On the last day of the sixteenth century the London trading house known as the Honourable East India Company was granted its charter by Queen Elizabeth I. It was not the first European company to do business with the subcontinent – the Portuguese had been conducting commerce there since 1510 – but it would rapidly become the most successful.
The paramount power in India at the time was the Mogul Empire of Akbar the Great (1556–1605). Akbar’s grandfather, Babur – a descendant of both Genghis Khan and Timur the Great – had established the Timurid dynasty in Delhi in 1526 after his armies had swept all before them during an epic march south from Samarkand, via Kabul and the Hindu Kush. But Akbar, with his unique combination of military talent, political acumen and cultural learning, was the greatest of the six Mogul Emperors who were to dominate Indian politics for almost two centuries. He hugely expanded Mogul rule – a confusing patchwork of imperial provinces, subordinate states and semi-independent towns and villages – and by his death his domains covered much of central and northern India. In 1613 Akbar’s successor, Jahangir Khan, allowed the East India Company to locate a trading post at Surat on the coast north of Bombay. Further permanent stations were established at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta in 1639, 1664 and 1696 respectively.
By 1700 the East India Company’s only serious competitors for Indian trade were the French companies based at Pondicherry on the south-east coast and Chandarnagar on the Hooghly River. The Portuguese still retained the enclave of Goa, south of Bombay, but were spent as a commercial force. The Dutch and the Danes also had trading posts, but their share of the market was falling. The East India Company, on the other hand, was going from strength to strength. Its success was based upon the seemingly insatiable demand in Europe for cheap calico, chintz, silks, fine china and tea. During the first half of the eighteenth century its annual dividends never fell below 6 per cent. Its yearly sales of £2 million made up a fifth of Britain’s total annual imports, and so profitable did it become that, in 1744, it was able to lend the British government £1 million. Pre-eminent on the London stock market, it occupied a position in the City comparable only to that of the Bank of England.
The Company’s gradual metamorphosis from mercantile to political power was prompted by the death of Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mogul Emperors, in 1707. His wars of consolidation and expansion, which had continued on and off for the previous twenty years, had exhausted the imperial coffers. But there was no respite as his numerous male offspring fought a lengthy war of succession and his Muslim empire – more than two thirds of whose inhabitants were unbelievers, mainly Hindus – began to disintegrate. Between 1739 and 1761 there were five successful invasions of northern India: the first by Nadir Shah of Persia, who sacked Delhi and removed the Mogul’s Peacock Throne to Tehran; the next four by the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali. Meanwhile, former Mogul governors, vassal princes and soldiers of fortune were carving out their own independent states. By the mid eighteenth century the Mogul empire had been superseded by a host of powerful polities, including Bengal, Hyderabad, Mysore, Oudh and the Maratha Confederacy of Deccan principalities. Meanwhile a number of looser political entities had been formed by the Rohilla nobles of Rohilkhand, the Rajput princes of Rajputana and the Sikh rulers of the Punjab.
To protect its valuable trade during this time of political flux, the East India Company stepped up its recruitment of Indian troops. The Company had been enlisting modest numbers of Indian soldiers (or sepoys, from the Persian for ‘soldier’) since 1684, but it was not until the wars with the French in the 1740s that the need for a permanent regular army became evident. Even before the outbreak of global war between Britain and France in 1744, the underfunded French Compagnie des Indes had begun to cultivate the native rulers of southern India in an attempt to acquire territory and revenue. The East India Company retaliated by supporting rival princes. But the inadequacy of the Company’s forces was revealed in 1747 when Madras would have fallen to the French had it not been for the timely arrival of the Royal Navy. The Company’s response was to authorize Major Stringer Lawrence, who had arrived with the British fleet, to recruit and organize Indian troops on the European model. Led by Lawrence and his deputy, Robert Clive, these troops inflicted a string of defeats upon the French and their allies in the early 1750s, as the British consolidated their economic and military presence in southern India.
