India under Colonial Rule: 1700-1885

Douglas M. Peers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317882855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Between 1700 and 1885 the British became the paramount power on the Indian subcontinent, their authority extending from Sri Lankain the south to the Himalayasin the north. It was a massive empire, inspiring both pride and anxiety amongst the British, and forcing change upon and disrupting the lives of its Indian subjects.

Yet it is not simply a history of conquest and subjugation, or dominance and defeat: interaction and interdependency powerfully shaped the histories of all involved. The end result was a hybrid empire. India may have become by 1885 the jewel in the British crown, but by that same year a series of changes had occurred within Indian society that would set the foundations for the modern states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This book provides a concise introduction to these dramatic changes.

Part One Introduction

Chapter One
Background and Historiography

In studying the history of India under colonial rule, how it came about and what were its short-term and long-term consequences, we are confronted with a number of seemingly intractable paradoxes. First, how did a commercial company become a territorial empire? Constant injunctions to avoid wars of conquest were ignored. Officially, the East India Company, who represented Britain in India until it was dissolved in 1858, pronounced that it was opposed to conquests, for conquests were viewed as being inimical to trade. But it never attempted to roll back its frontiers. The British government also initially took the view that the Company was there to trade and not to fight. However, from 1750 onwards they proved quite willing to dispatch troops and ships to India to bolster the Company’s activities. Secondly, how did the British become the paramount power given the limited resources at their disposal? What were the means by which the British were able to establish and maintain their authority in India, especially when the Mughal Empire was one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, empires in the world at the beginning of the eighteenth century? And by means, we are referring not only to naked instruments of coercion like armies, courts and the police, but also the administrative systems, ideologies and economic policies, as well as the knowledge which was collected about India, for raw force alone cannot account for the speed with which the British achieved such commanding influence in India. A third question is how did a regime which increasingly identified itself at home and abroad with liberal principles end up pursuing such illiberal policies? In other words, why were British policies, or at least their consequences, so obviously at odds with the often noble objectives that they claimed to be pursuing? Such contradictions were not lost on contemporaries [Doc. 2]. These paradoxes will provide an overarching framework within which some of the fundamental questions of modern Indian history can be approached, particularly the hows and whys of colonial conquest, as well as the ways in which colonial conquest shaped the lives of those who were subject to it.

It is important to reject the one-time dominant image which posited a vigorous British Empire, equipped with better weapons and with more abundant resources at its disposal, against a moribund East wherein a deteriorating Mughal Empire was wracked by internal dissent, weakened by religious rivalries, and burdened with an oppressive and intolerant administration. A sense of inevitability pervades earlier attempts at understanding the colonial conquest of India, with its juxtaposition of the progressive West against the stagnant East. And yet, while we can easily discount the historical accuracy of such views, we must take care not to overlook their legacy, for the widespread acceptance of such interpretations not only informed historical judgements, but also helped rationalize colonial rule. Trusteeship, or a belief that more advanced nations have a moral responsibility to help ‘backward’ nations develop, depended upon these kinds of historical narrative. Even early Marxist historiography accepted the basic premise that the British, because of their more advanced economy, were inevitably bound to dominate India, and that such domination would break the chains of tradition that held India back.

Not everyone subscribed to such positive interpretations of colonial rule. By the end of the nineteenth century Indian historians were throwing up challenges, calling into question the allegedly noble motives of imperial rulers and bringing into sharp relief not only the contradictions within imperial rule but also its devastating effects upon local societies. Evidence was presented that over the course of the nineteenth century India was impoverished as a consequence of British economic policies and that the legitimate aspirations of the Indian people were being quashed [Doc. 3]. Yet nationalist writers accepted, at least in principle, the basic idea of progress, and rather than challenge the underlying philosophy of development, chose instead to highlight the degree to which practice had diverged from principle. For defenders and critics of empire alike, there was a tendency to exaggerate British power and influence and underestimate Indian resilience and innovation.

