Mughal domains, capitalizing on imperial disarray. In short, the Mughal Empire was fragmenting, and eager hands reached in from all sides, grasping for the pieces.¹⁶

Among the powers bidding for influence in late Mughal India were the British and French East India Companies, each of which aimed to improve its position at the other’s expense. The outbreak of Anglo-French war in 1739, coinciding with a succession crisis in the South Indian region of the Carnatic, gave both their chance. (Both also, for the first time, enlisted Indian sepoys to supplement their otherwise relatively small forces.) Under the visionary expansionist François Dupleix, the French captured Madras in late 1746. Ultimately, however, it was the British who prevailed when their ally Muhammad Ali Walajah succeeded in claiming the title of nawab of the Carnatic. (Madras was returned to Britain under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.) One of the commanders instrumental in Britain’s victory was a young East India Company clerk turned soldier called Robert Clive. He was rewarded with a promotion to colonel. Dupleix, however, was recalled by Versailles in 1754. With him, some have said, disappeared French ambitions for a territorial empire in India—but, in fact, French influence in South India would simmer for decades to come.

While the battle for ascendancy between Britain and France raged in the south, a new obstacle to British trade appeared in Bengal to the north. From their capital at Murshidabad, the nawabs of Bengal presided over the richest province of the Mughal Empire. Cotton cloth, raw silk, saltpeter, sugar, indigo, and opium—the products of the region seemed inexhaustible, and all the European merchant companies set up factories to trade in them. Traveling downriver from Murshidabad was like traveling across a mixed-up map of Europe: there were the Portuguese at Hughli, the Dutch at Chinsura, the Danes at Serampore, the French at Chandernagore, and, of course, the British at Calcutta.

In April 1756, the venerable nawab Alivardi Khan died and was succeeded by his nephew and adopted son, Siraj ud-Daula, then about twenty years old. Siraj was described by a contemporary British historian as a “man of the most vicious propensities,” suspicious, stubborn, and violent—toward the East India Company, at any rate, a central target of his animosity.¹⁷ On coming to power, Siraj ud-Daula promptly requested cash gifts from the European trading companies (which was customary), and asked them to disarm themselves. The Dutch and French complied. The British, however, flagrantly refused to pay and continued to build up their establishment at Fort William, in Calcutta. Convinced that the Company was plotting against him, and determined to make it submit, Siraj marched on Calcutta within weeks of ascending the throne. He seized the little settlement in the space of one day. On the night of the capture, the nawab locked approximately one hundred fifty of Calcutta’s European residents into the garrison dungeon, or “black hole,” as such military prisons were often called. By morning, some sixty of them were dead, suffocated in the stifling, airless space. The incident, still remembered in Britain as “the Black Hole of Calcutta,” quickly became one of the most emotive and sensational episodes in the history of British India. Company propagandists played up the tragedy as a way of justifying their employer’s conquests in Bengal to a potentially critical British audience. But this defeat by an Indian ruler also served as a cautionary reminder of British (and European) weakness in the face of attack, and their sheer smallness of numbers.¹⁸

When news of Calcutta’s fall reached Madras, nearly two months later, the Company promptly launched a punitive expedition. To command it, they appointed Colonel Robert Clive, recently returned from a short leave in Britain. At thirty-one, Clive was a tough, war-hardened veteran, to outward appearances all self-confidence and swagger; few could know that he was also prone to punishing bouts of depression and had attempted suicide twice. Clive and his force of about twelve hundred landed in Bengal in December 1756, just as word arrived that Britain and France were again, officially, at war. The news, long expected, injected new strength and purpose into Clive’s mission. He was now there not only to reassert the East India Company’s strength in Bengal and bring Siraj ud-Daula into line, but to try to eliminate the French, Britain’s chief competitors for trade and influence, and the nawab’s possible allies.