But the events that were to establish the East India Company as a powerful political force in the subcontinent took place in Bengal. The Company had been granted extensive commercial privileges in that province, the richest and most populous in India, by the Emperor Farrukhsiyar in 1717. By the 1750s, however, Bengal had become the personal fiefdom of the descendants of the former imperial governor, or nawab, Murshid Quli Khan. They regarded the Company’s favoured position, in particular its permanent trading station at Calcutta and its exemption from transit levies, as both an affront to their sovereignty and harmful to their finances. So in 1756, shortly after becoming the Nawab of Bengal at the age of twenty-one, Siraj ud-Daula ordered his troops to occupy the Company’s bases at Kasimbazar and Calcutta. During the night of 20 June scores of European prisoners died at the Calcutta base after being crammed into a small and airless room. The so-called ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ was an atrocity akin to the Cawnpore massacres a century later – and was to reap a similar revenge.
The Madras Council gave Robert Clive the task of reoccupying Calcutta and restoring the Company’s trading concessions. Born in 1725, the eldest son of a struggling Shropshire squire who supplemented his meagre rent-roll by practising as a lawyer, Clive had joined the East India Company’s civil service as a junior tally clerk in the hope of reviving his family’s fortunes. But it was his success as an ad hoc military commander in southern India – particularly the courage and dash he displayed during the epic defence of Arcot in 1751 – that had brought him to prominence. Accompanied by six hundred European soldiers and nine hundred sepoys, Clive accomplished the first part of his mission with minimal bloodshed on New Year’s Day, 1757. The subsequent fighting was indecisive, however, and Siraj agreed to terms in February. But Clive was determined to replace the nawab and used the hiatus to strengthen his position. In March 1757, two months after raising the first battalion of Bengal sepoys at Calcutta, Clive captured the French base at Chandarnagar. He then negotiated a secret alliance with a group of Calcutta’s leading merchants and bankers, who were anxious to keep in with the British, and also with Mir Jafar, one of Siraj’s senior commanders, who promised huge sums in return for the throne. With his preparations complete, Clive gave battle at the village of Plassey, 80 miles north of Calcutta, on 23 June 1757: his force numbered just 3,000 soldiers and sailors (two thirds of them Indian); Siraj had more than 50,000 troops, albeit many who were unpaid and disgruntled. The action was decided by the superiority of the British artillery fire – as so many future battles in India would be – which panicked the Bengalis’ elephants and bullocks, and caused chaos in their lines. Even before Mir Jafar could defect, the nawab’s army had melted away.
Siraj was later captured and murdered. Having replaced him as nawab, Mir Jafar rewarded senior Company officials and the business community at Calcutta with huge cash payments (members of the Bengal Council, for example, received a share of £275,000, or £16.5 million today). He also ceded tax districts to the Company and dismantled the state control of inland trade. Such concessions were to prove fatal for the Bengal state. When Mir Jafar objected to the economic exploitation, in 1760, the Company replaced him with his more pliant son-in-law, Mir Kasim, and received the districts of Burdwan, Chittagong and Midnapur into the bargain. Eventually Kasim too tried to reassert Bengal’s independence, but his army was roundly defeated by Company forces at Buxar on 23 October 1764. So began a long period of commercial and territorial expansion throughout India as obdurate states were annexed and the more amenable became allies.
In 1773, alarmed by the growth of this private ‘empire within an empire’, not to mention the venality of Company officials (many of whom, including Clive, had returned home with enormous fortunes), Parliament passed the Judicature and Regulating Acts: the former paid lip service to the legal rights of Indians by establishing a Supreme Court in Calcutta from which appeals could be made to the Privy Council in London; the latter established the principle by which the British government could interfere in the affairs of India, as well as creating the framework for the Company’s rule. Henceforth the Governor-General of Bengal, the largest and richest of the Company’s three presidencies, would have supervisory control over the other two, Madras and Bombay. He would be advised by a Supreme Council, some of whose members were appointed by the Crown. Yet little was done to reform the local administration of India, beyond the stipulation that Company officials and officers were not to receive gifts or rewards from Indian princes.