Views such as those identified above were ultimately grounded in the long-standing assumption that Indian society in the eighteenth century was in a state of crisis. This view needs to be reconsidered for not only did it ignore the many signs of cultural, political and economic vitality within India, but it served as a major rationalization for colonial rule then and now [Doc. 4]. Furthermore, from a contemporary Indian perspective, this description of endemic factionalism could just as easily be applied to the British who were also plagued by corruption, constant infighting, and even the occasional attempted coup. The image that Indian society was locked in chaos and crisis began to change in the 1960s and 1970s when a new generation of historians, less inclined to defend or castigate imperial rule, began to look more closely at the deeper social, political and economic developments under way in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India. A much different view of Indian society began to take shape, one which emphasized its resilience, its capacity to innovate, and the transformations that were already under way prior to the arrival of British rule. Evidence was collected to show that the British were not acting alone, and that in fact the history of British India is a history of complex interactions. From this perspective, the British came increasingly to be seen as just another group vying for power and influence during a period of considerable flux (Bayly, 1988). An observer in 1700 would probably not have been able to predict the rapid contraction of the Mughal Empire and the emergence of a variety of new states in its place. Nor could they have foreseen the rapid build-up of British political, economic and military power.

In recasting the history of British India, historians broadened the scope of their analysis so as to consider the presence of a much wider spectrum of Indian society. Peasants and labourers began to figure in historical studies, and so too eventually would women and other groups that had hitherto been silenced. In doing so, however, historians encountered a number of methodological problems, not the least of which was how to recover the voice of millions of Indians who lived and died under colonial rule. It is a truism to argue that history is written by the victors, but in the case of British India, not only do most of the surviving documents emanate from British sources, and hence reflect their interests and assumptions, as well as the restricted scope of their vision, but there was also a widespread belief that in fact it was the British who brought an appreciation of history to India. Early British commentators on India were struck by what they saw as a lack of historical curiosity in India which only served to confirm India’s stagnation [Doc. 5]. Consequently, the task of writing India’s history took place within an intellectual context that was itself the product of imperial rule. Even early Indian nationalist historians framed their analyses within the terms of dominant western historical traditions, which is not surprising given that most of them were western educated.

Explaining why the East India Company embarked on a series of conquests is as difficult as explaining how. While certain individuals displayed aggressive temperaments, there was no clear broad-based commitment to conquest. Conquest was generally thought to be incompatible with commerce, and the Company, after all, was responsible to its shareholders. Many of the territories it acquired proved to be of little immediate economic value. There were exceptions of course – the densely populated agricultural lands of the Ganges Valley and the deltas of the Carnatic Coast were rich in revenues and the source of important exports. Nor did the British enjoy anything like a clear military superiority that would have encouraged risk-taking (Peers, 2003). An earlier generation of historians sought explanations in terms of Anglo-French global rivalry, thereby reducing the British conquest of India to the vagaries of European political rivalry. The upshot of the last several decades of historical work has been an appreciation that imperial expansion was the result of a complex interplay between British and Indian actors and institutions, involving a heavy dose of opportunism on all sides as Indians and Europeans sought to maximize their political and economic potential through complex and ultimately unstable alliances. While conquest often failed to meet Company demands, and in some cases threatened its interests, Company officials (civil and military) could turn military action to their own advantage. Company officials became entangled in local economic and political networks by virtue of the private trade in which they were engaged.

If the history of conquest is best explained by focusing on the dynamic interactions between Europeans and Indians, so too is the history of the subsequent consolidation of colonial rule. The British Raj, at least for the first century of its existence, is best understood as a hybrid state for the British lacked both the means and the local knowledge to operate independently of Indian assistance. For all its pomp and circumstance, British rule in India was, at least initially, dependent upon Indian labour, Indian capital, and the tacit cooperation of key segments within Indian society.

Historians continue to debate whether colonial rule was an abrupt and immediate rupture or if it was instead just one of a number of changes which Indian society was experiencing. The tension between exponents of change versus those who emphasize continuities is captured in a recent collection of essays (Marshall, 2003) and can also be glimpsed in reactions to the publication of the Cambridge Economic History of India (1983) which critics accused of ignoring the impact of colonial rule on the Indian economy. Ultimately, the answer to the question of change versus continuity is determined by what is being measured, and the extent to which hindsight is allowed to enter our calculations. It is certainly true that the colonial state fashioned by the British in India had many of the attributes of the modern state. It developed a specialized apparatus for the collection of revenues, the acquisition and interrogation of information and the administration of justice. It was centralizing, paternalistic at times, nakedly brutal at other times. Yet, despite its objectives and authority, much of India lay beyond its grasp. The commercial and cultural transformation envisaged by imperial advocates was only incompletely realized, and that which did occur often ran counter to their expectations.