After a day of intense fighting, with high losses—another reminder that the balance of power was by no means in European favor—Clive retook Calcutta in early February.¹⁹ He then moved upriver, to the French settlement of Chandernagore, capturing it in late March. This, too, was a tough fight, for the city was well fortified and Clive’s men outnumbered; losses on both sides were heavy, and in return for their exertions, Company troops violently plundered the town. (Though “the Dutch [as usual] have secured all they could get,” one officer snapped.)²⁰ Clive moved into the final phase of his campaign: to depose Siraj ud-Daula and install a new, pro-British nawab in his stead. For some weeks Clive and the nawab traded letters and ultimatums; Company demands included the full restitution of trading privileges and the expulsion of the French. But by early June it was clear that a confrontation was at hand. The nawab joined his army at Plassey, south of Murshidabad, and on June 13, Clive’s modest army of 3,000 men (2,100 of them sepoys), with just eight small cannon, set off north from Chandernagore to fight him.

They reached Plassey nine days later, on June 23, 1757. It was almost exactly a year after the fall of Calcutta, and—like the night of the Black Hole—a day of punishing heat, before the monsoons, when summer is at its most intense and the air is a thick, still fug. Clive had headquartered himself in a hunting lodge belonging to the nawab called Plassey House; most of his men camped in a nearby mango grove, hidden from view by the dark, waxy leaves and a high mudbank. One mile away lay Siraj ud-Daula’s vast encampments. With him were thirty-five thousand infantry, fifteen thousand cavalry—many of them able, well-armed Pathans—and more than forty pieces of heavy artillery, superintended by a team of French experts.²¹ The Company was outnumbered almost twenty to one, and severely outgunned. In terms of equipment and manpower, to say nothing of familiarity with the terrain, there was no contest.

Yet like so many of Britain’s early Indian adventures, the battle of Plassey rested on a foundation of lies, spies, and betrayal. For, during his one year on the throne, Siraj ud-Daula had alienated not only the East India Company but many of his own subjects, particularly those who did business with the Company. A powerful contingent of bankers, merchants, and courtiers had joined forces with Company agents to oust the nawab. Bengal hummed with rumor and conspiracy. At the heart of the plots was one of Siraj’s top commanders, a nobleman named Mir Jafar. Through a series of backroom maneuvers, the Company signed a treaty with Mir Jafar in which he agreed to grant the Company huge cash rewards and privileges in exchange for its assistance in toppling Siraj ud-Daula and installing him as nawab of Bengal instead. At the battle everyone now expected, Mir Jafar agreed to “stand neuter,” if not to lead his troops away from the fight. In effect, Plassey was won before it was even fought.²²

Early in the morning, the pounding from the nawab’s heavy artillery began, with an attack on one portion of the Company line. Most of the Company soldiers huddled behind their mudbank, hoping to hold out till nightfall, when they could make a counterattack. Clive, standing on the roof of Plassey House, could see the great mass of the army he faced, commanders on elephants, resplendent formations of troops, brilliant tents, and the gaudy pennants and banners of war. He could hear the great and sustained firing of the guns, and watched nervously as they battered his tiny group of men. Yet he could see no sign from Mir Jafar. Had Clive been betrayed, too?

Then a sign arrived, unexpectedly, from above. It began to rain. The monsoons were coming—and coming to the Company’s rescue. For as the rain pelted down, soaking the men (Clive, drenched to the skin, stepped inside Plassey House to change his clothes) and spilling off the trees around them, water saturated the enemy artillery: gunpowder turned to mush, the fuses into useless strings. The firing—so fatal just moments before—fizzled out. And through the rain, the soldiers in the mango grove watched their enemy dissolve. To the right Clive and his men saw a huge contingent of cavalry move down the river and away from the fighting; it was Mir Jafar leaving the scene of the battle, as promised. On the field ahead, the nawab’s men began to scatter and flee. For six miles they were chased by Company soldiers, who scooped up abandoned cannon, equipment, and stores along the way. The next day, Mir Jafar met with Clive, then traveled straight on to Murshidabad, “took quiet possession of the Palace and Treasures and was immediately acknowledged Nabob.”²³ Siraj ud-Daula, who had fled the city “disguised…in a mean dress,…attended only by his favourite concubine and…eunuch” was captured some days later and executed by Mir Jafar’s men.²⁴