Nine years later the issue of corrupt Company servants was again raised in the Commons when Whig MPs called for the dismissal of the Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings. So began the Whigs’ two-year struggle for new regulations that ended with William Pitt the Younger, the new 24-year-old Tory Prime Minister, stealing their thunder by passing the India Act of 1784. Its chief provision was to give executive control of Indian affairs to the newly created Board of Control in London, whose President was a Cabinet minister and therefore answerable to Parliament. But the Court of Directors retained their monopoly of patronage, and officials in India still enjoyed considerable freedom of action. At the end of the eighteenth century it took up to six months for instructions from London to reach Calcutta by sea; by 1857, using early steamships and the express route across the Suez isthmus, the journey time to Bombay, the nearest of the three presidencies, was still a month.
Hard fought victories by Sir Gerard (later Viscount) Lake and Sir Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) in the Second Maratha War of 1803–4 brought to a close a remarkable four-year period of military conquest and territorial acquisition. In 1799, after the defeat of the Muslim ruler Tipu Sultan, the powerful southern kingdom of Mysore was partitioned between the Company, its ally the Nizam of Hyderabad and the former Hindu rulers. That same year saw the annexation of the Hindu principality of Tanjore, the most fertile tract in southern India; and in 1801 the nominal ruler of the Carnatic formally renounced his mortgaged kingdom in return for a Company pension and the titular rank of nawab. In a few months the Madras Presidency had been transformed ‘from a few scattered districts’ into a British province covering most of southern India.
The Bengal Presidency was also considerably enlarged during this period. In 1798 it was made up of just Bengal, Bihar and Benares (the last two provinces acquired in 1775 and 1781 respectively). But in 1801 the Nawab of Oudh was pressurized into ceding the lion’s share of his territory in return for kingly status. The acquisitions included the districts of Allahabad, Fatehpur and Cawnpore in the lower part of the Gangetic Doab, and most of the province of Rohilkhand to the north-west. Bengal was now bounded to the west by the states of the Maratha Confederacy, which stretched from Malabar (south of Bombay) to the Himalayas. The most powerful Maratha prince, Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior, had been in possession of Delhi and the Mogul Emperor, the blind and enfeebled Shah Alam, great-grandson of Aurangzeb, since 1784. After Delhi fell to the British in 1803, Shah Alam regained some of his dignity but little of his power. He was given a Company allowance in excess of £100,000 a year, the title of King of Delhi and the revenue from a handful of districts. Yet his temporal authority was confined to the Red Fort and its immediate environs.
The Second Maratha War was fought because Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General (1798–1805), was determined to nullify the threat posed by the European-trained armies of the Maratha Confederacy. Scindia’s defeat by Lake at the battles of Aligarh, Delhi and Laswari cost him Gujarat in west India, which became part of the Bombay Presidency, and all his lands north of the Jumna River, including Agra, Delhi and Meerut. These last territories were amalgamated with Benares and the districts recently relinquished by the King of Oudh into the Bengal administrative unit known as the North-Western Provinces.
The Bombay Presidency was the chief beneficiary of the Third Maratha War of 1817–18. The chief protagonists were Peshwa Baji Rao II, the head of the Maratha Confederacy, and Appa Sahib, the Maharaja of Nagpur. Their respective forces were defeated by Company armies totalling more than 115,000 men, the most ever devoted to one campaign, in battles at Kurki, Nagpur and Mahidpur. The Peshwa was exiled to Bithur on the Ganges with an annual pension of 800,000 rupees, while all his territory in western India was swallowed by the Bombay Presidency. Appa Sahib was replaced by a kinsman, the last Maharaja of Nagpur, who agreed to cede a large tract of country in central India that became known as the Sagar and Nerbudda Territories.
The Company had become the undisputed master of India. Henceforth it conducted the odd campaign against unruly Indian principalities and rebellious subjects. But its major wars were fought against powerful neighbouring states.* The chief acquisitions of these closely contested, but ultimately successful, conflicts were Assam, Arracan and Tenasserim in 1824, Sind in 1843, the Punjab in 1849 and Pegu in 1853. Sind went to the Bombay Presidency, the rest to Bengal.