Two explanations for the paradox that the impact of colonial rule failed to live up to the reforming claims of British rhetoric (for good or bad) have often been advanced. (A third explanation – that India itself was so rooted in tradition that it could not be moved has fortunately been largely abandoned by historians.) The first has it that British rule, despite its rhetoric, was ultimately parasitic and rather than improve India, colonial rule crippled it. India became deindustrialized as government policy forcibly opened India to British textiles and killed off domestic production. In the countryside, revenue demands were cranked so high that many peasants were either forced off the land or so deeply impoverished that they were unable to free themselves from crushing debt burdens. Recurring famines and epidemics of cholera and the plague only made their lot worse. These experiences only served to accentuate the growing gap between what imperial rule promised and what it delivered, and not surprisingly there was a growing demand by Indians to have their voices heard.

Looking at the limits to rather than the potential of colonial power has provided an alternative explanation for this disjunction between what imperialism aimed at and what it achieved. The focus here is on the limited means available to the British as well as British anxieties: namely, a preoccupation with security and the fear of treading too heavily on Indian society. Ambitions were constrained by British apprehensions about moving too quickly and instead of embarking on sweeping reforms, as suggested by their rhetoric, they proceeded in a piecemeal fashion. Governed by a widely shared belief that Indian society was both ill-prepared for rapid change and ill-equipped to participate politically, the British chose to defend the practice of absolute rule and where possible try and operate within existing Indian practices and institutions, at least as they understood them. In common with many other liberal intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen made an exception of India. Memories of the rebellion of 1857–58, plus a long history of viewing Indian rule as dependent upon a show of force, led him to argue in an article in Nineteenth Century in October 1883 that British rule was ‘essentially an absolute government, founded not on consent but on conquest’ (Stephen, 1883).

This is where the contributions made by post-colonial critics have become so valuable, for they have provided conclusive proof that much of what the British understood to be genuinely Indian was in fact the product of their own misunderstandings about the nature of Indian society, in particular the timeless essences which defined it such as religion, caste and tradition as well as the notion that Indians were historically conditioned to prefer arbitrary rule (Inden, 1986; Cohn, 1996). Hence, while colonial intervention was often presented in the guise of modernization and reform, British rule often had the opposite effect, that in fact British rule froze social and political institutions and frustrated indigenous evolution (Washbrook, 1999). Put another way, it can be argued that the impact of colonial rule was most revolutionary and transformative when it tried to preserve what it deemed to be ‘tradition’, for it often invented ‘traditions’ or converted practices into tradition when in fact they were far from widespread or widely accepted (Dirks, 2001).

Part Two Analysis

Chapter Two
Empires and Entrepreneurs, 1700-65

Environment and the Physical Setting

Recent scholarship has shown a much greater interest in the ways in which environment and location have shaped the course of Indian history. The impact that distance had upon communications, for example, is an important determinant in modern Indian history for the time lag that affected the flow of news and information between India and Britain meant that British officials in India could not be so easily controlled from London, especially during the years covered by this book. The travel time between Britain and India averaged six months in the eighteenth century, which meant that as much as a year could elapse between a request for orders being sent to London and their response arriving in India. The introduction of steam propulsion and the opening of the Red Sea route dropped this time to three weeks by the mid-nineteenth century. The telegraph would later reduce the delay to a matter of days.

The influence of physical location and characteristics as well as that of climate are also widely recognized as having played critical roles in influencing Indian history. India’s location in the middle of the Indian Ocean has meant that it has long been at the centre of a number of interconnected trading networks which encouraged traffic in goods and people, but also facilitated the exchange of religions and ideologies (Chaudhuri, 1991). Traders on the south-east coast of India developed extensive links with South East Asia, some of them travelling further afield where they left permanent reminders of their presence in such places as Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Bali in present-day Indonesia. Even earlier, the archaeological record confirms that goods were being traded between western India and Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. At the same time, the characteristics of India’s seaward and landward frontiers have meant that it has been buffered against invasion from most directions save for the north-west and from the sea.