The battle of Plassey was a setup, not a set piece. Quite unlike the battle of the Plains of Abraham, it does not make for very glorious retellings, nor did it at the time. Yet somewhere in that swamp of conspiracy, heat, and cannon fire in the mango grove, something new coalesced about the nature of the British presence in South Asia. It was not until 1765 that Clive would consolidate his victory in Bengal by gaining the diwani from the emperor, thereby putting the reins of Bengal government directly into the Company’s hands. But there is a reason that 1757 serves as the conventional starting date for the history of “British India.” It was at the battle of Plassey that the East India Company irrevocably and victoriously asserted itself as a military and ruling power in the Mughal domains.

Plassey’s central significance for the Company was to marry territorial conquest and, from 1765, administration, to trade. But two further elements in the events of those months would remain part of the imperial landscape in India for decades to come. First, rivalry with France had acted as a spur and pretext for Company attack. It was rather beside the point whether the French threat to British interests was genuine or whether it had been exaggerated. What mattered was that Francophobia and Anglo-French war formed the framework within which Company expansion took place. The Seven Years War has often been seen as the end of France’s bid for empire in India, but the specter of a French resurgence—fomenting in the courts of anti-British Indian princes—haunted British rhetoric and plans right into the nineteenth century.²⁵

A second enduring feature of the events surrounding Plassey was that alliances and enmities cut across ethnic, cultural, and religious lines. The Company owed its victory to a partnership with Mir Jafar, the Jagat Seth banking family, and other Calcutta merchants.²⁶ Siraj ud-Daula’s strength, in turn, depended in part on assistance from the French. Crying “collaborator” in such a sea of interest groups is meaningless. Indeed, in Bengal as well as in the raging conflicts of southern India, it was, if anything, the animosity between the British and the French (however malleable these groupings themselves were) that helped define who was friend and who was foe.

In the short term, Plassey was the making of East India Company Bengal. With the compliant Mir Jafar now installed as nawab, the region was fair game to Company profiteers. Calcutta boomed, quickly replacing Madras as the East India Company’s social and political capital. Fort William, on the east bank of the River Hooghly, was rebuilt in brick, heavily moated, and studded with six hundred cannon.²⁷ In 1756, the old Fort William was manned with two hundred European troops; by 1765, the garrison was two men short of sixteen hundred.²⁸ Outside the fort’s walls, the number of civilians grew so fast that house-building could barely keep up. The new town, as one visitor described it, was “so irregular that it looks as if all the houses had been thrown up in the air, and fallen down again by accident as they now stand.”²⁹ Those who could afford it (and many could) began to carve out plots in the jungle south of town for the “garden houses” of their dreams.³⁰ From 1767, the many victims of Calcutta’s climate found a shady enclosure of their own, in the Park Street Cemetery.

Fantastic wealth, tremendous opportunity, the seeds of a new colonial society: it was as if Plassey had brought the East India Company an empire overnight. But what were Britons to make of it all? In Bengal lay profit for many. Yet there also lay great and unknown responsibilities, in the hands of an untested, unsupervised, largely unregulated Company government. While some Britons welcomed the opportunities presented by the Company’s conquest, others worried about its costs, its dangers, and, indeed, its morality. Whatever else, ruling Bengal was risky business. And nobody would appreciate both the rewards and the risks of this new empire more acutely than its conqueror himself: Robert Clive. For Plassey was also the making of Robert Clive—and he was determined to make it in Britain next. In India, Clive had committed himself to empire-building for the Company, but in Britain he used his Indian fortune to start building a vast material empire for himself.