There were, however, a number of bloodless additions to Company territory. In 1848, for example, Lord Dalhousie, the new Governor-General, annexed the state of Satara in western India – the original Maratha principality founded in the seventeenth century – after its raja had died without a natural heir. Because sons are necessary to perform Hindu funeral rites, thereby preventing their deceased fathers from descending to hell after death, Hindu law acknowledges adopted sons and enables them to inherit personal wealth and to succeed their royal fathers. But Dalhousie refused to recognize the Raja of Satara’s young heir, a relation adopted on his deathbed, on the principle ‘that, on all occasions, where heirs natural shall fail, the territory should be made to lapse, and adoption should not be permitted’, unless there were strong political reasons for making an exception. He added: ‘I cannot conceive it possible for any one to dispute the policy of taking advantage of every just opportunity which presents itself for consolidating the territories that already belong to us, by taking possession of States that may lapse in the midst of them.’ This so-called ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ – a pseudo-legalistic triumph of expediency over tradition – was also used to justify the annexation of Sambhalpur in 1849, and Jhansi and Nagpur in 1854. Dalhousie revealed the cynical thinking behind such appropriations when he told a family friend that the huge state of Nagpur, with its annual revenue of £400,000 a year, was ‘too good a “plum” not to pick out of the “Christmas pie”’.
Not all Indian officials agreed with the new policy. Colonel William Sleeman, the British Resident in Oudh who had made his name suppressing the murderous cult of Thagi,* wrote a number of letters of protest that were eerily prescient. In September 1848, for example, he warned Dalhousie that ‘the system of annexing and absorbing Native States – so popular with our Indian Services, and so much advocated by a certain class of writers in public journals – might some day render us too visibly dependent upon our Native Army; that they might see it, and that accidents might occur to unite them, or too great a portion of them, in some desperate act’.
Another critic of annexation was Colonel John Low, a member of the Supreme Council, who had spent most of his career as a political officer. In February 1854 he wrote two minutes protesting against the impolicy and injustice of the annexation of Nagpur. (The raja had died without adopting a son, which made it even easier for Dalhousie to apply the Doctrine of Lapse.) The confiscation of Satara had, he said, already shaken the confidence of ordinary people in the justice and good faith of the Indian government. Many Indians had asked him, with regard to Satara: ‘What crime did the late Rajah commit that his country should be seized by the Company?’ They understood ‘acquisition by conquest’, particularly when Indian rulers had brought it upon themselves (as in the case of the Punjab), but they could not accept the extinction of a loyal Indian state simply because the ruler had failed to provide a natural heir. Low also pointed out that while the British system of administration might be better than the Indian system, the people did not necessarily want it. They, like all indigenous peoples, preferred ‘their own habits and customs’ to ‘those of foreigners’. In any case, said Low, there was no legal justification for the annexation of Nagpur because the treaty between the late raja and the Indian government did not limit the succession to heirs of the body.
Nagpur was not the last of the Governor-General’s peacetime acquisitions. British Residents at the Court of Oudh had long complained of the corruption and maladministration of its rulers. But it was not until 1847 that the Indian government acted. The new King, Wajid Ali Shah, was given two years to reform the administration. He did nothing. ‘Sunk in the uttermost abysses of enfeebling debauchery,’ wrote Sir John Kaye, ‘the King pushed aside the business which he felt himself incapable of transacting, and went in search of new pleasures… [He] turned to the… delights of dancing, and drumming, and drawing, and manufacturing small rhymes.’