Within India, topographical barriers nurtured a number of distinctive subcultures. Forested uplands and deserts in western India separated much of the Deccan or central plateau from the northern plains, while the ghats partly insulated the drier interior from the moister coastal lands. Mountain ranges to the north and west and heavily forested hills to the east have hampered the flow of goods and ideas in those directions. This is not to say that India has been isolated, for over the centuries it has had to contend with a number of invaders as well as more benign visitors. They came to India in one of two ways: overland through the passes that cut through the mountains that lie to the north-west between India and Afghanistan (particularly the Khyber and Bolan passes), or by sea. Those who came by land came to trade, to settle and to conquer whereas, until the arrival of the Europeans, seaborne contacts were nearly always peaceful. Historically, India has had only intermittent contact with Tibet and China to the north and Myanmar (Burma) to the east. To the north-west, there has been a longer and more sustained history of interaction on account of the passes that thrust their way through the Hindu Kush and other ranges stretching down from the Himalayas. These passes, however, do not allow for completely unimpeded traffic and they can instead be likened to turnstiles, permitting relatively easy egress into India for invaders coming in from Central Asia but then frustrating their subsequent efforts at keeping the lines of communication open with their homelands. Consequently, overland invaders have over time tended to become much more assimilated into Indian society as compared to the British, for example, whose control over the seas enabled them to maintain close links with their place of birth.

The monsoon has played a critical role in Indian history. Not only did the timing and direction of the monsoon winds in the age before steamships determine sailing schedules, but the rainfall that monsoons brought to India dictated agricultural practices. The foothills of the Himalayas as well as the fertile coastlands receive as much as 80 inches a year of precipitation; farmers in Bengal can expect nearly the same. By way of contrast, the Punjab and much of Central India get fewer than 20 inches a year. And further to the west, Sindh and Rajasthan receive even less. The volume of rainfall that came with the monsoon, and its timing, were two important determinants of the kinds of crops that were grown, as well as their yield. A third factor is the predictability of the monsoon rains: some regions of India like Bengal not only could expect more rain but also could rely on the regular appearance of the monsoon (but should it fail, as it occasionally did, disaster was the usual outcome). Elsewhere in India, the Deccan for example, where monsoons were not so reliable, farmers turned to irrigation or the construction of tanks to forestall the threat of drought. Rice tended to be the major crop in areas with the greatest rainfall like Bengal; wheat and millet were favoured in drier regions in central and north-west India. Monsoons also affected warfare. As one British official observed, ‘In India there are, with certain local variations, three distinct seasons in the year: the hot season, and the wet season, and the cold season. In the first, if you go to war, you stand a chance of being burnt to death; and in the second of being drowned. The third alone is fit for military operations; and it does not last more than four or five months’ (Kaye, 1852: 462).

Within India’s frontiers, there are three major geographical zones. The first of these is a densely populated plain stretching across northern India, reaching from the Indus River in what is today Pakistan to the delta created by the convergence of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers in present-day Bangladesh. Known historically as Hindustan, it was in this region that most of the great empires of the past originated, and even today it contains about 40 per cent of the population. Communications across this region were helped by the rivers. The western and eastern coasts of India were also densely populated regions, but, given their location, they tended to be more outward-looking and over time experienced an influx of merchants and traders from the wider Indian Ocean world whose descendants are still visible today in the various Muslim, Jewish, Parsi (or Zoroastrian) and Christian enclaves that date back in some cases more than a thousand years. The Deccan is a much more arid region and agriculture on the plateau is more dependent upon irrigation. Where rainfall was reliable, and crop yields easily exceeded the subsistence needs of the cultivators, such as along the Indus and Ganges rivers, there was more labour and social stratification as the land could easily support royal courts and their numerous religious and military retainers. Elsewhere, as in the Deccan, the carrying capacity of the land was more limited which reduced the possibilities for a densely populated, highly specialized and stratified society. In such areas, the difference between rich and poor was not as great as in the north, and more egalitarian forms of political organization took root.

Historians now appreciate that the environment has its own history, and that the natural world has not only shaped human societies but has in turn been reworked by human activity (Gadgil and Guha, 1993; Guha, 1999). Changes imposed on the natural world, with often catastrophi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Preface
• Note on Spelling
• Chronology
• One Introduction
• Two Analysis
• Three Assessment
• Four Documents
• Glossary
• Who's Who
• Further Reading
• References
• Index
• Seminar Studies In History