The pressure for intervention was building. In the early 1850s the Resident, Colonel Sleeman, repeatedly urged the Company to assume the administration of Oudh but not to appropriate its revenues. Sleeman retired in poor health towards the end of 1854, but his successor, Colonel James Outram, was equally determined that the Indian government should step in. So was John Low, the opponent of annexation by lapse, who noted in a minute of March 1855 that the ‘shameful oppressions committed on the people by Government officers in Oudh have of late years been constant and extreme’. It was by now generally agreed that the government of Oudh would have to be transferred to European administrators. The outstanding question was what to do with the surplus revenue after the expenses of government had been paid. Lord Dalhousie’s answer – in his notorious minute of 18 June 1855 – was to appropriate the revenue but to stop short of outright annexation. The King of Oudh, while retaining the sovereignty of his dominion, would ‘vest all power, jurisdiction, rights and claims thereto belonging in the hands of the East India Company’. Quite what this ‘sovereignty’ would entail, without territorial rights or revenues, was not explained. Sir John Kaye made the obvious point that when the Nawab of the Carnatic and the Raja of Tanjore were ‘deprived of their rights and revenues, they were held to be not territorial, but titular sovereigns’. The settlement of Oudh was no different. By arranging for the balance of its finances to be paid to the Indian government, Dalhousie was ensuring that Oudh ‘became a component part of the empire’. The distinction between the King of Oudh and the titular sovereigns was purely one of semantics.
Rubber-stamped by the Court of Directors and the Board of Control, Dalhousie’s thinly disguised annexation of Oudh was instigated in January 1856. But the King was not taken in, and, on 4 February, he refused to sign the proposed treaty. Whereupon Outram, in line with his instructions, issued a proclamation declaring Oudh to be henceforth part of British India. The annexation of Oudh was to set in chain a series of events that would culminate in the great mutiny of 1857. It was not the only cause of mutiny, but it was a vital ingredient, not least because a significant proportion of the Bengal Army – as many as three quarters of all sepoys, according to one authority – were recruited from Oudh.
The contradiction between the Company’s dual role as ruler and trader had been finally removed in 1833 by the Act of Parliament that renewed its charter: in return for an annuity of £630,000, taken from the territorial revenues of British India, it was ordered to cease all commercial transactions. The same Act renamed the Governor-General of Bengal as the Governor-General of India and increased the powers of his Supreme Council. It also created a distinct Governor of Bengal on the same footing as the Governors of Madras and Bombay.*
By 1857 the East India Company was directly ruling about two thirds of the subcontinent as the agent of the British government. It had, moreover, long been recognized as the paramount power by the Indian princes who controlled the remaining third: all were advised by political representatives of the Company; many had armies that had been raised, and were still commanded, by Company officers. To police its own territories and to guard the frontiers of British India, the Company had three separate armies, one for each presidency. They contained troops raised and paid for by the Company – European and Native – and regiments of the British Army stationed in India. In 1857 the total strength of the three presidency armies was 45,000 European and 232,000 Indian troops, a ratio of 1:5. The Bengal Army – by far the largest, with 24,000 Europeans and 135,000 Indians – had a slightly worse ratio. But if all Indian troops commanded by European officers are taken into account – including regulars, irregulars, local corps, military police and the contingents of Indian princes – then the ratio falls back to 1:6 for India generally and more than 1:7 for Bengal.
It has often been stated that a gradual reduction in the relative number of European troops was partly responsible for the mutiny. In fact the ratio in India was the same in 1857 as it had been twenty-two years earlier – 1:6 – though the total number of rank and file in 1835 was much smaller: 18,000 Europeans to 112,000 Indians. Lord William Bentinck, the then Governor-General, had recommended reducing the ratio to 1:4 on the grounds that the Company’s Indian troops represented British India’s sole ‘internal danger’ in 1835. His target of an extra 10,000 European troops had been easily surpassed by 1857; but the expansion of Company territory had ensured that the Indian Army grew proportionately. Nevertheless, the ratio of European to Indian troops would have been slightly better in 1857 if two of the three Queen’s regiments removed during the Crimean War had not been retained by the British government. Lord Dalhousie had told his superiors that he regarded the removal of ‘any European infantry in 1854 as being absolutely unsafe to the maintenance of our power in India’. A year later, with the Sonthal rebellion in full swing, he reflected upon ‘the danger of withdrawing for any purpose too many troops from a country which, though tranquil and unwarlike in itself, is yet liable to such volcanic outbursts of popular violence as this now before us’.